Rock Critic Bullying

Very glad I’m not a rock critic anymore. Whatever you think of Macklemore, the bullying of him by rock critics, and bullying of anyone who maybe kinda enjoys him, borders on fascistic.

Music critics are people who were nerds about music for most of their lives, and rather than respect their roots as outcast intellectual weirdos, they’ve ended up acting like the exact same jerks who tormented them in their childhood. And if I was still a rock critic, I’d be just as guilty of this as anyone.

If the worst I had to deal with
in writing about music was backlash for not liking things fans or other critics liked, I’d be fine with
that. In fact, that’s part of the fun. The demand for consensus among rock critics is something that always annoyed me in positive reviews. But when the demand for consensus affects negative reviews, it scares me. It’s not fun for anyone, including those doing the bullying.

Another hopeless flaw in a great deal of the writing about jazz that has been done over the years is that in most cases the writers, the jazz critics, have been anything but intellectuals (in the most complete sense of that word). Most jazz critics began as hobbyists or boyishly brash members of the American petite bourgeoisie, whose only claim to any understanding about the music was that they knew it was different; or else they had once been brave enough to make a trip into a Negro slum to hear their favorite instrumentalist defame Western musical tradition. Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans, but middle-brows as well. The irony here is that because the majority of jazz critics are white middlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards; in fact, quite often is in direct reaction against them
Amir Baraka, Jazz and the White Critic, 1960.

Source: xroads.virginia.edu

We produced a record for Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys called BS 2000 and as a gift to me he bought me a boombox with a cassette deck and a keyboard in it from a yard sale. That’s like a movie. Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present, it’s a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can’t make that up. It had a beat already in it so I had an idea. I’m going to walk out, put that on a barstool, put a mike to it and just make s*** up to it. That’s what “Losing My Edge” was.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, telling maybe my favorite anecdote in the history of rock ‘n roll.
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10 years ago today, Mclusky Do Dallas, one of the greatest noise rock albums ever made, featuring some of the greatest lyrics of the 21st century, was released in the United States. If you like hipster burnout catharis, funny/heartfelt social commentary, a healthy place to address creative jealousy, and maybe a Pavement spoof, I can’t recommend it enough. But I’m not gonna lie and pretend I wasn’t probably listening to Linkin Park at the time. At least it wasn’t Interpol.