American
musician and musicologist Rick
Beato recently criticised a list of the 30
greatest contemporary American songwriters compiled by music
critics from The New York Times.
He dismissed the exercise as meaningless. His objection was
not primarily to compiling such a list, nor to the names nominated,
but rather to the dubious authority of the critics themselves.
Rick Beato is among the more knowledgeable commentators on
contemporary music. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical
Bass from Ithaca College and a Master’s Degree in Jazz
Guitar from the New England Conservatory of Music. He is an
accomplished performer and has lectured at various prestigious
music schools. His YouTube channel has more than 5 million
followers.
Yet
he noted that none of the critics from The NY Times had
any formal musical education. Their background lay instead
in journalism or the broader humanities. The result, in his
view, was a set of personal preferences and judgments untethered
from the technical and theoretical knowledge of songwriting
that would lend their evaluations validity.
This
does not mean that only trained musicians may speak about
music, any more than it means that only trained lawyers can
have an opinion about the law. But it does suggest that serious
criticism requires some degree of apprenticeship to the art
in question. In music, one must learn to listen with discernment,
and such learning is neither automatic nor trivial. It is
cultivated through attention, disciplined study, and exposure
to a range of works that, with effort, gradually refine one’s
powers of discrimination. Without such understanding, compiling
a list of “the greatest” becomes merely a matter
of idiosyncratic preference rather than of informed judgement.
At
first glance, this may seem a familiar complaint about the
specialist’s irritation with the generalist. One can
imagine the music critics’ retort: that art is not reducible
to theory, that the experience of music does not require a
conservatory credential, and that critics, precisely because
they stand outside the technical guild, are free to register
a work’s broader cultural significance.
Yet
Beato’s irritation points to something more serious
than professional pique. He raises a question that extends
well beyond music criticism: what constitutes authority in
artistic judgement, and what kinds of knowledge are required
to sustain it? In a culture increasingly comfortable with
opinion detached from discipline, the distinction between
informed judgement and impressionistic reaction has blurred.
Traditionally,
the music critic occupied a difficult yet necessary position,
neither merely a technician nor simply a consumer. The critic’s
task was interpretive: to mediate between the work and the
audience, to situate it within a tradition, and to illuminate
its structure and significance. This required not only sensitivity
but also extensive knowledge of musical technique, tradition,
the canon of recognised achievement, and the cultural life
in which the art moved and from which it drew its meaning.
What
troubles Beato is the erosion of this formation. When music
critics lack even a rudimentary grounding in the technical
dimensions of the art they assess, their judgments risk becoming
curiously weightless. They may describe how a song moves them,
or what a work appears to signify within the ever-shifting
currents of culture, but they are less able to say how the
musical work achieves its effects, or whether those effects
are achieved with distinction or skill. The language of evaluation
becomes thinner, more reliant on personal response. One is
left with a kind of aesthetic impressionism: vivid, perhaps,
but difficult to anchor in anything other than the personal
preferences of the critic.
In
music, this problem is particularly acute because the art
itself is structured in ways that are not immediately transparent.
Harmony, rhythm, form, voice leading—these are not arcane
technicalities but the very substance of musical composition.
To speak meaningfully about songwriting is, at least implicitly,
to make claims about how these elements are handled. A songwriter’s
melodic inventiveness, harmonic sophistication, and formal
coherence are constitutive of the work. To ignore them is
not to liberate musical criticism from pedantry but to evacuate
it of content.
What
is at stake, finally, is not the reputation of any particular
songwriter, nor even the authority of any particular group
of critics. It is the question of whether musical criticism
itself can be sustained as a meaningful activity in the absence
of knowledge of how music functions. To judge is to discriminate,
to weigh, to compare, and to give reasons why x is superior
to y. It is to acknowledge that judgment is not merely an
expression of personal preference but an appeal to impersonal
standards that transcend both the critic and the work of art
under review.
If
criticism is to be more than a catalogue of idiosyncratic
reactions, it must recover some account of what it means to
know an art, and of the responsibilities such knowledge entails.
Without this, the language of evaluation will continue to
drift. We begin to lose the idea that our opinions, if they
are to matter, must answer to something beyond ourselves.
The
loss is not merely professional but cultural. For those who
love music, criticism ceases to illuminate the art itself
and instead becomes another form of impressionistic commentary,
untethered from the disciplined knowledge that gives judgment
authority and depth. In such a climate, the language of criticism
gradually loses its capacity to distinguish between what is
merely popular and what is genuinely excellent.
Behind
all this lies a broader cultural shift. The authority of expertise
has, over the past several decades, been widely questioned,
often with good reason. Institutions that once commanded public
trust have, in many cases, squandered it through ideological
conformity, political partisanship, or simple intellectual
complacency. At the same time, the democratisation of media
platforms has allowed a far wider range of voices to enter
public conversation. This has undeniably enriched cultural
discourse, breaking the monopoly once held by a relatively
small class of gatekeepers and critics.
Yet
this democratisation has also produced a flattening effect.
The distinction between the informed and the uninformed, the
trained and the untrained, has become increasingly difficult
to sustain without appearing elitist or exclusionary. To suggest
that criticism requires knowledge, discipline, or technical
competence is now often heard as a defence of gatekeeping
rather than of standards. But the alternative to standards
is not a more democratic culture of judgment. It is a more
arbitrary one.
When
standards are abandoned, they are not replaced by freedom
so much as by fashion. Judgment becomes untethered from criteria
that can be articulated, defended, or meaningfully debated.
What prevails instead is the shifting consensus of the moment,
shaped less by sustained reflection than by cultural mood,
social prestige, and algorithmic visibility. The attentive
critic, formed through long acquaintance with an art and capable
of explaining why one work surpasses another, gives way to
the curator of preferences, whose authority rests largely
on visibility and cultural positioning.
Beato’s
complaint, then, is best understood not as an exercise in
snobbery, but as a defence of standards: not rigid or exclusionary
standards, but the minimal conditions under which evaluative
claims can be taken seriously. To say that a songwriter belongs
among the greatest of his or her generation is not merely
to express admiration. It is to make a comparative judgment
that presupposes knowledge, criteria, and the capacity for
discrimination, however implicit those standards may be. Without
such grounding, the language of greatness risks collapsing
into little more than rhetorical inflation, a vocabulary of
superlatives detached from the discipline of judgment itself.
The
result has been a flattening of judgment, a certain intellectual
shallowness in which all opinions appear equally valid precisely
because the criteria by which they might be assessed have
become obscure or contested. What is ultimately at stake,
then, is not the reputation of any particular songwriter,
nor even the authority of a particular group of critics. It
is the more fundamental question of whether judgment itself
can continue to exist as a meaningful intellectual activity.
To judge is not simply to express a feeling. It is to discriminate,
to weigh, to compare, and to give reasons. It is to acknowledge
that some works are better than others. Crucially, it is to
take the stance that such claims are not merely my private
preferences but propositions open to rational consideration
and debate.
One
need not be a musical connoisseur to recognise the force of
Rick Beato’s unease. If criticism is to possess authority,
it must recover some account of what it means to know an art,
and of the obligations such knowledge entails. Serious criticism
demands disciplined attention, standards of excellence, and
the capacity to explain why one work succeeds where another
does not. Otherwise, judgment collapses into mere preference
and opinion answers to nothing beyond itself.
