The Times, A-Changin'
Gut check on another pivot for culture criticism at the NYT
What does pop music criticism look like at The New York Times?
For years, one way to answer would be to say: whatever Jon Pareles is doing. As you’re probably aware, Pareles has been the NYT’s chief pop critic for ages — since 1988, the year he chronicled fainting teenagers at a Duran Duran show at Roseland, honeyed epiphanies at a Shirley Horn concert at Fat Tuesday’s, and scrambled funk signals on a gig by Arto Lindsay’s Ambitious Lovers at S.O.B.’s.
I’m thinking about Pareles’ legendary tenure unexpectedly today, on the heels of an internal staff memo from NYT Culture Editor Sia Michel — certain details of which were reported here by Variety. The story, by Todd Spangler, indicates that Pareles and three other veteran staffers — TV critic Margaret Lyons, theater critic Jesse Green and classical music critic Zachary Woolfe — will soon be taking on unspecified “new roles,” while the paper searches for replacements on their beats.
Because I haven’t seen the memo myself, I’ll quote from the Variety piece:
“We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in American culture. New generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions, smartphones have Balkanized fandoms even as they have made culture more widely accessible than ever, and arts institutions are facing challenges and looking for new opportunities,” Michel wrote.
“Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms,” she wrote in the memo. “Our mission is to be those guides,” she continued. “As we do so, I am making some changes in assignments in the department.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, and everything I have to say should be understood as a subjective first take, open to revision as we receive fresh intel. The first thing I’ll offer is a song of praise to Pareles, whom Michel rightly toasts as an “expert in a dazzling array of genres.” If anything, that encomium is an understatement; if you aren’t already familiar with Pareles’ endlessly curious, scrupulously clear-eyed approach to music criticism, I urge you to seek out his work. It spans everything from stadium pop to West African griots to whatever new sort of guitar band you’ve got.
His most recent piece1, which ran just yesterday, involves a new cache of songs by Woody Guthrie, recorded at home on a Revere T-100 Crescent tape recorder. “It was primitive: mono and running at a noisy, lo-fi, 3 ¾ inches of tape per second, with a little mono microphone,” Pareles writes of the machine, in a deftly reported piece that takes us into the technical details of state-of-the-art sound separation without losing sight of the artist and his songs, captured in a strikingly unvarnished setting.
I had the privilege of working with Pareles on a team of four NYT pop critics from 2005 to 2017. He was the one who emailed with an invitation to file my first concert review, and his example remained deeply instructive over the dozen years I spent as a regular contributor. Every once in a while, I had the opportunity to watch him work — or work beside him, as in a couple editions of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, wherein he filed the big review and I issued a series of in-the-moment dispatches for the ArtsBeat blog.
My pal Jody Rosen and I used to have an ongoing sidebar in awe of Pareles’ chops as a live reviewer. The image I call to mind is emblematic: J.P. deep in the crowd at the Bowery Ballroom or Webster Hall, scribbling in the dark. A furtive glance at his reporter’s notebook shows hastily scrawled yet pitch-perfect musical notation.2
A few times, the tables turned and I was the one covering a show that Pareles had chosen to attend. One white-knuckle example was the time I reviewed Radiohead3 in 2006, and Jon was literally in the seat next to mine. This was the band’s first New York show on a tour featuring the uncharted new songs that would finally appear, more than a year later, on In Rainbows. Picturing myself at this show, while Pareles stoically managed not to steal a glance at my notebook, is still the stuff of stress dreams — but what I remember most is his brief note of approval after the piece ran. (Whew.)
If you were around then, you’ll recall a time when the Times ran live reviews in the Arts section every weekday. Pareles would typically cover two or three shows a week, and see at least twice that number. We all did. That practice ended in 2016, when the Culture Desk decided that live reviews, and a weekly album column, were no longer in the best interest of the Times and its appeal to a global readership.
Pareles is 71, and I gather he’s less of a fixture on the scene than he was a decade ago. I’m hopeful that the Times is serious about honoring not just his service but his undiminished ear and enthusiasm. We need his keen, dispassionate expertise, even as prevailing winds insist on other models, or suggest that expertise itself is out of style.
“Hungry For Trusted Guides”
During all but the very end of my time as a regular Times contributor, the pop critic with the second-longest tenure, behind Pareles, was Ben Ratliff. I learned as much from Ben as I did from Jon — more, in fact, because we worked so closely together, sharing the responsibility for covering jazz and related musics.
When I arrived, the other critic in the stable was Kelefa Sanneh. After he decamped to take a staff job at The New Yorker, the person who filled his chair was Sia Michel, who came over after serving for years as editor-in-chief at Spin. She was soon hired as Pop Music Editor, and then as Arts & Leisure editor, gradually moving up the masthead to Culture Editor.4 Sia’s replacement was Jon Caramanica, who’s still on the beat as a critic and host of the NYT Popcast, previously hosted by Ratliff.
Right, back to Ben for a second. This year he released an excellent book titled Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening. He’s done a boatload of interviews to promote the book,5 including one with
that just went up on Substack.“As a listener to music I’m forever grateful that I have been a writer about music,” Ratliff says. A beat later, he elaborates:
If I’m using this opportunity to sound like an evangelist, I mean to. Fewer and fewer people know that music criticism is even a possible response. Or that “criticism” doesn’t just mean venting, ranting, negatively going off on something. That’s only a very small part of what it can be. Criticism is discernment.
Criticism is discernment. Could that be one reason it feels so endangered? I don’t think you need me to remind you that these aren’t, uh, the most discerning times. Part of that has to do with strategic decisions made in the corporate offices of media outlets, tech companies and lobbying firms. The popular “5 Minutes to Make You Love” series, which was initiated by Zach Woolfe and now often involves jazz stewardship from my friends Gio Russonello and
, supports the paper’s march toward light diversion and lifestyle utility — a take, in the form of a tip. “Nobody reads criticism” was a self-fulfilling prophecy, encouraged by a short-sighted culture industry more amenable to press coverage that can be reliably trusted to serve.Speaking of trust: let’s highlight one sentence from the Times memo. “Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape,” Michel writes, “not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms.”
This is a salient point right now. Caramanica is a pop critic who came up putting words to paper. But I wonder whether the average NYT subscriber who knows his name would even mention his writing. They might more readily talk about the snack he offered a star on a video episode of Popcast. They might mention his car.
Similar forces have been propelling Wesley Morris, a critic at large at the Times, into pole position as a video star and conversation-starter. There’s obviously value in that. I just feel the urge to defend the space in which Morris or Caramanica or whoever can also write — intelligently, searchingly, without always knowing where they’ll land — about the cultural landscape they’re trusted to survey. They know how to do this. It’s on the leadership (and readership!) of the Times and other outlets to hold the line.
I’ll confess to a few fretful thoughts to the contrary. As we know, AI is rampant, being weirdly forced upon every online facet of our lives. The wholesale erosion of reading, as a habit and a practice, goes hand in hand with an honest-to-goodness pivot to video — the phrase that upended newsrooms a decade ago, becoming a dark punchline.
When I saw the Variety report, gallows humor kicked in. I started thinking that what we’ll end up seeing from the NYT is something like Amelia Dimoldenberg’s YouTube behemoth Chicken Shop Date, a charmingly off-kilter celebrity interview show defined by its roving fast-food setting and irreverent tone. Here for your perusal is a clip from a recent episode with the TikTok creator turned pop artist Addison Rae.
There’s so much more to say on this subject, but the hour is getting late.6 I’m hopeful there are legitimately smart moves ahead for the Times, and for all of us. Meanwhile, I’ll conclude with a note of gratitude to everyone who directly supports independent cultural criticism, here on Substack as elsewhere. The Gig is my corner of that map. Among other things, it’s a platform and pressure valve where I can sort things out while other publications make their pivots (or fade to black). After all, where else would I be writing this post tonight? Where else would you be reading it?
That’s a gift link, friend.
This may sound apocryphal, but I saw him do it a handful of times. I have my own method of hasty notation at a show, but the flyspeck result is useful only as a memory prod. Pareles, who majored in music at Yale, would dash off melodic scraps with a copyist’s flair.
Another gift link; please enjoy.
I worked extensively with Sia when she was in the Arts & Leisure post, and have only good things to say about her editorial judgment, her professional standards, and her way of working with writers.
Have you heard the Ben Ratliff episode of The Late Set? Trust me, it’s a banger.
Hey, I named this post after one Dylan song; I can at least wink at another.
There must be some kind of way out of here.
Actually there isn't, I just wanted to extend the Dylan theme. Anyway, as you may remember from previous comments, I'm *inordinately* preoccupied with the Times arts section shifting its focus from, broadly, New York City to the contents of readers' phones. I bet to most editors the rationale is bullet-proof: only a few dozen readers were at the Village Vanguard last night, and by definition they already know what they heard, whereas every reader has a phone. You gotta meet the readers where they are.
Unfortunately, the message over time is, "Our paper comes from nowhere, its ganglia are as fried as yours, and no place on earth is more interesting to it than whatever you're doomscrolling. Don't mind us."
Wow. I read this while taking a break from writing my latest book review. Nate, thank you. I don't know as anyone could have written this better but frankly, I'm going to need some time to process this news.
"Criticism is discernment."