About a yr and a half in the past, I used to be scheduled to play a live performance in Vermont when phrase got here that the gig could be canceled due to an approaching nor’easter. I checked out of the lodge early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental automobile, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been dwelling for the higher a part of twenty years, however after a transfer to the Pacific Northwest, I used to be returning as a vacationer, and the present’s cancellation augured a uncommon free night within the metropolis. There was only one drawback: How was I going to determine what to do with my night time in town?
This was once straightforward. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Instances, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the occasion listings. Once I graduated from school and moved to town in 2003, Time Out shortly turned my bible, syllabus, and street map. The listings guided me by way of the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark’s Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden inside, the place Richard Foreman’s mind-bending performs made an indelible impression on me. The listings introduced me to Southpaw to listen to Neko Case’s bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, the place I noticed a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, after which bashfully hand out CDs burned along with her demos, wealthy with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she’d recorded them.
However over the previous decade, occasion listings have all however disappeared. The New York Instances killed its weekly arts listings on the finish of 2016, and its on-line arts-and-entertainment information stays frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: “New York Arts Establishments Closed Due to Coronavirus” reads the highest headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has lately been revived however has no listings part to talk of.) The New Yorker’s Goings On About City part was slashed in 2023 to only a web page or two, now providing one suggestion per self-discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concert events a month.
That is, partially, a well-recognized story about declining advert income, about altering pressures and priorities within the journalism enterprise. When listings started to vanish, many imagined that the web would merely fill the void—that artists and their followers (in addition to nonprofit establishments and their audiences) would discover new methods to attach. However a world wherein clicks are {dollars} has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism wherein what’s already in style have to be written about—which will increase its recognition, which implies it have to be written about, which will increase its recognition—and a social-media ecosystem wherein artists, now not capable of depend on legacy media for visibility, should create content material to please an algorithm as a substitute of their followers or themselves.
As mainstream tradition grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Maybe social-media influencers are as we speak’s critics and curators, however whilst our feeds promise “discovery,” they principally serve us what we already like. We do not know what we’re lacking.
The listings have been my lodestar. And that star’s orbit was maintained, a minimum of partially, by a journalist named Steve Smith.
Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He’d gotten his begin at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and taking part in in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night time. This stylistic mishmash would turn into a trademark of his sensibility. After we spoke final month, Smith talked about Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Conflict; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian steel; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all throughout the first 10 minutes of our dialog.
Time Out “was {a magazine} that was principally nothing however the listings,” Smith informed me. “No one mentioned, ‘Oh, that obscure factor that’s taking place on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that’s too bizarre.’ I used to be principally informed, ‘Record what’s attention-grabbing; checklist what folks will need to learn about.’” A coveted pink asterisk denoted a critic’s decide. “I had the privilege,” he mentioned, “of constructing a distinction within the lives of various composers and performers. And that, to me, was essentially the most gratifying piece of the job.”
One of many lives he modified was mine. The primary overview I ever obtained as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his weblog Night time After Night time. A 33-word itemizing in Time Out got here quickly after—a blurb that might stay in my press package for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Instances Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Middle known as my supervisor and provided me a debut on its American Songbook efficiency sequence. Who reviewed that live performance for the Instances? None aside from Steve Smith.
These listings weren’t only a boon for artists like me—they have been additionally a teeth-cutting alternative for cub journalists, one which demanded brutal concision. Smith, a grasp of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of these akin to Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. A couple of Patti Smith present, from the April 7, 1975, challenge: “Humorous, scary, and simply polished sufficient, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry studying like somebody who actually believes in road literature.”
In its heyday, the Voice’s newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all masking New York Metropolis with an obsessive dedication to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore exhibits at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Decrease East Facet nightclubs to cowl bawdy efficiency artwork and contortionist spectacles. Right here was a newspaper that, by way of dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile inventive microclimates, got here to wield wide-reaching affect over nationwide aesthetic developments because it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Speaking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the native in favor of established celebrities could in the end lead to its irrelevance.
Sixteen years after that first profile within the Instances, I’m lucky to nonetheless be making a residing taking part in music. However mine was a transitional technology: I got here of age simply in time to profit from the outdated fashions and media apparatuses, solely to look at them crumble round me. Few rising musicians as we speak might dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small membership on the Decrease East Facet, not to mention a thousand-word profile.
The demise of listings is “twisted up with the erosion of overview protection,” the jazz critic Nate Chinen informed me, whereas stressing that “the elemental utility of a publication is bringing folks out” to see a gig: “The speedy hazard is that artists play and folks don’t learn about it.”
Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Instances from 2005 till 2016. These blurbs, he understood, might imply the distinction between a standing-room-only present and one the place the musicians outnumbered the viewers. At present, it’s more durable than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the enterprise, and others limp alongside, subsidizing their revenue with instructing gigs and odd jobs. In the meantime, pop stars are doing nice.
The decline of listings adopted the broader development towards “poptimism,” a essential motion that started as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late twentieth century. In a now-canonic broadside revealed in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of these white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and infrequently resulted within the neglect of music by ladies and folks of colour. Poptimists believed that music that was really in style—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail within the automobile, lots of them carried out by nonwhite, nonmale artists—must be handled with the identical reverence granted to the artwork rockers. Honest sufficient!
However what Sanneh and like-minded critics couldn’t have anticipated was the extent to which their aim would collide with the financial imperatives of internet-based journalism. Within the 21 years since Sanneh’s essay was revealed, poptimism has turn into the established order in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA At present’s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you could need to sit down—501 articles about Swift throughout her Eras Tour. In such a local weather, it’s straightforward to neglect that poptimism was as soon as pushed by the impulse to raise up marginalized voices.
Certainly, a lot of as we speak’s cultural protection displays a unique societal extra, one wherein, because the political thinker Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the worth of individuals’s contributions to the widespread good solely by “the market worth of the products or companies they promote.” In different phrases, masking what’s in style doesn’t simply serve journalism’s financial backside line; it additionally expresses our beliefs. In a society wherein dignity and standing accrue to the highly effective, it’s no surprise that retailers as soon as devoted to nurturing subcultures now publish infinite paeans to celebrities.
A reader may object: Aren’t you simply complaining in regards to the cultural model of pure choice? If area of interest genres can’t hack it in as we speak’s algorithm-driven world, possibly they deserve extinction. But when they’re allowed to die, in style music may even endure. The phrases intellectual and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology wherein the uncooked supplies of artwork transfer simply from one style to a different. Classical composers have lengthy ransacked people music to furnish their symphonies with nice tunes. Equally, there could be no Beatles’ White Album with out Karlheinz Stockhausen’s tape music, no Rosalía’s Motomami with out the vocal preparations of the Pulitzer Prize–successful composer Caroline Shaw. If we would like the subsequent Billie Eilish to have the ability to work with the subsequent Attacca Quartet, we should always be sure that lesser-known artists get pleasure from a naked minimal of assist.
To take a look at a web page of occasion previews was to know how a set of artists associated to 1 one other. This, in keeping with the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one among Smith’s nice presents as an editor. “He crafted listings,” Giovetti informed me, “in such a approach that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, in order that the reader got here to know that in the event that they loved that Victoire present at Le Poisson Rouge, they could additionally dig a yMusic live performance at Rockwood Music Corridor.” It’s possible you’ll not have heard of both group, however you probably know the Metropolitan Opera, the place Victoire’s founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed along with her adaptation of George Saunders’ Lincoln within the Bardo, and also you’ve in all probability heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to hitch him on his farewell tour in 2018.
The lack of listings is, on this sense, the loss of a complete world, which historians, too, should deal with. Take any challenge of The New Yorker from the primary 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About City part provides a wealthy snapshot of town and its subcultures. The identical was true of the Instances. “On any given day,” Chinen informed me, “there could be a overview of a New York–based mostly dance firm on the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff overview a few koto participant at Situation Challenge Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe’s Pub. It was this extremely strong account of a thriving arts group in a metropolis that, proper or mistaken, considers itself to be the middle of the universe. That’s the backyard. That’s the plant combine that existed.” How will historians write the story of a metropolis that now not maintains a document of its personal cultural life?
In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, really feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has turn into my private advertising and marketing and public-relations departments, but resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I attempted to choose out, taking a full yr off from the web and one other six months away from social media, returning solely when my supervisor begged me to take action. “The cellphone has stopped ringing,” he mentioned bluntly.) So sure, amid the gallimaufry of hyperlinks, images, and display caps, I submit bite-size songs: right here, a William Carlos Williams–impressed lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist advert free of charge reptiles. Lots of my work is sober and politically minded, however I feel it’s essential to carry on to laughter and absurdity too.
Nonetheless, these miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, typically bypass my very own Instagram followers, touchdown as a substitute within the feeds of complete strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism as soon as created that context.
What’s to be carried out? Performing-arts establishments might work collectively to underwrite their very own weekly listings web site or print publication, with their monetary contributions scaled in keeping with their finances in order that small operations aren’t ignored. Positive, there could be challenges, specifically a blurring of the road between promoting and editorial. Ideally, a bunch of writers and editors would produce listings with complete independence, shielded from stress by funders.
The opposite answer—believable or not—is for retailers such because the Instances and The New Yorker to reverse course: to acknowledge that their listings have been a public good serving artists, audiences, and humanities presenters alike. The societal good thing about a complete information to the cultural sector can’t be readily calculated on a stability sheet.
For now, Smith remains to be serving because the secretary, the minute keeper, the city historian for the creative-music group in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, after which bounced between numerous jobs masking music again within the metropolis, together with a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He’s now a copywriter at an arts establishment. Nonetheless, he maintains a Substack e-newsletter, Night time After Night time, which shares the identify of his outdated weblog, the one on which he gave me my first overview. Every week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable occasions in music that lives past that slender mainstream. Once I requested him when he returned to writing listings, he mentioned, “I by no means actually stopped.”
Though a complete digital archive of Time Out doesn’t exist, The New Yorker is searchable again to its inaugural challenge, revealed in February 1925. Like all good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a fast search of my identify to search for its first point out in Goings On About City. There it was, within the challenge for April 27, 2009. What else was taking place? That week, Nathan Lane and Invoice Irwin have been starring in a manufacturing of Ready for Godot; Steve Wilson was on the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Corridor featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (taking part in the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera celebrity Eric Owens; Chick Corea was main an all-star band at Lincoln Middle; and Lou Reed was holding courtroom on the Gramercy Theatre.
Hell of a metropolis, no?
