NYT Mag Critics Fire Back With Insufferable Smugness After Internet Trashes Their ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List
When The New York Times Magazine (NYT) put out a list of “The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” in April, they were met with swift backlash.
Read more US Official Denies Iran’s Claim That Oil Sanctions Are Being Lifted
Some online commenters took issue with the omission of names like Billy Joel, Tom Waits, Trent Reznor, and Jason Isbell. Others took issue with the inclusion of Bad Bunny and Young Thug.
“Hahaha. This is ridiculous. Who are some of these people? Makes no sense. Where’s Billy Joel, Jeff Tweedy, Jason Isbell, Steve Earle, James Taylor, Jackson [Browne], David Byrne…. Young Thug?!? What a joke. Dude has a couple (great!) songs. Mariah [Carey] is a songwriter? She doesn’t wake up everyday and write. Also, to make a list like this and just put Bob Dylan on it someplace is silly. There is Dylan, a long, long gap, and everyone else,” reads a comment from a reader that accompanies 6,000 other comments. The comment received 1,500 recommendations from other readers.
Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” opens with these lines:
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó” opens with these lines (in translation from Spanish):
Hey, auntie asked me if I have a lot of girlfriends, a lot of girlfriends
Today I have one, tomorrow I’ll have another, hey, but there’s no wedding
Auntie asked me if I have a lot of girlfriends, heh, a lot of girlfriends
Today I have one, tomorrow I’ll have another
I’ll leave it to you to determine the merits of either song.
The NYT Magazine critics who made the list put out a podcast episode May 7 in response. (RELATED: Luther Vandross, Phil Collins, Wu-Tang Clan Lead The Honors As 2026 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Inductees Announced)
“You know how lists are. No matter what, they will cause a scandal,” said Wesley Morris, host of “Cannonball with Wesley Morris.” Morris spoke with some of the project’s participants about their decision-making process.
“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 slots to play with. But, you know, 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 host of the podcast, and the editor of the project, Sasha Weiss, friend of the show, to talk about the impossible task we faced.”
Morris, Caramanica, Coscarelli, and Weiss addressed readers’ and fans’ displeasure with their list.
“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. Um, and, engaged fans, which I know we’ll talk about later, who have an extremely fixed idea of what constitutes songcraft,” said Caramanica.
“And what do you think that idea is?” asked Weiss.
“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.”
Caramanica explained: “As much as I enjoy some of that music, I do not mistake it for the totality of American song. I do not mistake that for the best examples of songcraft.” (RELATED: Boomers Were Right About Music All Along)
Anything but heroic white men!
During the podcast, Coscarelli noted: “I love that [Young] Thug is on this list. I would have put … Just personal biases. If it’s my list, I put 5 or 10 Southern rappers on the list.” One wonders which songwriters he would have removed to make room for those rappers.
The critics devoted a section of the podcast to discussing Joel, and why he did not make the list. Caramanica began by reading a comment from a NYT Magazine reader.
“I went to Berklee College of Music … and there was an entire songwriting curriculum on Billy Joel’s songwriting. It’s literally stupid he’s not on this list,” Caramanica read, laughing.
“It’s like not having Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen on a list of greatest guitarists,” the comment concluded. Caramanica then flung the paper on which the comment was printed behind him.
“Okay. It’s not,” Caramanica chortled. Caramanica clarified that Joel is a “very good example of a person who writes one or two or one and a half kinds of songs really well, that also people before him wrote really well, and people after him wrote really well.”
“I like Billy Joel. I just want to go on the record and say I like Billy Joel … But, if we are making a list of 30 greatest living American songwriters, you’re not only saying what are they great, you’re saying, what aren’t they doing?”
Caramanica added that Joel “exists in pre-existing traditions. He’s good at it. Some days, I think great, but you … gotta draw the line somewhere.”
As YouTuber and musician Rick Beato pointed out, most of the NYT Magazine critics are “Ivy League people.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he continued, “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.”
Beato slammed the critics as “the most pretentious, cork sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music. Exactly what you would expect from a New York Times music critic.”
Post Comment