Rock Criticism

My first published article ... in the Village Voice, October 21, 1971 ... I was 24 years old and living on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. I sent this in as a Letter to the Editor - in response to a negative review of Paul McCartney by Voice critic Robert Christgau - and was surprised about two weeks later by a check in the mail and a note from the Voice that they wanted to publish my letter as an article.

This article was written in response to the New York Times' negative review of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."  The Times article, published June 18, 1967, called the Beatles album "dazzling, but ultimately fraudulent."  Four days later, on June 22,  the Village Voice published my review under the headline "Beatles' Sgt. Pepper: The Album as Art Form." 
Contrary to some Rock histories, this was NOT one of a chorus of rave reviews that appeared immediately after the album's release.  As far as I know it was the only favorable review, and the only one to offer a critical analysis of the album's revolutionary form and content.

Though their cultural births coincided, punk and rap musicians performed in New York City for at least 7 years before they endeavored any substantial creative interactions. Musicians, critics, and fans referred to both punk and rap as ‘primitive’; however, this article compares the acceptance and celebration of punk as ‘primitive’ with inverted judgments of shared qualities in rap music. Specifically, this article considers New York punk in the 1970s as a white racial project. Persistent stereotypes in white music media, particularly rock criticism, constructed the discursive meanings of punk and rap, while institutional and political segregation structured this distinction. Artistic ‘amateurism’, thus, functions as a celebratory term only when we give such art the benefit of the doubt – that it is not mere ineptness, that it is fruitful, that it is intentional, or that it is subversive. This benefit, in this case, is a white privilege.

An incident at the US men’s magazine Maxim involving a rock critic who did not listen to a record before reviewing it serves as a catalyst in this paper for considering the ethics that guide the practice of rock criticism. By examining the historical genesis of the field and its relationship to nontraditional, literary journalism, this article attempts to theorize how rock criticism has mediated the relationship between criticism and journalism in ways that offer it conflicting standards on which to build its ethics. This article argues that journalism studies needs to consider the challenge rock criticism presents in order to do better by nonstandard forms of journalism as well as the contemporary economic realities which constrain music critics.

"I've just figured out who this little fuck is. .. Same guy who wrote the Book of Revelations."-Ken Kesey (Dodd 419) Shabtai Zizel ben Avraham. Robert Zimmerman. Bob Dylan. He has many names and like the Hebrew word for G-d it may seem that we cannot speak the word that tags him. Using the writing of Abraham Heschel, this paper connects Dylan's work to the Judaic tradition of prophecy. Once we see Dylan as an inheritor of this tradition, pretty much all varying iterations of Dylan become one. He's a poet and he knows it--but he's a prophet first. His poetry serves his religious calling. It's hard for many of his most ardent fans to swallow, but that comes with the territory. Ask Jeremiah.

In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s.

The French audience of so-called "independent" pop (or indie pop) has been found mainly within a population of students or young workers one might refer to as "educated", and who have aspired to distinguish themselves from the most common musical tastes. Still, the starting point of our concern is that of a gap between this cultural profile and the apparent triviality of the pop genre: has this audience's fondness anything to do with legitimate dispositions (despite appearances) or, on the contrary, does it step away from the historical features of "legitimate culture"?

Sylvain Courtoux crée dans Clara Elliott, Strangulation Blues deux dispositifs : celui du leurre en créant « Clara Elliott », identité fictive qui écrit un recueil de poésie, en se présentant comme le passeur critique de cette œuvre et ; celui de la forme de celle-ci. Il déploie alors une vaste entreprise historicisante dans la pratique des notes de bas de page, donnant des informations sur les citations musicales utilisées dans les poèmes. En quoi Sylvain Courtoux opère une subversion de la critique rock traditionnelle ? Entre définition du dispositif poétique et critique rock traditionnelle, il sera question d’un mélange entre critique universitaire et critique éthique dans lequel l’auteur effectue une « déterritorialisation »  du domaine de la critique dans un domaine clairement littéraire, au sein d’un système poétique évoluant durant une période punk et post-punk.

Intervening in the ongoing debates in the United States about the decline of public intellectualism, this article suggests that rock critics, especially those writing in 1960s New York, should be re-imagined as public intellectuals. Coinciding with the moment when commentators lamented that public intellectualism began to wane, rock critics
participated in the vigorous defense of popular music as a legitimate field of intellectual scrutiny, using the forum of alternative journalism to do so. As such, rock critics deserve a secure place not only in the history of popular music studies, but also within the general narrative of American intellectual history.

Intervention dans le cadre du Congrès Annuel de la Société Française d'Esthétique. "La critique dans tous ses états. Arts, littérature, théorie."
14 juin 2019

En mars 1976, le critique rock Jon Landau lance un signal d’alerte qui sonne comme un aveu d’impuissance : dénonçant « l’absence de tout esprit critique dans la critique », il constate que les critiques musicaux sont en train de passer à côté de la révolution disco parce qu’ils n’en comprennent ni l’esthétique ni les enjeux spécifiques, et qu’ils balayent ainsi d’un revers de main un pan entier de la production musicale.
Une telle incompréhension ne relève pas seulement d’une logique de spécialisation. Elle repose sur les valeurs qui innervent en profondeur la critique rock. Tributaire d’une histoire des contre-cultures qui se construit largement en s’opposant au courant dominant (au mainstream), celle critique reconduit des valeurs que l’on pourrait qualifier de romantiques : authenticité, originalité, marginalité, etc.
En faisant siennes ces valeurs, la critique musicale en vient à dessiner une définition axiologique de l’art. Or, cette définition se heurte à un genre musical qui n’y souscrit guère. En appliquant à la musique mainstream des critères qui lui sont étrangers et hétérogènes, la critique musicale se rend cet objet incompréhensible, infréquentable ; au point parfois de lui refuser le statut d’art.
Nous souhaiterions étudier les mécanismes rhétoriques et littéraires par lesquels est reconduite l’axiologie romantique. Nous verrons que celle-ci se manifeste par une incompréhension des spécificités esthétiques du mainstream, et par le retournement de ces spécificités en défauts au regard d’une norme sous-jacente.
En prenant pour objet d’étude la critique rock confrontée à la musique mainstream, nous souhaitons ouvrir une interrogation plus large sur les pouvoirs de la critique d’art : à quelles conditions peut-elle se saisir de son objet avec justesse, ou en manquer les particularités esthétiques ? Une incompréhension première est-elle nécessaire à toute critique à titre d’étonnement, ou rend-elle son objet durablement illégitime ?