I tend to run hot and cold on Robert Christgau depending on how obscure and high-falutin' he is from piece to piece, but he hit the nail on the head in this week's review of Sonic Youth's forthcoming disc, Rather Ripped in the Village Voice. The disc (which can be streamed at the band's site and which has been available in file-sharing circles for weeks), is pretty great, the most tuneful and focused thing the band has ever done. Or, in the words of the Dean, "a light-seeming, unprecedentedly hooky thing that could prove one of their best."

It's not his review of SY that hooked me, however. Rather, it was the meta-critique of reviews in general embedded within the review. He discusses previous SY reviews from the VV, written by younger people, that pointed out that the band's music was getting boring. He's all for differences of opinion, he writes, but there is a difference between taste and judgment: "It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art."

With that, he encapsulates something I've been grappling with for a while, very loosely tied into the whole Stephin Merritt - Sasha Frere-Jones is he or isn't he a racist debate quietly raging in the music blogosphere. Articles about that debate often deal at least tangentially with the notion of "rockism," a term meant to signal a dislike of anything, for lack of a more coherent explanation, that doesn't focus on guitar-bass-drums and a 4/4 beat.

How does all of this tie together? It seems as if critics, thanks to the overwhelming number of them, have found it necessary to crawl as far into the obscure abyss in search of the previously unknown as a means of survival. If they simply tell us that the new disc by the hot new band is pretty good, we increasingly find we no longer need them. Thanks to aggregators like Metacritic, a number of new discs (and movies, books and games) are given a critical thumbs up or down, which is all most people have time for. Sure, some people might actually seek out a real review to find out why something is deemed good or bad (though I'd argue they usually are looking for views that simply reinforce their own), but mostly they want to be told if it's OK to spend their money on a given product. Reviews are reduced to the equivalent of stock market tips.

To combat this, critics often dig deep, seeking the new-new thing about which the masses can't possibly have aggregated an opinion. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; trendspotting is a valuable service of critics of all stripes. It just means that the critics' Darwinian self-preservation efforts are the very things that seem to marginalize them further. Frere-Jones looks for some dark secret in Merritt's musical playlists, unwilling to admit that it isn't racism that drives Merritt's taste so much as an aversion to bad music. Critics hype young bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Tapes 'n Tapes long before these good-but-still-growing bands deserve such lofty praise. And, to get back to Christgau's point, it seems some denigrate things they know are good simply to draw attention to themselves. We'll call this the Ann Coulter effect.

I've given positive reviews to many a mainstream or country act whose music I'm ambivalent about at best, because I understand that these are things that are done well and accomplish what the artist set out to do even if I don't personally like the results. There is a difference between taste and judgment, and perhaps when critics find better ways to bridge the gap between the two, their reviews will take on the very relevance they have unwittingly worked so hard to avoid. It's ironic to find this nugget of wisdom in a review by the sometime king of those obscurantist seekers, but I take it where I can get it. Thanks to Christgau's help in crystallizing this idea a bit, there's probably more of this to come.