Remember when music critics were a little bit like respected, but much-feared royalty? They wielded the power of life and death over the musicians they both loved and hated, and they were courted almost as lavishly by record labels as the spotlighted stage denizens, themselves. On a critic’s whim, praise or damnation doled out in proper scoops could make or break a band’s future while simultaneously crushing or lifting its members’ ambitions. If the purchasing public reacted accordingly and the scrutinized band wasn’t enough of a “radio friendly unit shifter,” the corporate bean counters in charge of its record label’s finances could just decide to opt out of whatever shoddy arrangement the greenhorn band had signed in a moment of fame and fortune clouded naivete.
Being a music critic in those days must have been something of a head-swelling ego trip, but some came to terms with it by making a game of the business and venting their eccentricities like true artists in their own right. Lester Bangs is one famous example who comes to mind. Author and music critic Jim DeRogatis described him as “the great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock writing… Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one.”
To get an idea of the healthy irreverence he brought to the table, Lester Bangs’ preferred method of attack when setting out to interview someone went, as he described it:
“Well, basically I just started out to lead with the most insulting question I could think of. Because it seemed to me that the whole thing of interviewing as far as rock stars and that was just such a suck-up. It was groveling obeisance to people who weren’t that special, really. It’s just a guy, just another person, so what?”
But even this shoulder-shrugging nonchalance toward the performers in an industry that provided bread and butter for their tables made music critics an integral part of the process. By deconstructing these “people who weren’t that special” in interviews and reviews, music critics still helped build them into larger-than-life figures by the simple act of acknowledgment. After all, you wouldn’t be reading about these performers and buying their music if the music critics hadn’t taken the time to write about them.
But what a difference a decade (or two) makes.
Thanks to the World Wide Internet and the approximately eighty zillion streaming music services that live there, you can check out pretty much any new song or album by any band or musician in the world the very precious second that it’s released. In 2012, do you really need jaded music critics to tell you what “infectious” new pop song you should or shouldn’t like?
Christopher R. Weingarten at SPIN magazine would grudgingly agree with you on that point, and he is a music critic.
Music critics once had the privilege of being the first to hear promotional copies of albums months before they were released to the public. They could gnaw on this material and pen longform essays about the pros and cons of a band’s new material before anyone else had a chance to hear it, and, as a result, could shape public opinion around their own. Now, with the proliferation of lightning fast broadband Internet connections and the ease of finding anything through intuitive search engines like Google and Bing, new albums and songs are commonly “leaked” — either by roguish interns, industry marketing strategists, or the performers themselves — to everyone with a will to listen. Critics no longer have the head start, and their reviews often don’t hit the press until weeks after they’re no longer relevant and people have moved on to the next big leak. As Weingarten said in a speech given at the 140 Characters Conference in 2009:
“Now, it’s not a game of hearing the right record, it’s hearing the leak the fastest. Music websites report on leaks, and they still don’t cover them fast enough, ’cause Twitter people cover the leaks. When Animal Collective’s last album leaked a month ago, everyone was talking about it. When the reviews finally came a month later, [they were] completely pointless. All a music review does now is reinforce the opinion that somebody already has.”
But what point is there in being bitter? To persevere in a climate so hostile to the survival of music critics, the music critic must adapt. In 2009, Weingarten embarked on a mission to review 1,000 new records on Twitter with his @1000TimesYes project. And while these mini-reviews were longer than the famous two-word review for Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich, they were still able to convey the essence of why someone might want to give a new album a listen in short enough bites that catered to the average Twitter user’s attention span.
A couple of weeks ago, Weingarten announced that he was bringing this idea to SPIN magazine. Over the course of 2012, @SPINReviews ambitiously plans to review “more than 1,500 new records,” but this time, Weingarten’s not working alone. With a staff of around 20 music critics hammering out 140 character reviews, the magazine is well on its way to achieving this goal.
This isn’t to say that SPIN is completely giving up on the longform music review. Even though the print magazine recently went from a monthly to a bi-monthly format, it still plans on offering around 20 regular — that is, non-tweeted and quite a bit more characters than 140 — record reviews per issue. By the time we reach 2013, I guess we’ll see which format sticks best to the hearts and minds of Internet-savvy music fans.
When was the last time you depended on the opinions expressed by a music critic to decide where you’d like to spend your entertainment dollars? Sure, you have more options and ways to listen to music than ever before with the Internet on hand, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with so many choices, too. I think that Weingarten — and SPIN — are on the right track for remaining relevant by distilling down what a listener might expect with a new album and presenting a short, tweetworthy review as a place to start.
For example, I use Spotify every day. And every day, new music is made available on Spotify’s network for its users’ eager ears. The problem is, I don’t know who most of these new-fangled artists are, so I generally just resign myself to listening to music by artists who are already familiar to me. The new stuff might be good, or it might be horrible, but the fact of the matter is, I just don’t have time in my day to sort through it all. But if I’m following @SPINReviews in my Twitter stream, I can tell, at a glance, if a new album is something I might be interested in checking out. The music critic is doing his or her job — and still offering what I consider to be a valuable service — by sorting through all that new music I don’t have time for and describing first impressions in a way that lets me know if I should pursue a listen or skip it altogether.
I’m not as interested about a music critic’s personal bias for or against a band or an album as I am about a short, choice list of adjectives that acts as a launching pad for my attention. In the @SPINReviews tweet above, “Stereolab folkadelic ramble” will convince me to go out of my way to listen to Cate le Bon more than any 1,400-word missive by some pompous music critic of yore that really just boils down to one of two conclusions: “It’s great!” or “It sucks!”
Just like the evening news that (ideally, anyway) covers the day’s events in summary, description will beat out opinion as being useful to my understanding of what’s new and exciting in the world around me. Twitter, with its 140 character limit and ease of use for anyone from the Internet novice to the practiced professional, is what I’d consider to be the perfect venue for the expression of what’s essential about anything. There’s no room for filler. So while music critics may bemoan how the Internet has made them irrelevant, I would argue that it’s made them more relevant. They may not be getting wined and dined by the big record companies anymore or pulling in yacht-buying paychecks, but I’m definitely paying more attention to what they have to say now than I ever did before.
What say you?