The Intro Popular Music , Media , and the Written Word

hen I began thinking about writing, collecting, and commissioning essays about music criticism, I wondered whether I might feel like Charlie Brown in Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown! When he puts a single ornament on the lonesome, fragile Christmas tree he finds, it falls over. Charlie Brown throws his hands up in the air and says, “Augh! I’ve killed it!” I wondered if making rock criticism an academic subject might do something of the same. But of course plenty of rock critics take their cues from academic work, so why not? And if Robert Christgau of the Village Voice is the “dean of rock critics,” surely there is room for a professor, or perhaps even a full department, in the field. It was among friends, colleagues, critics, and fellow students that the academic origins of my interest in popular music first took on clarity. However, from the conversations I had with them, it became clear that little existed in the way of systematic study of popular-music criticism as it has evolved since the 1960s in the press. Little understanding of its history exists among many popular-music critics either. Numerous academic studies of popular music are published each year, and there are several scholarly journals that serve as forums for popular-music scholars. Yet little has been published about popular-music criticism, in popular-music scholarship or in journalism and mass communication scholarship. Nor can