My Mount Rushmore Of Critics

The Four Writers That Impacted Me Most As A Critic (Inspired By A Recent Q&A)

This week I did a book event at my hometown book store Magers & Quinn with my good pal Alex Pickett. (Check out his new short story collection Camera Lake. It’s awesome.) As of now it’s the last date I have scheduled for the There Was Nothing You Could Do tour. These are by far the best in-person events I have ever done, and I’m sad that there are no more on the horizon. If you happen to own a book store, and you happen to be situated in a cool town, hit me up and I just might talk Boss in your vicinity!

During the Q&A, someone asked me an interesting question I had never previously considered (at least not in this exact way): Who is on my Mount Rushmore of critics? I improvised an answer on the spot, and upon further reflection, I think my four choices were spot on. Going with my gut without thinking about it too much was the right call in this instance.

I thought I would elaborate on my choices, in Substack form.

Roger Ebert

I think the original framing of the question was strictly for music critics. But I had to mention Ebert in the pole position, as he was 1) the first person (along with Gene Siskel) I was aware of who made a living by consuming art and talking about it; and 2) he was the first critic whose work I read (and studied) at length. I’m part of the generation that was shaped by watching Siskel & Ebert on TV at a formative age, and then I took the extra step of going to the library and reading multiple volumes of The Roger Ebert Home Companion. Reading those books while listening to music in my room at age 11 or 12 is what directly led me to my career.

Ebert influenced how I write, and how I approach criticism, more than any other critic. It’s not even close. I wrote about it in my obituary for Pitchfork, which I’ll quote here:

I became a student of clean and concise sentences that emphasized clarity and the right balance of humor, thoughtfulness, and accessibility, as well as how to shape my raw impressions into well-rounded opinions that cohered on the page into narratives. The idea that the most interesting part of a movie happens after you see it — during the post-mortems you have with others and with yourself in your own head — was something that carried over easily to the songs and albums I was discovering at the time.

There were other lessons that a budding music critic could learn by following the Roger Ebert way, starting with the idea that art should be judged on its own terms. Ebert understood that there was an audience for a movie like Beethoven, and that it was his job to honestly and fairly assess how well it performed the duties of a dog-centric family film starring Charles Grodin. For Ebert, being a critic didn’t make you some kind of remote, ivory-tower aesthete — you had a place in people’s lives as a trusted advisor and friend. As respected as Ebert was, he wasn’t an intellectually vain person. For much of his career he reviewed pretty much everything, good and bad, and if he saw something worthwhile in a film that snobs automatically dismissed as dreck, he wasn’t afraid to praise it. (He wound up giving Beethoven two and a half stars.)

Greil Marcus

In some ways the anti-Ebert. I say this without malice: Greil Marcus strikes me as a very intellectually vain person. But that’s okay when you’re the writer of Mystery Train, the greatest book about rock ‘n’ roll ever. I doubt that any book will ever blow my mind like that one did when I read it as a teenager. We all have that one book that you read at an impressionable age, and you only understand about 25 percent of it, but that 25 percent is so incredible that it makes you want to push your brain toward a higher level consciousness. I yearned to understand 35 percent of Mystery Train, or even 31 percent. I think I eventually got there, and then some.

My takeaway from Mystery Train was that you can use the vehicle of music criticism to write about whatever you want. You can make connections between songs and historical events that would occur to literally no one else, or you can even make it about your own life. And as long as you do it well —  the doing it well part is what trips most people up — it can feel as exciting as listening to a great record.

Chuck Klosterman

If you came of age as a critic as I did in the aughts, you were influenced by Chuck Klosterman. Anyone who says different is a liar. Now, not everyone was influenced in the same way. There were people who loved Klosterman’s writing and tried to emulate it (usually without success). And then there were people who absolutely despised his writing, and in some way tried to react against it. Either way, we all read him. That to me is what makes Chuck Klosterman different from any music critic working today.

The most celebrated music critic in 2024 is Hanif Abdurraqib, a truly thoughtful and uncommonly sensitive writer. (He’s also more than “just” a music critic, obviously.) The difference with Hanif is that he basically has a 100 percent approval rating — I’ve never seen a single solitary soul disparage his work, so if he has haters they’re keeping it to themselves. Or they simply avoid reading him. And that isn’t quite the same level of prominence as a writer who compels his critics to read him with arguably more passion than his fans. I won’t say nobody will ever do that again, given (waves hands) all this going on in media now, but I have my doubts.

On a personal level, Chuck was absolutely crucial for two reasons. One, he went from working for daily newspapers in the Midwest to being a fixture at all the top NYC publications. It’s hard to convey how impossible that transition was in a pre-social media world, but let me tell you: If you didn’t already live in New York, and you didn’t go to an East Coast school, and you didn’t go to parties with the right editors, you had NO shot to break in that world back then. Absolutely none! The proverbial camel had a better shot passing through the proverbial eye of a needle! So, as a person who also got started working for a daily newspaper in the Midwest and assumed I would never get to be a full-time music critic, seeing Chuck be that camel was hugely inspiring.

Two, Fargo Rock City invented the modern “first-person music criticism book with jokes” format, i.e. the kind of books I write. So, thank you for that.

Ellen Willis

My current favorite music critic, which is sad given that she passed away 18 years ago. Willis also is more than just a critic — she’s probably better known as a political writer and feminist. But her writing about music for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and other publications in the sixties and seventies is what I care about the most. I was reading her work for years without knowing much about her, in places like The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock And Roll. (My Springsteen book opens with epigraph taken from her definitive essay on CCR from that book.) But it wasn’t until the posthumous compilation Out Of The Vinyl Deeps that Willis’ greatness fully crystallized for me. More than any other music writer I can think of, Willis’ work does not age. When I read one of her essays, it feels more alive and fresh than the writing I see tirelessly lauded as “brilliant!” and “essential!” in my social media feeds.

And she’s still not all that famous! Which is a crime! Out Of The Vinyl Deeps is the music book I recommend the most whenever people ask me for music book recommendations. So I will recommend it again here.

Self Promotion Time

I meant to mention this last week, but on Uproxx I published a column on my favorite music of July 2024. There’s a lot of country on this list! That’s partly due to the time of year (country sounds great on the patio right now) and also because there’s jsut a lot of great country music right now.

Speaking of great country music: The Johnny Blue Skies/Sturgill Simpson tour is going to be insane. The YouTube clips from the tour kickoff on Friday in San Francisco has me salivating.