Preface to Music in a Word, Volume 3

(c) Ira Robbins 2022

I did my childhood during the Cold War, a time when Serious Men dealt with Grave Matters, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fluoride and Mutually Assured Destruction. There was a fallout shelter sign (three orange triangles in a black circle, a graphic appropriated in 1973 by the Who, thus connecting my anxious adolescence to my avid adulthood) on the brick wall of my apartment building. At school, we practiced hiding under our desks and lining up in the hallway, absurdly futile drills for the potential nuclear obliteration we were taught to fear. The wryly doom-laden phrase “bend over and kiss your ass goodbye” remains firmly engraved in my memory.

Pre-teen me was told how to dress, how to behave, what to eat, when to get up, when to go to sleep and what I needed to know. My family had only recently acquired a used black-and-white television, but my viewing time was strictly limited. The only real freedom I had was at the playground and on the streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood. But that came with its own fears: “all-I-find-I-keep” bullies, some of them schoolmates, who would occasionally relieve a dweeb like me of money, my bus pass or baseball cards in lieu of kicking my ass. One standard torment was asking to “hold” a Spaldeen and then “roofing” it, which meant irretrievably pitching it atop an apartment building so you’d have to rustle up a quarter (then a hefty portion of my weekly allowance) to buy a new one.

The radio, The Flintstones, Mad magazine, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan — those were the things that gave us kids the inkling that we could be something other than what our parents told us to be, that a new and expanding part of our lives wasn’t created by or for them — a profound exposure to FUBU. In fact, the less they liked any of it, the better. With the advent of long hair as a declaration of rebellious independence, barbershops became a generational battleground; haircuts were a source of fraught conflict nearly as long as I lived with my folks.

The dawning of youth culture meant we kids shared things adults wanted no part of. They might endorse the street sports we played — stoopball, Chinese handball, skelly, Johnny on the Pony, sandlot baseball — but the slang we used was ours alone. “Tip” updated the hipsters’ “split”; if you liked a girl, you “rapped” to her. We didn’t talk about “muggings”: victims of street crime were “jumped” or “taken off.” Shamefully, “retarded” and “faggot” were still acceptable in our vernacular of insults. So was “mofo,” whose unexpurgated form, like the never-used “cunt,” went well beyond the pale of casual banter and was generally understood to be a thrown gauntlet best avoided unless you were ready to make a fist. With the Civil Rights movement in full swing and there being no chance for it to be employed without hatred or provocation, no one in my little world, Black or white, ever uttered the N-word aloud.

The A-bomb that haunted our dreams never landed, but rock and roll sure exploded in 1964. The music had been around a decade by then (as had I), stirring up no small amount of frenzy and parental consternation, but the British Invasion blew the doors open and made it clear to adults that their sons and daughters, in the words of Bob Dylan, were beyond their command. We were happily swept up by the westbound tidal wave and that was that.

Ten years after that, I was a self-declared rock writer, trading plans for a career in radio engineering (or radical politics) for proselytizing in print on behalf of the music I loved. Still enjoying the luxury of living at home, I could afford to harbor a professional ambition that could never support me: freelance record reviews paid $5 or $10 a pop, and I didn’t have the first clue about how to go about seeking a salaried magazine job (or any other kind, for that matter).

It never occurred to me to consider journalism school, a non-decision I have never regretted. (Engineering school was probably the wrong choice, but that’s the one I made.) My writing about music began strictly on instinct: I knew of no set rules to follow, no mentors, no instruction books — just the internalized examples of magazines I read (Creem, Rock, Circus, Hit Parader, Melody Maker, Go, Fusion, Crawdaddy, Cheetah, the Village Voice) and sought to imitate. Crucially (if inexplicably) armed with the belief that what I thought about music would be of interest to others, I wasn’t any good at first, but years of new left activism and an exaggerated sense of my insightfulness countered innate shyness and enabled me to give written voice to strong opinions, which at the very least meant I always had something to say. I could spell, had a conveniently rich grounding in grammar and access to a decent typewriter. The only ingredient missing was an outlet for my cocky yammering. After collecting a few well-earned rejection notices, fate intervened: Dave Schulps, Karen Rose and I hatched the idea of starting a fanzine to give ourselves a voice in late 1973. I grabbed on with both hands and devoted the next ten years of my life to it.

We ran Trouser Press entirely on instinct as well. We knew no one who could tell us how to edit or publish a maga­zine: we copied what we liked, did whatever felt right and learned what we needed, step by tiny step. For me personally, what felt right was to love and hate records with equal unguarded fervor, to favor underdogs and view commercial success with, if not quite disdain, a healthy dose of skepticism about the compromises likely needed to achieve it. We valued art over commerce (another direct result of my political views) and wrote as if the magazine’s readers were our friends, pushing our own collective taste so strongly that, to this day, people still refer to “Trouser Press bands” as if that were a branch in rock’s taxonomy.

It's no secret that a lot of early rock journalism was cavalier and amateurish; our mid-’70s arrival put us smack-dab in the evolution of criticism from fannish cheerleading to more nuanced, informed and analytical contextualizing of records, artists and performances. (After Paul Williams, who set the template with Crawdaddy!, I give Rolling Stone a lot of credit for raising the field’s journalistic standards.) It helped all of us that information sources began to multiply, advertising money grew and a lot of talented writers came on the scene.

But we were still going on instinct. Thanks perhaps to their emergence in the fog of new journalism, the people who took it upon themselves to become, in that now-quaint phrase, “rock writers” had to invent their own ways of dancing about architecture. Slowly, the field — started by young white men writing about slightly older white men, which was unquestionably demographically narrow but never in my experience or through my effort intentionally exclusionary — grew to include practitioners and subjects who were neither. Whatever barriers limited the parti­cipation and coverage of women and people of color have thankfully fallen; diversity in music journalism is now a given. But ending the hegemony didn’t erase history, and there are those who view rock and its old-school Boswells, both then and now, as reactionary, blinkered and to some measure racist, sexist and homophobic.

Inclusionary progress has, unfortunately, been paired with a less salutary development in the coverage of culture. Features about music, once the jolly realm of choose-your-own-adventure imagination and battles royale, are now just as likely to be a dismal display of promotion-styled spin-managed suck-up collusion with artists and their handlers. Music criticism, which once happily indulged extremism and hyperbole to the point of verbal savagery has been defanged by a participation-trophy generation queasy about the very idea of judging, an instinct forcefully encouraged by corporations allergic to any words that might trigger a reader and cost the advertising department a pageview. Meaningless controversy and sensationalism make fine clickbait, but the overriding goal of engaging and holding readers disfavors minority opinions, 25-cent words and subjects that might be unfamiliar to people.

We chose to value Trouser Press’s readers by challenging them; I always kept a dictionary handy and liked to imagine that our subscribers did as well. Ever since the launch of USA Today in 1982, a lot of mainstream journalism has tacked toward keeping things brief and simple, serving the lowest common denominator, forcing those who are better informed and more curious to look elsewhere. That led us to the count-it-in-seconds attention spans now encouraged by Twitter, TikTok and their ilk. While LCD may be a necessary and socially commendable educational approach, as a way to sell newspapers it’s a shameful sellout of media’s vaunted purpose.

As MTV’s influence grew in the early ’80s, making stars out of new wave and post-punk acts we liked — some of whom we had championed — Trouser Press took commercial advantage by putting pretty pictures of popular artists on the front cover. But that didn’t obligate us to blindly praise them. So sometimes the articles and reviews inside the magazine were critical, even mocking, of our cover stars. That earned us angry truth-in-packaging letters from readers who felt cheated when we wrote mean things about the idol they bought the magazine to read about. With naïve thoughts of news value and cultural significance rather than pin-up slavishness, it never occurred to us that selecting an act to feature was an intrinsic endorsement of approval. Journalism doesn’t have to be favorable to be informative and entertaining. We didn’t assign writers based on their avowed loyalty to a band but because we knew they’d deliver a thoughtful article or review worth reading. We were curious to see what would come of an encounter, not ensure in advance what the result would be. Yes, we took advantage of famous faces to sell magazines, but we still couldn’t bring ourselves to publish puff pieces. For better or worse, we picked our subjects and reported on what we saw, heard and felt. Four decades later, that idea must seem like an unthinkable form of self-defeating nonsense, but a number of bands I have really admired over the years have likewise evinced a deficient sense of self-interest, so maybe flaw recognizes flaw.

In the old days, a review assignment would be a best-guess effort by an editor to select a contributor who would be equipped and familiar enough with an artist or a genre to react thoughtfully to an album. If a writer made a pitch, it would often be out of curiosity to hear a record, not simply to request the opportunity to voice an established opinion. (I wonder if streaming audio has had an impact on that process.) I don’t routinely read enough record reviews any longer to be a reliable authority on the state of things, but it’s certainly my sense that a lot of the independent thinking and courage that once characterized music journalism has been tamped down and buffed up. (That said, a tip of the sword to the Atlantic magazine critic who trashed the 2022 Arcade Fire album.)

Trouser Press magazine ceased to be a going concern in 1984. Far be it for me to paint iconoclasm as a prudent business strategy, but we were always a flimsy little operation, financially speaking, so our editorial ideals were not the direct cause of death. They did, however, keep us proud of what we were doing, feeling free to print what we believed in rather than take a phony stance to sell copies. You’d think media companies that publish music reviews nowadays should be able to withstand a little consternation on the part of readers, but when it’s so much easier (and profitable) to keep happy faces on everyone in the publicist-band-reader-advertiser ecosystem, the notion of telling the truth whatever the downside has probably lost some of its self-righteous luster.

Leaving behind a lot of its individualism and expression, music criticism has taken on the golden glow of appreciative marketing material, only occasionally interrupted by dismay at a well-established artist’s creative misstep. Add to that the blundering mistake that popularity is somehow proof of artistic achievement, and there goes a whole realm of insightful examination of music. Even the Condé Nast-owned Pitchfork (and I must confess to only a passing acquaintance with the site), with its proud and bratty reputation for skewering albums, now seems more inclined to find common ground with both artists and its audience, serving up passionless B+ blandness rather than unpre­dictable clear-minded judgment. To wit, here are the first six reviews on the site this morning, with the numerical grades (out of 10) given them and the pull lines displayed under the titles:

Belle and Sebastian A Bit of Previous (7.5) The Scottish band’s first studio album in seven years considers the importance of togetherness with clear, aphoristic language and a few musical experiments.

Bloc Party Alpha Games (5.2) Taking cues from their early records, Bloc Party’s sixth album successfully marries post-punk with dance grooves—and confusingly devotes a lot of its energy to spite.

Otoboke Beaver Super Champon (7.8) The Japanese quartet returns louder, faster, and fiercer, tearing through 18 hilarious and ferocious songs in 20 minutes.

Action Bronson Cocodrillo Turbo (7.7) The rapper and professional gourmand’s latest album is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out journey into the wilderness.

Ben Vida / Lea Bertucci Murmurations (7.1) The New York composer and improviser brings an inquisitive, playful approach to experimental music.

Arcade Fire WE (7.0) The band’s sixth album pivots back to a more melodic, sincere, and effortful style, attempting once again to find a genuine connection.

The failures now plaguing music journalism have deep roots. Thirty years ago, a reporter from the New Zealand rock magazine Rip It Up attended a press panel at the New Music Seminar and recorded this mind-boggling declaration:

Gregory Sandow, then of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner but soon to join Entertainment Weekly, expressed a decidedly anti-critical stance for a critic: “How do I talk to an audience I'm not part of? By criticizing an actor [or] genre, you're also criticizing the audience. Don't judge. To think you know what you're talking about is dangerous. What the audience knows about an act is just as important as what you know."

Just for fun, here are some pungent quotes from other members of the panel:

Nelson George of Billboard: "You've got to take a point of view, otherwise you're just reviewing records. Alternative points of view are important. I still think Elvis Presley was a bum and I'm not going to back off."

Bruce Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh, rejecting an accusation of compromised ethics: "What? You won't give a bad review to a friend? Are you so wimpy you'll only give bad reviews to people you don't know?"

Chris Bourke, the Rip It Up writer, concluded with a quote from classical critic Virgil Thompson: "The function of criticism is to aid the public in digesting musical works. Not for nothing is it so often compared to bile."

In this best of all possible worlds, who is keen to hear that something they enjoy is rubbish? My wife has, on occasion, called me “the pleasure stealer” when we strongly disagree on a movie, a record or a painting she likes. In my 1994 interview with him (see page 57), Morrissey says, “The basic job of most pop journalists in England is to convince audiences of the reasons why they should not appreciate the music they enjoy.” There was a time when differences of opinion could be taken in stride without offense or anger. (Except maybe by an artist who’s been trashed in print. Those grudges can be eternal.) Comments could be rejected, laughed at or simply ignored without rancor or recrimination. But genial disagreement is out of fashion, replaced by bug-eyed calumny. Critics who don’t rave about the latest superhero blockbuster are now unwelcome interlopers in the custom of consumer satisfaction. Film reviewers won’t get their quotes on ads if they don’t rave. Artists with clout can limit access to writers and publications whose support is assured. And positive reviewers may even enjoy the flattering warmth of being thanked (or at least “liked”) online by their subjects.

I have to admit, however, that my high horse is kneeling these days. With age comes the wisdom of uncertainty, and self-doubt is all but fatal to the proper practice of criticism. I’ve pulled in my horns, put down my dukes, softened the rhetoric, traded visceral explosions for more careful consideration. Remember that famous line about “breaking a butterfly on a wheel”? Granted, it was meant for Mick and Keith, who no longer bring the image of butterflies to mind, but regardless: ferocious putdowns don’t feel so clever any longer. Music whose lack of merit pisses me off does not immediately incite me to complain publicly about it. (Well, not every time.) These days, when I get inspired to add a new review to the TrouserPress.com site (which is already well-stocked with rancor and vitriol), it’s likely to be praise for a band I really like. Having tasted the ash of hard work yielding disappointing results on enough occasions, I am happy to use my small measure of online influence to tell people about a meritorious effort. I can’t tell if being kinder and gentler is a failing or an achievement, a sign of maturity or of cowardice. I blame some combination of diminished conviction, increased empathy and fear of being ostracized. I do feel some disappointment at the weakening of my critical spine, and I don’t know what to make of that.

Before the social media cloud floated overhead, with its constant threat of opprobrium raining down on extreme opinions, weak arguments, factual errors and expressions of politically incorrect thought, print journalism was a one-way communications channel, insulating us writers from public response beyond the mild sting of letters to the editor. (And even then we usually got to have the last word. Fair? I suppose not.) Sure, one might have to endure an incensed phone call from a label publicist or a manager from time to time, spats that could lead to drinks being tossed at parties, but the electronic public square has given new voice to artists, insiders and fans, who can (and will) respond angrily to negative valuations of a record or artist they worship. People used to laugh off the decimation of a film or a book or a record they’ve enjoyed; nowadays, it’s a signal to reach for those QWERTY flamethrowers.

The fourth estate once enjoyed and exploited its lofty perch, but that advantage is well and truly gone. We are no longer shielded from, or privileged by, our readers via the knowledge and authority we possess. We make ourselves fair game by publishing and posting, but with a decent chance a controversial opinion or harsh depiction will be debated, disputed and possibly derided online — complete with accusations or assumptions about the author’s qualifications, motivation, demographic bona fides or personal prejudices — it’s not a gantlet I’m always inclined to run. I get that it's overdue fair play and all, but being shat on in public is a drag (even if you deserve it, which all of us do from time to time.) As some of my colleagues have discovered, even qualified praise (I’m looking at you, Lana Del Rey) can summon a shitstorm of online calumny, and who wants to subject themselves to that?

If the socio-political impulse to avoid exposure to unwelcome ideas has spread to cultural criticism, then its con­sumption becomes subject to a selection process that shuts out opinions the reader doesn’t already hold. What's really frustrating, and this goes for the expression of political opinions as well as creative ones, is being set upon by an angry mob that has seized upon a sentence, a word or (worst of all) a misunderstanding to flex their thumbs and come pounding on your virtual door. (The old game of telephone could not have been more prescient in forecasting how public discourse would evolve in the 21st century.) Clear writing is a worthy goal; bullet-proofing one’s work to prevent it from being taken the wrong way is a powerful disincentive to free thought and expression. There was a time I could have written this whole essay in an afternoon, not the weeks of thinking, reconsideration and calibra­tion that it actually took.

I’m not a working critic any longer, so I’m not obligated to put my ideas out there for public inspection. I am still prone to sharing the occasional intemperate social media post promoting a controversial view, but the likely blowback makes me think twice before sharing potential provocations beyond a small circle of friends. I do occasionally find it worthwhile having to defend my assumptions and assertions, but virtual editing by strangers is not peer-review, and hardly the most pleasant way to strengthen one’s thinking.

Along with the public rebuff of the news media, criticism in all its forms has lost a lot of luster as a valued and complementary element of culture, a thoughtful response to art that can add to the appreciation and understanding of it and even provide a useful sounding board to artists themselves. A new generation gap has opened up between journalism’s old guard and young consumers with novel cultural values, public forums and digital listening oppor­tunities unimaginable 25 years ago. As has often been said, if everyone’s a critic, then no one’s a critic.

I searched the phrases “music critic” and “music journalism” on Twitter:

How can it be valid criticism when he’s not a fan of hers nor is he her target audience.

Whether music is good is entirely down to the listener. It has fuck all to do with how difficult it is to perform or what any music critic/snob thinks. If it gives people pleasure then it is good. End of.

Music journalism is simply finding a thousand ways of saying 'good and also catchy'

The point of living life is to bring light in the dark, to bring positive things to those in need, not to say that another person is not good.

With all your expertise, it’s not surprising your music critic advice is worthy of 3 flushes at least.

Qualified music critic? Is that something you have go to university for? Here's me thinking that music was subjective, I didn't realise you had to be qualified to voice an opinion.

I feel like we shouldn’t allow a person who literally couldn’t make a hit song even if they tried, be a fucking music critic. Wtf does he know

Someone once told me I would be a good music critic: I've rarely been so insulted

There’s another generational issue: as pop music both renews and repeats itself endlessly, a 60-year-old listener will have a completely different awareness of the archive of recorded music, its forms and its potential than a young person who has not been exposed to nearly as much music. This clueless demonstration of callowness regarding the New York Dolls was recently published by Vulture.com in a commentary on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2022 (to which they were not elected):

Another terrible band. They were Lower East Side denizens. They performed very close to The Village Voice offices and were therefore able to schmooze the first generation of rock critics enough to earn themselves a critical reputation that will never fucking die. I just don’t hear it. They were musically inept, and lyrically, there was barely anything there. They’re a rock band for people who think that rock should be a form of theater.

Trainspotter citations of past influences, long a source of point-scoring among ooh-ooh-pick-me! rock critics, lose their relevance when foisted on readers who neither know nor care about such precedents. I don’t know how you take ignorance into consideration without condescension, but that’s another LCD problem that today’s commen­tators face. And there have been profound changes in what listeners value in music. If concepts like individual expression, poetry, melody, autonomy and diversity have not quite been erased from the pop panoply, common regard for them has surely dropped more than a few pegs. And while cultural values shift all the time, recalibrations of consensus aesthetics can put a critic with consistent views in a very difficult position. I, for one, am not prepared to favor the sustained bellowing that is the apparent appeal of many popular American Idol singers.

Another sign o’ the times on social media: every day my feeds are filled with posts marking anniversaries of archival record releases, each one a joyous celebration of their enduring wonderfulness. Sure, time has helped establish a canon, and most of what I see is fairly defensible, but that’s not criticism, it’s a circle jerk of community nostalgia. There are sites whose only raison d’être seems to be the promotion of rah-rah rock memories, which may be one way to introduce the youngs to music of the olds, but spoon-feeding just drags the culture down further. It is, essentially, a form of mindless marketing, encouraging overpriced sales of that artisanal vinyl, and collectively presents a woefully inadequate version of music’s creative history.

I once thought (as a defensive rationale) that rock stars inhabited a completely other world, that those of us peering through their window and commenting on their work were safely outside of it. Lob an impotent jumble of words and ideas in their direction and they’d never know or care. (Actually, that was never true: see Eric Clapton’s dissolution of Cream). There always was an element of “they can take it — what could I possibly do to them?” behind brutal takedowns of major artists in print (like the early response to Led Zeppelin in Rolling Stone); anyone with the temerity to write a dissenting opinion on, say, Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967 (that might have been 13-year-old me had I the opportunity) would never have expected to discourage sales of the LP or endure a public bollocking by John Lennon. These days, we know that, thanks to social media, artists both read and sometimes respond to criticism, whether it comes from a major media source or just some opinionated asshole with a phone.

Hand in hand with the creeping self-awareness of media as marketing (it was always thus from the artist side, but some of us refused to be anything more than passive participants in that game: now, everyone understands it to be a prime purpose), the removal of barriers to creating and circulating music has flooded the world with hopefuls, which has led to the widespread conviction that writing negatively about any but the richest and most powerful is tantamount to stomping out the courageous flicker of creativity.

I don’t mean this to be a defense of negativism; lord knows, there’s enough of that in the world already. But I have never understood people who like everything. As I wrote in the first volume of Music in a Word, prolonged exposure to art ought to encourage discernment, not acquiescence. I can’t imagine how enjoyment can be so easy to derive. A music listener will encounter brilliance and mediocrity on a continuum of achievement and originality. For me, at least, the wit, insight, beauty, excitement, memorability and other fine qualities I first found in rock and roll as a child, sounds and words that reliably affected and stayed with me, became the values that I later used to think and write about music. I didn’t find those qualities in many records, but rejoiced in print when I did. I still don’t understand how dedicated listening can fail to narrow and focus appreciation of achievement and excellence.

I had the great pleasure recently of meeting and conversing (via video chat) with one of the field’s true O.G.s: Gene Sculatti, the esteemed West Coast journalist whose writing career began about a decade before mine. I’d known his byline since reading him in Phonograph Record, Rolling Stone and the Warner Bros. Records house organ, Waxpaper, which he edited, but we had never spoken before. I bring this up because I was heartened by reading two of his recent books, which — intentionally or not — track the progression of rock criticism, both as a genre and as a reflection of age and maturity. Tryin’ to Tell a Stranger ’Bout Rock and Roll, a concise anthology of his work, begins in 1966, when he was 19, with pieces for Paul Williams’ Crawdaddy! and Greg Shaw’s Mojo Navigator. Two years on, he’s assessing a Mason Williams album for the recently launched Rolling Stone. From the outset, his writing is literate, clear and well-organized, as strong on scrutinizing as opining, but still packed with brash, unequivocal judgments and blithe dismissals that hallmark the views of a young man full of what my father used to refer to as “piss and vinegar.” One Simon and Garfunkel track has “overwhelmingly poor lyrics,” while another is ”third-rate Bob Lind (if that’s possible).” Jefferson Airplane Takes Off is “perhaps the best rock album ever produced,” but songs on Kinks albums “have a tendency to all sound alike.” A few book pages and several years later, he scrapes the group America off his shoe in Creem. I recognize the self-assured brio, the unfounded confidence that having a voice in print will lead readers to listen and learn, from my own youthful exertions. A little knowledge and strong opinions are the ungerminated seed of real critical authority, but it seems as if every rock writer had to start with those tools and work their way to a more reasoned (and reasonable) perspective.

Gene’s most recent book, For the Records: Close Encounters With Pop Music, has that critical and historical authority in spades, and still is a warm and winning stroll through decades of cherished singles, a diverse jukebox that stretches from doo wop to disco to punk. The knowledge, perception, context and enthusiasm of the writing is an invitation to share the joy; free to select favorites rather than confront the unknown, Sculatti has no need for negativity here. But his favorable evaluations are honestly come by; there is no taint of critical compromise, of lowered standards.

Mea culpa. Twenty years ago, I read Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, which hit me the wrong way and prejudiced all of my subsequent feelings about his writing. He was, at the time, a music and film critic for a Midwest newspaper, and something in the book convinced me he was a subscriber to the popularity=quality equation that goes against every fiber of my being as a critic. I just re-read FRC — which now strikes me as smart, funny and courageous in its rousing defense of largely indefensible music, a balanced blend of teenaged naïveté and adult depth that feels fair and honest and includes what purports to be the author’s phone number — and I cannot find any basis for that belief. (I did, however, find myself name-checked for something in a Slayer review in The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock that I didn’t write.) It’s experiences like that which make me wonder if the last third of one’s life should be spent reexamining experiences of the first two.

Despite appearances, prejudices and dismissive allegations, the business of criticism has never been merely the expression of personal opinions; it involves reflection, examination and explanation of them. If a critic does that work with rigor and honesty, there should be a rough measure of predictable consistency to values and outlook. If a critic finds substantially different value in comparable artistic efforts, she or he had better be able to work out where the crucial difference lies. To understand and explain opinions, critics need to be prepared to question and explore emotional reactions, to question assumptions and set aside preconceptions to make more thoughtful judgments about quality and impact. I know how pretentious that all sounds, but there’s a good reason people like me get hacked off when the response to serious critical writing is, “That’s just your opinion.” It’s not.

I have long clung to the notion of an empirically developed idea of why I like the music I like, an intricate formulation that factors in melody, intelligence, wit, originality, degree of difficulty, passion, skill, sound, honesty and a bunch of other things to understand my intuitive pleasures, approvals and dismissals. If I like something, I want to reassure myself that it also checks the right boxes, otherwise, I might have to reconsider what those boxes contain. (Yes, it’s a lot of work, and, no, it is not entirely conducive to simply enjoying music. That’s why it’s a job.)

Gut checks of why I like something usually feel true to me, that they fall within the logical structure I have worked out for myself, which means there’s some reliable throughline to my taste. But music isn’t made in a laboratory (well, not usually), and appreciating it is hardly science, so there have been inexplicable exceptions, things I’ve liked that by my own rights I shouldn’t have and vice versa. I’ve certainly gotten some things wrong through inadequate consideration, external forces, an irksome quirk or some other cloud to my perception. It turns out there are many permutations possible to cause system failure, and maybe trying to apply my own E=MC2 to 60 years of listening is not practical.

I can live with that.

Ira Robbins
New York City
Summer 2022