“A new class of music writers is on the rise — call them the rock

curmudgeons. Call them dangerous.” Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Dead? Only if You Aren’t Listening The author, chairman of the English Dept. at SIU, finds rock music criticism to be part of a larger critical problem:

The decision to stop listening, for a music critic — or stop watching,

for a film critic, or stop reading, for a literary critic — is a

perfectly legitimate one; to delimit, however arbitrarily, the

boundaries of one’s expertise and interests creates a field of

manageable size within which one might hope to make a

significant contribution. But surely there’s a world of difference

between admitting “I don’t find time to read a lot of

contemporary poetry,” on the one hand, and pronouncing that

“no significant poetry has been written since Robert Lowell,” on

the other. Chronicle of Higher Education