My semester as a Public Fellow with the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities’ interdisciplinary research seminar on PLAY is winding down. For the center’s website, I reflected on how play and ludic impulses relate to the practice of music criticism. Link here, and excerpt below:
“As a music critic, my work is a lot of play. Beyond the deluge of press emails and deadlines, awkward phone calls with indie rockers, digging grimy pink earplugs out of every pocket, and occasionally pissing off Coldplay fans—the job is fun. But it’s meaningful fun: a critical approach to culture that requires a playful attitude.
…The best music criticism retains this magic: It makes something more in the space between the music and the writing, not simply a stimulus and response. In Ludic City (2007), Quentin Stevens writes, “Play is a lived critique of instrumentally rational action because it discovers new needs and develops new forms of social life.” Allowing for experimentation and reinterpretation, the most effective music critique creates an active, ongoing conversation—even if the conversation goes beyond what an artist (or its diehard fans) may intend or agree with.”