Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: The Critical Imperative is a call for a new kind of academic writing about popular music: one that places primacy on sounds as made and heard, and which is styled in a way that foregrounds not just academic rigour, but also imaginative description, creative interpretation and daring evaluation.While criticism is increasingly marginalised in the mainstream media, many writers and readers have constructed new spaces for musical reflection online-and this discourse, as sophisticated as it is public, represents a challenge to academic work on pop ensconced behind university paywalls.Of course, scholarly methods have their own virtues, and the eight essays that follow have taken up the challenge of marrying deep research and reflection with lively critical language, direct argument and formal experiment.But this is not just an exercise in style: it's an investigation into how we think and write about music in new intellectual and publishing contexts.And since the kinds of critical approach we are considering are inseparable from the financial and attention economies amid which they have emerged, it's important to begin by considering how the monetised internet has reset the relationship between readers and writers, journalists and scholars.What many see as a contemporary crisis in critical discourse was dramatised in January 2016, when Kitty Empire-one of the UK's comparatively few broadsheet pop critics, and one of the most insightful-was assigned David Bowie's Blackstar release.Empire's 400word Observer review appeared just hours before Bowie's death, which was unexpected to all beyond the artist's inner circle.The writer's piece was dutiful, formed of factual information and only the vaguest interpretive gestures, with Empire suggesting the songs betrayed 'little obvious connection other than unease' (Empire 2016a, p. 26).But Bowie's passing, announced the next day, sent millions to Blackstar, and prompted what amounted to a crowd-sourced mega-critique: numberless online commentaries, authored by professionals and amateurs-by devoted Bowie specialists and me-too hacks-together described in great detail the record's lyrical and symbolic portrait of an artist approaching the end.It seemed so obvious in retrospect, and, her expertise called into question, two weeks later Empire used her column to provide an apologia for her first review: she had only been permitted two prerelease listens in a PR office, the writer complained, and an interpretation based on the artist's ageing had seemed too pat (Empire 2016b, p. 31).Even with so little to go on the column had needed to be filled, the Observer's authoritative judgement handed down.
Source: Popular Music
Authors: Devon Powers, Tom Perchard
Institution: Temple University
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2567418231