Musing on Music Criticism

And playing tonight.

Composer Gabriel Kahane is in The Atlantic lamenting the end of music listings, an excellent and sorely-needed essay (linking to Ethan Iverson’s post with a gift link to The Atlantic):

The demise of listings is “tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,” the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that “the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out” to see a gig: “The immediate danger is that artists play and people don’t know about it.”

Today, it’s harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great.

The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward “poptimism,” a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough!

But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh’s essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today’s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down—501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it’s easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices.

—Gabriel Kahane, “A Love Letter To Music Listings”, The Atlantic, July 27, 2025.

Kahane’s article was perfectly timed, appearing just as a chorus of voices were reacting to Nate Chinen’s distressing notice that the New York Times has taken four critics, including longtime popular music critic Jon Pareles, and Zachary Woolfe, who mostly covered classical music, permanently off their posts.

This is, at the very least, disappointing. Many folks voiced their disapproval, including Substackers Damon Krukowski and George Grella. Grella snarls righteously:

I will point out that the statement from [New York Times editor] Sia Michel [leaked to Variety with reasons for dismissing their critics], “This department has already made major strides to adapt to this moment,” is the kind of bland management-speak that barely hides that she thinks the moment is something like Instagram, all the fucking time.

Puffing up listicles by claiming a “100 Best Movies” project “anointed a new canon” is the perfect expression of a bourgeois, drive-by interest in culture as a decoration to a comfortable, monied lifestyle. (Full disclosure, I was asked to contribute to Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Miles Davis’s Electric Period, which I should not have done because the fucking NY Times paid $0.00 and I am ashamed for being taken advantage of, if you want to know why I desperately need you guys to be full subscribers.)

Yeah George!

Damon Krukowski, who was a part of the booming record industry when he played drums in Galaxy 500, understands, like Grella, that what the New York Times wants is more clicks and more likes, not the kind of thing you get from nuanced critiques of classical music concerts.

Krukowski writes that “given the realities of scale for internet platforms, a personal encounter with individual work is valueless”, and then extrapolates:

I know I am not a part of a fundamental unit of the music business when I make or sell a record. Am I still when I review one? Sadly, I cannot share [New Yorker film critic Richard] Brody’s confidence in that.

Krukowski means economically valueless, and I get what he’s saying. But it’s odd to read Damon Krukowski, who’s played and written about music for decades, does sound at local venues, and records in his home studio, assert that he is not ‘a fundamental unit of the music business’.

Why the abnegation? Why let Spotify dictate the terms? They’ve already got the money! Are we gonna give them the world too?

I think the personal encounter with music, a movie, a book, or whatever is now the only thing that matters, precisely because Big Tech doesn’t value it, can’t value it, doesn’t know what to do with it!

A disregard for streaming economics is what moves me and all my esteemed colleagues to write about jazz and music here on Substack. Naive or worse, I think we need folks willing to ignore the reality dictated by Big Tech, and say and do what they love.

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I have skin in this game. I care about music criticism because it’s a natural part of music: people make music because of ideas, emotions, and experiences, so listeners want to explore all that stuff around the music. It’s disheartening to see the New York Times toss that away with a shrug.

Nat Hentoff’s Jazz Is (1976) was one of my many gateways, showed me what the whole thing was about. In Jazz Is, Hentoff was summarizing a whole way of being in the music that he learned from the first generation of jazz fans and musicians, including Jo Jones, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and others.

Music critics are as essential as musicians, because musicians are music critics. I watched the great Tony Mason play with pianist Erik Deutsch last night in Williamsburg, and Mr. Mason changed the muffling on the snare drum throughout the set, depending upon the tune. Mason was critiquing his own sound, based on sensitive and nuanced understanding of what was needed for every tune. In a sense, he was doing real-time music criticism.

The instinct to understand and discuss music is creative, coming from love and reverence. Music theory and history are in fact forms of criticism; to label a sound “major triad”, to describe a tempo as “fast”, or to hear that Elvin Jones’s solo vocabulary is deeply connected to Max Roach, is criticism.

The person who loves the music so much that they shush the philistines talking through their moment, who follow the band to every gig, devoted to every musician and every sound— that’s music criticism. Obviously, most of these folks don’t write down their ideas. But when ideas do get written down, they’re building on the actions of folks like this.

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Fine. If the New York Times doesn’t want it, we’ll do something here. Let’s hear it for:

• Hank Shteamer on Joe Farnsworth and Billy Mintz, two of our most important drummers; on Ozzy Osborne and the final Black Sabbath show, helping me better contextualize a band I’ve listened to for decades but for some reason haven’t thought much about. Hank is a fellow drummer and diehard music lover. I learn something from every essay he writes.

• Steve Smith, a hero in Gabriel Kahane’s Atlantic article, listing events on Substack.

• Ethan Iverson, thinking through the same things, and plugging some under-appreciated voices. He’s right that we should be explaining each other to you, and that this is much harder than it sounds.

Lots of great movie writing on Substack, some well-known, some less:

• Charlotte Simmons, insisting that there’s a new way to watch movies;

• Ray Banks watching and thinking about films I’d never consider;

• Sophie from That Final Scene, full-stop movie fandom and critiquing of current movie culture;

• And my main man, Vince Keenan. Everything he recommends is worth checking out; his feeling for movies, books, baseball, and drinks is infectious; he is actually funny; if I could write half as well as him, I’d stop.

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The musician’s job is to make music. Tonight, Monday, July 28th, at 8 PM, I’m playing a set with pianist JP Schleglemilch at Ibeam. We’re playing duo, new music and new arrangements of old music, the beginning of something.