I detest music critics. Music criticism is too often marked by an almost total ignorance of music. It pretends to an objectivity that hides personal preference behind a claimed understanding that too often falls short. Popular taste can become a good measure of musical ability, only to the point where the critic discovers faults with the audience. The best example, given in a review of British progressive rock, Rocking the Classics, is a quote from a review of a Black Sabbath song, in which both the musician and audience are belittled as "neanderthals". Another example (although one with which I happen to agree for the most part) is a quote concerning the 70's stadium band Styx, in which an album was compared to a parking lot full of whale vomit, and it was said that no one liked them except for their fans. At the time, Styx was selling millinos of records and selling out entire tours, so perhaps, depite certain musical failings, they were on to something the critics, in love with Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cramps, might have been missing.
Music critics tend to be Platonists. Despite a veneer of radicalism that in itself shows their shallowness, they would rather ignore the audience, the performers, indeed each performance of a piece, and concentrate on the music as if it fell from the sky somehow, unencumbered by the messiness of actual people who performed and listened to it. They ignore the social setting in which musics rise, become popular for a while, then fade. They hype music that is inconsequential. The most famous example, of course, is the love music critics had for British punk in the mid- to late-1970's, too often to the embarrasment of their own reputations. The quintessential punk band, The Sex Pistols, were a put-on, a get-rich-quick scheme by a plucky, conniving, unscrupulous entrepreneur who used up his musicians in an effort to make money. The musicians were exploited; the press was manipulated - and the critics thought they had something. Even today, the critics protest that, even though all that is true, The Sex Pistols were still important because of what followed in their drug-addled wake. It is true that bands sprang up imitating not only their "style" (which was nothing more than a variation on the roots rock of The Ramones), but their attitude as well. This does not alter the fact that they were as fake and manufactured as The Monkees or The Village People, and possessing as little musical ability as the latter two groups.
What works and what doesn't work for the public is never knowable beforehand; musicians play what they play and the public responds or not, depending upon a variety of factors, many of them inarticulate and unconscious. Even the most gifted musician - Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai, Miles Davis - has ups and downs (if they live long enough; in Parker's case, I'm not quite sure the rule applies) based upon the vagaries of popular taste. Sometimes a musician comes along who is so different that they are completely misunderstood; Art Tatum was a bop pianist playing in the swing era; Robert Fripp wanted (and probably still wants) to play Kind of Blue with variations over and over again until he and the musicians he gathers around himself get it right (although, one night in New York in 1981, according to Fripp, they did get it right); Miles Davis saw no reason electric instruments could not serve as vehicles for jazz, even with the limitations inherent in such a construction. To reduce these three to, in order, a master of technique; a rocker who wishes he were a jazz musicians; a musician yearning for acceptance and respectability by an audience growing tired of acoustic jazz - these "narratives" are not only shallow, they are, in the end, false because they completely ignore the depth of commitment, the stated preferences of the people in question, and the whole context in which these musicians lived and worked. I use these three as examples because they are so flagrant, but the list could include, for example, those who lump the Beatles with The Rolling Stones as similar bands (it would be better to compare the Stones with Led Zepelin); those who compare The Who with Led Zepelin (it would be better to compare The Who with Marvin Gaye; they were an electric R&B band while Zep was a blues band). Even the dismissal of bands such as Journey, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, and Loverboy as bad is wrong. They aren't so much bad as they were just middling, mediocre bands, producing not so much bad music (the worst rock music was too often performed by the best bands; can anyone say The Magical Mystery Tour?) as it was music that was dull and uninventive.
Of course, critics complain about the mediocrity of such bands, and often get excited by the wrong new thing, but if a form of music is popular - progressive rock in the early- to mid-1970's (and enjoying a revival for the past decade or so), and heavy metal continually since the late-1960's - but unappealing to critics, for whatever reasons (the aforementioned Rocking the Classics has an interesting, even compelling, but I think incomplete, explanation - a combination of phony elitism and faux-political radicalism combined with that streak of Platonism of which I wrote before), then stand back, because not only is the music in for attack, but the public who likes such music is ignorant, benighted, and being taken for a ride by corporate interests only interested in the bottom line. Such arguments are so erroneous on their face one wonders why and how they could or should be taken seriously, but they are.
Music criticism is based upon the false idea that there are objective standards that can be applied without prejudice or favor across any and all genres of music. Once a critic insists the music he or she is "serious" enough, they get to work applying those standards. It is silly, it is easily disproven, but it still holds. Rarely do critics take a piece of music and let it stand on its own merits, as the product of an individual or group within a broader context, existing within a larger musical milieu with which to understand, appreciate, and criticize.
Music is a human invention, existing not in and of and for itself, but because of, by, and through human agency. As such, it can only be understood as a product of a huge variety of factors, too many to adequately address in its entirety. Rather than say this, and surrender to the inevitable truth that they write about music they like based upon personal preference, they hide behind all sorts of nonsense and an assumed intellectualism to try and prove that they are actually applying standards that make their choices and observations and criticisms true.
Nonsense.
