May 2026
Last July, music critic and jazz historian Ted Gioia published an article on his Substack blog, The Honest Broker, about the poor state of music criticism. “What Is Happening to Music Criticism?” wasn’t lamenting the decline in the quality of writing about music. It was sounding the alarm that the genre is disappearing.
Gioia has written in the past about the decline of arts coverage in major newspapers and magazines. This time, he was moved to make his comments because the New York Times had reassigned four of its arts columnists, including the highly regarded music critic Jon Pareles. A The Hollywood Reporter article about the change noted that Pareles “has been the Times’ pop critic since 1988, and has long been one of the most influential reviewers in the music business.”
Unfortunately, this move by the Times is only the latest example of a publication deciding to shrink its arts coverage. Ten years ago, USA Today and the New York Daily News thinned out their staff of music writers and the New Orleans–based Times-Picayune stopped covering music completely. The last one was the most surprising. New Orleans has long been one of the key centers of American music.
The Washington Post recently jettisoned its book coverage, and other newspapers and magazines have either given less space to news and reviews about the arts or just eliminated them. It’s hard to know what causes publications to make these decisions. It’s likely they’ve seen readership of arts-related articles decline, and in an era where circulation and subscriptions are shrinking, they’ve concluded it’s not worth the cost.
In addition, they probably think most people take their cues from social media and from comments posted online by people who have seen a film, read a particular book, or bought a CD or LP. As a substitute for reviews or analysis, the New York Times has decided to post articles that, we are assured, will introduce us to a musician’s work in five minutes (“5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk”). The articles consist of an introduction, followed by comments from musicians.
Those five-minute reads are more in-depth than a user review on Amazon.com, but not by much. It might be hard to believe, but there was a time when people read and cared about longer reviews that took a careful look at a book, movie, or music recording. I have been an avid reader of reviewers and critics since my teens. My introduction to that kind of writing was in rock’n’roll magazines.
I began reading rock mags when I started buying albums. There was a shopping center near my house and it had a book and magazine shop. I found a copy of Circus magazine there. It was the March 1969 issue, which had a picture of Jimi Hendrix on the cover. Circus had changed its name with that issue of the mag, which had been published since 1966 as Hullabaloo.
The masthead for that copy of Circus included the names of three writers I would see in other magazines: Tony Glover, Paul Nelson, and Richard Robinson. There were feature articles about Hendrix, the Doors, and the MC5. A couple of rock’n’roll gossip pages included an entry about Soft White Underbelly, a Long Island band that I forgot about until they showed up in 1972 as Blue Öyster Cult.
Circus was printed on glossy paper and included five pages of color photos. The centerfold in the March 1969 issue was a series of photos of Hendrix slinging a guitar around, looking sharp in a pair of purple velvet bellbottoms. I taped those pages to my bedroom wall, and they must have scandalized my mom. A couple of days later, the photos were gone.
I started to read other rock magazines I found on the magazine shelves, but some appeared irregularly. They were published each month but didn’t always show up at my local shop. I picked up a couple of issues of Crawdaddy, which, like Circus, had begun publishing in 1966.
Paul Williams was at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College when he started Crawdaddy. In the magazine’s inaugural issue, Williams wrote, “Crawdaddy! will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the specialty of this magazine is intelligent writing about pop music.” By the time I bought a copy in 1970, the magazine had dropped the exclamation point.
Writers at Crawdaddy included Jon Landau, Richard Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman, and Peter Knobler. Knobler later gave Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums enthusiastic reviews, which featured prominently in ads Columbia Records placed in various publications.
I don’t remember seeing Rolling Stone right away, but I knew that it covered rock music, so I must have heard about it. The first issue I bought, in April 1970, had a cover photo of Abbie Hoffman, and the feature story was about the trial of the Chicago Seven. The issue also included a lengthy and somewhat disturbing story about the Stooges, who at that point were recording their first album. Considering how my mom reacted to the Hendrix photo from Circus I figured I’d better not let her see the article about the Stooges.
Crawdaddy only appeared on my local newsstand sporadically, but Rolling Stone started showing up every couple of weeks, and Circus was there reliably each month. I read them from cover to cover—usually more than once.
When my family moved to a smaller town, the local drug store had a limited selection of magazines. The only rock mag it carried was Hit Parader, actually a popular-music publication that had been available since 1942, but which by 1970 was publishing articles about rock music exclusively. Contributors included Richard Robinson, Lisa Robinson, Lenny Kaye, and Patti Smith.
My dad picked up Rolling Stone for me at a head shop near his office, and I continued to read it regularly. All the publications I have mentioned had writers that treated rock music as something worth careful consideration, and many of those writers helped form my tastes in music. They also made writing music reviews look like a cool thing to do.
Some of those writers became favorites and I looked forward to reading their opinions about records. Greil Marcus and Jon Landau wrote thoughtful, well-reasoned reviews that required careful consideration. Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, and John Mendelsohn were often clever and funny, but just as smart in their defense or criticism of a record as Marcus and Landau were.
Peter Guralnick did occasional reviews for Rolling Stone in its early years. Robert Palmer joined the magazine in the early ’70s to write about jazz and blues. Other music critics whose work I remember from Rolling Stone—from many of these magazines, really—include Bud Scoppa, Ed Ward, Jon Swenson . . . the list could go on.
Women were perhaps underrepresented, but Lisa Robinson, Lillian Roxon, and Ellen Willis did work as solid and thoughtful as that of their male peers. Willis was, in fact, among the best. She’s part of my holy trinity of rock critics, along with Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau.
I had read Willis’s work in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (1980) and in the Village Voice and other publications, but it wasn’t until the University of Minnesota Press published Out of the Vinyl Deeps in 2011 that I realized how deeply, intensely, and intelligently she wrote about music. Willis wrote many pieces for the New Yorker, which I didn’t turn to for reading about pop music. I wish I had read more of her work sooner.
Willis’s writing expanded to encompass feminism, anti-Semitism, free speech, and more. The Essential Ellen Willis, published in 2014, is a terrific selection of her work, including a few pieces about rock music and a generous helping of her writing about politics and culture. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Her essay about Janis Joplin for The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll looked at the singer’s musical accomplishments, but also at Joplin’s importance as a woman in a 1960s culture and music that was dominated by men: “[Joplin] was second only to Dylan in importance as a creator / recorder / embodiment of her generation’s history and mythology.” The essay is richly written and carefully argued, but readable and understandable.
In her piece on Bob Dylan, published in Cheetah magazine in 1967, Willis grasps Dylan as a poet, songwriter, image shifter, and much more. Her writing on the Velvet Underground shows an appreciation of the group’s psychological depths in ways I can’t begin to describe here. Willis’s entry in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History about Creedence Clearwater Revival embraces the sheer danceability and joy of its music, while at the same time considering Creedence’s complex place in a ’60s culture that was suspicious of popularity on AM radio.
Greil Marcus’s reviews often reflected his interest in rock’s place in the flow of American culture and politics. His first book, Mystery Train (1975), recently released in a 50th-anniversary edition, placed the work of several musicians, including Elvis Presley, Sly Stone, and Randy Newman, in the context of American art and history. Marcus makes the argument that the music of such artists is as important and valid as any art the country has produced, and deeply connected to artistic expression that came before and would follow.
He edited a couple of books after Mystery Train, including a collection of critic Lester Bangs’s writings, but it would be 14 years before Marcus’s second book appeared. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) connected punk rock to various avant-garde movements in politics, philosophy, and art.
Marcus has since published books at a steadier rate, including a collection of book reviews he’s written over the years and two books about key moments in Bob Dylan’s career. He’s published a collection of reviews and essays he has written about Dylan over more than 40 years. Marcus has also written books about the Doors and Van Morrison, and about American history and literature.
Robert Christgau is as intellectually rigorous as Willis and Marcus, but has a lively sense of humor that he often employed in his Consumer Guide column, which appeared in the Village Voice and was reprinted in Creem magazine. His capsule reviews brilliantly caught the spirit and feel of a record in just a few sentences, and were witty and insightful.
His longer pieces about musicians showed an acute appreciation of their talents, goals, and place in music and culture. His essays on soul singer Al Green—one for the 1976 edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History, one for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995—contain smart observations about Green’s vocal style, but also about his stage presence and unique approach to soul music. Christgau notes that Green was the last traditional soul singer, and the best, and explains how he differed from his peers.
Christgau opened a 1968 essay in Esquire with a confession: “I don’t know anything about music, which ought to be a damaging admission but isn’t, or I wouldn’t be making it. . . . I used to confide my worries about this to friends in the record industry, who reassured me. They didn’t know anything about music either. The technical stuff didn’t matter. You just gotta dig it.”
That’s true of a lot of rock critics, but it didn’t keep Christgau from writing one of the best pieces about Thelonious Monk I’ve ever read. You can find it and many other pieces by him at a website he maintains. His 2001 essay on Nirvana in the New Yorker gave me an understanding of the band’s greatness that had somehow eluded me until I read it. He admired Kurt Cobain, but gave credit to all three of the band’s members and didn’t shrink from descriptions of Cobain’s excesses and self-destructiveness.
Christgau edited a lot of writers during his many years at the Village Voice, including Willis, Marcus, and Bangs. He also edited three great jazz critics, Gary Giddins, Stanley Crouch, and Greg Tate.
As I wrote Bangs’s name in that last paragraph, I realized I needed to expand my holy trinity to a quartet. Unlike the other three, Bangs didn’t go to college. He began writing for Rolling Stone after Marcus, who was editing the reviews section, accepted a negative review of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams that Bangs had written. Wayne Kramer, guitarist for the MC5, says that Bangs later came to like the band and became a good friend.
Bangs wrote the liner notes to Them Featuring Van Morrison, a 1972 two-LP compilation of Morrison’s recordings with his first group. It’s one of my favorite pieces of rock writing. About Morrison’s first great rock tune, “Gloria,” he wrote: “It’ll be heard as long as rock ’n’ roll endures, and never sound less timely than it did the day they cut it.” His description of the guitar in “One Two Brown Eyes” is disturbing and, at the same time, accurate: “The pocketknife alternative to bottleneck guitar . . . slithers and slides and makes all appropriate incisions, almost as if peeling skin away from a still-warm body.”
Bangs’s essay about Morrison’s album Astral Weeks appeared in Stranded (1979), a collection of essays edited by Marcus, who asked some of his favorite writers to pick a record they’d want to have with them on a desert island. What Bangs wrote about Astral Weeks is personal, because the album had gotten him through a dark time, but he also offers one blazing, brilliant observation after another about Morrison as a singer, writer, and performer.
When Bangs was on—which was often—no other critic, even one of my original holy trinity, could touch him. The Astral Weeks essay, which also appears in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Marcus’s 1987 anthology of his work, is one of his best and most carefully reasoned. Every line is quotable:
It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison’s previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.
You can read the essay here and you’ll see what I mean.
Bangs’s many reviews and articles about Lou Reed in the anthology are, by turns, funny, disappointed, angry, and admiring. Read his review of Reed’s Metal Machine Music and decide for yourself if he likes it. The essay that gives the book its title makes a pretty convincing argument that the Count Five single “Psychotic Reaction” is a better and more important record than the entire recorded output of the Yardbirds, and that of plenty of other bands besides.
Bangs moved to Detroit in the early ’70s to write for Creem magazine. Dave Marsh was also an editor and writer at Creem, whose other writers included Ben Edmonds and John Morthland. Since so many writers in critics in rock were freelancers, their work showed up at one time or another in different publications.
For a while, rock critics mattered. When the Beatles released “Revolution” as a single in 1968, the “underground press,” which included Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, discussed the implications of the song. In 1973, critics reacted so negatively to Jethro Tull’s album A Passion Play that the band called a press conference upon the release of its next album, War Child (1974), to let critics know the direction it was taking.
A Passion Play had reached number one in the US despite those bad reviews and hit the top ten in other countries. Even so, Ian Anderson, Tull’s leader, who had little regard or affection for critics, felt the need to talk to them about War Child.
By the end of the 1970s, rock critics didn’t have that kind of influence. Bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were commercial powerhouses, immune to critics. Actually, both bands were well treated by reviewers during their peak years, but their popularity and massive sales had little to do with how their records were received by critics.
Punk rock and new wave revitalized interest in rock critics for a while, but by the early ’80s, MTV was selling music. Rolling Stone had expanded by that time to cover popular culture that included, but wasn’t limited to, rock music. Bangs died in 1982 of an accidental overdose. Willis moved beyond rock in the ’80s to write about feminism, politics, and social issues until her death from cancer in 2006. Marcus continued to write, but he was no longer doing regular album reviews.
Of the early critics, only Christgau has consistently stayed in the review game. A recently released documentary, The Last Critic, celebrates his life and accomplishments. A promo for the movie showed up in my Facebook feed, and a lot of people sounded happy to hear the news. However, some dredged up hatred for Christgau because he gave a bad review to a band they loved.
A few days later, a member of a Facebook group for vinyl collectors that I subscribe to posted a picture of The Rolling Stone Record Review, a 1971 collection of reviews the magazine had published in its previous four years. The post bellyached about the influence of critics over the years, asserting that their reviews established guidelines for inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The angry comments in those posts missed the point. Fans comprised the first wave of rock critics, but they weren’t writing for fanzines. Readers could go to 16 and Tiger Beat for fluff. Prior to the mid-1960s, rock was teen music and no one bothered with it. Newspapers didn’t cover it, although Jane Scott at Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer wrote about the Beatles in 1964 and qualifies as an early rock critic.
The writers at Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines took rock music seriously and wrote about it intelligently. To me, those reviews were part of a conversation. I listened to the music and firmed up my own arguments for or against the points a reviewer made.
Even the best critics weren’t always right. Jon Landau wrote negative reviews for Cream’s Disraeli Gears and Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. John Mendelsohn hated Led Zeppelin’s first two albums. Yet Landau wrote perceptively about soul music and early rock, and Mendelsohn’s review of Who’s Next is a masterpiece of music criticism, as was his writing about the Kinks and the Move. Greil Marcus was dismissive of Laura Nyro and Tim Buckley, two of my favorites, but few writers have commented with more sensitivity and intelligence about Dylan.
I found out about some of my favorite music from reading great critics. Lester Bangs wrote a rave review of Trout Mask Replica (1969), Captain Beefheart’s third album and his first masterpiece. I saw Beefheart’s next album, Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970), at a record store and bought it because Bangs had liked it. And I hung in there for the several listens it took to understand it, because I trusted Bangs.
Marcus and Christgau both have Substack pages. When I read them, I am sometimes moved to check out something they’ve reviewed, and sometimes frustrated by what they’ve written. I’ve had those feelings about their work and that of other good critics for more than 50 years. A good critic, essayist, or pundit isn’t someone you agree with all the time.
Audio magazines still review music releases, and there are websites like Pitchfork and Consequence that cover music. These sources are worth checking out, but I don’t expect to see any arts coverage having the kind of impact it had in the past. Not in a world where opinions and information come at us quickly and are just as quickly forgotten.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
