Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis are real live rock and roll critics, they have a show on NPR called "Sound Opinions", and they have quite a resume. All the usual suspects. And they are the last of a dying breed. Rock critics are going on the trash heap of history, they just don't matter.
Because the decision as to what music to listen to becomes more and more less open to opinion and more to direction. People don't need to be told to listen to, say, Fang Island, when they can go on the "We Are Hunted" app on Spotify, click on their pix on the Top 50 songs on the week, and make their own mind for themselves.
Kot and DeRogatis can still write, but who else can?
And who wants to?
Writing is fairly dead in its own write. Why write when you can list? Why review a concert when if somebody is so interested they can always go on youtube and watch it: and that is the generation we're in now, people like me? We were raised on rock criticism. In the 1970s my heroes weren't musicians, but the people who wrote about them.
Who is that true of today?
If you don't have to pay for music, your need to be educated in music dissipates. If you have the choice of just about anything, and can boil it all down to a list, or, as in Pandora (which I loath, by the way) a self programmed radio station, where do you enter into it.
Plus, in 2012, who really cares about scholarship? Does the world stop because Bob Babbit dies? Do they know that they are probably hearing him play as we speak on some classic song on some classic radio station are on the jukebox in a bar or on the soundtrack to some movie they don't actually deserve to be felt emotionally about?
And if there is nobody to worry out the new masters of… Well, you get the idea.