Tag: music criticism

  • What’s Next for Music Criticism?

    While I’m pret­ty sure some of the arti­cles pro­nounc­ing music crit­i­cism dead have reached puber­ty at this point, there remains an open ques­tion of its val­ue (and virtue). Is it pos­si­ble that the future of music crit­i­cism isn’t writ­ten? That’s not a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. Is it pos­si­ble that the future of music crit­i­cism is…vlogging? I’ll…

  • A Must-Read Kanye West Roundtable

    Were you one of the poor souls spazz­ing out over Kanye’s 10.0 from Pitch­fork? How per­fect­ly 2002 of you. If you’re look­ing for more grist for the mill, look no fur­ther than Jeff Weiss’ excel­lent My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twist­ed Fam­i­ly round­table, in which sev­er­al crit­ics offer their thoughts on what most peo­ple seem to believe…

  • A Benediction for Music Criticism

    Today’s my last day as music edi­tor at comcast.net. It’s a weird feel­ing to be wrap­ping up what has been a pret­ty amaz­ing 10-year jour­ney at the periph­ery of the music industry. I’ll be the first to admit that I was nev­er a great music critic.When I first start­ed scrib­bling about songs back in ’99,…

  • Why We Are Debating Free

    The answer’s easy: it does­n’t work for music. Unless you were liv­ing under a rock on Fri­day, you prob­a­bly read Techcrunch’s post, “The Sor­ry State of Music Star­tups.” With­out going into great detail, Arring­ton’s com­plete­ly right, and for once, he does­n’t resort to the whole “music just wants to be free” argu­ment so com­mon among…

  • The Sky Is Falling!

    Here’s my absurd, reduc­tion­ist view­point on why edi­to­r­i­al will sur­vive the demise of the music indus­try: just because big con­glom­er­ates won’t make mon­ey sell­ing music does­n’t mean peo­ple will stop mak­ing it. Artists will keep doing all sorts of beau­ti­ful, irra­tional things, often at con­sid­er­able per­son­al expense, even if there’s no one to buy it.…