‘*1/2’ a critique of rock criticism in North America

Extract

As a particular type of gatekeeper, rock critics play a significant role in shaping the representations of artists for an admittedly small, but influential, population, as well as establishing an artist's place in music history. In Sound Effects, Simon Frith (1983) maintains that rock critics are ‘opinion leaders’ and are the ‘ideological gatekeepers’ of the community for which they write. Additionally, I argue that rock critics function as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ who articulate the ideas held by the population of which they are a part (Gramsci 1971, pp. 5-14). The community that rock critics represent and speak for is made up of an overlapping network that comprises those connected with college radio, record collectors, local music scene participants, musicians and various record company employees, among others. Frith (1996, p. 18) argues in Performing Rites that if ‘social relations are constituted in cultural practice, then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process of discrimination’. By understanding the ways in which evaluations are made within the communities that rock critics are a part of, we can gain a better understanding of the communities themselves. Because there are no sustained scholarly writings that examine rock criticism in North America from a historical, sociological or communicative perspective, it is important to begin examining the profession of the rock critic, as well as the discourse generated by rock criticism.