Pop Music Critics Embrace the Mainstream

Quite the opposite: It's a daily practice. Invented by rebel newspaper staffers (most notably, Ralph J. Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle) who stayed out late and never came into the office, codified by freaks and attitudinal New Journalists, the pursuit of passionate thought about pop music rose up as a challenge to taste hierarchies, and has remained a pugilistic, exhibitionist business throughout pop's own evolution.

Here's my friend Robert Christgau, one of the genre's founding troublemakers, on the subject, from a paper he gave at the 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle (an annual music writers gathering organized by my husband, Eric Weisbard). The theme that year was, in fact, guilty pleasures. “Rock criticism was conceived as a reproach to the idea of guilty pleasure," Christgau wrote. “In fact, 'reproach' and 'conceive' are putting it too politely. 'Reproach' makes it sound as if we had the upper hand, so make it 'attack.' It was a kick in the pants, a fart in the face, a full fungu."

I'm not entirely certain what a “full fungu" is (well, sound it out), but I'm sure I've been on the other end of many, not only from my music scribe colleagues, but from readers, musicians, industry types and anyone else who takes a whack at the determinedly amateur pastime