What hath popism wrought?
Readers who follow Hitsville know that he deplores popism, that metaphysical school of crypto-critical thought that holds that a) rockist boy critics have perennially undervalued pop music and that b) popism was a necessary corrective to it.
Hitsville doesn’t take it seriously because a) in fact, critics have always appreciated pop music, and b) he suspects “popism” is just an intellectual cover for critics writing artist- and label-friendly reviews and features, just the sort of thing that—surprise—artist- and label-friendly newspapers and magazines pay top dollar for.
Anyway, popism has spread, giving cover to all sorts of critical pathologies. (Here’s a good example.)
Still, I can imagine what you are thinking. Do you have any evidence, Hitsville? Is there any data out there?
By an entirely fortuitous event, I can now say yes.
Looking up the critical reception of a recent album on Metacritic, I noticed something odd.
I poked around a little, and discovered what might be incontrovertible evidence of the pernicious effects of popism on contemporary music criticism.
Consider the elongated illustrations below.
On the left, a screenshot of a vertical section of the left-hand side of the main Metacritic film page.
On the right, ditto for the site’s main music page.
<br>It’s interesting. You wouldn’t say film critics are a particularly daring group these days. Newspapers and magazines are losing readers and, rightly or wrongly, a lot of editors think that dissing popular films—like the ones that now commonly anchor weekly sections in many major dailies—isn’t the way to retain them. But you look down that list, and there’s a lot of mediocre and even negative consensuses. (Consensi?)
On the music side? Not so much. You might conclude, in fact, that the nation’s rock critics … well, I was going to say graded on a curve, but that’s not a curve! It’s a frickin’ hockey stick! Hoobastank, which gets about the same rating as the film critics gave the not-unserious Despereaux, is about the bottom, and the ratings go straight up from that point …. and stay there!
Who knew that Justice and Chris Isaak, Fall Out Boy and Robyn Hitchcock, were putting out work worthy of such critical acclaim?
On the entire list of current albums (two or three times as long as the part I excerpted), there wasn’t a single artist whose reviews would drop it into the red zone.
Am I missing some explanation?
Or are the nation’s rock critics so craven that they no longer know how to write negative reviews?
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I have long maintained that a record critic needs to think like a consumer reporter: “Is this CD worth $10?”
I confess I had tears in my eyes from the REM review sidebar so I missed the point of the numbers to the left of the group name, initially thinking that was the year they last made a decent album…. until I got to Melinda Doolittle- she wasn’t ALIVE in ‘81 and has NEVER made a decent album.
OK, so rock critics have gotten lame and undiscriminating — fair enough. Was there some earlier post I missed where you explain how exactly popism is linked to an overall loss of critical standards?
To me “popism” just means getting beyond lazy prejudices that if it don’t have two guitars, a bass and drums, then it ain’t real music. (Prejudices that, frankly, seem to regularly surface on this site.) It doesn’t mean that everything is good and nothing is bad.
After all, don’t plenty of “artist- and label-friendly reviews” puff up traditional rock and roll records just as much as “pop” ones? Like, um, R.E.M.?
Here’s a thoughtful take on “rockism” vs. “popism” that readers might enjoy:
http://www.slate.com/id/2141418/
The “grading on a curve” metaphor is all too apt - it’s the first thing I thought of looking at the graphic. Believe me, Kids Today expect high grade and they gripe if they don’t get ‘em. Nor, it often seems, do they really understand what would be considered an A paper; they just expect one. It seems to me that the graders here probably come from that school of thought. The fact that something EXISTS means it gets a B, and they work up from there.
Thank you for this post.
Side note: I was curious to see if memory served and that this “hockey stick” had started the down swing just in the last several years - so I dug up an old back issue of Spin (Feb. 1996 - a young Trent Reznor on the cover) and did a side by side comparison of the record review sections with the latest issue (March 2009 - Yeah, Yeah Yeah’s).
Both issues graded records on a ten point system (1 bad - 10 good).
Feb. 1996
13 New Records Reviewed, 89 total points = 6.846 avg. review
March 2009
46 New Records reviewed, 315 total points = 6.847 avg. review
So even though I completely agree with your point about music critics playing it more safe now than ever (which is probably why the grumpy nerds at Pitchfork have attracted so many fans- they are willing to deliver some more jubilant highs and eviscerating lows), these numbers speak to an additional point - volume. Maybe the pure glut of releases is one more layer in the strata of sediment burying the music industry right now.
Two points really:
1. There are a LOT more records released than movies, so inevitably records are more likely to be reviewed by someone who has an interest in that genre/style/band and will give a more favourable review.
2. (research-wonkish) It doesn’t matter where on a nominal scale a curve starts as long as there’s differentiation on that scale: i.e. look at the distribution not the marks. If music reviews go from 5 to 10 and film ones from 3 to 8 then fine, they’re both using a 6 point scale. So a “65″ is actually a BAD score for music and “55″ is a GOOD one for films, it’s just that Metacritic’s one-size-fits-all traffic light grading system won’t recognise this. If Metacritic averaged out its scores in each category and moved to an INDEX system you’d get a clearer picture.
I have to say BTW that I don’t see pop albums being particularly rewarded by this scheme, so I don’t see the link to “popism”.
Maybe you noticed this because Peter Suderman noticed it five months ago?
http://culture11.com/blogs/theconfabulum/2008/11/20/in-praise-of-negative-reviews/
To amplify Tom’s point above, there are exponentially more albums released each year than films. While every film, save for the most low budget releases, is reviewed dozens, if not hundreds of times, it isn’t possible to give even a cursory review to every album released. Most critics seem to have decided to spend their time writing about things that they think their readers ought to hear, which accounts for the generally high marks. It doesn’t explain why major label pop pap is given uniformly high marks. That comes, I think, because critics in mass market outlets aren’t really critics at all, they are reviewers in the purest sense of the word, offering a book report-like summary rather than analysis. These understandably come off as positive in the eyes of an aggregator like Metacritic.
This came up on Idolator late last year: http://idolator.com/5097276/the-rainbow-connection-are-music-critics-too-tolerant
Why single out Robyn Hitchcock as an unlikely artist to get good reviews? He’s been a critical fave for decades, and the consensus seems to be that th new disc is one of his stronger ones.
Rock Critics are the anti-life equation, present company excepted.
I notice the same creeping suckupism in comics criticism too, if the inexplicable wagon circling around Grant Morrison for the twin disasters of Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis are any indication.
A decade ago I used to drink wine with some enthusiasts who always spoke about whatever was about to be opened in point-based review terms. Every single bottle was defined by “It got 98 points from Parker” rather than varietal or vintage, which made all of them like it more. The other side was “not sure why this only got 89 points,” which translates to “I spent a lot of money on this bottle and now a critic has devalued it.” My question was always: What does a point taste like?
While Melinda Doolittle’s album gets 81 points based on seven reviews and the Gourds’ “Haymaker” gets 78 from 10 reviews, only when you read the actual reviews the two received that the distinction is clear. Critics are in agreement that Doolittle released a record that does not surpass expectations and takes no chances, but does not disappoint. The Gourds, on theother hand, try a few new things that some critics enjoy and others find fault with, but there’s no denying that all 10 reviews point out that this album is not simply a rehash of their older work. Both albums received serious consideration from the reviewers; go back 20-25 years and find anyone taking serious a singing competition contestant’s debut album. Highly doubtful they exist. And in the long run, what does a point sound like?
[…] of comments here and elsewhere on “What hath popism wrought,” in which Hitsville pointed out that if you take a look at the Metacritic lists of current movies […]
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