Abstract: Rock and roll music was a national youth obsession for more than ten years before the first rock critics began writing seriously about the form. Rock was dismissed by adult cultural authorities as empty, degraded, and even dangerous. However, to its fans, rock was an important form of personal expression, a source of group identity, and a mode of political discourse. Rock critics understood its cultural and political power. In their work, they explained its importance to the American public.
In 1966, the first rock critic, Richard Goldstein, began writing about rock and roll in a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Pop Eye.” In it, he asserted that rock and roll was an art that deserved the same recognition and protections afforded to other art forms. By 1967, The New Yorker hired Ellen Willis to write about rock in a regular column called “Rock, Etc.” She brought an intellectual sophistication to the genre that would resound long after her career as a rock critic ended. Later in 1967, Rolling Stone debuted; it would become the most visible and influential source of rock criticism for the next fifty years. Editor Jann Wenner’s tastes and approach would affect the way rock was perceived in his own time and for decades after. Finally, in 1968, Lester Bangs debuted onto the scene, writing artful reviews for publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, explaining the changes that were taking place as rock music splintered into subgenres like punk and heavy metal.
The quality of these rock critics’ thought and the influence of their writing makes rock criticism an important and under-studied branch of Sixties literature. Each of the rock critics addressed in this dissertation explained to the public what rock music meant and why it mattered. By placing rock in its social, political, and cultural context, they demonstrated that it was far from the empty form cultural authorities thought it was. Their work permanently changed perceptions of popular music, proving that it was substantial enough to stand up to the same kind of critical treatment as other art forms.