21st Century Lester Bangs: Where Are You?

The explosion of blogs, mp3's, and internet-media has transformed the arts of publication and criticism, especially when it comes to rock and roll. The following two articles address this trend:

Chris Dahlen of Pitchfork asks, "With music moving so fast and words becoming so cheap, have we reached the end days of criticism?" He then goes on to break rock writing down into three stages: "buzz, description, and judgment." He concludes that bloggers have a corner on all three stages, but that true rock critics still have three advantages: quality writing, synthesis, and analysis.

Chuck Klosterman of Esquire Magazine argues that the future of criticism lies not in rock and roll but in video games. Gaming, he argues, represents the same cutting edge of culture that rock and roll did in from the 1960s to the 1980s. He says, "Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequence of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as it does with the art form."