Bratty by nature

SHAMELESSNESS IS not a problem for pop critics. Quite the opposite: It's a daily practice. Invented by rebel newspaper staffers (most notably, Ralph J. Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle) who stayed out late and never came into the office, codified by freaks and attitudinal New Journalists, the pursuit of passionate thought about pop music rose up as a challenge to taste hierarchies, and has remained a pugilistic, exhibitionist business throughout pop's own evolution.

Here's my friend Robert Christgau, one of the genre's founding troublemakers, on the subject, from a paper he gave at the 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle (an annual music writers gathering organized by my husband, Eric Weisbard). The theme that year was, in fact, guilty pleasures. "Rock criticism was conceived as a reproach to the idea of guilty pleasure," Christgau wrote. "In fact, 'reproach' and 'conceive' are putting it too politely. 'Reproach' makes it sound as if we had the upper hand, so make it 'attack.' It was a kick in the pants, a fart in the face, a full fungu."

I'm not entirely certain what a "full fungu" is (well, sound it out), but I'm sure I've been on the other end of many, not only from my music scribe colleagues, but from readers, musicians, industry types and anyone else who takes a whack at the determinedly amateur pastime.

Insults, rejections of others' authority, bratty assertions of superior knowledge and even threats of physical violence are the stuff of which pop criticism is made. (One of the great rock-critical works is "James Taylor Marked for Death," by Lester Bangs.) The best also offers loving appreciation and profound insights about how music creates and collides with our everyday realities. Yet like the music it celebrates, made for dancing and kissing and, yes, getting out your aggressions, pop criticism needs that edge of self-aggrandizement to really sing.

It gained its footing, as Christgau noted in his talk, as a slap at the establishment, at publications such as the hippie homestead Rolling Stone and the rawker outpost Creem. Contrarians such as the great Ellen Willis used it to sneak the counterculture into staid rags like the New Yorker. But as classic rock and soul transformed into the language of the baby-boomer establishment, pop criticism had to get bratty again -- and again.