The rise of the internet has changed criticism forever. The online world detonated the media landscape once dominated by the likes of the NME, Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, scattering its millions of pieces to settle in unoccupied areas of cyberspace. While magazines and newspaper supplements continue to exert some influence on more traditional readers, our attention has now been split among the thousands of websites and blogs that vie to capture our eyeballs for a few moments before they flit off to find another moment of entertainment in our infinite playground. In many ways this change is a positive one. Access to new music, movie trailers or gameplay footage is now a mere mouse-click away. Gone are the days of suffering through two hours of inane drivel and recycled bullshit on the radio before getting to the one song premiere that was promised. If we've just read an online review of an album or film that sounds interesting, it has never been easier to instantly check out trailers, interviews or songs for ourselves, usually without even having to switch sites. Through sites like Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, Ain't It Cool News, IGN and streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify, the world is at our fingertips.
One of the only drawbacks to democratising arts writing is the effect it tends to have on reviews and comments online. Although there are many sites that run really excellent reviews within their fields, the inevitable byproduct of creating a never-ending space where anyone can pick up a loudspeaker is an awful lot of white noise. Garbled, barely comprehensible, egocentric white noise.
Of course, in an environment that's essentially made up of millions of people screaming into the abyss, the natural tendency is to focus on the self. This can have strange and insulating repercussions for our sense of perspective. What separates good reviews from the never-ending waterfall of consciousness is the ability to think outside of the self, to some extent make the self invisible.
I'm not talking about removing "I"s and "me"s and all that stuff we were trained out of when writing essays in school or university. I think one of the things that makes a great review is understanding that an album, movie or game exists to transmit the vision of whoever created it, and it should be judged based on the degree to which it succeeds in carrying out that vision. A piece of art doesn't exist solely to interact positively with its audience, and good reviewers should understand that an album or film not eliciting a personal response doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't succeed at what it set out to do (although it often does).
Stepping outside of one's own perspective to measure the successes and failures of a film, for example, immediately marks a review out from the frothing rabble of fanboys that plagues the net. Bryan Singer's 2006 movie Superman Returns is an example of a film that has been horrendously mistreated online, despite the generally glowing reception it received on its release.
Fanboys decided that it didn't have enough action to sate the cartoon fantasies playing in their heads and railed like petulant princesses against the fact that it didn't cater to their own visions for the character. Despite not being perfect (the secret child ending overcomplicated the film's message and Kate Bosworth was an inadequate Lois Lane), Superman Returns was hugely successful at translating the classic, innate qualities of America's homespun messiah. It's particularly depressing that the fanboy tantrums managed to soil popular perception of this film to the point where Zack Snyder's upcoming reboot is considered not only necessary, but an opportunity to get the character back to his roots, something Returns had already done spectacularly well.
This is something I always try to keep in mind when reading or writing reviews (with limited success, to be sure). To take this argument to its extreme, there's no point complaining that an album by Fleet Foxes doesn't have enough jungle beats or that an Odd Future mixtape wouldn't be suitable for a dinner party. These are the concerns of the listener, not the album. For a review to justify its name and be more definitive than simple comment, the reviewer has to shake off prejudices and bugbears to make a judgement based on something more universal than just opinion.
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