criticism criticism, pt. 1: Goethe

over the past few days, i've been reading music reviews from people who should not be writing them. sometimes the reviews are written poorly; sometimes the score doesn't correlate with the review; sometimes the reviewer just flat-out doesn't understand the artist's intention.

now, i can't presume to know everything about writing music reviews. i've only been doing it for four-odd years, and i've only been good at it for about a year (and that's by my standards). but i've gotten a lot of good advice on how to be a music critic - not just a reviewer, but a critic - and i feel compelled to pass it on (particularly to a few of my friends who are interested in getting into music criticism). with this in mind, i'm gonna be posting every few days about how to make your criticism legitimate, polished, and artful. of course, many of these tips are primarily based on music criticism, but my hope is to present these pieces of advice such that they can be applied to criticism of any art form.

one of the HUGE breakthroughs i had in learning criticism was in an Elements of Performance class i took my freshman year. it was essentially an introduction to theatre for both majors and non-majors. over the course of the semester, we evaluated plays and works of theatre from the school. at the very beginning of the semester, my professor taught us about the German writer Goethe. aside from an oddly-pronounced name, Goethe had a great series of evaluative questions for analyzing art. learning these questions has forever impacted the way i criticize music. they are:

1. what is the artist trying to do?
2. how well does the artist go about doing it?
3. was it worth doing?

they're easy sentences to remember. remember them. memorize them. commit them to your memory. you will need them. my professor in this class would chant "know it, become it" every time she said something we needed to know (and not just for tests, either). you need to know this stuff. know these sentences. become them.

so many reviews i've read of late - from amateur to prolific criticism - fail to remember these questions. it's one thing to see a review that utterly misses the point of an album or song on a small blog buried in the internet, but it's absolutely disheartening to see that on Pitchfork or in Rolling Stone. if you are a professional critic, or want to become one, you have to keep these questions at the forefront of your mind every time you strike pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

of course, not everybody was made to be a music critic. oftentimes, amateur reviewers will give an album they like a 9.5/10 simply because they like it, and won't feel the need to explain why in detail. this works the same way if they don't like an album; perhaps these "reviewers" simply feel that their listeners will approach the music from exactly the same perspective they do. (there are a lot of problems with this logic that i'll go into in later entries.) but, if you want to go from being a hypeman who fellates his favorite band's every release, or a hater who trashes albums he knows he won't like, to an actual music critic, you've GOT to remember these three questions.

so, the next time you listen to a new album - any new album at all - ask yourself. what is this artist trying to accomplish with this album? how well does he or she go about achieving this goal? ultimately, was it worth the effort? if you know (and become) these questions, you're off to a great start.