Rick Beato examines a podcast featuring New York Times music critics discussing their recent list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. By analyzing the background and commentary of those involved in the selection process, Beato questions their qualifications and explores their perspectives on song craft, genre definitions, and the omission of notable artists. This commentary is a follow-up to
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The guy that you’re going to hear speak first is Wesley Morris. I want to play you a few clips of this podcast and talk about who these people are and what their background is. I think this is instructive to get a vibe of what the people that write for the New York Times, what the music critics that write for the New York Times are like.
This is Wesley.
WESLEY LEE, NEW YORK TIMES: First thing I’ve ever been asked to do, like what am I supposed to do when Bonnie Raitt submits her list of the greatest songwriters, not obey her wishes?
BEATO: I get on my kids about that.
LEE: But the assignment was to take all those ballots and then use our own critical judgment to nail down a list of 30. So I, along with the reporter Joe Coscarelli, my fellow critics Danielle Smith, Jody Rosen, Jon Caramanica, and Lindsay Zoladz, we all hung out in a room, sequestered, and spent days talking it, shouting it, singing it all out.
Last week, we published the list, the 30 greatest living American songwriters. And look, it went out into the world. Y’all had feelings. About 6,000 comments have come in so far, mostly asking, how could you possibly leave out so-and-so?
Well, look, I mean, we only had 30.
BEATO: I had a lot of comments, but they didn’t say that.
LEE: But we also made those choices for a reason. So I’m inviting two of the folks who were in the room with me making those decisions, Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, the hosts of the podcast and the editor of the project, Sasha Weiss, friend of the show, to talk about the impossible task we faced.
BEATO: Okay, so check this guy, Jon Caramanica, out as he explains what a songwriter isn’t to him.
JON CARAMANICA: I feel like everybody in that room was willing to think expansively about what songwriting is. And songwriting is such a peculiar thing. It has so much baggage. It comes with attachment to certain communities, certain subgenres. And songwriting has baggage. Engaged fans, which I know we’ll talk about later, who have an extremely fixed idea of what constitutes songcraft.
SASHA WEISS: And what do you think that idea is?
CARAMANICA: I think it’s a heroic white man with a guitar struggling through his emotions, sitting in a room, no collaborators, no contact with the outside world, perhaps alcohol, perhaps drugs, accessing some kind of pure emotional truth and putting it in a rock country or otherwise roots-affiliated genre.
JOE COSCARELLI: Singer-songwriter. Yes.
CARAMANICA: To me, as much as I enjoy some of that music, I do not mistake that for the totality of American song. I do not mistake that for the best examples of songcraft.
BEATO: So songwriting is not the best example of songwriting. Who are these people that were part of this article? So that guy talking there, John Caramanica, he’s 50 years old.
He went to Harvard University. He has a BA in English, not in music. He contributed to this thing, not only as a judge, but he actually wrote some of the bios of the people that were selected.
Lionel Richie, Young Thug, Romeo Santos, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and Bad Bunny. Those were his contributions to it. The other guy with the beard, that’s Joe Coscarelli. Unfortunately, these guys are actually Italian, it seems like. So I apologize for them. He’s 37. He went to NYU. He has a BA in journalism, writes for the New York Times. He contributed the Taylor Swift, Outkast, and The-Dream portions of it.
And then you have Jody Rosen. He contributed Nile Rodgers, Jay-Z, Paul Simon, Missy Elliott, Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally, Stephen Merritt, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan. He has a BA in American Studies from Yale University. Okay, so we have Yale, we have Harvard.
Wesley, who’s hosting this, he’s 50 years old. He has a BA in film studies from Yale University. And Sasha Weiss, who is the deputy editor of the New York Times, is in the video here. She has her degree from Princeton University. So mostly Ivy League people.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t see any music degrees in here from these music critics. Not that you need to have a degree in music to be a music critic, but maybe it would help a little bit if you’re talking about, I don’t know, melody, rhythm, song structure. Maybe it’d be helpful if you’re talking about production, know something about music.
A lot of these people, as you can see, have their degrees in literature and American Studies. So I guess literature and history. I want to play the same guy, John Caramanica’s response to why Billy Joel did not make the list. Check this out. Here we go.
CARAMANICA: James says, “I went to Berklee College of Music. I didn’t. And there was an entire songwriting curriculum based on Billy Joel’s songwriting. It’s literally stupid he’s not on this list.” It’s like —
BEATO: That’s true.
CARAMANICA: This is great. I wish I’d seen this. I would have responded to this comment.
“It’s like not having Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen on a list of greatest guitarists.”
BEATO: Okay. Okay, here we go. This is why Billy Joel shouldn’t be on it.
CARAMANICA: It’s actually not like that. Thank you for this opportunity to respond to this comment, to which I do respectfully. When you think about Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen, you think about formal innovators who are also, in their way, hit makers and creators.
BEATO: Billy Joel wasn’t a hit maker?
CARAMANICA: And also processes that are universal in how they have moved through the world in their wake. Billy Joel is a very good example of a person who writes one or 1.5 kinds of songs really well, that also people before him wrote really well, and people after him wrote really well. I love that I’m delivering this to camera. This is, I’m really going in.
COSCARELLI: We’re clipping this.
CARAMANICA: No, no, yeah, we’re really going in. I like Billy Joel. You get the idea. I just want to go on the record.
COSCARELLI: I don’t.
BEATO: You hear these guys competing for the worst take? The one guy’s like, I love Billy Joel. And the other guy’s like, I don’t.
CARAMANICA: I like Billy Joel.
COSCARELLI: I don’t
CARAMANICA: I know you don’t like Billy Joel. I like Billy Joel. People I love.
BEATO: It’s ridiculous.
Here’s four Ivy League educated people. You’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there, that are the most pretentious, corksniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music. Exactly what you would expect from a New York Times music critic… Now, I shouldn’t rag on these people because of their education. I believe in education.
As a matter of fact, I actually worked for Harvard University indirectly back in 1986 when I played in the pit orchestra, upright bass, at the American Repertory Theater for about a year back when I was in grad school in Boston in 1986. I went to New England Conservatory and did get a music degree. In fact, I got my master’s in music and jazz studies in particular at the New England Conservatory of Music, which is an actual music school where you learn about music.
When I’m talking about music on here, I can play the music myself. I can play any song except for Alan Holdsworth. If I’m talking about classical music, if I’m talking about jazz, if I’m talking about rock, pop, folk, country, I can play all the parts.
I can play the guitar parts, the bass parts, the piano parts, the drum parts. But I’m not going to sit here and say this is a definitive list of the greatest living American songwriters. It’s ridiculous.
That’s why I always say at the end of these videos, this is my personal opinion. I’d love to know yours. Leave it in the comments.
These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to do is watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.
And I thought I have to make a video about this so that you guys can at least experience this because it only had 40,000 views on YouTube. So I thought I’d give it a little boost here. Love to know your thoughts.
