The New Yorker:

It’s possible that I listened to more music this year than any other. I lost interest in podcasts. I lost interest in silence. There was too much extraordinary work out there.

By Amanda Petrusich

There is perhaps no moment in history when being a music critic felt like a respectable, lucrative, or essential position, though there are certainly years when it maybe seemed more fun—long before the mobilization of seething fan armies, before the alt-weeklies vaporized, before TikTok nurtured the idea that context is dispensable, before we all sort of forgot that real listening requires time. The job’s formative practitioners were smart, galloping, and bold: Lester Bangs loudly typing a review live onstage with the J. Geils Band at Cobo Hall, wearing sunglasses, his Smith-Corona miked like a Stratocaster. (He eventually knocked the typewriter onto the ground, stomping on it until it was smashed to bits. “It felt good, purging somehow,” he wrote.) Jon Landau scribbling “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” after a show at the Harvard Square Theatre. Greg Tate going long and weird on Bad Brains and the annihilating catharsis of hardcore (“I’m talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby,” he wrote in the Village Voice). Ellen Willis, this magazine’s first pop-music critic, simultaneously celebrating and skewering the Velvet Underground in only six words: “antiart art made by antielite elitists.”

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