September 14, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic offers a tribute to the guides who help us make sense of songs, whether they speak to you through the radio dial, across the counter of a local record store or, these days, from a YouTube reaction video.

Herb Kossover/Getty Images

Hello adventure seekers,

Last night I had a dream I want to share with you. In it, I found myself wandering on a hillside dotted with cabins and strings of lights; music wafted toward me from a nearby meadow. Maybe this was a music festival; I’d been at the Evanston Folk Fest over the weekend, under a moon similar to the one in my dream’s eye, high in the sky, opalescent and full. I could hear a band playing in the distance, guitar strums and keyboard shimmers. I looked up and suddenly the sky began to fill with blooms. Beautiful light forms formed and unfurled like sky anemones. Absorbed in the beauty, I felt renewed. Then my alarm rang.

I think this dream was about music discovery. I am not super fond of that word, discovery. Like content, it’s been deployed for nefarious purposes by corporate entertainment entities to mystify the process of sharing and promoting cultural work. Content, well, the problem with that is obvious — it’s a cold word that could be applied as easily to microfiber pillow stuffing as to an artist’s handiwork. Discovery can also be applied to many objects and scenarios; its history points to both the scientific realm and the colonialist incursion on “virgin” lands. The ping of excitement that the word always carries is irresistible but a little problematic, because discovery always requires some kind of erasure: of those who have been somewhere or done something before you, and even of anyone who might have helped you get to the point of finding something or someone new.

Think of it this way: You’re on a hike, tromping through the woods, and suddenly you hit a clearing and a vista unfolds before you. Your body vibrates with the rush of the encounter with a landscape of peaks or lakes or waterfall crags that you’d maybe anticipated, but couldn’t have fully imagined. Your sublime experience encloses you within a golden aura; you feel like you’ve accomplished something amazing simply by ending up in the right spot. Even your companions, who’ve trod alongside you, dissolve into the background. Yet in reality, someone else found this exact spot for the first time, who knows when; others carved out the path and maintained it, cleared the view-obscuring brush, hammered a wooden sign marked with an arrow onto a fir tree. Discovery feels singular and sudden but it’s actually always contextual and, even when it doesn’t feel like it, communal.

Especially now, in a consumer economy that values frictionless experiences above all others, the fetishization of discovery narrows its scope. Within the musical sphere its use is targeted to make listeners less aware of the work that goes into carrying a song from its origins to a listener’s ears. While content equates self-expression with mass-produced goods, discovery hides the labor, enthusiasm and discernment of the many different kinds of people who cultivate creative realms, enforcing the sense that either chance or some mechanism that’s best left unacknowledged leads people to the sounds they come to love.

My dream offered me an image of that supposedly miraculous kind of discovery, beauty spontaneously bursting into form before my eyes. My waking life has taught me that discovery is a process that requires many hands, working together in what can seem like seamless ways. Maybe navigation is a better word than discovery. Or guidance. It’s fun to stride aimlessly across the cultural landscape, but guides make the journey legible. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s guided me. As a kid, I discovered the poetry of Yeats when an uncle gave me an anthology for Christmas, fell in love with Brecht’s plays through the guidance of a university professor and fell into the Ramones mosh pit because a friend gave me a push. Growing into my music-writer life, I devoured music magazines and liner notes and books about music I didn’t know anything about; this is how I found out about virtually every artist that matters to me. Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train gave me Robert Johnson and The Band. Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje’s novel about Buddy Bolden, took me to Jazz Age New Orleans. I found out about X-Ray Spex and realized punk could be feminist from Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons’ The Boy Looked at Johnny. The authors of these books guided me along a path I was trying to bushwhack, and showed me signposts I would have otherwise taken years to find.

In the age of “music discovery,” a favorite term of corporations like Spotify, the role of the guide is changing. Some kinds, like old-school critics and curators, are being pushed to the side, their roles devalued as part of the “anyone can be an expert” social media-ization of expertise. I’ve written about this before; obviously it cuts close to the bone, since I’m one who’s worked really hard to gain the knowledge and perspective I attempt to deploy within my work. Yet one thing I’m realizing as I ponder whether I need to up my own nonexistent TikTok game is that the new media personalities who are making people like me outmoded, according to those pundits ringing the death knell for criticism, are really just the same old guides carving trails with different tools.

While Anthony Fantano and other talking-head nerds are essentially doing old-school rock critic improv — and putting in the same amount of work to prep that improv comedians do — two other very popular forms guide listeners to new music without explicitly making that the center of their schtick. One is the instructional model popularized by theory-heads like the Atlanta-based music producer Rick Beato and the New York jazz bassist Adam Neely. These studio- and gear-savvy YouTubers are technical nerds who can speak the language of session players in ways that even non-musicians understand. Most of their many viewers would say that Beato, Neely and the like are teaching them ideas, sharing the basics of music theory and songcraft and helpful hints about developing technical skills. They are also shaping taste and leading their fans toward music they otherwise might now know. The Beato-Neely crowd weighs in plenty on various musical canons, sometimes reinforcing old hierarchies (check out Beato’s rock-centric “What Makes This Song Great ?” series) and sometimes nudging viewers out of their comfort zones (Neely’s 23-minute exploration of Wayne Shorter’s harmonic system surely introduced a lot of undergrads to that jazz great’s discography).

At a time when music education is woefully underfunded and retail stores have been replaced by streaming apps, I think it’s great that these explainers have found an audience. They're like the cool band teacher or record-shop clerk who’s there to help you get over your jitters about your chops and your taste. And though they tend to favor the familiar, either grounding their lessons in classic popular song or courting clicks by deconstructing Sabrina Carpenter songs, some do use their platforms to promote undersung artists. Neely, for example, recently produced a video called “The Harmonic Genius of Lau Noah,” highlighting the Catalan jazz wizard (and, I have to add, incorporating some shots from this Tiny Desk Concert). Neely released a collaboration with Noah in July; if he were a traditional music writer, that fact would have caused some people to question his critical distance. But since he’s more like a mentor than a critic, his professional experience with her actually strengthens his recommendation. The traditional media figure these YouTubers (and some similar podcasters) recalls the most, in fact, was a musician herself — Marion McPartland, whose long-standing public radio show Piano Jazz let listeners in on the fellowship of musicians as she interviewed and played songs with esteemed peers.

The other kind of video offering invisible guidance is one that’s a favorite time-waster for many: the musical reaction video. This niche has been making stars for more than a decade and has, writers have argued, challenged genre boundaries, expanded the parasocial universe and exposed complicated aspects of the West’s racial dynamics. It’s also introduced millions of listeners to both new stuff and music from the vaults. If music theory explainers tickle their fans’ brains, reaction vloggers aim for their hearts: As a song plays, their swaying shoulders, thrown hands and raised voices, unleashing thrilled “ooooohs” and disgusted “yikes,” offer context that is personal and embodied instead of analytical or historical. They are the old-school radio jocks to Beato and his ilk’s groovy band teachers. Wolfman Jack’s howl would fill his XERB radio booth and echo across the California border when he played a new Stones cut; Alison Steele, the Nightbird, murmured her fandom for Doors singer Jim Morrison late at night across WNEW’s airwaves in New York.

The most beloved DJs mirrored fans’ enthusiasm for the artists they championed and offered virtual companionship; that’s what reactors like the father-and-son team of Rod II and Rod Sr. or the singing couple Terry and Kaniyia do when they’re rocking in their seats to Clipse or Lady Gaga. Music reaction adds dynamism and immediacy to curation in the same way that DJs did in the pre-automoted days when a listener could imaginatively experience a jock grabbing a record from the shelf, twirling it in her hands, placing it on the turntable and carefully putting the needle to the groove. That many reactors come in pairs adds a new layer to this paradoxically palpable virtual experience. Instead of the intimacy of what feels like a one-on-one encounter, listening offers access to a private club (or maybe a fantasy dorm room, or a subway car where two kids share a set of wired earbuds) where mutual appreciation is the only entrance requirement.

These audiovisual forms of guidance through the ever-expanding music universe are often invoked (especially in the recent round of doomy think pieces about the death of criticism) as replacements for music writing. I don’t think that’s what they are. They update other roles within music’s collaborative world, ones that themselves benefited from the complementary work music writers were doing.

Musicians can use the support from all corners, especially in an increasingly bot- and algorithm-driven industry where platforms are proving careless in the extreme, even sometimes failing to note when an album is created by a real person or AI. And though, for writers like myself, new-media commentators can feel like a threat (mostly, I say after decades in this biz, because media companies are always eager to put someone on the cost-cutting chopping block), in truth every way a person learns about music adds something specific and complementary to the others. I still believe in reading prose as a uniquely effective way to absorb history and subtle arguments about music, but videos and podcasts do offer multi-media experiences that have their own obvious value — they allow a listener to actually hear the music under discussion.

Beyond that, though, I think it’s the human touch that matters. Earlier, I mentioned the books that influenced my listening as a novice nerd. I didn’t tell you that I also spent many afternoons rifling through the bins at the Lower Queen Anne Tower Records, where a sweet guy named Michael told me to buy that Shangri-La’s single and the debut from some new singer-songwriter named Rickie Lee Jones. Or that my radio dial was tuned to the college radio station KCMU — which evolved into the indie stalwart KEXP — where my friend Shirley spun Goth sides until Jon Kertzer started his African music show, the Best Ambiance.

I didn’t get anywhere in this game of loving music for a living by myself. And I don’t think any one path toward expertise, or even just enjoyment, should be favored above the others. These days I’m gaining clarity from the explainers, heart from the reactors and the resonance from the writers. It’s all helping me find new corners to explore.

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Here are some of my discoveries this week

Frequent NPR Music contributor and Nashville Public Radio music reporter Jewly Hight brought together some of the leading lights of Black folk music for this excellent radio special on the revival of the banjo among Black pickers, a collaboration between WPLN and WUNC.
This inquiry into how very online guys actually feel about Sabrina Carpenter from Bea at the Digital Meadow newsletter blew my mind (TL;DR – they don’t like her one bit).
I was so happy to see the producer, singer-songwriter and mystical human Joe Henry receive a lifetime achievement award at the Americana Awards this week. He’s one of my favorite artists, deserving of all love. And I’m equally thrilled that his long-simmering collaboration with Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Famer Mike Reid — the guy who wrote my personal saddest song ever, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” — is now out in the world. Listen to Life and Time, and catch Reid and Henry on their mostly-East Coast tour right now. It’s a gorgeous night of music.
It’s always fun to hear personal landmarks name-checked in song. This heartfelt honky-tonker from Kapali Long, whose life brought him from Hawaii all the way to Nashville, namechecks the arterial that runs right by my house! Respect, Gallatin Pike.
Huge congrats to my pal and former New York Times compatriot Ben Ratliff — his meditation on music and running, Run the Song, made the nonfiction longlist for the National Book Award.
I’m not sure I can really advise you to do as I’m doing and binge all the films in the Criterion Channel’s 1970s thrillers collection, but I got a lot from finally watching Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid classic The Parallax View. Uncomfortably relevant.
I recently discovered lychee martinis. If you indulge… OMG.

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