Also, look. As people here have pointed out, critics will generally gravitate toward stuff they kind of like. Believe me, I have little doubt that I’d pan most high-average-scoring metacritic albums *if I actually wrote about them.* Editors may well realize that, too. (Though then again, maybe if metacritic took into account my skeptical to less-than-glowing Rhapsody blog reviews of TV on the Radio, Gang Gang Dance, No Age, Los Campesinos, Hercules and Love Affair, Santogold, etc — like they count the reviews I write in lots of other places — that might make those scores more fair. But they don’t.) (And those are all acts that I actually think are *worth writing about*, which is more than I can say for *most* indie rock, which isn’t even *worth* panning to me.)

Finally, sorry, but I really don’t see evidence that the critic population, in general, is becoming more open-minded. I dunno, I guess these days you get your token metal or teen-pop or Nashville country album on year end composite lists, which you wouldn’t have 15 years ago. (Or, for metal, maybe 25 years ago — pre-Metallica.) So there’s that. But in general, I’d be kind of surprised if the last couple Pazz & Jop (or Idolator) poll lists are more diverse than Pazz & Jop lists from the early to mid ’80s. Which happens to be the last era in which such lists coincided remotely with my own tastes. So I find it kind of laughable thi time of year, when people whine about such-and-such album they like missing from, say, Blender’s or Paste’s year-end lists. So wait….there’s ONE album you like that didn’t make some random consensus? Not 100?What are you, a frigging pod person? Jeez.

And POV is also malleable. I helped a friend of mine mix down his CD of noisecore tracks several years ago — He was working with an old sampler, a couple of guitar pedals, and little else, and I had a bunch of rack processing gear and a decent mixer, so we married our rigs for the duration. In the course of working with him I was able to hear what he felt was ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a genre that I don’t normally listen to at all, or enjoy when I hear it.

My poor wife had to put up with several evenings of screamed obscenities, distorted bass and relentless gabber beats. She never really got with that aesthetic, but surprisingly she heard enough of it to make comments like “that one sounds like it’s coming together well.” So she wasn’t entirely immune.

My point being, when it comes to music, everyone is so subjectively affected by it that there’s no real hope for any sort of objective grading of music.

Now these are Starbucks customers and UGA students, so it was primarily white middle-to-upper-class folks, but I found it illustrative and more than a little hopeful.

I agree that it’s irresponsible to trash a bluegrass record when you hate all bluegrass and aren’t sure why. But if you’ve listened to some bluegrass and really thought long and hard about why you hate it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to write a negative review of a record. Of course, nobody wants to spend their life listening to music they hate just so they can write some fire and brimstone tracts on why it’s all so terrible. That’s masochistic. But I do wish critics would take more time to periodically pan things. When they don’t you end up with RS style 3.5/5 star standards and nobody wins.

What it all boils down to in the end is a) tolerant listening mixed with b) exposure to new things equals progress. And at the end of the day, I hate to say it, but 90% (a guess) of people out there are still completely intolerant of anything too shockingly new and will point blank ignore anything that doesn’t fit into the parameters of their established taste — no matter how much more new and wonderful things they’re exposed to via the internet, viral marketing, etc.

But we all know this already! So, I’m here to say that though it may appear that people are becoming more tolerant, I’m positing that that’s actually not the case — that people are actually more compartmentalized, there’s just a better vehicle (the internet) for making sure that everyone’s compartment has a soapbox.

Of course, I have pretty wide tastes in music…from Beethoven to Black Flag, from Black Sabbath to Biggie, and I’ve written extensively about rock, rap, punk, metal and the blues. It’s getting harder these days, though, to sift through carbon-copy rock bands, bland rap music, and mindless country to find those few gems, but I guess that’s part of the game, innit?

The Ego Trip book didn’t make me a stark, raving Biggie and/or Nas fan, though I like both. What it did was make me realize I’d been half-consciously knee-jerk dismissing them as “the rap I’m not supposed to like.” That, I think, is the key thing: people tend to dismiss whatever isn’t marketed directly to them, even in bloggy free-for-all times. Part of a critic’s job, I felt even then, was to be open to things that weren’t necessarily for them. I’d rather read a critic who’s actually made an effort to understand something and then dismissed it gleefully and with malice aforethought (I’ve been learning, thanks to [archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com] that mid-’80s Melody Maker was especially good at this) than “are you kidding?” disdain for something the writer plainly isn’t getting. Not everyone needs to get everything–I’m never going to understand what the hell people like about Guided by Voices, for starters, and I never want to. There are writers (and, god knows, musicians) I enjoy who think the techno I treasure is garbage. So it goes.

The rock-first mindset has been around so long, and has devolved into such cliche, it’s hard to remember how startling it was at first. A lot of the late-’60s stuff by Marcus, Marsh, Christgau, Bangs, Willis, etc., was clearing ground: making the case for rock as worth discussion in what amounted to lit-crit terms. (Early rockcrit’s over-reliance on lyrical analysis is a direct result of this.) The idea that stuff kids liked was worthy of any kind of analysis was dismissed on its face by, oh, 99% of everybody, and that still happens now, albeit under very different circumstances.

I wonder: are music fans in general, not just critics, beginning to listen more catholically, across genre lines? Or even more to the point, are non-indie-ID’ed serious fans doing it to any greater degree than before? I honestly have no idea, though my hunch is that it has to be true to some extent, however small, simply due to the ready availability of such a wider swathe of information and access than ever before. That could just mean people are buying more Putumayo comps, who knows. Too bad my girlfriend flew back to New York last night; she’s a social-work Ph.D student at Columbia, first year of three, specializing in statistics, and would know just how to make a questionnaire to quantify that info.

That’s also the case for me. Part of the reason I got into music journalism is the urge to evangelize on behalf of records I like. People are always saying that critics want to be nasty and tear artists down, but I honestly cue up every new album hoping it’s a masterpiece. Doesn’t happen very often, of course, but when it does it sure is satisfying.

On the other hand, sometimes an album comes along that simply demands a good beating…of course, in this Internet age (unlike the bygone era of print criticism), no critical review ever goes away, and I still receive hatemail every now and then for an appropriately negative review of Vanilla Ice’s Hard To Swallow that I wrote a decade ago.

On the whole, though, I’d rather spend my listening and writing time enjoying Scott Kempner or the Hold Steady than have to sit through some o’ the crap the labels are flinging up against the wall these days.