There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?” One of the era’s best-known critics, Lester Bangs, specialized in passionate hyperbole. In a 1972 review of the Southern-rock band Black Oak Arkansas, for the magazine Creem, Bangs called the singer a “wimp” and suggested (“half jokingly”) that he ought to be assassinated—only to decide, after more thought, that he quite liked the music. “There is a point,” he wrote, “where some things can become so obnoxious that they stop being mere dreck and become interesting, even enjoyable, and maybe totally because they are so obnoxious.” Something similar could have been said about Bangs and the other early critics of what was commonly referred to as “popular music”—a usefully broad term, although sometimes not broad enough. In 1970, Christgau ruefully conceded that some of his favorite groups, like the country-rock act the Flying Burrito Brothers or the proto-punk band the Stooges, might more accurately be said to make “semipopular music.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter