Steve Almond on Music Criticism

“Am I suggesting that music criticism is a pointless exercise? Yeah, I guess I am.

In many cases it’s even worse than that. Because critics are, by their very job description, charged with being hypercritical. I certainly was. It was as if my critic credibility depended on my not being fooled into actually enjoying myself.”

Rumpus contributor Steve Almond takes on music criticism over at The Boston Globe.

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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