i used to love writing about music and then i hit a point where i felt i had nothing interesting enough to say in the review/essay format about music any more (and i've since grown skeptical that 99% of other ppl have plumbed + exhausted the same wells) and then doing it just became tedious and rote. there are only so many adjectives, so many contexts. i did some ethnomusicology at that point which was better because then i could write about communities and do more intensive research and then sometimes transmute academic research into more publishable reviews. even then tho... there was something staid about the entire enterprise + i found it unsatisfying. when i found myself writing about emo + teenpop albums in the context of radical 19th century politics i realized that the jig was really up and i was just wasting my own time (and probably everyone else's). now i feel like the only music crit that interests me is "X is good," or "X isn't great," or "I didn't like X," bc at least these mundane value judgements are honest and useful if you can identify whose opinions are close enough to yours that their approbation means something is worth checking out. :/
― Mordy, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 21:58 (seven years ago) link