Jon Caramanica is a bad cliché

New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica followed up on the decision to not include Billy Joel on the “Greatest Songwriters” list – one of the most arbitrary, inconsequential pieces of musical “criticism” the newspaper has delivered in my almost four decades of reading it – in a video chat with his colleagues. He yelled this glibly – as he often does in other videos and podcasts I’ve tried to listen to of him, or at a round table with his colleagues – with supreme self-confidence, taken in with his own supposed edification:

“Billy Joel is a very good example of a person who writes 1 or 1.5 kinds of songs really well, that also people before him wrote really well, and people after him wrote really well…I like Billy Joel. People I love like Billy Joel. But…we are making a list of 30 greatest American songwriters. You’re not only saying what are they great at. You’re saying what aren’t they doing…And Billy Joel exists in pre-existing traditions. He’s good at it. Some days, I think great. But you gotta draw the line somewhere.”

I try to read and listen to Jon Caramanica because I have a paid subscription to the New York Times and I am a musician as well as a music fan. But Jon Caramanica has never illuminated anything about music for me, and I’m pretty sure he never will. Jon Carmanica spends the majority of his time fawning over pop-confections like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or Kacey Musgraves. The pop that “matters” to Jon Caramanica is pop that matters, largely, for tween and teenaged girls. Is he not aware of the irony of his situation? There is indeed pop that matters. But Jon seems obsessed with the bubble-gum variety.

And then he speaks dismissively of Billy Joel?

What is going on here? The thing is, this is par for the course in the New York Times. Jon Caramanica is the latest iteration of a perennial figure: the Know-Nothing Pop Critic who thinks he knows something. He personifies the problem that has always existed in criticism of pop music – and historically, jazz as well. (If anyone remembers the bad old days of jazz critic Peter Watrous they know what I mean.) Namely: Jon Caramanica doesn’t know anything about the nuts and bolts of music. He is taken in with pop music as a cultural phenomenon, and not as a musical phenomenon.

I do not mean to set up an us-and-them between musicians and everyone else. There are plenty of people who do not have a musical background or education and can understand that Billy Joel’s craft is deep and innovative. Jon Caramanica, alas, is not one of them. So he confidently yells that Billy Joel “writes 1 or 1.5 kinds of songs really well, that also people before him wrote really well, and people after him wrote really well…” This displays utter ignorance of the subject he is paid to write about. It is so deeply untrue.

Jon Caramanica is like the guy I went to high school with in the 1980s: the guy who listened to Depeche Mode, Joy Division and Talking Heads, and refused to listen to Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Heart, Aerosmith – or Billy Joel for that matter, and any number of other bands. He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically. He is a cliche in this sense, but one that will be forgotten. Billy Joel may be a cliché – but for all the right reasons. He’s cliché because he’s great, and he will not be forgotten.

What do I mean when I say Jon Caramanica is a snob? It’s all there in that little sentence:

“People I love like Billy Joel…”

He might as well have said, with zero irony, “Some of my best friends like Billy Joel.” Jon Caramanica listens to music like a critic, in the worst sense of the word: he doesn’t listen because he loves the music. He listens with an eye on how he can situate himself in the social strata, as a pop music critic and fan. This means doing some gymnastics to show he’s hip enough to understand the zeitgeist of Bad Bunny. It also means dismissing Billy Joel.

And what do I mean when I say that Jon Carmanica knows nothing about music? Well, first of all, I say that from the perspective of a musician. Billy Joel’s recorded oeuvre shows him as an innovative melodist, harmonist, rhythmicist, and orchestra/producer. And this all plays out in his songwriting craft. Here is a random list of Billy Joel songs. Each one is a groundbreaker in its own right, each one tells a story, the way a song is supposed to, and importantly, this collection of some of my own favorites dispells Caramanica’s embarrassingly stupid claim: each one is unique in its own right:

“Rosalinda’s Eyes”

“Zanzibar”

“She’s Always a Woman”

“Stiletto”

“Just the Way You Are”

“Prelude/Angry Young Man”

“Streetlife Serenader”

“Last of the Big Time Spenders”

“James”

“Movin’ Out”

“Allentown”

“She’s Right on Time”

“Vienna”

“She’s Got a Way”

“All for Lenya”

“Don’t Ask Me Why”

That’s just a cross-section, and I only included a few of his big hits. Jon Caramanica should stop listening to Taylor Swift and listen to those songs. That’s songwriting, from a great songwriter. It’s not a “team of songwriters” and producers, trying to engineer a personality cult for tween listeners.

The thing about Caramanica and some of the other critics in these clubby podcast chats that are now the thing at The NY Times is…I really don’t get a sense of what music any of them actually like, let alone love. They are so busy self-consciously trying to show that they understand the product placement and marketing of people like Taylor Swift, all in this kind of winky-nudgy way, with jokes all the time. I’m not even sure they like her. The bottom line is: they’re not talking about the music they love. I never hear Jon Caramanica speak about the music he loves, with reverence - whatever music that would be.

Billy Joel is one of our greatest living American musical artists and he will be remembered long after Jon Caramanica. I am sick of opening up my NYTimes app and scrolling through to read the music review, and finding it’s about some teenybopper bullshit. It’s not just that Jon Caramanica doesn’t know much about music. It’s that the music he chooses to write about is inconsequential – unless you’re a 13-year-old. In one sense, I want to support critics because their revenue stream is diminishing. Pop matters, for sure. But not the pop you’re choosing, Jon. Am I gatekeeping? No more than he is. And he gets paid for it. There are any number of writers here on Substack who write much more illuminatingly about pop music than him.

The Beatles were pop. And Billy Joel – like his contemporaries Supertramp, Elton John, ELO or like any number of bands who Jon Caramanica probably doesn’t like – came out of The Beatles. You’re damn-right, Jon, that Billy Joel “exists in pre-existing traditions.” Billy Joel also loved Ray Charles, and had an ear on jazz – you hear that breadth in his songwriting and production, in tracks like “New York State of Mind” or “Zanzibar.” That’s a good thing. It’s called influence, having roots.

Jon Caramanica, please, please, please – you’re right around my age but you seem so childish when you’re yelling on these NYTimes videos on your podcast. Take my advice: Do not be so fucking goddamn sure of yourself. You are a mere critic, who is displaying his ignorance on musical matters. Tread lightly, with humility. Do not speak so flippantly about great musicians like Billy Joel. Less is more, Jon. Step back. Go back to the records you really love, that you fell in love with. And stop making podcasts about Taylor Swift. I really don’t fucking care. None of us do.