The New Yorker:

David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker

Critics at the magazine have a history of not pulling punches. In 1939, Russell Maloney called “The Wizard of Oz” “a stinkeroo.” “I did not care for Agatha Christie,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1944, after sampling the author’s vast œuvre with “Death Comes as the End,” “and I never expect to read another of her books.” Pauline Kael was notoriously spiky; of the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” she wrote, “the movie is ungainly—you can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting.” And, while she seemed to adore “Yentl,” she called “Shoah,” which is considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time, “a form of self-punishment.” (She was wrong, but that’s for another day.) Then there was the rock critic Ellen Willis, who had the temerity to trash the Woodstock festival, in 1969, and a few years later lamented, of David Bowie, that there was “nothing provocative, perverse, or revolting” about him, and announced plainly that “his more recent stuff bores me.”

The potential for sharp, disputatious cultural criticism has arguably slackened. As Elizabeth Hardwick and others have contended over the years, criticism has too often diminished as a form of argument and rigorous engagement. Kelefa Sanneh agrees with that diagnosis. A former pop-music writer for the Times and, since 2008, a staff writer for The New Yorker, covering music and much else, Sanneh believes that, in general, critics have gone soft—music critics in particular. In our latest centenary issue, The Culture Industry, he charts the rise, fall, and potential return of edginess in music criticism.

“When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport,” Sanneh writes, and notes that his favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers delivering biting reviews from their private box. That spunky spirit lingered into the nineties and early two-thousands. Nick Hornby was indicating his boredom at Destiny’s Child. Ryan Schreiber, leading quite a pointy Pitchfork, was picking up the mantle put down by Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus (who began his 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?”) and Creem’sLester Bangs (immortalized in the film “Almost Famous” by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who explained that music is “a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America”). These critics were not afraid to be critical.

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