What Makes A Good Critic?

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. “Everyone’s a critic” has been a lament my entire life, but the advent of the internet rendered it literally true. Anyone can review anything online, from new albums to tubes of toothpaste. But just because you can review something doesn’t mean you’re doing criticism. It’s easy to conflate the two nouns, especially now that the occupation of professional critic is all but extinct. Every critic out of a job has been replaced by an endless crowd of civilian reviewers, which means fewer enlightening pieces of cultural criticism. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but above all, it leaves the culture at large unable to understand what good criticism looks like, or even what criticism is. Because criticism isn’t just me telling you “this was great” or “this sucked.” A good critic provides necessary context to whatever it is that they’re evaluating. My favorite music critic ever is Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who used to review albums for AllMusic before the site cut him loose and he was forced to open up his own Substack. Erlewine knows far, far more about music than I do. He's listened to every previous album/B-side an artist has put out before reviewing their newest release. He knows the background story of how that album was made. He knows if the lead singer and lead guitarist stopped talking to each other a week into the recording sessions. He knows the producer of the album, and he’s heard all of the other albums that producer has made. He’ll render a final judgment on a work, as the job requires, but he’s done enough homework to make certain that his is an educated judgment.

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