A ‘Sonic Tapestry’ Walks Into A Record Store: We Need More Music Reviews & Fewer Puff Pieces

Why is everybody’s music “dreamy” these days? Or "ethereal" "atmospheric" or "genre-blending"? The sounds coming out of the indie scene itself are more diverse and unique than ever, with each artist essentially working towards refreshing takes on any subgenre, yet the language we use to describe them has shrunk into a PR-approved list of non-descriptive buzzwords. Instead of digging into the actual guts of a record, most modern music journalism routinely defaults to vague mood labels. We are actively losing the discerning vocabulary needed to speak about music, trading incisive analysis for dull, non-offensive marketing speak that tells you nothing.

It wasn’t always like this, though. In the mid-1960s, music journalism morphed from dry trade reporting on record sales in magazines like Billboard into a high-stakes literary art form. Publications like Crawdaddy! treated rock music as worthy of serious intellectual analysis. Soon after, Rolling Stone was launched, tying rock records to anti-war politics, youth rebellion, and major cultural shifts. Over in Detroit, Creem magazine exploded onto the scene with a chaotic, gonzo style, with its writers coining foundational terms like ‘punk rock’ and ‘heavy metal’ while picking fights with mainstream rock stars! At the same time, Ellen Willis, a leading voice of 2nd wave feminism, became The New Yorker’s first pop music critic, bringing radical feminist theory and deep cultural critique to mainstream pop records.

Across the pond in the 70s and 80s, UK weeklies like NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds operated at a frantic journalistic pace that allowed them to actively shape explosive youth subcultures like punk, post-punk, and 2-Tone. Weaponizing a fierce brand of adversarial journalism, influential writers could launch an underground band onto the national Top of the Pops stage with a single front-cover feature, or decisively tank a major-label marketing budget with a devastating, single-paragraph review. By the early 2000s, digital outlets like Pitchfork inherited this kingmaking power — a rave 9.0 'Best New Music' rating to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's unsigned, self-titled debut in 2005 would cause a sudden stampede of internet traffic famously crashing the band's website, forcing the musicians to spend weeks frantically licking stamps and mailing thousands of CDs straight from their Brooklyn apartment to keep up with their overnight worldwide fame. The critic’s role across these was to act as an uncompromising filter, tell the reader if a physical record was worth fifteen dollars, and explain why the work mattered to the culture.

Here at home, Indian rock bands spent the early nineties almost exclusively playing covers of foreign acts at college festivals. That was until Amit Saigal AKA ‘Papa Rock,’ founder of Rock Street Journal (RSJ), drew a line in the sand, refusing to cover any band unless they wrote original music. As India’s first and largest independent music magazine, RSJ not only wrote about the emerging scene, their team physically produced the ‘Great Indian Rock’ cassette tapes — studio-recorded compilation albums of original music by underground Indian artists — and bundled them as free physical gifts with the print magazine, building a nationwide distribution network across isolated hubs like Shillong, Delhi, Kolkata, and Bangalore, which sparked the legendary G.I.R. Festival, single-handedly transforming India from a nation of cover bands into a powerhouse of original independent music.

Even with everything RSJ pulled off, India still struggled to build a serious, self-sustaining culture of music criticism, largely due to the overwhelming monopoly of Bollywood. For decades, mainstream Indian media treated music as background noise to market films or as vehicles for lifestyle branding. Because independent music lacked a paying audience and a robust non-film record market, the infrastructure needed to support independent journalists never matured, which allowed public relations teams, corporate sponsors, and PR handlers to take over the narrative almost immediately. Music writing melted into friendly celebrity Q&As, brand-friendly puff pieces, skipping past the actual sound, production, or vision of the artist.

When Spotify and Apple Music made tens of millions of tracks available instantly for a low monthly fee, listeners no longer needed a reviewer to tell them whether an album was worth buying. Algorithmic playlists further took over music discovery, recasting songs as background utility — no more deep listening to a record from track 1 to the outro — more ‘lo-fi study beats' or ‘chill workout tracks'. With discovery outsourced to these algorithms, traditional music publications saw their ad revenue collapse, pushing outlets to pivot to high-volume search engine optimisation, relying on major label press releases to churn out quick, digestible content.

This got even worse with AI flooding the internet with its lifeless words that crept into human vocabulary. Today, real criticism has dissolved into “content” online coming from everywhere — just a sea of mild, non-opinions floating around with a few exceptions like The Indian Music Diaries, Wild City, and Rolling Stone India, where dedicated journalists like Amit Gurbaxani and Anurag Tagat still fight to document genuine subcultures — and Pitchfork across the pond, which has managed to remain uncompromising in its criticism, even if its reviews are often called out for being "more critical of the artist than the music," as observed by a Redditor. 

But across the board, it seems like nobody is willing to critique a bad record or passionately defend a weird one anymore because everyone is terrified of losing access to the artist, getting blacklisted by a PR agency, or tanking their engagement numbers with an unpopular take. As a writer who’s also guilty of going easy on albums I wasn’t particularly fond of, here’s a question: what if our discontent with the general quality of music today, compared to, say, the 60s, is a symptom of a culture of indifference that could change if we just stopped glazing everyone? Food for thought. I know we have it in us to criticize and do it well. We do it all the time online on people’s bodies, behaviours, and problematic takes on politics. I think music could use some of that as well, not to be mistaken for being mean for its own sake, but to tap into what really speaks to us instead of resigning to tasteslop. 

Writing about music does require a critical lens, but it’s the personal one that makes it worth anything. It is more than a summary of track themes and guest features; it is a snapshot of what a track does to you, how you relate to it and all the ways in which it comes to mean something to you — not whether it’s “a sonic tapestry that intersects nostalgia and longing”. To challenge this sterility and rebuild an honest, grounded approach to music writing, Musician, DJ and Educator Abhi Meer is leading a two-and-a-half-hour workshop at Method Gallery. The session tackles the core elements of music criticism, analyzing foundational texts, studying the greats, and banning empty, impersonal buzzwords like "vibes" "soundscape", "infectious", "eclectic", or "seminal".

“What you’ve been trained to do is stand outside and document it, even as the music rattles your insides, changing you irreparably,” he notes. “I want us to find a way back into the heart of it.” Sourcing from Method Gallery's in-house record store to pick physical records straight off the shelf, writers will build reviews based solely on their listening experience. All you need to bring is an open mind and a willingness to listen. You can sign up via the link in bio, and walk-ins are welcome on the day. 

Follow Abhi here.

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