This is a guest post by Australian writer Tim Dunlop, who runs the music blog Johnny’s In The Basement for independent Australian publishers Crikey.

Why listen to a music critic?

I’ve been reading music reviews and related journalism more or less religiously since the 1970s. In cold, music-deprived Canberra back in those days, a good part of my life was spent with friends hanging around the local newsagents checking to see if the latest copies of magazines like New Musical Express or Melody Maker had arrived. We counted ourselves lucky in those pre-internet dark ages if the issues that showed up in the racks were only two months out of date. We would get them home and pore over the pages, mining the dirty ink for information on our favourite artists and for portents of upcoming releases. We scoured the record reviews in the hope of finding new artists, and then would go and bug the local record shops until their stock arrived.

But don’t let the air of desperation in that description of a misspent youth fool you into thinking that we were uncritical readers. Far from it.

We knew our stuff, so if some British hack claimed, for instance, that Band X combined the technical wizardry of Emerson Lake and Palmer with the blues sensibility of Robert Johnson to forge a new sound that was going to change the face of contemporary rock, and then we got a listen to the advertised masterpiece and found out it was actually some bunch of dickheads pounding out a twelve-bar with a bit of one-fingered Moog thrown into the mix, then it was unlikely that we were ever going to take said hack seriously again. If it had been the age of blogs, I dread to think what message of discouragement we might have left in the comments section.

The relationship between a reviewer and his or her audience is sacred and entirely predicated on trust. Is that true?

Such thoughts have been swirling around my head ever since I started writing about music for Crikey earlier in 2009. What I’m about to talk about is probably old news for critics who’ve been at it for longer than me and who have maybe made their peace with the matter. In which case, fine, go read something else. But for a newbie like me, the problem still rankles: how do you give an assessment of an album or a band that balances the various responsibilities you have as a critic?

In fact, your obligation isn’t just to your readers. It mightn’t be popular to say so, but you also have an obligation to the music companies who supply you with the music you review. Sure, they only want you to say good things about their artists, and you have absolutely no obligation to bow to their whims in that regard, but you do have a professional obligation to make some sort of use of the product they give you. Timely and fair use should rule.

You also have an obligation to the artists themselves. For the most part (and that’s an important proviso) they are hard-working, dedicated professionals — or wannabe professionals — who have probably sweated blood to produce the music you are listening to and you owe it to them to acknowledge all that by giving the music a fair listening and not just tipping a bucket on it, especially after only a cursory listen. This is especially true, I reckon, of independent artists, people who have enough barriers between them and success without the added discouragement of some dipstick reviewer not taking the time to pay them the professional courtesy of as objective a listen as possible. I mean, if you hate it you hate it and you have to say so, but that hatred should be your considered opinion, not just something you write for effect.

So you can’t write a favourable review just because you got a freeby from a company who is going to keep supplying you. You also can’t write a favourable review just because an artist is well-meaning and hardworking: no-one is forcing them to be in the business. And the reason for this is because your ultimate responsibility is to your readers and they deserve nothing less than the truth as you see it.

Now, the obvious problem here is that we are basically talking about matters of taste, and deity knows: subjective! The chances that you are going to agree with someone’s taste in all things musical is zero, so as a critic, you have to be aware that your heartfelt recommendation of Band X is not always going to justify for the reader shelling out cash for an album that they turn out to hate. The reader has to bear this in mind too. But as long as you, as reader, are convinced that reviewer recommended Band X in good faith, there is no sense blaming him or her for what you now consider a waste of money. That’s the unwritten contract between reader and critic.

Since I started doing this professionally, I’ve tried various ways of conveying to readers the reason I am saying what I am saying about a given album. People want, I think, honest information and writing that doesn’t presume they know everything about everything — that ways lies fake cool — while at the same time they don’t want to be patronised with clever tidbits that are only designed to make you, the reviewer, look smart. You must also have some understanding of who is reading what you write, and given the Crikey demographic, I always presume our readers not only have a pretty good idea of what they like, but are also knowledgeable about music, probably in some areas more so than me, and that they will therefore appreciate some context to help explain the music I am talking about. In other words, apart from my opinion of the music at hand, I think it useful to provide some information about the artist, to place the music in some sort of broad category (jazz, alt.country, punk, funk, whatever), and to offer examples of other artists they sound something like.

My readers, I’m pretty sure, are not hanging out for the latest sugar hit of the biggest new release: they are much more likely to be in the market for music that they can safely add to their well-rounded and longstanding collections of music that, for them, have stood the test of time. It is that understanding that I try and respect and inform.

Anyway, you can get a handle on the various ways I tackle this problem on the site itself. For instance, in this review, I go to some lengths to explain the sort of music that I love and try and explain the way in which the artist under consideration, Marie Fisker, fulfills my musical desires (god, I love that album!). Or in a review like this, I discuss the problems of recommending a good album that I wouldn’t necessarily want to own myself. It’s all about walking the line between honest assessment and genuine recommendation.

But I think I can simply pin all this down to one basic point and it is kind of obvious, though it didn’t really hit me until the other day when I was driving into town with my wife.

I had a review copy of the new album by an Adelaide band, Special Patrol, in the car CD player and I’d been listening to it for the past few days. My wife asked what it was and what I thought. I told her, and that I thought that it was really good, that it had some great pop tunes on it, and that I was really enjoying it, that it had really grown on me. I was (and am) pretty enthusiastic about it.

‘Still,’ I said. ‘It’s not really the sort of album I would…’

‘Spend money on?’ my wife suggested.

And that was it exactly. I’d been given the album and I really, genuinely liked it, but there was probably no way I would ever go out and buy it for myself. To me, as someone who reviews music, that’s where the rubber hits the road: you always have to remember that you are getting for free what others have to cough up cold, hard cash for. It creates an enormous difference in how you understand what you are listening to.

A couple of final points. Getting paid to write about music is a great gig, but it is hardly the most important thing in the world. While I take it and the responsibility that goes with it seriously, I’m not so much of a wanker as to presume that readers are hanging off every word I write in order to make spending decisions. Obviously, a review of a live band or a CD is nothing more than an opinion, and I’m sure no-one uses such reviews as anything more than a guide or as a source of pertinent information that might help inform their choices. Still, readers should feel that they are getting an honest opinion, not one paid for by those with a vested interest in promoting a given artist.

That’s the “rule” I try and follow at Johnny’s In The Basement.

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