I’m excited to announce the release of the latest report I’ve been working on for Critical Minded: Beautiful Struggles: Pop Music Critics of Color and the Critical Landscape. It’s the second in a series that began last year with Topdogs and Underdogs: Critics of Color and the Theatrical Landscape.

I am super-proud to be part of this research on the conditions, challenges, and, increasingly, threats, faced by cultural critics. As our arts & culture landscape is increasingly riven with censorship, fear, and unbridled attempts to quash even the most anodyne avant-garde art, it’s more important than ever to advocate for a free, rich, and vibrant critical ecosystem. Critics need to be able to critique, to speak their minds, to air unpopular, ugly, and inconvenient truths. And we need a cultural landscape that is resilient enough to tolerate dissent, disagreement, and discussion.

I hope this report serves as a call to action to publishers, funders, and anyone who cares about culture, not just to take note, but to do something, no matter how small, to support cultural criticism. I also hope it will serve as a stake in the ground so that future folks know how passionately we struggled to speak our minds, what we sacrificed to do it, and how much it meant to us.

In the past months, I have personally experienced two examples of the fear and pressure that publishers seem to be feeling right now. In one case, a piece I wrote, which made a general critical statement about the Trump administration (and has not been published yet) caused the publication to consult its lawyers before accepting it. In another, my description of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran as “unprovoked” was deleted, even though it was in an art review (I was not reporting on the war) and could be construed as my opinion.

I have been writing and publishing about art for over 20 years and I have never experienced this kind of “editing” before. In the latter case, I could have pulled the piece, but decided it was more important to highlight the show and the artists than to insist on criticizing the egregious attacks. In hindsight, maybe the word “egregious” is a clearer statement of opinion and would have passed muster, but the fact that I am even thinking about how to get around the censors chills me to my bones. Next time, I may make a different decision.

A little uplift

As we head into the Labor Day weekend here in the U.S., I share Jeff Chang’s latest “Notes from the Edge.” It’s chockfull of reflections on work, in particular the work of care, which comes in many guises: caring for loved ones, care-as-domestic-work, caring for ourselves. And, in the spirt of Beautiful Struggles — Jeff is a long-time music writer — it also includes “A Brief History of Work Songs,” a sweet meditation on how American popular music is rooted in the blues, which come from work songs, which come directly from the lived struggles and labor of Black people, whose enslavement was the foundation of American wealth. They wrought beauty out of struggle. It’s the least we can do to talk about it truthfully.