Dancing About Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the Negotiation of Authority

Abstract

This article addresses the impact of the culture divide on the establishment of critical authority through the examination of popular music critics. In-depth interviews with music critics illustrate how the popular culture critic's experience might be distinguished from that of high culture critics. If criticism has the ability to elevate the status of the object it evaluates, this article argues that, in the case of popular criticism, the cultural object has the ability to lower the status of the critic. Lacking the formal training characteristic of higher critics, popular music critics must establish their cultural authority by consistently displaying their qualifications-proficiency as a writer, breadth of knowledge, and studied judgment regardless of personal preferences-through their work. Likewise, it analyzes how aspects of the roles, relationships, and resources managed by popular music critics can create obstacles to the establishment of cultural authority in the popular realm.