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, tore into the panel of music experts behind it.

In a nine-minute video, he called them “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 article.

Beato’s got a point. The list included Young Thug and Bad Bunny but left off Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits and Jimmy Webb. Beato noted the panel held four Ivy League degrees between them, in film studies, American studies and English. Zero music degrees.

(I once did a brief version of this myself, reviewing books and occasional music and movie commentary also for three newspapers between 1997 and 2004. Great fun, and confirmation that any mug with a Big Ten degree can also do criticism.)

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 about 1965 to 2000, maybe two dozen people in the country decided what records got heard, bought and remembered. They wrote for Rolling Stone, Creem, the Village Voice, a few others like NME and in my 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 most of them and trusted none entirely. 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.

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 critics also wanted credit for spotting the next big thing first. That urge warped plenty of reviews. You’d buy a record on a critic’s word, bring it home, play it and hear nothing worth the money.

Radiohead’s “Kid A” is the classic case. In 2000 it got near-perfect scores across the board: Pitchfork gave it a 10, Rolling Stone gushed. The album has no rock and no hooks, just electronic drift under Thom Yorke’s voice. Critics sent people there under false pretenses.

Previously, The Velvet Underground got the same treatment. Everyone called that first album a classic, 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’s two hours of 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

Nothing about Clapton’s guitar playing had changed. Rolling Stone had changed, and not for musical reasons. A list that once meant something had become a punishment, issued anonymously. Whoever wrote it didn’t even sign his name.

None of this matters much now, because the structural advantage critics once held disappeared two decades ago. Napster and Limewire peaked around 2006 and put every recorded song within reach of anyone who wanted it. Advance copies now go to bloggers and random websites.

The gatekeepers lost the gate. By the time smartphones and social media showed up, critical authority had already drained out of the job.

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

What’s left?

Newspaper economics killed off most of the remaining critics, at all but a handful of 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.

Allmusic is still useful for genre history and catalog deep-dives, but the site is slow and hard to navigate, a library with a broken card catalog. 

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

A great critic, even when wrong, could point you toward something you didn’t know you wanted. That’s the part that’s actually gone, or on life-support, and that’s too bad.

Beato’s video now is at 1.7M views and counting because he’s right, and because everyone already knew he was right. Meanwhile those impressively credentialed NYT podcast panelists revealed their ignorance.

My own critique of these critics would be: “This nameless panel, especially that one guy, was insufferable.” 

The best rock critics made you think… They made you uncertain enough about a record or artist you hadn’t heard to want to learn and hear more. So you did your homework to see what you might be missing. 

The Times panel shows that critics can still miss, badly. Beato’s savvy (and large) audience could reach that same conclusion all by themselves.

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