Pop Goes the Music Critic

Pop music criticism can be a tough gig. After all, there’s rarely a story to relate. Few albums have characters to talk about. And in our increasingly iTunes-saturated world, where singles rule and custom playlists are the norm, it’s growing increasingly rare for an album to be made as a unified work. Even more problematic is the difficulty of writing about sounds out of the context of daily life. It’s easy to describe a strange sound heard on the street downtown; it’s not nearly so easy to come up with ways to describe the increasingly synthetic, unnatural sounds that populate pop albums. The vocabulary just isn’t there to describe the sounds, certainly not in the way that vocabulary exists to describe common elements of books or movies or plays.

So, lacking easy ways to talk about the music itself, much pop music criticism makes due with distractions: the artists themselves, their “scenes,” and music culture. This material, much of which is just padding, is regularly delivered with a sassy rhetorical veneer, ostensibly to capture the faddish, fashion-obsessed texture of pop music. Far too often, this results in articles that aren't much more than barely coherent strings of high-slang gibberish. Pitchfork gets knocked for this regularly, and justly so. But The Village Voice is often just as bad. For example, this short piece by Debbie Maron on a Gnarls Barkley show:

The emcee punk'd us, stating that regrettably, Gnarls couldn't make it, and proffered up a cover band named Brushfire instead. The devastating news was met by nary a clap until—voilà!—the stars themselves appeared in hair-metal regalia: DJ-producer Danger Mouse had the boa, enigmatic hip-hop crooner Cee-Lo had the cloak, and each flaunted a gargantuan mullet wig. Oy. Was this posturing for the scenester nation? An ironic homage to Axl Rose, perhaps? Nope: The metal accoutrement was less about shock value and more about teaching kids some musical unity using anachronism.

Heaps of supporting musicians strode onstage as well, but Cee-Lo took the forefront as a new kind of sex symbol with a new kind of liturgy. He had Aretha in the urethra, belly quivering over spandex tights in plain defiance of skeletal-hipster vanity, while svelte Danger Mouse modestly took a scratcher's backseat, the Mary Magdalene to Cee-Lo's Jesus. But those spoonfuls of sugar do help soul's medicine go down—surely a suicide anthem was never met with such lively sing-along as "Just a Thought?" And hell, if Gnarls's patented threesome of metal, soul, and goofy dance-offs makes the masses swallow, so be it.

Oh sure, it’s got a sneering, street-savvy rhythm to it. “He had Aretha in the urethra” sounds fun indeed, and maybe the band members really meant to "[teach] kids some musical unity using anachronism" (though I doubt it). But fluff essays like this are the verbal equivalent of Tony Scott films, all tripped-out flashy excess meant to hide an inherent shallowness. Saying nothing with style is still saying nothing.