Rules for critizing music
This is aimed more at rock critics, but the points should apply pretty broadly.
- It's more important, ultimately, to know how to hear music if you're going to write about it, than it is to know how to play it.
- Being a musician may help your writing, but it's not required
- "Music" is more than just notes and chords and sound: it's audience participation...
- How come the "more discussion of the music" approach more often gets applied to Radiohead and Bjork and drum 'n' bass, and not so much to Daft Punk and teen pop and commercial rap? I'm guessing there's a tendency to equate "difficult" with "accomplished"...
- I think Joe Carducci's book, All Commercial Pop Music Sucks, was most valuable for this reason: for trying to formulate an actual aesthetic of hard rock and punk rock...
- I can't describe chord changes in real specific, technical ways--"tonic," "sub-dominant," etc.--but I can often identify certain chord changes as being the source of a particular mood in a particular passage of a song.
- I can name you (though I don't feel like it now) probably a dozen great music critics off the top of my head who I either know or suspect can't play a damn note.
Thanks to the indispensible Coolfer Glenn for the tip.
Posted by Casper at August 12, 2004 01:06 AM
