what we talk about when we talk about pop music criticism

the discourse surrounding the nyt songwriters list neglects a broader problem

Hark! Certain precincts of the internet have been abuzz in recent weeks over the publication in The New York Times of a list of the (alleged) Thirty Greatest Living American Songwriters. Unsurprisingly, this highly subjective agglomeration trended heavily toward today’s mainstream pop. Many people were incensed, which, of course, was the point: the “interactive feature” was little more than gussied up clickslop. The piece elicited a deluge of rebuttals and grievances, many of which took the form of righteous fury over, say, the inclusion of songwriter X and concomitant omission of songwriter Y. The more thoughtful responses, like this one from Damon Krukowski, offered a wider lens. Still, a good deal of the #ListGate discourse has amounted to a series of skirmishes over competing tastes, as in this polemic courtesy of Brad Mehldau (a friend and hero), who took NYT critic Jon Caramanica behind the schoolyard and stole his lunch, leaving him with contusions and a severe reputational wedgie. (All of this had to do with Caramanica’s rather dismissive remarks about Billy Joel, who didn’t make the list.) Yet Mehldau’s retort — and a host of others that griped about the ignorance of today’s pop music mandarins — missed, in my view, the central problem facing our impoverished critical landscape.

The issue isn’t that writers like Caramanica champion Taylor Swift or Young Thug, but that they have become almost exclusively reactive. In an earlier era, NYC pop music critics—love them or hate them—spent many of their nights in sweaty clubs, taking the pulse of fledgling scenes, writing capsule reviews of shows and albums for The Times, The Village Voice or any number of other outlets. Think of John Rockwell reviewing the first Sonic Youth album in 1982 (skeptical), or Robert Christgau writing up a Patti Smith show at CBGB in early 1975 (enthusiastic). In those days, the hyperlocal focus of New York-based critics made those writers—and, by extension, those outlets—national tastemakers. (I made a similar argument in a 2025 essay for The Atlantic.)

By contrast, today’s sorry excuse for a music criticism apparatus—in which clicks are dollars and an increasing number of news outlets are owned by vulture capitalists—has led those same outlets to do an about-face: rather than championing something new and homegrown, they wait for algorithms, digital marketing firms, and what remains of the major label machine, to do the anointing. At that point—chasing clicks and ad dollars—they simply bestow the imprimatur of the NYT on what is already popular, rendering the Times (and, I would add, The New Yorker) irrelevant.

None of this is to suggest that those who sounded off about the Times’ list were firing without merit. On the contrary, their arguments, often rooted in the age-old tension between craft and zeitgeist, point toward a palpable decline in the analytical arsenal of today’s music writers. Gone are the days when pop music critics—like John Rockwell, who could review a David Bowie gig and a Mahler symphony in the same week—had enough musical knowledge to assess both sides of that equation. As a result, there’s an entire aesthetic universe—call it “art music built from the vernacular,” or vice versa—one concerned more with musical architecture than with “vibes,” that is written off in toto by the Jon Caramanicas and Lindsay Zoladzes of the world. It is within this paradigm that someone like Randy Newman, who, for my money, is the living heir to the Great American Songbook tradition, could be left off The List.

To be sure, craft, itself, is a highly subjective construct; the ways in which we define craft are, themselves, a form of gatekeeping. Unimpeachable counterpoint and sophisticated chord progressions are not prerequisites for good pop music, but neither should they be disqualifying. Moreover, a critical praxis predicated on stream counts and TikTok virality is exclusionary in ways that surrender human agency and ingenuity to the insatiable maw of capital.

Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963, silkscreen. Photo: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Y. Suspitsyn / © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

It also begs the question: what is pop music criticism for? The poptimist movement began as a corrective to a critical discourse which too often neglected women and people of color. Poptimism argued that white male critics lavished attention on white male artists to the exclusion of (non-white male) performers who had broad followings, but who were perceived, by dint of their pop aesthetics, as being less serious or sophisticated, and thus less worthy of critical ink. Poptimists took it as axiomatic that what is popular is good and that it therefore deserved to be written about.

Twenty years after the publication of Kelefa Sanneh’s landmark essay, “The Rap Against Rockism,” which, in popularizing the concept of poptimism in the United States, signaled a shift in coverage of popular music, the poptimists’ conquest is complete. But if the movement initially sought to lift up marginalized voices, it now serves, depressingly, to reinforce a culture dominated by algorithms and stream counts.

I have a number of friends who, understandably incensed by this state of affairs, expend a great deal of emotional energy being pissed off at Taylor Swift and the people who love her. But as I age, I just don’t have the energy to get exercised about the monoculture. I try to use my modest platform to lift up music I care about, and am grateful when others do the same. At the end of the day, what matters most to me is nurturing community, which, as I see it, is the only way out of our political hellscape.

In chasing national trends, the critics of the New York Times have forsaken their duty to animate and articulate, through their coverage, a community of artists. Some time ago, the paper shifted its focus—for ostensibly existential financial reasons—away from being a local paper and toward an identity as a national/international outlet. That’s all well and good, but it leaves a gaping hole in the ecology of the arts.

For my money, the “Greatest Living Songwriters” list was dumb clickbait which omitted an entire pantheon of irreplaceably brilliant songwriters. But the thing I most lament is the loss of a critical landscape in which you could open up the paper each morning and read six reviews of weird shows on the Lower East Side. Back then, critics were in the trenches seeking not only to discover the next big thing, but also to connect the dots between artists and micro cultures, rather than regurgitating, in greyish prose, the outputs of the Spotify algorithm.

My new album, Elevator Songs, a collaboration with Roomful of Teeth, is out now. You can listen & purchase here. My tour dates are here. As always, thank you for reading, and to those with paid subscriptions, for making this publication possible. If you’re not in a position to upgrade, please consider liking, sharing, or commenting on this post, which will help it become visible to others.