\n<\/p>\n
About a year and a half ago<\/span>, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled because of an approaching nor\u2019easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show\u2019s cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town?<\/p>\n This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, Time Out New York<\/em>, or The Village Voice <\/em>and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out <\/em>quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark\u2019s Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman\u2019s mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case\u2019s bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she\u2019d recorded them.<\/p>\n But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times <\/em>killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: \u201cNew York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus\u201d reads the top headline. The Village Voice<\/em> folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out<\/em>, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month<\/em>.<\/p>\n This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void\u2014that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about\u2014which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity\u2014and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves.<\/p>\n As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today\u2019s critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise \u201cdiscovery,\u201d they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n The listings were my lodestar<\/span>. And that star\u2019s orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith.<\/p>\n Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York <\/em>from 2001 to 2014. He\u2019d gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars\u2014he was the drummer\u2014by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven\u2014all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation.<\/p>\n Time Out <\/em>\u201cwas a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings<\/em>,\u201d Smith told me.<\/em> \u201cNobody said, \u2018Oh, that obscure thing that\u2019s happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that\u2019s too weird.\u2019 I was basically told, \u2018List what\u2019s interesting; list what people will want to know about.\u2019\u201d A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic\u2019s pick. \u201cI had the privilege,\u201d he said, \u201cof making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night<\/em>. A 33-word listing in Time Out<\/em> came soon after\u2014a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times<\/em> Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times<\/em>? None other than Steve Smith.<\/p>\n These listings weren\u2019t just a boon for artists like me\u2014they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice <\/em>music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: \u201cFunny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.\u201d<\/p>\n In its heyday, the Voice<\/em>\u2019s newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance.<\/p>\n Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times<\/em>, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile.<\/p>\n The demise of listings is \u201ctangled up with the erosion of review coverage,\u201d the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that \u201cthe fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out\u201d to see a gig: \u201cThe immediate danger is that artists play and people don\u2019t know about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times<\/em> from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it\u2019s harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great.<\/p>\n The decline of listings <\/span>followed the broader trend toward \u201cpoptimism,\u201d a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually<\/em> popular\u2014the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists\u2014ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough!<\/p>\n But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. <\/em>In the 21 years since Sanneh\u2019s essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today<\/em>\u2019s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file\u2014you may want to sit down\u2014501<\/em> articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it\u2019s easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices.<\/p>\n Indeed, much of today\u2019s cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people\u2019s contributions to the common good solely by \u201cthe market value of the goods or services they sell.\u201d In other words, covering what\u2019s popular doesn\u2019t just serve journalism\u2019s economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it\u2019s no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities.<\/p>\n A reader might object: Aren\u2019t you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can\u2019t hack it in today\u2019s algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction<\/em>. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow<\/em> and lowbrow<\/em> conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles\u2019 White Album <\/em>without Karlheinz Stockhausen\u2019s tape music, no Rosal\u00eda\u2019s Motomami <\/em>without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support.<\/p>\n To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith\u2019s great gifts as an editor. \u201cHe crafted listings,\u201d Giovetti told me, \u201cin such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.\u201d You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire\u2019s founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders\u2019 Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em>, and you\u2019ve probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018.<\/p>\n The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker<\/em> from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times<\/em>. \u201cOn any given day,\u201d Chinen told me, \u201cthere would be a review of a New York\u2013based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe\u2019s Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That\u2019s the garden<\/em>. That\u2019s the plant mix that existed.\u201d How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life?<\/p>\n In this new paradigm<\/span>, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. \u201cThe phone has stopped ringing,\u201d he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams\u2013inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it\u2019s important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too.<\/p>\n Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context.<\/p>\n What\u2019s to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren\u2019t left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders.<\/p>\n The other solution\u2014plausible or not\u2014is for outlets such as the Times<\/em> and The New Yorker<\/em> to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can\u2019t be readily calculated on a balance sheet.<\/p>\n For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out<\/em>, he spent two years at The<\/em> Boston Globe <\/em>as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker<\/em>. He\u2019s now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, \u201cI never really stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out <\/em>does not exist, The New Yorker <\/em>is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot<\/em>; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Caf\u00e9 Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.<\/p>\n Hell of a city, no?<\/p>\n