Main Character Music Journalism

With publications, journalists and content creators all catering to social media, the question of who is doing the talking is starting to become just as important as whatever they're saying.

Back in July, First Floor interviewed Kieran Press-Reynolds, a New York-based writer and regular Pitchfork contributor who’s quickly gaining a reputation as one of today’s finest young music and culture journalists. (It’s telling that just a few weeks after our conversation, he landed back in GQ magazine, having penned a profile of leftist streamer Hasan Piker that quickly blew up a very specific slice of the internet.)

Press-Reynolds shared numerous pearls of wisdom in that interview, even providing working definitions of oft-used zoomer vocabulary like “brainrot” and “fried.” Yet some of his sharpest observations had to do with the current state of music journalism, and the following passage felt particularly insightful:

To succeed now as a critic, you need some component of parasociality. People need to feel like they know you and your taste profile, and will almost treat you like an artist yourself. They want that vulnerability or personality to come through.

Although he was talking specifically about criticism (as opposed to investigative reporting), his thoughts likely sound blasphemous to some journalists, especially those of a certain age. As much as the field has always had a handful of outsized personalities—names like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau immediately spring to mind—the idea of writers explicitly inserting themselves into their work is something that runs counter to long-standing industry norms.

For decades, individual bylines carried far less weight than the names of the publications they were writing for, and while journalists obviously still brought their own personal tastes, experiences and perspectives to the table, they were generally expected to couch those things in impersonal language. (At many outlets, even using the first person in a piece was widely frowned upon—that is, if it wasn’t prohibited altogether.) Maintaining the integrity of the masthead was most important, and by writing at a kind of professional remove, music journalists were thought to convey a sense of impartiality and erudition.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then.