Son Raw talks about it AND he lives it.
It’s no secret that the economics of music journalism, while never brilliant, have metastasized into a full-fledged crisis. Publications engage in painful layoffs while demanding content lame enough to have people waxing fondly about the days of peak listicle. The economics of publishing, however grim, aren’t the full story. It gets worse.
As the way people listen to and discuss music evolves and devolves according the whims of tech companies and media conglomerates, the entire point of writing about music feels fraught. A quixotic venture or a vestigial pursuit tied to an industry eating itself. Throughout this series, I hope to open frank conversations, break taboos and maybe, just maybe, convince myself that writing about popular music and engaging with the industry is still worth the time and effort. I hope we survive the experience.
At first glance, there is no good reason to review music in 2024.
Before you close this tab in disgust, given that anyone reading this is one of the few remaining people who does care about music criticism. Think about it: why should you care enough to read a long-form tract about a single or album, when you can go to your app of choice and make up your own mind about it? Hell, if you want a hot take, Twitter or your plant-based Twitter alternative of choice will provide a near unlimited buffet of snark about Bebe Rexha, Jojo Siwa and other pop stars whose names sound like muppet babies.
If enthusiasm’s more your speed, hop onto a short-form video app and be greeted by a barrage of teenagers “reacting” to whatever the song of the minute happens to be. Hell, even the intellectuals among us, weirdos and freaks who still like read and write words, probably only read the few remaining music reviews published out of habit. When’s the last time a write up of a new album genuinely provoked thought or changed your mind about something?
I’m not saying music writing itself is pointless: I have a bookcase full of well-researched, well-written and well-edited books on a dozen or so music scenes that I cherish deeply. But none of that has anything to do with a hastily written piece on an album that dropped last Friday, written for, at best, 3 figures.
If the record review seems pointless, it’s probably because readers and writers have long ago lost sight of why they existed in the first place, conflating advocacy and salesmanship until neither functioned as intended. From a mercenary point of view, album and singles reviews were part of an unspoken compact between record labels, magazines, and music fans. Labels sent music to publications for review in the hopes of selling more records, while also buying ad space. Meanwhile, magazines hired people with theoretical expertise to write about this music – to inform their readers on where to spend their money and which music to avoid. In turn, music fans spent actual money on said magazines to access this privileged information (along with news and interviews) because, in the long run, it would save them time and money wasted on mediocre music.
Of course, criticism exists for reasons beyond the above arrangement – or else no one would care and the practice would have faded away a decade ago, discarded to the dustbin of history as a silly rock-era fad that outlived its welcome. Beyond the pragmatic reasons for music reviews, a small subset of people turned the whole exercise into something greater. While the larger history of literary criticism is (mercifully) beyond the scope of this piece, all you need to know is that eggheads like yours truly have always loved to debate culture from poetry to film, and the rise of the late 20th century music and publishing industries allowed a few rarified talents to elevate their work into thoughtful criticism worth exploring for reasons beyond purchasing decisions.
For our oldest readers, that might mean Robert Christgau or Lester Bangs insisting that Rock was actually important and life changing. For ’80s readers of the NME or ’90s readers of The Source, criticism illustrated the connections between these new genres and the political climates that birthed them. Perhaps this site even did the same for younger readers – you’re welcome. In any case, as the money got tighter and headwinds stronger, we convinced ourselves that music criticism was a worthy endeavor for its own sake. I’m not saying that’s wrong, just that we rarely stop to question our baseline assumptions, lest we realize there’s no solid ground under our feet and will plummet to our doom like an animated coyote.
In any case, the internet has long since made the above compacts untenable. Napster may not have been the death knell of the music industry, but it sure made reading a review before checking out an album an obsolete practice. Even years removed from the industry’s MP3-fueled implosion, labels now see little reason to support (read: buy advertising) in music publications; it’s just not a good return on investment. Likewise, most people would rather spend $15 on a Spotify subscription allowing them to access whatever music they want, rather than spend that same money supporting a publication telling them what to listen to. It’s hard to blame them.
Initially, this was freeing for writers: fuck the industry, we were here to tell people how we really felt, not hawk UMG-financed pablum! The late ’00s saw a plethora of acidic, snarky takedowns and rapturous proclamations of classic status, complete with harsh/bombastic numerical scores – all to grab a reader’s attention and earn coveted clicks. After all, the financial motive for music and culture publications no longer involved moving records, it was all about gaming the numbers so the publication could “scale” and maybe get acquired by Hearst or (heh) Buzzfeed or at least make the Complex ad network. How could that ever go wrong?
I’ve got my fair share of grievances regarding that ’00s media environment – it was rockist, accountable to only a narrow middle-class readership, and generally unhelpful in promoting good music. But it wouldn’t last anyways. What really kicked the stool out from under the now strangulating practice of record reviews, was social media clapback and a more general societal rejection of expertise.
Recall our initial compact: readers spent money to access information from an expert. In some cases, this expertise was generalized – think Robert Christgau’s attempts at considering and rating the as much of a given week’s musical output as he could fit into a Village Voice column. But in the print era, music was mostly tribal, and listeners trusted their own. Boomers and radio listeners might grab Rolling Stone before a flight, but heshers would gravitate toward Kerrang! Hip-hop heads treated The Source like a bible. Once the internet (and the iPod) flattened these divisions, it made little sense for music publications to limit themselves to a specific demo – the goal was to get as big as possible ahead of a prospective buyout.
The problem is, if you’re covering the entirety of popular music, you’re suddenly accountable to every type of music fan out there and – surprise – a whole lot of them will begin to take your negative reviews personally. Readers and writers eventually concluded that publications were biased towards legacy genres, (in)conveniently, those fronted by white men. Whereas major label pop once merited fierce drubbings from punk-adjacent writers, publications now have to consider well organized Stan armies. Back in ’05, it was perfectly reasonable to have an indie-leaning writer wax about coke rap, now it’s impolitic. Hell, even genres long left to die, think Nu Metal, have their defenders and they will call you out for even the slightest dig at Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis. Negative reviews are at best, inconvenient, and at worse, dangerous for writers. I’ve gotten threats over them, which is mostly funny because none of those reviews mattered.
All of this leads us to our current quagmire, where publications are decreasing the amounts of reviews they publish and the entire practice seems headed towards an inevitable death. And yet… I can’t help but think a well written record review is better than the alternative. For all of the attention heaped on Youtube’s biggest music Vlogger (you know who), a lot of people hate that guy and I believe part of that is down to the unpleasantness of being lectured at by a music nerd. Meanwhile, TikTok as criticism is even worse, inviting shrill, poorly nuanced takes full of academic buzzwords by C students as distributed by a CCP-owned algorithm. Personally, I’ve spent 2024 mostly discussing music on Twitter and Reddit, and I’ve felt a constant, nagging sense of guilt that I was arguing with children and wasting my time. I should be working on real writing. Perhaps there’s no good reason for a record review to exist in 2024, but that doesn’t mean readers want the practice to die out.
So, if we’re determined to keep the record review alive, what would a good or even a great review look like in 2024? What should it accomplish? Who should write it and who should it be aimed at? Where should it be published? How much should you get paid for writing it? How much should you pay for reading it? All of these questions are up in the air, and I’m not so arrogant as to pretend I have the right answers for myself, let alone anybody else. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d want to read reviews that are accountable to the fans and practitioners of the genres being covered: I want to read rap reviews by people who live and breathe hip-hop, my dance reviews by DJs and clubbers in the thick of things right now. I want a writer to get to the heart of why a record is important and how listening to it might change a listener. Alternately, I’m fine with finding out the newest Conway The Machine drop WON’T change my life but it is 45 minutes of dope gangster rap.
What I’m least interested in – at this point – is moral judgment and the evaluation of culture on a university and thinktank-approved point system. Music and musicians are messy things, and if all we’re doing is fact checking to find out if an artist a good person or if they committed any sins against good behavior and social norms, then that’s just pointless as writing to tell someone to spend money on a CD in 2024. That goes double for hip-hop, but we’ll save that for a future installment of this column.
Confession: I hate when people call me a music journalist, because I am, in fact, not a journalist. I never went to J-school and I never signed onto a journalistic code of ethics. I was never interested in those things. I began writing about music on message boards in the early 2000s, because I NEEDED to express myself and air out my feelings about music, to such a degree that my actual friends were sick of it. This somehow led to my writing for blogs, which led to my writing for real publications, which led to my writing turning into a side hustle and eventually, to burnout. All the while, I reviewed and rated music dutifully ranking and writing up lists of what I thought was the best music in any given year.
In January though, I actively decided to stop listening to music like a reviewer. I’m no longer trying to listen to every single album that the internet insists I need to pay attention to. I’m no longer forcing myself to open every promo that hits my inbox. I’m not confining myself to “important” music – most of the time I’m perfectly happy listening to what would objectively be a 3.5 mic record just because it’s what I want to hear at any given time. I don’t know if that will lead to my writing fewer reviews, but I’d like to hope it might lead me to write better ones.
