Your Excellent Media Experiences correspondent, who has spent eight installments cataloging great media, now turns his critical eye on Critics — and yes, he appreciates irony. EME series intro/complete index here.

Rick Beato is mad at the New York Times. Last week the newspaper published its list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, and Beato, the classically trained multi-instrumentalist and YouTuber with upwards of five million subscribers, went scorched earth.

In an acerbic nine-minute video, he called the panel “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug critics with no background in music. Exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.”

Within hours, his rant had ten times the views of the original Times piece.

Beato’s frustration is legitimate. While including such songwriting luminaries as Young Thug and Bad Bunny, the panel excluded Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman and Tom Waits. 

Four Ivy League degrees among the critics, Beato added — in film studies, American studies and English, and zero music education between them. 

His remarks got me thinking about what we actually wanted from a music critic, what value their existence added to the life of a music fan during their heyday, and why their near-total disappearance is a relief. And a bummer.

From roughly 1965 to 2000, maybe two dozen people in the country had real influence over what records got heard, bought and remembered. They wrote for Rolling Stone, Creem, the Village Voice, a few others like NME and in my personal world, Chicago newspapers. (Greg Kot reviewed for the Tribune, Jim DeRogatis at the Sun-Times.)

Rolling Stone produced the most prominent reviewers of the rock/classic rock eras: Dave Marsh, David Fricke, Anthony DeCurtis. Others included Robert Christgau at the Voice, Rob Sheffield at Spin. Lester Bangs at Creem was polarizing.

I read many of them and trusted none completely. Today the rock critic has gone the way of The Dodo.

Music criticism is subjective, and this small group of writers had the power to make or break an album release or influence an artist’s career.

A new album was coming out, you hadn’t heard any of it, and then came the review. These writers got advance copies, maintained label relationships and built cultural authority that the average listener did not possess.

That power imbalance was consequential. 

A critic then was a gatekeeper between you and the purchase decision. A rave review could send hordes to the record store to lay the money down. A pan could stall an album’s momentum. 

Greil Marcus penned what may be the sharpest single sentence the genre ever produced, a verdict on Rod Stewart’s squandering of his early brilliance:

“Rarely has a singer had as full and unique a talent as Rod Stewart; rarely has anyone betrayed his talent so completely.”

That’s a critic executing his task, precise and unforgettable.

But “critic vanity” kills. The temptation to anoint the next big thing before the crowd arrives, to be on record as the person who saw it first, warped more than a few reviews.

The result sometimes was a glowing notice for a record that turned out to be unlistenable, or a band that just flat sucked.

You committed to the purchase on the reviewer’s words, brought it home, played it, heard nothing and walked away feeling screwed.

Radiohead is the classic example. “Kid A” in 2000 received near-universal perfect scores — Pitchfork gave it a 10, Rolling Stone genuflected, critics competed to out-praise each other. The album features no rock, no hooks, just electronic drift and Thom Yorke’s voice somewhere overhead. 

The critics had sent you there under false pretenses.

The Velvet Underground received similar treatment — every critic owned or cited that first album, which for my friends and me sounded like Andy Warhol’s tone-deaf version of The Monkees. (Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music also got praised as avant-garde vision. It is two hours of guitar feedback.)

When Eric Clapton described his severe reaction to the COVID vaccine (for a time his hands wouldn’t work, and he suffered prolonged pain long afterward), Rolling Stone dropped him from number two to number 35 on its Greatest Guitarists list. 

Rolling Stone’s entry on Clapton read in part:

“Since starting his career on the British blues rock scene during the 1960s, Clapton had a unique gift for melody that made his solos just as catchy as the songs they adorned. He was always a diligent student of the blues from Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters to Albert King and Otis Rush and even cut an album of mostly pre-electric repertoire with Wynton Marsalis. But his most memorable recordings were born of real life tragedy from Layla inspired by stealing the wife Patty Boyd of his best friend George Harrison to Tears in Heaven, a lament for the infant son who fell to his death from an apartment window. These days, nobody really considers Clapton God. His COVID comments clearly rule out any chance of being all knowing, but that doesn’t stop guitarists from worshiping his playing

Clapton’s past accolades, decades of albums and well-known guitar mastery hadn’t changed. Layla hadn’t changed – only Rolling Stone had. 

And not in any way that had anything to do with music. A list that once meant something had become political, a form of punishment.

For you and your ‘interaction’ with any critic, it only takes one highly questionable call like this one, uncredited by the way — the RS journo was too cowardly to sign his own name — to turn erosion of trust into an avalanche.

And that’s just fine given that for music critics the structural advantage disappeared about 20 years ago. In 2006 Limewire and Napster peaked, pipelining all the music ever recorded to anyone willing to use the services. 

Advance copies today go to bloggers and websites; the gatekeeper has no gate.

(I had a brief run on the other side of this — reviewing mostly books, but also music and movies for three news dailies and Citysearch Austin between 1997 and 2004. It was great fun to give it a whirl and also realize, as Rick Beato points out, any mug with a Big Ten degree can also do music criticism).

By the time smartphones and social media arrived, reviewer authority had already bled out of the role. Fans today are well equipped to arrive at their own conclusions. 

That’s the relief part. You no longer need a stranger’s permission to trust your own ears.

What’s left?

Today’s horrendous newspaper economics means that only a smattering of critics survive, and at only the top few news outlets. In a move that makes its own gravy Pitchfork, which spent two decades as Rolling Stone’s most credible successor, was folded into GQ by Condé Nast in 2024. Bryan Ferry would be proud.

Elsewhere, Allmusic is occasionally useful, particularly for catalog deep-dives and music-genre genealogies that differentiate it. But the site is hard to navigate, slow, cluttered. A library with a shaky card catalog.

Spotify tells you what you might like based on what you already like. But that’s a mirror.

Great critics, who might also have had flawed logic, once educated you about an artist or a record, or about what you might be missing. But the days are gone of a strong critic showing you something you didn’t know you wanted. That’s too bad.

Beato’s video got eight thousand comments in eight hours because he’s right, and because everyone already knew he was right. Meanwhile an extraordinary amount of formal education in that NYT podcast revealed a stunning absence of actual knowledge. Plus the nameless panel, especially that one guy, is insufferable. 

The best rock critics made you think… made you uncertain about a record or artist to want to learn and hear more. So you’d do your homework to see what you might be missing. 

Nobody watching a YouTube video feels uncertain about anything.