Music journalism
Music journalism is media criticism and reporting about music topics, including popular music, classical music, and traditional music. Journalists began writing about music in the eighteenth century, providing commentary on what is now regarded as classical music. In the 1960s, music journalism began more prominently covering popular music like rock and pop after the breakthrough of the Beatles. With the rise of the internet in the 2000s, music criticism developed an increasingly large online presence with music bloggers, aspiring music critics, and established critics supplementing print media online. Music journalism today includes reviews of songs, albums and live concerts, profiles of recording artists, and reporting of artist news and music events.
Origins in classical music criticism
Music journalism has its roots in classical music criticism, which has traditionally comprised the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of music that has been composed and notated in a score and the evaluation of the performance of classical songs and pieces, such as symphonies and concertos.Before about the 1840s, reporting on music was either done by musical journals, such as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and in London journals such as The Musical Times ; or else by reporters at general newspapers where music did not form part of the central objectives of the publication. An influential English 19th-century music critic, for example, was James William Davison of The Times. The composer Hector Berlioz also wrote reviews and criticisms for the Paris press of the 1830s and 1840s.
Modern art music journalism is often informed by music theory consideration of the many diverse elements of a musical piece or performance, including its form and style, and for performance, standards of technique and expression. These standards were expressed, for example, in journals such as Neue Zeitschrift für Musik founded by Robert Schumann, and are continued today in the columns of serious newspapers and journals such as The Musical Times.
Several factors—including growth of education, the influence of the Romantic movement generally and in music, popularization, among others—led to an increasing interest in music among non-specialist journals, and an increase in the number of critics by profession of varying degrees of competence and integrity. The 1840s could be considered a turning point, in that music critics after the 1840s generally were not also practicing musicians. However, counterexamples include Alfred Brendel, Charles Rosen, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek; all of whom were modern practitioners of the classical music tradition who also write on music.
Women music journalists in the twentieth century who covered classic music performance include Ruth Scott Miller of the Chicago Tribune, Henriette Weber at the Chicago Herald-Examiner, and Claudia Cassidy, who worked for Chicago Journal of Commerce, the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Tribune.
Classical
In the early 1980s, a decline in the quantity of classical criticism began occurring "when classical music criticism visibly started to disappear" from the media. At that time, leading newspapers still typically employed a chief music critic, while magazines such as Time and Vanity Fair also employed classical music critics. But by the early 1990s, classical critics were dropped in many publications, in part due to "a decline of interest in classical music, especially among younger people".Also of concern in classical music journalism was how American reviewers can write about ethnic and folk music from cultures other than their own, such as Indian ragas and traditional Japanese works. In 1990, the World Music Institute interviewed four New York Times music critics who came up with the following criteria on how to approach ethnic music:
- A review should relate the music to other kinds of music that readers know, to help them understand better what the program was about.
- "The performers be treated as human beings and their music be treated as human activity rather than a mystical or mysterious phenomenon."
- The review should show an understanding of the music's cultural backgrounds and intentions.
In 2007, The New York Times wrote that classical music criticism, which it characterized as "a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers", had undergone "a series of hits in recent months" with the elimination, downgrading, or redefinition of critics' jobs at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, citing New York magazine's Peter G. Davis, "one of the most respected voices of the craft, said he had been forced out after 26 years". Viewing "robust analysis, commentary and reportage as vital to the health of the art form", The New York Times stated in 2007 that it continued to maintain "a staff of three full-time classical music critics and three freelancers", noting also that classical music criticism had become increasingly available on blogs, and that a number of other major newspapers "still have full-time classical music critics", including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Globe.
Popular
20th century rock criticism
Music writers only started "treating pop and rock music seriously" in 1964 "after the breakthrough of the Beatles". In their book Rock Criticism from the Beginning, Ulf Lindberg and his co-writers say that rock criticism appears to have been "slower to develop in the U.S. than in England". One of the early British music magazines, Melody Maker, complained in 1967 about how "newspapers and magazines are continually hammering pop music". From 1964, Melody Maker led its rival publications in terms of approaching music and musicians as a subject for serious study rather than merely entertainment. Staff reporters such as Chris Welch and Ray Coleman applied a perspective previously reserved for jazz artists to the rise of American-influenced local rock and pop groups, anticipating the advent of rock critics. Among Britain's broadsheet newspapers, pop music gained exposure in the arts section of The Times when William Mann, the paper's classical music critic, wrote an appreciation of the Beatles in December 1963. In early 1965, The Observer, the country's highbrow Sunday newspaper, signalled a reversal of the establishment's cultural snobbery towards pop music by appointing George Melly as its "critic of pop culture". Following Tony Palmer's arrival at The Observer, the first daily newspaper to employ a dedicated rock critic was The Guardian, with the appointment of Geoffrey Cannon in 1968.Melody Makers writers advocated the new forms of pop music of the late 1960s. "By 1999, the 'quality' press was regularly carrying reviews of popular music gigs and albums", which had a "key role in keeping pop" in the public eye. As more pop music critics began writing, this had the effect of "legitimating pop as an art form"; as a result, "newspaper coverage shifted towards pop as music rather than pop as social phenomenon".
In the world of pop music criticism, there has tended to be a quick turnover. The "pop music industry" expects that any particular rock critic will likely disappear from popular view within five years; in contrast, according to author Mark Fenster, the "stars" of rock criticism are more likely to have long careers with "book contracts, featured columns, and editorial and staff positions at magazines and newspapers".
Author Bernard Gendron writes that in the United States "the emergence of a 'serious' rock press and the rock critic" began in 1966, presaged by Robert Shelton, the folk music critic for The New York Times, writing articles praising the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the latter of whom had just embraced rock 'n' roll by performing with electric backing at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Paul Williams, an eighteen-year-old student, launched the pop journal Crawdaddy! in February 1966; in June, Richard Goldstein, a recent graduate and New Journalism writer, debuted his "Pop Eye" column in The Village Voice, which Gendron describes as "the first regular column on rock 'n' roll... to appear in an established cultural publication". Rock journalist Clinton Heylin, in his role as editor of The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing, cites "the true genesis of rock criticism" to the emergence of Crawdaddy! Lindberg et al. say that, while Williams is widely considered to be the first American rock critic, he "nevertheless looked to England for material".
According to Gendron, Goldstein's most significant early pieces were a "manifesto" on rock 'n' roll and "pop aestheticism", and a laudatory assessment of the Beatles' Revolver album. Published in late August, the latter article provided "the first substantial rock review devoted to one album to appear in any nonrock magazine with accreditory power". Whereas Williams could be sure of a sympathetic readership, given the nature of his publication, Goldstein's task was to win over a more highbrow readership to the artistic merits of contemporary pop music. At this time, both Goldstein and Williams gained considerable renown in the cultural mainstream and were the subject of profile articles in Newsweek.
The emergence of rock journalism coincided with an attempt to position rock music, particularly the Beatles' work, in the American cultural landscape. The critical discourse was further heightened by the respectful coverage afforded the genre in mainstream publications such as Newsweek, Time and Life in the months leading up to and following the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in June 1967. Within this discourse, Richard Meltzer, in an essay for Crawdaddy! in March, challenged the highbrow aesthetic of rock proposed by Goldstein. The latter's mixed review of Sgt. Pepper in The New York Times was similarly the subject of journalistic debate, and invited reprisals from musicologists, composers and cultural commentators.
Among other young American writers who became pop columnists following Goldstein's appointment were Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis and Ellen Sander. Christgau was the "originator of the 'consumer guide' approach to pop music reviews", an approach that was designed to help readers decide whether to buy a new album.
According to popular music academic Roy Shuker in 1994, music reference books such as The Rolling Stone Record Guide and Christgau's Record Guide played a role in the rise of rock critics as tastemakers in the music industry, "constructing their own version of the traditional high/low culture split, usually around notions of artistic integrity, authenticity, and the nature of commercialism". These review collections, Shuker continues, "became bibles in the field, establishing orthodoxies as to the relative value of various styles or genres and pantheons of artists. Record collectors and enthusiasts, and specialisation and secondhand record shops, inevitably have well-thumbed copies of these and similar volumes close at hand."
In the realm of rock music, as in that of classical music, critics have not always been respected by their subjects. Frank Zappa declared that "Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read." In the Guns N' Roses song "Get in the Ring", Axl Rose verbally attacked critics who gave the band negative reviews because of their actions on stage; such critics as Andy Secher, Mick Wall and Bob Guccione Jr. were mentioned by name.