Clickbait Dressed in the Clothes of Cultural Authority

The New York Times Magazine’s Greatest Songwriters List, the Industry Insider Problem, and the Traditions American Criticism Cannot See

The New York Times Magazine just published a list of the thirty greatest living American songwriters, assembled by polling more than 250 music industry insiders—artists, producers, managers, and executives—alongside six Times critics.

The individual entries are often well-written, and many of the inclusions are genuinely difficult to dispute.

But before examining who is on the list, it is worth examining how it was made, because the methodology explains the results.

The music industry is not a neutral observer of American musical culture. It is an institution with specific economic interests, specific professional networks, and specific blind spots that follow from both.

When the Times asks 250 music industry insiders to identify the greatest living American songwriters, it is not consulting a representative sample of informed musical opinion. It is consulting a professional class whose working definition of “songwriting” is inseparable from commercial popular music—from records, radio, streaming, and the elaborate ecosystem that sustains those activities.

The result is predictable: the list reflects the tastes and priorities of that professional class. It is a portrait of what the contemporary music industry values. It is not a portrait of what American songwriting has been.

The omissions are so systematic that they constitute an argument in themselves. Country and western songwriting—the Nashville professional tradition that has produced some of the most formally accomplished popular songs of the last half century—is largely invisible apart from a handful of predictable exceptions.

Soul as a distinct compositional tradition, separate from its R&B-pop descendants, is absent.

Jazz composition since 1970 does not appear. Gospel, simultaneously the most influential compositional tradition in American popular music history and the one least acknowledged by the commercial press, is recognized only as a background influence on artists who appear for other reasons.

American classical and art music composition is not even in the frame.

These are not minor oversights. They represent the majority of serious compositional work in American music over the period the list purports to cover.

My argument is straightforward: when you ask the music industry to identify the greatest songwriters, you get a list of the greatest commercially successful recording artists who write their own material.

But it is not the same category as “greatest American songwriters,” and the conflation of the two produces a document that is simultaneously accurate within its narrow frame and profoundly misleading as a portrait of American musical achievement.

What the Industry Sees—and Why

The artists on the list share a common profile: they are recording artists who write their own material, achieved commercial success on a significant scale, and whose work has been absorbed into the professional conversation that sustains the music industry. The 250 insiders who voted encounter these artists in label meetings, award show discussions, and the streaming data that drives industry decision-making. They are the songwriters the industry has created.

This means the list is organized around a specific model of what a songwriter is: the artist-songwriter, who performs their own material and whose songwriting is inseparable from their identity as a recording star.

This model displaced an older one—in which professional writers crafted songs for other artists to record, and compositional skill was evaluated independently of any particular performance. The older model produced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, Nashville’s Music Row, and the independent gospel songwriting tradition. The newer model produced this list.

Neither model is inherently superior. But they reward very different kinds of craft and are visible to very different professional constituencies. A Nashville session musician, a gospel choir director, or a jazz composer would generate a very different list. They were not, apparently, among the 250.

The deepest irony is that the traditions the list ignores have been in continuous conversation with the traditions it celebrates. American music has always been a delta—traditions constantly merging, diverging, and recombining in ways that confound the industry’s genre categories.

Blues became R&B became soul became funk became hip-hop, but at every stage it was also absorbing country, gospel, jazz, and Caribbean influences that the genre labels conceal.

Ray Charles understood this more clearly than any critic. His 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was not a crossover experiment but a demonstration that the harmonic language of country and the emotional vocabulary of gospel and soul were, at their roots, the same language. When Charles sang “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” he was not translating a country song into R&B. He was revealing that the distinction had always been partly artificial.

The Times list, organized by the industry’s genre categories, cannot see this cross-cultural reality—cannot see that the greatest American songwriting has always happened in the spaces between genres, not within them.

Nashville: The Craft Tradition the List Cannot See

The most glaring omission, given the breadth of the list’s claim, is the Nashville professional songwriting tradition. Country music is, by most commercial measures, the most popular genre in the United States. Its songwriting tradition—organized around professional writers who compose for other artists to record—is the most direct institutional descendant of Tin Pan Alley. It has produced, over the period the Times covers, some of the most formally accomplished popular songs in American musical history.

These are not stars. They are craftspeople whose names the metropolitan cultural press does not know.

Bobby Braddock co-wrote “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (1980) with Curly Putman—a song recorded by George Jones that is widely regarded, across decades of stable critical consensus, as the finest country song ever written. It is a masterwork of narrative compression: a man’s lifelong love told in three verses of accumulating detail, resolving in a final verse whose twist recontextualizes everything preceding it.

The management of tense, the controlled withholding of information, the deployment of reversal as emotional mechanism—this is sophisticated formal technique by any standard.

Braddock also wrote “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” (Tammy Wynette, 1968) and “Golden Ring” (Jones and Wynette, 1976). His absence from the Times list is a symptom of the methodology.

Kris Kristofferson represents a different strand: the songwriter whose work escaped genre boundaries through sheer literary quality. His songs of the late 1960s and early 1970s—“Me and Bobby McGee” (Roger Miller, 1969; Janis Joplin, 1971), “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Sammi Smith, 1970), “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” (Johnny Cash, 1970)—combined literary ambition with country vernacular in ways that had few precedents.

The opening line of “Me and Bobby McGee”—“Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train”—establishes character, situation, and mood in nine words with the economy of the best fiction. Kristofferson is a songwriter’s songwriter, not a recording star, which is precisely why the industry insiders who voted for this list do not work in his world.

The Times will note, in its defense, that the list includes not only Dolly Parton but Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, and Shane McAnally — whom it praises as “Music Row pros par excellence, brilliant practitioners of the time-honored tradecraft: crisp hooks, witty wordplay, brisk storytelling, songs that click and whir like little machines.”

But notice who these three are: Nashville writers associated with Kacey Musgraves, with the progressive-country movement, with songs addressing sexual orientation (”Follow Your Arrow”) and with a Tony-nominated Broadway musical (”Shucked”).

They are the Nashville songwriters whose work has already crossed over into the cultural world the Times inhabits — who have made themselves legible to the same metropolitan insiders who voted for the list. While the Times acknowledged the Nashville tradition at its most culturally palatable edge, its leading practitioners remain invisible. That is not a correction of bias. It is an illustration of it.

The Politics of Genre: How Music Gets Coded

The omissions on this list are not only aesthetic. They are political—and the politics run in a specific direction that’s worth spelling out. The Times is a metropolitan, liberal publication, and its list reflects the cultural politics of that world. Pop, hip-hop, and R&B—the genres that dominate the list—have come to function, in the contemporary cultural landscape, as markers of progressive identity. They are the music of the cities, of younger audiences, of communities defined by their distance from the traditional American heartland.

Country, by contrast, has been politically coded as conservative—associated in the cultural imagination with rural whiteness, with a traditionalism that shades into reaction.

Gospel occupies a wholly different space: it is the music of Black Christian community, which cuts across the liberal-conservative divide in ways that neither the metropolitan left nor the evangelical right knows how to accommodate.

These codings are not entirely wrong—country radio did become, particularly after the culture wars of the 1990s and the post-9/11 Toby Keith moment, a vehicle for a specific kind of American nationalist sentiment, and hip-hop did become the most sustained vehicle for Black political expression in contemporary popular culture.

But the codings are also profoundly reductive, and they have consequences for how lists like this one get made. When the 250 industry insiders who voted for the Times list systematically overlooked the Nashville songwriting tradition, they were not making a purely aesthetic judgment. They were, consciously or not, registering a cultural preference: country is not their music, not their world, not their politics.

The same insiders who can discuss Kendrick Lamar’s engagement with systemic racism with genuine sophistication may never have seriously engaged with the tradition of Kris Kristofferson or Bobby Braddock—not because that tradition is inferior but because it is politically coded as belonging to the other side.

This is a significant intellectual failure, and it cuts in both directions. The right’s dismissal of hip-hop as music is a parallel failure—a refusal to engage seriously with a tradition of formal innovation and political expression because of its cultural coding.

What neither side can see, and what a serious critic should insist on, is that compositional achievement is not a function of political alignment. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is a masterwork of narrative compression that has nothing to do with its audience’s political leanings. “Alright” is a formally sophisticated and politically consequential song that has nothing to do with the fact that it is beloved by coastal progressives.

Judging music by the politics of its audience is tribalism dressed in aesthetic language.

Gospel complicates this picture in ways that are particularly revealing. The gospel tradition is, among the traditions the Times list ignores, the one that most dramatically cuts across the political and cultural divisions that structure the list’s blind spots.

André Crouch’s songs were sung in Black Baptist churches and white evangelical megachurches simultaneously. Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day” reached secular audiences across racial and class lines. This cross-denominational and cross-cultural reach is itself a compositional achievement—evidence that Crouch and Hawkins were writing in a musical language of sufficient breadth and depth to transcend the demographic categories that commercial music uses to organize itself.

The Times list’s inability to see this achievement is a failure of cultural imagination that the politics of the list’s own production helps explain.

Soul and Gospel: Absorbed but Unacknowledged

Soul music presents a different kind of omission. Its compositional heritage is present on the list—but absorbed into the history of later artists rather than recognized as a distinct tradition with its own practitioners deserving direct acknowledgment.

The collaboration between Al Green and producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records in Memphis between 1971 and 1974 generated a body of work—“Let’s Stay Together,” “I’m Still in Love with You,” “Call Me,” “Here I Am”—whose formal economy is remarkable. These songs achieve emotional intensity through the most compressed means: minimal chord progressions, spare arrangements, lyrics that circle a single emotional state. The restraint is the art.

Ann Peebles, working in the same studios, co-wrote “I Can’t Stand the Rain” (1973)—one of the decade’s most formally perfect singles, its central image (rain on a tin roof as an emblem of memory and absence) managed with a precision that recalls lyric poetry.

The Muscle Shoals writers Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham co-wrote “Dark End of the Street” (James Carr, 1967) and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” (Aretha Franklin, 1967)—songs of extraordinary harmonic sophistication that have functioned as standards across multiple genres.

The distinction between Smokey Robinson, who performed with the Miracles, and Dan Penn, who wrote for other artists, is not a distinction of craft or achievement. It is the distinction of commercial visibility, which the methodology converts into the distinction of merit.

What is particularly striking about both the Nashville and soul traditions is how thoroughly they have borrowed from each other—a cross-pollination that the genre categories disguise. Muscle Shoals, Alabama, is geographically and culturally part of the Deep South that produced country music, and the white musicians who formed the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section—the Swampers—were steeped in country as much as in R&B. When they played on Aretha Franklin’s recordings, they were not abandoning one tradition for another; they were demonstrating that the traditions shared a root system.

The Nashville Sound of the late 1950s and 1960s, associated with producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, deliberately smoothed away the rougher edges of country in the direction of pop and easy listening—absorbing orchestral techniques, background vocal arrangements, and production values from the mainstream pop world. Charley Pride, the first major Black country star, reached the top of the country charts repeatedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a genre that was supposedly racially exclusive.

These interpenetrations are not exceptions. They’re the rule. American musical genres have always been more porous than the industry’s marketing categories suggest, and a criticism that takes those categories as natural rather than constructed will always miss what is most interesting about how American music actually develops.

Gospel presents the starkest case. It is simultaneously the most influential compositional tradition in the history of American popular music and the one least acknowledged by the commercial music press. Every R&B, soul, and hip-hop artist on the Times list has been shaped by gospel harmonic language and compositional structures—but the gospel composers who developed those languages exist in a separate professional world organized around churches and gospel radio, invisible to the 250 insiders who voted.

André Crouch, who died in 2015, wrote “Through It All” (1971), “My Tribute” (1971), and “Soon and Very Soon” (1976)—songs that became standards across the entire spectrum of American Christianity, sung simultaneously in Black Baptist churches, white evangelical megachurches, and Catholic parishes.

His cross-denominational reach is itself a compositional achievement: his harmonic language mediated between gospel and popular idioms in ways that made him accessible to communities with radically different musical backgrounds. Michael Jackson and Madonna sought his collaboration. U2’s Bono has cited him as a significant influence.

Among living composers, Twinkie Clark—primary composer and arranger for the Clark Sisters—brought harmonic sophistication to gospel recordings of the late 1970s and 1980s foundational for the R&B and hip-hop producers who subsequently sampled them. Her influence is universally acknowledged except on the Times list.

Jazz and Classical: Outside the Frame Entirely

Jazz composition since 1970 represents the most formally sophisticated body of compositional work produced by American musicians in that period, and it is entirely absent from the Times list—not because jazz composers are unrecognized within their own field, but because that field is institutionally invisible to the Times’ methodology.

Wayne Shorter, who died in 2023, was the most important jazz composer of the last half century. His compositions for the Miles Davis Quintet—“Footprints,” “E.S.P.,” “Nefertiti”—moved jazz composition away from blues and AABA structures toward through-composed forms integrating melody, harmony, and rhythm in unprecedented ways. His “Birdland,” written for Weather Report, is a piece of genuine compositional intelligence masquerading as a funk groove.

Chick Corea’s “Spain” (1972) has sustained hundreds of interpretations without exhausting its interest—the classical standard of durability. The institutional separation between jazz and commercial popular music, a social fact about the music industry, has been silently converted into an aesthetic judgment about relative merit.

Classical and art music composition is absent for a more fundamental reason: it exists entirely outside the conceptual frame the list presupposes. The terms “songwriter” and “composer” have come to function as class markers disguised as aesthetic distinctions.

Meredith Monk, whose compositional language integrates extended vocal technique, minimalist structure, and theatrical performance, is routinely described by scholars as one of the most significant American composers of the last half century. Steve Reich’s minimalism—“Drumming” (1971), “Music for 18 Musicians” (1976), “Different Trains” (1988)—has shaped producers across virtually every contemporary genre, from Brian Eno’s ambient music to aspects of hip-hop production.

Neither was ever a candidate for the Times list because the question of whether they are great living American songwriters was never asked.

From Song to Track: Technology, Copyright, and What We Gained and Lost

The omissions catalogued above are not only products of institutional bias. They reflect a transformation in what a song fundamentally is—driven by technology, reinforced by intellectual property law, and largely completed within the period the Times list covers.

For most of the twentieth century, the song was understood as a composed object separable from any particular performance or recording. Sheet music was primary; recordings were realizations of something prior to and independent of them.

A song was evaluated as a text—melody, harmonic structure, lyric—and its quality was demonstrated by its capacity to survive translation across contexts. The survival test was decisive: a great song performed by a lounge singer, a string quartet, and a jazz ensemble remained recognizably great in all three. Standards endured because they were structures of sufficient integrity to bear repeated reinterpretation.

The track, which has displaced the song as the dominant unit of popular music, works differently. It is not a composed text from which productions are derived; it is a specific sonic artifact in which the production process makes the work.

The beat, the sample, the particular timbre of a synthesizer: these are not vehicles through which a song is realized but the substance of the work itself. This shift began in psychedelic rock, was accelerated by hip-hop and electronic dance music, and became normative across virtually all commercial genres by the 1990s.

Its consequence for songwriting craft is profound: the ability to write a melody that survives reharmonization, or a lyric that works independently of its original setting, becomes less important than the ability to conceive a sonic world.

A track cannot be meaningfully covered, because its identity is inseparable from its production—which means the standard by which earlier songwriters were judged (can anyone perform this?) has been abolished without replacement.

Intellectual property law has accelerated and deepened this transformation in ways that rarely get discussed in music criticism. As recordings became the primary commercial product, the legal apparatus surrounding them became more elaborate and more aggressive.

Copyright terms were extended repeatedly—the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 being the most notorious instance—until songs that might once have entered the public domain and circulated freely remained private property for the lifetimes of their creators and beyond.

Sampling, which was the primary creative technique through which hip-hop built its sonic world, became increasingly legally fraught after the landmark Grand Upstairs/Bridgeport decisions of the 1990s and 2000s, effectively pricing smaller artists out of a technique that had defined the genre.

The result is a musical culture in which the tools of creative synthesis—building on, transforming, and recombining existing musical material—have become legally dangerous precisely as they have become technically easier. What the technology gives, the law takes away.

The transformation in how audiences relate to music has been equally profound, and equally unremarked by the Times list.

For most of the twentieth century, music was fundamentally a social experience: people gathered to hear live performances, listened to records together at home, shared music across generations within families and communities.

The Walkman, introduced in 1979, initiated a privatization of listening that earbuds and noise-canceling headphones have completed. Music became an intensely individual experience—a soundtrack to private life rather than a medium of communal experience.

The algorithmically driven playlist, which now mediates most people’s music discovery through Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, has extended this privatization in a new direction: instead of discovering music through shared social contexts—through friends, radio DJs, record store recommendations, or critics—listeners now encounter music filtered through personalization algorithms optimized to maximize engagement time.

These algorithms reward immediate emotional response and penalize music that rewards active, repeated listening. They create what Eli Pariser called a “filter bubble” in the domain of music: each listener inhabits a personalized sonic world that increasingly diverges from everyone else’s.

The shared musical culture that once made criticism meaningful—the assumption that critic and reader had encountered the same music and were arguing about its value—is dissolving.

It would be dishonest, however, to present the shift from song to track as an unambiguous loss. The track-based model has enabled genuine achievements that the song-based model could not have produced.

The layered sonic world of a Kendrick Lamar album—the way “To Pimp a Butterfly” integrates live jazz improvisation, spoken word, funk, and soul into a unified compositional argument—is an achievement that has no precedent and no analogue in the song-based tradition.

Missy Elliott’s work with Timbaland created a new vocabulary of rhythmic displacement and sonic texture that permanently expanded what popular music could sound like.

The hip-hop producer’s art of sampling—building new compositional contexts for existing recorded material, creating meaning through the juxtaposition of sonic references—is a genuine form of musical intelligence that the song-based tradition had no framework to evaluate or reward.

My argument is not that the track is inferior to the song but that the track and the song are different cultural technologies with different capacities and different limitations, and that a list purporting to honor “songwriters” should understand the difference—and acknowledge what has been lost along with what has been gained.

Protest Songs, the Latino Void, Broadway, and the Songwriting Room

Four further structural absences deserve naming together, because they share a common cause: each represents a tradition whose practitioners do not attend the same industry events, read the same trade publications, or move in the same professional networks as the 250 insiders who voted.

The folk-rock synthesis of the mid-1960s—the most productive merger of formal craft and political engagement in American popular music history—has almost no presence on the list. Bob Dylan appears, but the Times’s account underweights his early work, the phase most directly continuous with the protest tradition.

Phil Ochs’s songs—“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “There But for Fortune” (1964)—achieve a formal sophistication within their chosen constraints that critics who dismiss the tradition as propaganda have never engaged with seriously. Tom Paxton is still living and absent. Jackson Browne, who sustained politically engaged songwriting into the twenty-first century, and Ani DiFranco, who built an entire independent music infrastructure around politically committed work from the 1990s onward, do not appear.

The political song migrated into hip-hop—Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”—but largely vacated folk-rock territory, and that vacancy goes unacknowledged.

The underrepresentation of Latino musical traditions is, alongside the country and gospel omissions, the list’s most consequential gap. Bad Bunny and Romeo Santos appear, and their inclusion is warranted. But the list barely acknowledges the depth of Latino songwriting across four distinct musical cultures. Jorge Hernández of Los Tigres del Norte wrote “Contrabando y Traición” (1972)—the foundational narcocorrido, establishing compositional conventions that have shaped Mexican popular music for fifty years, addressing drug trafficking and border identity comparable to Anglo-American ballad tradition.

Ruben Blades’s “Pedro Navaja” (1978) is a seven-minute New York narrative integrating corrido structure with jazz harmony and Cuban son rhythm—its refusal to judge predator and victim differently is achieved through compositional architecture, not authorial commentary.

Willie Colón’s trombone-based arrangements, shaped by New York jazz and the Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrant experience, represent salsa at its most formally ambitious.

The United States has the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population. Latino music dominates streaming metrics. The insiders who voted apparently could not see past the English-language industry’s institutional boundaries.

Among all the omissions on this list, Broadway’s absence is the one that best exposes what the list’s conception of “songwriting” actually excludes. The American musical theater tradition—running from Rodgers and Hammerstein and Frank Loesser through Harold Arlen, Jule Styne, and Stephen Sondheim—represents the most rigorous surviving form of the older conception of the song: a composed text, separable from a particular performance, in which the integration of music and lyric is the central compositional problem rather than a secondary consideration.

Sondheim spent his career theorizing this problem and solving it at the highest level, insisting that lyric is not poetry set to music but a distinct art form in which syllable stress, vowel color, and phrase length are musical decisions as much as verbal ones.

His harmonic language in Sweeney Todd (1979) or Sunday in the Park with George (1984) is more formally sophisticated than anything on the Times list. His integration of dramatic situation and musical form in Company (1970) and Follies (1971) sets a standard of compositional intelligence that the artist-songwriter tradition has rarely approached.

Sondheim died in 2021 and is excluded by the living-only criterion—but the tradition has living practitioners. Jason Robert Brown, whose Parade (1998) and The Bridges of Madison County (2014) extend the Sondheim model into the contemporary period, is doing work of genuine formal distinction.

Lin-Manuel Miranda achieved something that the Times list cannot quite accommodate. In Hamilton (2015) he applied Broadway’s tradition of musico-dramatic integration to hip-hop compositional techniques, creating the most successful fusion of those two traditions in American musical history.

Miranda has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the Grammy, and the Emmy. He is not on the Times list.

The list’s model of the artist-songwriter who generates streaming plays has no framework for a composer-lyricist who writes for performers in service of a dramatic narrative.

Broadway also illuminates the cross-cultural borrowing argument the essay has been making throughout. West Side Story (1957)—music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents—integrated Latin rhythms, jazz harmony, and operatic vocal writing at a moment when those traditions were understood as categorically separate. The “America” number alone moves between mambo, Broadway showstopper, and operatic ensemble in ways that anticipate the genre crossings the Times list celebrates in hip-hop and reggaeton fifty years later.

Cy Coleman’s Sweet Charity (1966) absorbed soul and R&B idioms into the Broadway form at exactly the moment Motown was reshaping commercial popular music. These are not borrowings from a tradition above or below Broadway’s own level; they are examples of the same creative synthesis that produced every genre on the Times list—and they are invisible because the list has no category for a songwriter who works in the musical theater.

Finally, the list celebrates individual songwriters and established partnerships while rendering invisible one of the most significant structural changes in commercial songwriting: the rise of the songwriting room.

The Scandinavian pop production model—associated with Denniz PoP and Max Martin at Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, which produced the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and early Britney Spears—systematically decomposed songwriting into specialist functions: chord progressions, melody, lyric, and production handled by different contributors.

By the 2010s, pop songs routinely listed five, eight, or fifteen credited songwriters—not because all made equal creative contributions, but because the industry’s legal structures incentivize credit proliferation.

The Goffin-King partnership that wrote “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was a genuine creative collaboration in which the compositional vision was identifiably shared. The contemporary songwriting room produces songs that are the result of a process rather than the expression of a sensibility. The list does not acknowledge this transformation. It cannot, because to do so would require the kind of historical analysis the methodology was not designed to provide.

Clickbait Where Criticism Should Be

All of the failures catalogued here—the genre omissions, the methodological bias, the conflation of commercial success with compositional achievement—are symptoms of a single deeper failure: the abandonment of criticism’s educational function at precisely the moment when that function matters most.

Popular music criticism in its serious phase understood its mission as partly pedagogical. Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Dave Marsh wrote about music in ways that required engagement with formal properties—harmonic structures, rhythmic innovations, the relationship between lyric and melody, the history of forms within which artists were working. They assumed readers willing to learn and used the occasion of reviewing records to teach.

Marcus’s Mystery Train (1975) situated rock and roll within American cultural history in ways that demanded genuine intellectual engagement. Gary Giddins’s jazz criticism assumed readers would want to understand what made Lester Young’s phrasing formally distinct from Coleman Hawkins’s—and explained it clearly enough that they could grasp the difference.

These critics contextualized, compared, contrasted. They did not merely celebrate or condemn. They taught.

That tradition has been largely displaced by criticism oriented toward cultural commentary rather than formal analysis. Contemporary popular music writing is primarily concerned with cultural significance: an artist’s relationship to social movements, their representation of marginalized communities, their place in the cultural conversation. But this is sociology, not criticism—and it is a different enterprise from criticism that educates readers about how music actually works.

The Times’s songwriters list is a case study in this substitution. The entry on Stevie Wonder notes his harmonic complexity without explaining what it consists of—what specific innovations he introduced, how they relate to the jazz harmony he drew on, how they function in the compositional structure of particular songs.

The entry on Jay-Z notes formal virtuosity without analyzing how his internal rhyme schemes function as musical counterpoint, or how his flow relates to the rhythmic structures of the tracks he raps over.

The entries on Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson praise the Motown aesthetic without explaining the formal conventions—the AABA structure, the management of the bridge, the verse-chorus relationship—that Motown songwriting both inherited and transformed. To explain those things would require knowing them. More importantly, it would require believing that readers deserve to know them.

This failure is not merely aesthetic. Arts education has been systematically sidelined in American schools—music, visual art, and theater among the first casualties of budget pressure.

Critical engagement with the arts is vanishing from public culture: book review sections have collapsed, arts journalism has contracted, the reviewer as a professional role is endangered.

In this context, a project like the Times’s songwriters list—with its institutional reach, its production values, its cultural authority—represents an enormous missed opportunity.

It could have taught readers how to listen to Wonder’s harmonies, how to follow the narrative architecture of a Kristofferson song, how the dembow rhythm works in reggaeton, how gospel harmonic language flows into R&B and hip-hop.

It could have shown readers that “American songwriting” encompasses traditions they had never encountered and given them the analytical tools to engage with those traditions seriously.

Instead it produced a celebrity index: thirty names, thirty appreciations, thirty playlists. Clickbait dressed in the clothes of cultural authority.

The great reviewers of the past—Edmund Wilson on literature, Clement Greenberg on painting, Andrew Porter on opera, Gary Giddins on jazz—understood themselves not just as critics but as educators.

They wrote as though their readers’ capacity to engage seriously with art was something that could be developed, not merely a fixed quantity to be satisfied. They contextualized their subjects historically, compared them across traditions, and contrasted achievement against failure in ways that gave readers frameworks for judgment rather than verdicts to accept.

That conception of the critic’s role has eroded, and the Times list reflects its erosion. It assumes readers who want to be told who is great rather than readers who want to understand why. That is a low estimate of the audience, and it is wrong.

The readers who would follow an argument about Bobby Braddock’s narrative technique, or about what Wayne Shorter did with harmony that jazz composers before him had not done, or about how André Crouch’s songs crossed denominational lines—those readers exist. They are not being served.

At a moment when the institutional supports for arts education are collapsing everywhere else, the abdication of that responsibility by institutions with the reach and resources of the New York Times is not a minor cultural failing. It is a serious one.