Explaining Pop Music to The High-Class Crowd

For those of you who hold onto the dream that if you hone your writing enough, get into the best journalism school, and schmooze your way into the circles of Manhattan’s literary elite, you might someday, possibly, make it into the sacred institution of the New Yorker, you might not want to finish this sentence: Sasha Frere-Jones never planned on becoming a journalist. Ten years ago, if you had asked him what he did, “I would have said, ‘I’m a guy in a band.’”

Frere-Jones, the full-time pop music critic for the New Yorker, began his journalism career essentially by chance. In the mid-’90s, he happened to meet Village Voice critic Ann Marlowe, a friend of the drummer in his band at that time, Ui. Marlowe overheard Frere-Jones grumbling to a friend about the indie low-fi trend. As Frere-Jones put it, “She said, ‘Why don’t you write down the thing you just said, when you were ranting against Guided by Voices?’ ... I was like, ‘How do you know I write?’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t, but you look like you probably write.’” He wrote the piece for Marlowe’s upstart zine, Pretty Decorating, and then wrote another one. He began getting requests to write articles for Spin and the Voice; worked stints as a pop columnist for the New York Post and Slate; and, a little over a year ago, got the call from the editor of the New Yorker.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been on staff anywhere,” he says. “At some point I just sort of found, ‘Oh, I guess I’m a rock critic now.’”

Frere-Jones has a laid-back, disarmingly modest demeanor that might mislead you into thinking he’s a “nice critic”: not too picky, non-confrontational. But in fact, his writing on music is demanding, provocative, and sometimes polemical. He joked, “If you want to get a job somewhere or you want to meet somebody, write something telling them why they suck.” Frere-Jones actually does have a track record of stirring things up in the critical world when he sees his peers getting sloppy or complacent. A couple of years ago, in a Slate review of the album Justified—subtitled “Why are some writers so afraid of Justin Timberlake?”—Frere-Jones attacked the pop music criticism in “highbrow” publications (including the New Yorker) for what he called “Rockism”: the attitude of some (usually aging, white male) critics who refuse to take contemporary mainstream music, especially hip-hop, seriously.

Before Frere-Jones came into the picture, it may not have been unusual to find a “pop music” review of someone like Lucinda Williams or Björk in a publication like the New Yorker, but it was rare to find a piece that could discuss the latest Britney Spears album without ultimately reassuring you of its ironic distance or bewilderment. Frere-Jones’ importance as a critic within this environment has been his commitment to reporting on music that’s actually popular. “That’s my project: it’s not to write about, you know, white dudes with guitars who make people feel comfortable,” he says. “From a reporter’s standpoint, I look at [pop] like, here is this just gigantic output of music; millions of people buying it and selling it and arguing and downloading ... it’s just like, this thing is on fire!”

This is not to suggest that Frere-Jones writes about pop through the lens of detached cultural fascination. He emphasizes that he is genuinely, aesthetically thrilled by a lot of the mainstream music being produced today, and he tends to get frustrated by people who claim otherwise: “I think hip-hop is at an amazing place right now. I think pop is at an amazing point. I mean obviously there’s tons of music that sucks, but like, when the fuck wasn’t that true? In the ‘hallowed days’ of punk rock? In the ‘hallowed days’ of early hip-hop? Somebody is always having a golden age, and something else is always crappy. That’s popular culture. There’s never been a ‘sucky year.’”

We are currently listening to a bouncy hip-hop track by the British rapper Lady Sovereign, on a grime compilation CD called Run the Road; Frere-Jones is writing his next article on it, and he is very excited about it. He doesn’t like to play favorites among pop genres—the albums he reviews run the gamut from top 40 rappers to indie singer-songwriters—but he admits that, if there is a genre of music having its “golden age” today, it would probably be hip-hop. “Instead of following individual artists, which I think is sometimes a pretty bad game, if you follow history and you follow the moment, you’ll see a sort of energy converge around a point,” he says, gesturing toward the CD player. “I just feel like, if there’s a wave, they’re on top. And I mean that wave to be the social course of history and life, I don’t mean music. ... You wake up and we’re all in this drama where fucking buildings get bombed, and people steal your future savings, and shit is crazy and you have to wear a face mask when you walk outside.” Frere-Jones continued, “Whatever, that’s a moment in history, and you can’t even see it because you’re on top of it. There is music that feels like it’s squirting out of that, and there’s other music that feels like it’s wandering around, going the other direction. And I don’t care which music it is—if the hottest shit in the world right now were harp music. ... There are certain people who seem to have drawn that energy out of the earth.”

Frere-Jones doesn’t keep specific criteria in mind when judging an album; he just looks for stuff with “vigor”—songs that make him feel alive. He wants to keep New Yorker readers guessing about what will come next, and keep them open to anything. And hopefully people will stop telling him that music sucks right now. “That’s like going to the bodega on the corner and being like, ‘They don’t make milk anymore.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they’re all out of milk.’ Dude, just go to a different bodega. There’s still milk in the world.”