You may not know who Anthony DeCurtis is, but you know the people he writes about. He's a consummate music critic, having written about musicians like Keith Richards, U2, and, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the Notorious B.I.G. He's most likely to write the profiles you read in entertainment publications-not have one written about him.
Critics like DeCurtis shape how we perceive musicians and how we listen to their music. Talking to DeCurtis is an object lesson on how to write and think well about music-something that is harder than most people think.
Many people just don't see how music criticism can qualify as work. Like circus performers, hit men and that guy who drive the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile around the country, music critics do jobs that no one else really gets. These are individuals whose career hazards include unholy amounts of very bad music, rabidly irate publicists and bodily harm and stench in mosh pits. Worstof all, they routinely hear disparaging comments about the validity of their interest: "Why would anyone want to write about music? Aren't you making something out of nothing?"
DeCurtis knows well that music critics have serious credibility problems, and he's not afraid to point them out. As a critic, DeCurtis has a strong grasp on the field of music journalism, and he often speaks out against the pretentious, self-indulgent tendencies of rock criticism; his keynote address to the "Representing Rock" conference, held two weekends ago on East Campus, chided criticism's tendency toward "outrageous displays of self-importance."
"There's a tendency to really enshrine the adolescent perspective," he commented over lunch at Torero's later in the weekend. The bratty "rock star" prose of some critics makes what they're communicating inaccessible to some, according to DeCurtis, who mentions how a biting, sarcastic tone can alienate readers and how esoteric references keep readers from getting inside the review.
Very often, what's missing in this style of reviewing is the pleasure and emotion of music, which DeCurtis foregrounds in his own process: "When I'm editing, and certainly in my own writing," he said, "the question I ask myself a lot is 'What did you feel when you heard this?' What I want informing the heart of this piece, is some sort of emotion." DeCurtis also notes how the emotional pleasures of music can be an embarrassment for the reviewer, which comes across in their writing style. "There's a sort of adolescent male tone [to rock criticism] so that you're embarrassed about emotion. There's always an effort in a lot of the writing to avoid any emotion. To substitute attitude for emotion, to substitute opinions for ideas is almost a kind of project for a lot of people. Whereas, I think you can patch a lot of ideas in, and I think that your emotions can be informed by what you think."
This process of allowing the emotions that music inspires to fuel writing is an aspect of rock criticism that DeCurtis finds most valuable. "There's an aspect of self-examination and emotional honesty with it. A lot of the times, that's the most exciting moments of when you're writing," he said.
Having seen the span of music writing since he first began writing in the early '70s at the humble Bloomington Herald Telephone (yes, that's what it was called), he remembers when there was no such thing as serious music criticism. While we assume that mainstream publications like Time and Newsweek have decent music critics today, it was not always so. DeCurtis noted, "The assumption about rock and roll was that it would go away," and because the music was assumed to be a transient phase, there was a lack of prominent discussion about it. "At that point, there was a huge cultural vacuum to be filled," he said.
While music criticism as a serious discourse was just developing, DeCurtis assumed he was headed for a career as an English professor. As he began to write more extensively, DeCurtis found journalism more and more intriguing.
"The kind of instantaneous response that journalism generates was really exciting," he said. "The idea to me was that you could walk into the office at four in the afternoon, hand somebody a few sheets of paper, and then the next day would be in the newspaper. And then your friends would read it, talk about it-it was exciting."
Eventually, a teaching job at Emory led DeCurtis to Atlanta in 1979, just as a now-legendary music scene began taking off. "I was on ground-zero with the B-52s, R.E.M., Pylon, the whole Athens scene," he commented. DeCurtis began covering the burgeoning musical culture and eventually found himself at Rolling Stone. He also hosted VH-1's "Four on the Floor" show and won a Grammy for his liner notes for Eric Clapton's Crossroads.
Most recently, DeCurtis edited an anthology of essays, Present Tense, for Duke University Press. Currently juggling reviewing, interviewing and writing, he's still shaping and critically examining the ever-evolving state of pop music discourse. "There's a sense of a cultural din now," he said, noting that analyzing the music's different levels of meaning has become more difficult as media becomes increasingly sophisticated. "It's hard now to isolate an aesthetic experience so that while you're watching a movie and totally absorbed in it; you're also aware of product placement and those kind of issues. I think that rock criticism needs to find a way to address all that." Despite the many aspects of music that can be discussed, however, DeCurtis still finds a lack of diversity in opinions. "That's part of the larger cultural problem for rock criticism-there's almost more voices but less diverse voices," he said.
This multitude of voices also has a defeating tendency to squabble over insular issues like authenticity or credibility. DeCurtis tells a story of a colleague at the South by Southwest music conference where "these things are always a brawl," he wryly notes. "Someone got up in the audience and said, 'How can you write about this stuff? When was the last time you were in a mosh pit?'" he recalls incredulously. "'When was the last time you saw Jimi Hendrix?' Okay, now are we done? You insulted me, and I insulted you-now what can we tell each other? What is it like to be in a mosh pit? I'll tell you what it's like to see Jimi Hendrix. There's a conversation that could be taking place."
It's a conversation in which DeCurtis has had a strong, distinctive voice and will have for a long time to come.
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