Music Journalism - Popular Music

Popular Music

Music writers only started "treating pop and rock music seriously" in 1964 "after the breakthrough of the Beatles...". One of the early music magazines in Britain, Melody Maker, complained in 1967 about how "newspapers and magazines are continually hammering pop music". Melody Maker magazine 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".

Steve Jones claims that both popular music articles and academic articles about pop music are usually written from "masculine subject positions". 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"; as well, in the way that critics differentiate between pop music and rock, using terms like "trivial", "fluffy", or "formulaic" for pop (versus "serious", "raw", and "sincere" for rock), there is an implicit or even explicitly gendered dichotomy. Simon Frith notes that pop and rock music are closely associated with gender; that is, with conventions of male and female behaviour.

In the world of pop music criticism, there tends to be a quick turnover. The "pop music industry expects that any particular star can disappear within five years; in contrast, 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. Critic Robert Christgau was the "originator of the 'consumer guide' approach to pop music reviews", an approach to writing pop recording reviews that was designed to help consumers to decide whether to buy a new album.

In the realm of rock music (as indeed 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.

Carl Wilson describes "an upsurge in pro-pop sentiment among critics" during the early 2000s, a "new generation moved into positions of critical influence" and then "mounted a wholesale critique against the syndrome of measuring all popular music by the norms of rock culture." In 2008, Ann Powers of the LA Times argued that "op music critics have always been contrarians", because "pop music rose up as a challenge to taste hierarchies, and has remained a pugilistic, exhibitionist business throughout pop's own evolution."

Powers claims that "nsults, rejections of others' authority, bratty assertions of superior knowledge and even threats of physical violence are the stuff of which pop criticism is made"; at the same time, the "best also offers loving appreciation and profound insights about how music creates and collides with our everyday realities." She states that pop criticism developed as a "slap at the establishment, at publications such as the hippie homestead Rolling Stone and the rawker outpost Creem." She notes that the "1980s generation" of post-punk indie rockers "has lately been taken down by younger "poptimists," who argue that lovers of underground rock are elitists for not embracing the more multicultural mainstream". Powers claims that with the 2000s-era "poptimism" critical approach, debates about bands and styles are "like the scrum in rugby", because "verybody pushes against everybody else, and we move forward in a huge blob of vehement opinion and mutual judgment".

Slate magazine writer Jody Rosen discussed the 2000s-era trends in pop music criticism in the article "The Perils of Poptimism". Rosen notes that much of the debate is centred over the perception that that rock critics "...regard rock as "normative … the standard state of popular music … to which everything else is compared." At a 2006 pop critic conference, attendees discussed their "...guilty pop pleasures, reconsidering musicians (Tiny Tim, Dan Fogelberg, Phil Collins) and genres (blue-eyed soul, Muzak)" which rock critics have long dismissed as lightweight, commercial music. Rosen states that "this new critical paradigm" is called "popism"—or, more evocatively (and goofily), "poptimism". The "poptimism" approach states that "Pop (and, especially, hip-hop) producers are as important as rock auteurs, Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act". In 2006, Martin Edlund from the New York Sun argued that music bloggers are to some degree displacing newspaper and magazine-based pop music critics. Edlund notes that while the "Internet has democratized music criticism, it seems it's also spread its penchant for uncritical hype".