Critics, not fans, perpetuate the failed second album myth, study shows
phys.org
phys.org
1. Regression to the mean and survivorship bias (a band with an atypically good first album has much more chances to make a second, but can find it difficult to live up to the first because maybe it was mostly luck),
2. The album that people consider "the first" actually being "the first big hit" (e.g. how many people know the album that came before Jarre's Oxygene?),
3. The first hit done with no pressure, the following album under pressure and deadlines because there's a public wanting to hear it,
I would actually be surprised if the discussed effect didn't exist.
I wouldn't say second albums are universally bad, but many artists seem to have only a limited amount of inspiration in them. Some have just one song, some an album or two, and some just never seem to run out. Also, when a "perfect" or near-perfect album is followed by a less exceptional performance it makes the second look bad even though it might be pretty good on it's own. I've definitely been more disappointed by mediocre output from artists that I expect great things from than I would be otherwise.
If you only went by King Crimson's first two albums, you'd think they'd run out of ideas. The second album, while actually a decent album, just seems like a copy of the first one down to the ordering and the vibe of the songs. There's only maybe one original idea on it (Cat Food).
Then from the third album on, KC pivots into entirely new directions and goes on to release a string of absolute prog rock classics. So I guess they escaped that second album curse.
The Cars, Boston, and Van Halen come to mind (though as somebody born in the early 90s I would argue that VH II is _superior_ to their debut even if saying so is heretical).
Some artists change their style over time, and the alignment between their style and your appreciation of certain styles only holds up for one or two albums. This has been the case with me for several bands.
Critics can sometimes be aloof or out of touch, but the alternative is basically just money-driven populism untethered to any deeper notions of quality.
They could be huge jerks, but I lament the fact that people like John Simon or H. L. Mencken don’t exist anymore. Nowadays people like them would probably be unable to make a living.
Of course paradoxically we now also have more professional critics than ever before. We just call them reviewers and influencers. A lot of them shallow or outright bought, but that has always been an issue with critics. But if you avoid the bad actors you will find insightful critics on the most obscure topics. And if you don't you can always just ask the relevant subreddit
Reddit has plenty of its own biases and isn’t a great source either.
Often series and films get accused of having an "agenda" and a lot of non-fans join in review bombing. It can still be good media if "fan reviews" don't like it.
A terribly lazy movie that even the popcorn-guzzling public could see through, but which mysteriously received rave reviews from the “culturally elite” critics.
“But it makes money” has to be one of the worst concepts humanity has come up with.
The popcorn and soda public loved it - it was the highest grossing movie in 2017.
There is no mystery in its rave reviews. Both critics and general public enjoyed it. The vicious hate this movie gets is from Star Wars fans only. Nobody hates Star Wars as much as its fans.
If you earnestly believe this, you really need to seek out more diverse news. Everyone I know absolutely hated both TLJ and TRoS, and I can guarantee it's not because they're racist or misogynist. They are just really bad movies (TRoS in particular is a series of nonsensical mcguffin quests held together by the most nonsensical plot). TFA is pretty universally agreed in my experience to have been fine, but too safe.
It also feels like a big stretch to call Kelly Marie Tran the lead, even if the harassment she experienced was abhorrent. It's an ensemble cast and she has 12th billing.
The labeling of any sort of expert opinion as “elitist” is precisely the issue.
If you thought botting on reviews was bad now, LLMs and the like are going to supercharge spam and drown us all in a grey goo of bullshit.
1. they have seen/heard a lot. A professional movie critic watches more films in a month than I have in years. That gives him opportunities to compare, or to draw connections that I cannot.
2. they are known quantities. We have a certain image of Roger Ebert (as an example) in our minds and can adjust his reviews to get closer to our hypothetical opinion about the film. Also, we get to know his mannerisms and idiosyncracies.
Nothing makes Roger Ebert a priori a better reviewer than Mike from 4chan who obsessively watches films, but having a handful of critics we recognize is more valuable w.r.t. these two points than having thousands of unknown reviewers.
I'm guessing choosing him as the example means he's one of the biggest names in professional critics, but he's as unknown to me as Mike from 4chan. I really do wonder how much the average person actually payed attention to critics like him compared to trailers/commercials and friends.
"IGN 7/10" became a meme in the gaming community for meaning "we think the game has some serious flaws but we don't want to appear too negative". People pick up on this stuff, if bad products are 7/10, then reviews get meaningless and people seek more niche critics who are more honest and are not afraid to rate the latest release 2/10 if it deserves it.
For some reason this doesn't apply to eg. non-book/movie/music/etc. Amazon purchases though - people are willing to call garbage garbage there. Perhaps the greater the real-world utility of a purchase, the more picky people are about it? Or that only fans are willing to purchase art in the first place, much less review it at all, and so fewer who are likely to criticize ever encounter it?
You can't listen to even 1% of the music in the world in your lifetime. You need to filter somehow.
TL;DR: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you know anything about it?"
I expect an (ironically academic) argument about how monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't necessarily entail a race to the bottom.
I'd be surprised if someone believes that in reality a monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't entail a race to the bottom, though.
> I expect an (ironically academic) argument about how monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't necessarily entail a race to the bottom.
If the above sounds too academic and pedantically rejecting the idea of mass-market appeal entailing a race to the bottom, let's turn the question around: why are you assuming that the only two options focusing on mass-market appeal or focusing on what critics think? Do you really think that there wouldn't be any music produced for a niche audience if not for critics? There's plenty of existing music that isn't produced for mass market appeal already, and I have trouble believing that it exists only because of critics rather than in spite of them.
It matters less to me that they're not as eloquent, not professional public figures, not well renowned or have a fancy title at some prestigious publication.
In our fields we have many of that, I'm thinking at people like John Siracusa, with a background in doing things first, and using it to comment on stuff that pick his interest.
In the musical field I see podcasts like Switch on pop in the same vein, where they're not critics by trade, and will dive into the music mainly from a technical viewpoint.
I think both have their spaces, but honestly, I would like to have more critics.
With the advent of podcasts and YouTube channels, we have an unprecedented level of access to experts. In my case, I was about to record an album with my band, and back in the day it was hard to get information on what happens in a studio. I saw one video from a band that I liked and got more or less the idea about the process and what it takes [1].
Regarding the critics I agree with others that access journalism corrupted the role of the critics, and I tend to think that we're in thins moment another side of the layman or surface critics (in this context someone who can translate small nuggets of technical knowledge to a broader public, or infotainment) dictating part of the discourse based on cultural aspects.
One example was the whole debacle related to the Disney Star Wars series Acolyte.
The surface critics dunked the series on YouTube, and on the other side, the access journalism tried to protect the series due to the relation or personality of their authors.
I watched the whole series and even though I personally rated it 3/10, I really would like to understand the artistic and technical aspects of why the show wasn't great.
- Why the writing aspect was the main problem of the show? - What's the role of cinematography in the scenes? - How does this piece tie with the lore and what are its implications? - What are the issues with the sound and depth? - And regarding acting, which elements went wrong?
I tend to agree that the old 3 superficial paragraphs critique is gone, but I do not think that the new critique via Podcasts and Youtube are great substitutes either.
Moreover, they tend to seem jaded, and are either unable to enjoy anything, or feel the need to pretend not to enjoy anything to appear sophisticated. Seeing that negativity before experiencing something reduces the enjoyment of it.
> highly-educated professionals who saw the role of the critic as something worthy in itself.
Which one then describes men like George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, or Alistair Cooke? The distinction you've made is unclear and unsubstantiated.
But not every "professional" critic was worth paying any amount of time to eiter. Just because your brother worked at the paper you got to be "the critic" back then.
Scholarly critics were much more interested in understanding how a work fits into the cultural canvas, and how it innovates and advances culture. Identifying patterns and making sense of distinct movements that would otherwise look like chaotic cultural dynamics. They also cared about criticism as a legitimate literary form and a craft to master in itself.
I believe that's what you are missing, that makes a lot of sense, that is an important social service, but I'm not sure we associate that with the purpose of a critic anymore. It has become much more pragmatic now, it's much more about guiding a purchase decision, as well as, sometimes more importantly, to entertain with humour and snark. That is quite different.
I believe that actually most readers always read criticism mostly to make purchasing decisions and had to reluctantly go through the rest of the "erudition". The more cynically entertaining critics were always the most popular too. We've cut the cruft and made it more like what the audience wants, which is a shame, but we have to be realistic.
That being said, YouTube is much deeper than it seems and looks very different to different users, for better or worse the recommendation engine is amazing. Seek out good critics and you will find more, there are strong niche communities of full-time critics like you describe that have been doing it for over a decade and are masters of their craft. They might not be in the newspapers everyone reads, but there are more of them, and even if they might not sound as scholarly, I believe they are more substantive and they are just better at it than those hiding behind flowery language.
This is the crux of it for me. A good critic will be of great use whether their tastes align with yours or not.
Critics feed ideas to those that attend parties so those can have an opinion to express when they feel no confidence in their own taste. Critics are Cyrano de Bergerac.
And every decent reviewer makes an effort to lay out the facts in front of you and try to be somewhat objective, or at least account for diverse tastes, for a portion of the criticism, so you can reach your own conclusions.
There are tons of excellent full-time critics that know what they are doing. They might not sound as scholarly as in the past, but that was mostly a stylistic choice and I'm skeptical about there being much more substance behind the flowery language.
In most of the (big) YouTuber movies and TV shows critics, I have a very hard time knowing what is their taste and what is a piece of art.
I think in the future the role of a critic will be more to the technical aspect of the piece, and how it fits in their lore than something related to the taste specifically.
In my case, I cannot watch most of the modern TV shows 'cause most of them lack good cinematography, character development, and sound which are important aspects for me in terms of immersion and engagement. Most of the shows today with CGI, only closed camera takes, and lack of external shooting look like sitcoms of the 90s.
That's I think most of the Youtube Critics channels lack, that kind of nuance around those technical aspects.
But then you might say, "Medicine is a science, and art isn't. All art is relative and no one's opinion is better than another."
With that, I don't agree. I think someone who has spent more time studying a topic probably, not always, but probably has more insightful things to say about it. A Shakespeare scholar probably has more insights about Hamlet than a guy who read it in high school twenty years ago. In short, I reject the idea that expertise doesn't exist in evaluating the arts.
If you think academic expertise has no value, there isn’t much point in continuing this discussion.
That's much more needed in any non-mainstream analysis/critique of music. How do you expect someone who never listened, for example, to noise music to be able to judge the quality of a new artist in that field/genre?
I care if I’ll like it.
How do you tell if someone else will like it without education?
Critics are a privileged bunch and I'm happy the 'profession' is dying - or opened up for everybody to have a stab at it. I mean, there's thousands and tens of thousands of critics on YouTube.
Being able to conjure creativity on-demand and/or under deadline -- self-imposed or not -- seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
My opinion is that perhaps 10% of artists continue to produce equal or greater work as their career goes forward, depending on their life circumstances, how they handle their success or lack thereof, and how their label treats them.
They seem to be like programmers and Dunning-Kruger test subjects: 10% are exceptional, talented and humble craftspeople that produce work that is enjoyed by others as the years press on. The rest either only had a few good ideas or are such true artists that their explorations move them away from the kinds of art that their fans or critics enjoyed in their earlier work.
Sure, yes, the game you are reviewing might not be doing anything new or unique, but so what? Does it do what it does well? And that's what I focus on. (And to be fair, the reviewers I watch usually make that point clear).
Robert Plant was an unknown just singing around with perhaps the greatest fricking drummer of all-time (at least legendary, for sure). And Plant is also just incredible.
John Paul Jones was a multi-instrumentalist session player of renown, and Jimmy Page was already famous.
It's one of those stories where the very first time they played together they just looked around at each other, nodded, and knew that it was special.
Plus, they did the 2nd album while touring the first one (within a year, IIRC).
And, wow, that second album has "What Is And What Should Never Be" and, my all-time favorite, "Ramble On". Just epic. And then, later, "Kashmir", "The Rain Song", the list goes on and on and on.
And they also back up my point that alcohol is a pox upon humanity. RIP Bonzo. The alcohol-encouraging cultures on Earth are insane, but the ones that forbid it tend to be even worse in many ways. What a troubled bunch of kinda-monkeys we are, huh? Common sense just ain't very common.