Is Music Criticism dead?

Fri 20th Jan, 2012 in Features

We all know that the FL Forums love a good “impassioned discussion”, so each Friday over the next five weeks we will be fuelling that chatter with five controversial music debates. Thanks to Hyundai’s new Veloster will be giving away prizes each week for the best debaters.

Last week we moved into round two of the debate series with a huge discussion about ‘Record Stores vs The Internet’, as ominous as it sounded you sure did find a lot to argue about..

This week we are stirring the pot to find out if you think whether, in this digital age where every man, woman or dog with a twitter account, music criticism can survive. And moreso, if it can then what makes a good critic. The winner of this debate will take home a $350 Amazon books voucher, so you can buy all the best ramblings of your favourite critics.

The Death of the Critic – is it greatly exaggerated?

You know what is fun? Sticking your naked paw into a jar full of wasps. Or, failing that, why not have a go a defining the role of the music critic in this modern digital age of the Facebooks and Twitter and Pitchfork! and blogs and etc? No one ever talks about that! Definitely not music critics. There is definitely not an almost infinite feedback loop going on there about if or not the critic is dead.

No, actually there are few areas of public discourse more concerned with examining its own ongoing state of “crisis” than criticism—and music criticism in particular—which can often come off as a whole lot of people fiddling while Rome burns. In much the same way Twitter is often blamed for the downfall of news journalism, logic would dictate that it is far more likely that its downfall is due to the undue coverage it gives to Twitter and how it is killing journalism, and not to say, actually breaking news.

Anyway! This is fun. Like a gift from fury heaven, this eyeball-searingly horrible review of PJ Harvey just fell into our laps. Truly this is the very definition of “everyone’s a critic”, (the review was crowd-sourced). It’s already been dissected endlessly by ‘the internet’, but let’s look more closely at this review, and see if or not it truly fails: Clearly, the review is horribly, appallingly written (the writer cannot spell “Divine”, unintentionally championing a professional troll opinion columnist), ill-informed, misogynistic and conveys nothing to the readers beyond the writer’s own shortcomings. But! It is very definitely entertaining. We can’t stop talking about it! Not even now! So it cannot fail completely, if “to entertain the reader” is one criteria of a good review. So half a star there.