Lots 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 and CDs, the film one shows a wide variation of critical points of view (ranging from green to yellow to red), but the music one seemed a lot narrower (almost all green with a smattering of yellow).

I’ve noticed two outside blog posts on the subject I want to address …

…. to explain why they are wrong.

The first is by Peter Suderman in Confabulator, from last year, which notices the same phenomenon I did but which I hadn’t seen. His explanation:

Is contemporary pop music really that much better than contemporary mainstream filmmaking? I think not. Instead, it’s just that the music reviewing culture has developed in such a way that most everything scores a “pretty good” or a “not bad.”

I find this unacceptably tautological. “It’s just that the management at Enron developed in such a way that the outlook for earnings was always bullish.”

Well … yeah. But it begs the question of why (not to mention the criminality), and of what that says about the profession. The item did provoke an interesting essay in Idolator by Mike Barthel, which is substantive and well-written and penned from a place in the critical universe I cannot begin to comprehend*.

A more substantive discussion of the same point can be found here, at a UK site called Freak Trigger. Tom Ewing takes the issue seriously, and even constructs an intimidating spreadsheet, arguing, using British orthography, that you can “look at the distribution as well as the mean, which lets you normalise the results.”

I read his post twice, and looked at his spreadsheet carefully, and I think all he’s doing is creating a new curve to obscure the (to my mind) damning stats on the music side.

This is wrong for two reasons. For the first, the clustering he is artificially creating is irrelevant. If you only had three movies on the chart, and they were The Godfather, Pulp Fiction and Slumdog Millionaire, the first would be green, the second yellow and the third red on his spreadsheet.

In other words, there’s no demand for a curve in the Metacritic world. The ratings assessment is obviously somewhat subjective, but its visitors don’t want to the site merely to make the top five movies of the year “green.” Quite the opposite; in fact, to fuel “was 2008 as good as 2007 for film” arguments, they want to know, given the site’s assessment process, how many of the movies in a particular year are “green.”

And secondly, he obscures, in a fundamental way, the reality of the data. The fact is, the site didn’t harvest any bad reviews. Merely assigning the bottom 15 or 20 percent of the positive reviews red doesn’t change the fact that the original Metacritic assessment was that they were at least moderately positive.

One last point. When I was reading both of these posts, I was thinking of the Marx Brothers line, “Who are you going to believe: Me or your own eyes?”

Anyone who reads contemporary music criticism, particularly in the music magazines and the major papers, knows that, with only a few exceptions, negative reviews are almost extinct. This is what I charted in my analysis of how Rolling Stone reviews R.E.M. albums. As I said in my original post, the Metacritic charts just provide an arresting codification of this phenomenon.

* Barthel, for example, argues that “when you review an album, it seems odd to place it in any context other than its target audience,” a contention that produces this critical cri de coeur:

An example: I hate the Arcade Fire. If you asked me my opinion of them, I would say that they’re a very bad band doing horrible things that make me want to punch puppies. But were I to write a review of an Arcade Fire album—which is unlikely in the first place, since my hatred isn’t so active as to make me bother engaging with them—I would probably not write that. The fact is, I know too many other critics whose tastes otherwise match mine and who I greatly respect that really like the Arcade Fire. Moreover, my tastes are so catholic that I know exactly why I hate the Arcade Fire: I hate them because I hate U2; I hate them because they’re meaningful-core. And at that point my opinion on them becomes no different than it would of a bluegrass band. I’m not too fond of bluegrass either, but I wouldn’t feel at all qualified to write a negative review of a bluegrass band just because I didn’t like the genre. Since I don’t like bluegrass and/or bands that sound like U2, I don’t know enough about them to have an informed opinion, and since the audience for my review would be people that are highly informed, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to offer a lesser-informed opinion as the definitive one. My hypothetical Arcade Fire review, then, would consist of a lot of description, context, and the reactions of others, with a brief mention of the fact that I didn’t like it. But then, their albums aren’t even that bad; they just annoy me. They are one of the bands I hate most right now, but I would be hard-pressed to actually pan their album.

Buried in there is I think the best refutation of Hitsville’s contention that popism is at the root of all of this; there’s also other aspects of self-consciousness seeping through contemporary critical theory that are screamingly apparent in that excerpt.

That’s what critics do: They look at things out of context.

The crushingly ironic thing is this: The internet is supposed to be full of snarkiness, and few sites on the internet are more synonymous with this worldview than the Gawker network. (Idolator, which I just learned is no longer part of the Gawker family, engages in this to a much lesser extent than some of the others.) Barthel’s obviously a smart guy; he’s got a platform that supposedly sits at ground zero of contrariness and snark. Yet he admits he didn’t express a heartfelt contrarian view about, in effect, a sacred cow.

At root, this is a discussion about the primacy of the writer. A good critic is a smart and intellectually honest person with something to say and the chops to say it with—and the description ends there.  Anything that gets in the way of that simple formulation is a cheat to readers, but ultimately rebounds back against the writers as well.

If I were Barthel’s editor, I would have made him write the fucking Arcade Fire review, and it would have been the most discussed article of the week.