7 Non-Music Writers Who Shaped My Music Criticism
I heap praise on some of my biggest sources of inspiration.
Inspiration is a funny thing.
Most of the time, I don’t know exactly where it comes from, nor do I plan whose writing makes it into my own prose on any given day. Honestly, I’m more focused on putting one foot in front of the other and keeping the content calendar moving in the right direction. Some weeks are better than others, but if nothing else, the work gets done.
Whatever growth my writing has enjoyed happens between those lines.
All that said, I find myself returning to familiar sources for inspiration time and again. Not to intentionally rip them off, but simply to cleanse my creative palette with prose I consider to be next-level. I thought I’d share seven figures whose oeuvres loom largest in my mind’s eye and from whom, subconsciously or not, I’ve undoubtedly picked up a trick or two over the years.
Before diving in, a brief reminder to do all the usual engagement things, including sharing this post with friends, family, or pets if you enjoy it (it’s the best, and totally free, way to help this newsletter reach more people worldwide)
Let’s begin:
1. Roger Ebert
Ebert was the first critic who I read for his writing and not for this thoughts on the latest movies or film culture. He was a great critical thinker, don’t get me wrong, and often ahead of his time, but he was an even better writer.
Not a massive revelation about a man who won a Pulitzer in 1975, but somehow, maybe because he’s still best known for his work in front of the camera, it’s a quality that consistently gets overlooked.
Here are some of my favorite Ebert lines:
From his review of The Squid and the Whale:
“ I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel during ‘The Squid and the Whale.’ Sympathy, I suppose, for two bright boys whose parents are getting a messy divorce. Both parents are writers and use words as weapons; the boys choose sides and join the war.”
From his review of My Neighbor Totoro:
“Here is a children’s film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.”
And, from the last review he ever filed, for To The Wonder:
“Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren’t many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren’t many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn’t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?”
Simple, approachable prose that was consistently evocative, heartfelt, and often very funny (especially in his infamous one-star reviews). After rereading his work over and over again in my life, the same lesson always resurfaces: A critic’s job is not to deliver a verdict but to help the reader understand what the experience actually was.
Explain what it does to you, and then earn that claim.
2. Seymour Hersh
When I think of fearless, unflinching reporting, I think of Seymour Hersh.
He’s undeniably one of the most important investigative journalists of the last 100 years. He’s broken stories like the My Lai Massacre, the Watergate fallout, and Abu Ghraib, all with tenacious, occasionally pugnacious methods. Like any other writer, you can agree or disagree with the “how,” but you can’t deny the brilliance of the “what” when it legitimately shifts the national conversation.
So why does Hersh belong on this list of music criticism influences? One big reason is how economically he can establish a vivid setting and palpable stakes. Here’s the opening paragraph from his Abu Ghraib piece, which does a tremendous amount of work in two straightforward sentences:
“In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.”
There’s also the fact-based narrative aspect of his writing that’s rubbed off on most of what I publish in this newsletter. The formula is simple: Go find the thing and use the data to augment what you’re saying. Don’t gesture at production techniques when you can name the specific studio where the album was recorded. Don’t paraphrase critical reception when the actual review is one search away. Don’t attribute commercial success to “the cultural moment” when the chart data is right there.
The facts exist. Go get them.
Also, for those interested in learning more about Hersh’s extraordinary career, I highly recommend the Netflix documentary about him.
3. Hunter S. Thompson
To clarify: I’m referring to Hunter S. Thompson the gonzo journalist, not Thompson the novelist (though Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book I’ll return to every couple of years and learn something new from a craft perspective).
More than any other reporter (including a couple on this list), Thompson pioneered the writer’s point of view as a feature, not a bug. He wasn’t a violet who shrank under the auspices of alleged objectivity. Instead, he made his reactions to the action in the story, not necessarily the action itself. It’s a key difference that, as much as it’s flourished in the age of Substack and, increasingly, in a post-mass-media world, I haven’t read anyone who has leaned as hard into this profile as Thompson.
His 1970 Scanlan’s Monthly piece “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved“ is the purest example of what made him an essential voice. It’s also an eye-opening structural guide for anyone who wants to reframe their writing to make it more distinctive and personal. It opens with an act of pure self-observation and never positions him as a neutral bystander. In music criticism, your reaction to an album isn’t something to bury or hedge around. It’s the whole reason someone’s taking the time to read what you have to say. Make your case.
One of my favorite passages from that piece:
“The next day was heavy. With 30 hours to post time I had no press credentials and — according to the sports editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal — no hope at all of getting any. Worse, I needed two sets; one for myself and another for Ralph Steadman, the English illustrator who was coming from London to do some Derby drawings. All I knew about him was that this was his first visit to the United States. And the more I pondered that fact, the more it gave me fear. Would he bear up under the heinous culture shock of being lifted out of London and plunged into a drunken mob scene at the Kentucky Derby? There was no way of knowing. Hopefully, he would arrive at least a day or so ahead, and give himself time to get acclimated. Maybe a few hours of peaceful sightseeing in the Bluegrass country around Lexington. My plan was to pick him up at the airport in the huge Pontiac Ballbuster I’d rented from a used car salesman named Colonel Quick, then whisk him off to some peaceful setting to remind him of England.”
4. David Foster Wallace
Like Thompson, I’m focusing on Wallace the essayist, not the novelist. At the peak of his fame, he was more than a celebrity. In interviews like this one he gave to Charlie Rose, he’s fascinating to just sit and listen to. And, though his intellectual heft could easily blind those unprepared for it, his short-form work was never anything less than accessible and, more often than you might think, uproariously funny.
A well-known example is “Consider the Lobster,” published in Gourmet in 2004. The feature turns a Maine Lobster Festival assignment into a genuine ethical inquiry. He couldn’t stop asking whether boiling an animal alive for your dinner is something you should just keep doing. “Up, Simba,” his reporting on the 2000 McCain campaign follows the candidate’s bus tour and uses accumulating detail to make a complicated argument about authenticity in politics.
Both pieces showcase an instinct I’ve tried to add to my own writing over the years: follow the question past the comfortable stopping point. An example, from “Lobster:”
“Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in coming up with a compelling argument for why this belief is true [...]”
Also, if you haven’t yet, getting through Infinite Jest is a rite of passage for any serious scribe.
5. Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron is flat-out one of the best writers who ever lived. Funny, insightful, and, most importantly for this conversation, consistently surprising in the way she constructs her prose. I would read her essays and think I knew where the end of a sentence or paragraph was going, but she’s one of the masters of the quick left turn or, if you prefer, left hook to the jaw. She could be writing about the smallest, occasionally mundane topics (a ruined dinner party, forgetting things, etc.), but everything I’ve read of hers has been nothing less than enthralling.
It’s a shame most people only know her as the Queen of Rom-Com, having written the screenplays for When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and many others. It feels weird to call Ephron underrated, but if you take into consideration the vast amount of material she published outside the confines of Hollywood, I don’t think her legacy is fully appreciated either. Her pieces on women, food, and media still read as current, even if some first saw the light of day more than 35 years ago.
A couple of my favorite bits of hers …
From Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women:
“I wish he were better at hailing taxis than I am; on the other hand, I realize that expectation is culturally conditioned, utterly foolish, has nothing to do with anything, is exactly the kind of thinking that ought to be got rid of in our society; on still another hand, having that insight into my reaction does not seem to calm my irritation.”
From “A Few Words About Breasts:”
“But you could see breasts; they were there; they were visible. Whereas a girl could claim to have her period for months before she actually got it and nobody would ever know the difference. Which is exactly what I did. All you had to do was make a great fuss over having enough nickels for the Kotex machine and walk around clutching your stomach and moaning for three to five days a month about The Curse and you could convince anybody.”
I have a saying about writers as effortlessly prolific as Ephron: If I had a tenth of the talent they do (or did, in her case), I’d have a very, very good career.
6. Anthony Bourdain
In a revelation that will likely not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed this newsletter for a longer period of time, I’ve always wanted to write about anything, but music and culture in particular, the way Anthony Bourdain wrote about food and the life of a bon vivant.
The word “authentic” gets thrown around a lot in this discipline, and I’m a little dubious of the concept, since the largely anonymized, faceless nature of this profession means writers can, with practice, fake it pretty well. That wasn’t the case with Bourdain. His incisive, no-BS way of looking at the world could be scathing to the point of making readers and watchers of his TV shows uncomfortable, but that was the point. He had no patience for protecting consensus opinions or softening his views to “fit in.” He was always unapologetically himself.
That’s a big part of the reason why, when he doled out praise and wisdom, it meant something. A mass audience listened to him and, long before the digital nomad lifestyle became normalized as a way to set foot in as many countries as possible, found within themselves the courage to push beyond what they thought was “safe.” His enthusiasm for a bowl of noodles in Hanoi or roasted lamb in Marrakesh stemmed from open-hearted curiosity and a welcoming spirit. You can’t manufacture that in the same way you can “authenticity.”
His books are a reminder of how much of a game-changer he was in the literary community. Kitchen Confidential, which is, without a doubt, one of the most formative books I’ve ever read, taught me more about cultural observations than any music writer could. There’s a directness in the way he speaks to you on the page that cuts to the core of what he really believes.
Take this example:
“Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime... Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”
He had a saying (and I’m paraphrasing): Accept offers of hospitality without fear or judgment. We should all do the same with music and art.
7. Ray Ratto
Ray Ratto spent four decades covering Bay Area sports for the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NBC Sports Bay Area. He’s now one of the many prolific and notable names plying their trade at Defector, a site I proudly subscribe to. Imagine if a seasoned, erudite columnist formulated every thought the way a Las Vegas insult comic would, and you have a pretty good idea of Ratto’s prose style.
A couple of brief samplings, courtesy of the Ringer’s 2019 profile on Ratto:
“Ratto on the NCAA: ‘The Association defends its trademark prerogatives down to the last soda cup with an almost Serbian zeal.’”
“Ratto on an NFL Sunday: ‘Forty Niners–Bucs at 10, Jets-Raiders at 1:30. As for church, family obligations, or just lifting your bloated and ever-widening seater off the couch, you’re on your own.’”
His refusal to romanticize his own trade, or the professional athletes that trade was prone to building up and tearing down in equal measure, taught me a lot about how not to overdose on the “fan” aspect of music criticism. Praise can often be a cop-out in either field, an easy substitute for specificity. Let’s call it reaching for the lowest-hanging cliché instead of admitting what you actually think. Ratto continually proves that nostalgia is not analysis, and treating a genre’s past as automatically superior to its present is its own kind of pseudo-authority.
I’ll leave you with another excerpt of his that builds on that notion and lands a handful of great zingers along the way:
“[He] was a breathtakingly literate, cultured and erudite man who just happened to look like the Czar Nicholas II, wear the chest-harness microphone (to keep his hands free) like a stevedore, drive cars with millions of miles on them that predated even chrome, and dress like the Ancient Mariner. If he had socks, he kept them around only for special occasions. Frankly, to call him a renaissance man does more justice to the Renaissance than it does him. He was a character because he had character, not because he developed one for career reasons.”
Which writers have shaped how you write and/or how you hear music? Drop yours in the comments.