While suspecting as much, I’ve long wondered whether the sentiments in this piece are actually true. So I perused some of the album reviews on rollingstone.com to see what all the fuss is about. Turns out Ted Gioia is on to something when he complains that current music criticism contains no “in-depth discussion of music” whatsoever. I mean none.
To see how bad things have become, I grabbed a 40-year-old copy of Rolling Stone from helveticka’s library* and scanned the record reviews. Guess what? No “cogent analysis” there either. The only difference I can see between the two is that the new stuff is little more than a string of tenuous comparisons with the old.
Yes, it’s probably—maybe even demonstrably—true that today’s pop listener is musically illiterate. I think a lot of it has to do with the remarkable lack of imagination among current “artists.” And public schools, which all too often dump their music programs at the first hint of a budget crisis, should share some of the blame. But music critics? I’m not so sure.
*That’s right: we have a library.
