Rockcrits versus trusted voices

This piece in the Washington City Pages provoked a fair amount of discusson on ILM today. While I tend to ignore the blog pseudo-events that are the musical equivalent of discussing Dick Durbin or Karl Rove's latest remarks, the premise of the essay - not to mention the position(s) the reporter took - troubled me. It wasn't just Jason Cherkis' lazy polarity - rock critics vs, ahem, "the average Insound or Pitchfork or blog reader" -or his quiet dignified blubbering over The Death of the Rock Critic As Cultural Force; it was Cherkis' tone, which veered between scorn for the recividism of Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby to sentimentality for the loss in cultural capital that the Serious Rock Critic must accept if she's going to publish anything worthwhile. And the context in which he inserts his quotes defies description:

It’s huge,” says [Matt] Wishnow, [president of Insound], “the fall of the rock critic as celebrity that we used to know—Greil Marcus, the Chuck Eddy, the Christgau. Peer opinion and access to peer opinion have been so elevated and multiplied that people tend to know about [records] from a trusted voice before the rock critic even does."

Um, rock critics aren't "trusted voices"?

The bottom line is that any serious commentator must disgard orthodoxies when confronted by the world-historic. It's too easy to dismiss Jonathan Lethem, Hornby, Eggers, et al as rockcrit hacks who got their gigs because their novels were hip to the zeitgeist. I'll accept them if they wrote something which persuades me to think about a band in a novel light, as Lethem's Go-Betweens piece from 2000 (but not, alas, the tendentious biographical account he published in The New Yorker a few months ago.