Music journalism
[5]: 15 One critic of the study pointed out that because all newspapers were included, including low-circulation regional papers, the female representation of 26% misrepresented the actual scarcity, in that the "large US papers, which are the ones that influence public opinion, have virtually no women classical music critics", with the notable exceptions of Anne Midgette in the New York Times and Wynne Delacoma in the Chicago Sun-Times.
[6] In 2007, The New York Times wrote that classical music criticism, which it characterized as "a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers", had undergone "a series of hits in recent months" with the elimination, downgrading, or redefinition of critics' jobs at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, citing New York magazine's Peter G. Davis, "one of the most respected voices of the craft, [who] said he had been forced out after 26 years".
[13] Following Tony Palmer's arrival at The Observer,[14] the first daily newspaper to employ a dedicated rock critic was The Guardian, with the appointment of Geoffrey Cannon in 1968.
"By 1999, the 'quality' press was regularly carrying reviews of popular music gigs and albums", which had a "key role in keeping pop" in the public eye.
[20] According to Gendron, Goldstein's most significant early pieces were a "manifesto" on rock 'n' roll and "pop aestheticism", and a laudatory assessment of the Beatles' Revolver album.
Published in late August, the latter article provided "the first substantial rock review devoted to one album to appear in any nonrock magazine with accreditory power".
[24][25] The critical discourse was further heightened by the respectful coverage afforded the genre in mainstream publications such as Newsweek, Time and Life in the months leading up to and following the release of the Beatles' Sgt.
Pepper in The New York Times was similarly the subject of journalistic debate, and invited reprisals from musicologists, composers and cultural commentators.
These review collections, Shuker continues, "became bibles in the field, establishing orthodoxies as to the relative value of various styles or genres and pantheons of artists.
[33] Additionally, Larson argued that the beats used in rock music could cause rebellion in younger generations due to their hypnotic and influential nature.
[30] Drawing from styles like rhythm and blues and jazz music, rock and roll was first innovated by black communities, but was soon appropriated by white populations.
Most white conservative Christians in the mid 20th century understood that rock started among black populations and feared what the success of the genre implied for the church, segregation, and racial equality.
[35] For example, The American Tract Society in New Jersey released a booklet called "Jungle to Jukebox" that used racist, exotic tropes to illustrate the dangers of rock music to white youth.
[37] Slate magazine writer Jody Rosen discussed the 2000s-era trends in pop music criticism in his article "The Perils of Poptimism".
[39] She stated that pop criticism developed as a "slap at the establishment, at publications such as the hippie homestead Rolling Stone and the rawker outpost Creem", adding that the "1980s generation" of post-punk indie rockers had in the mid-2000s "been taken down by younger 'poptimists,' who argue that lovers of underground rock are elitists for not embracing the more multicultural mainstream".
[39] Powers likened the poptimist critics' debates about bands and styles to a "scrum in rugby", in that "[e]verybody pushes against everybody else, and we move forward in a huge blob of vehement opinion and mutual judgment".
Miller suggested that critics could navigate this problem by being prepared "to give young artists credit for terrific music without being intimidated into a frame of mind where dark subject matter always gets a passing grade", stating that a critic should be able to call a young artist "a musical genius" while "in the same breath declaring that his or her lyrics are morally objectionable.
For example, Miller noted that critics rarely "identify catchy melodies as specific passages within a song", in the way that working musicians might discuss "the A-minor in the second measure of the chorus".
According to Vice magazine's Larry Fitzmaurice in 2016, Twitter (X) is "perhaps the last public space for unfettered music criticism in an increasingly anti-critical landscape".
She argues that the current culture of consuming new music, particularly with the release of Taylor Swift's album The Tortured Poets Department (2024), is unhealthy.
She condemned the Paste review for making "a litany of petty, exclamation-pointed digs" at Swift, and dismissed the rave Rolling Stone review for calling the album a classic within a day, as well as criticizing articles by "reputable publications" like Time and The Philadelphia Inquirer for catering gossip to the masses and fandom instead of serious journalism of the art.
In 2004, critic Kelefa Sanneh defined "rockism" as "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star".
[53] McLeod found that a likely cause of this dichotomy was the lack of women writing in music journalism: "By 1999, the number of female editors or senior writers at Rolling Stone hovered around a whopping 15%, [while] at Spin and Raygun, [it was] roughly 20%.
[55] Crawford points to "[t]he record store, the guitar shop, and now social media: when it comes to popular music, these places become stages for the display of male prowess", and adds, "Female expertise, when it appears, is repeatedly dismissed as fraudulent.
Every woman who has ever ventured an opinion on popular music could give you some variation [of this experience] ...and becoming a recognized 'expert' (a musician, a critic) will not save [women] from accusations of fakery.
"[55] Daphne Brooks, in her 2008 article "The Write to Rock: Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theory, and the Pleasures of Rock Music Criticism", wrote that in order to restructure music criticism, one must "focus on multiple counternarratives" to break away from racial and gender biases as embodied in "contemporary cultural fetishizations of white male performative virtuosity and latent black male innovations".
[50]: 55–56 Brooks pointed to Christgau's statement that, after the Beatles' arrival in America, "rock criticism embraced a dream or metaphor of perpetual revolution.
[50]: 58–59 Willis, who was a columnist for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1975, believed society could be enlightened by the "ecstatic experience" of visions expressed through music's rhythm and noise and that such joy would lead people to different ways of sharing.
