I began Michael Kammen’s biography of Gilbert Seldes after breakfast. Before breakfast, I’d read my morning newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, a sober broadsheet which has just started a weekly rock-video column—and nothing as humdrum and utilitarian as reviews of new rock videos, but rather a provocative and ongoing debate on issues arising and trends discernible therefrom. The connection between Seldes and The Gazette’s latest signing is made explicit in Kammen’s cumbersome title: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Perhaps we would have got here one way or another, but it’s still doubtful whether, without Seldes’s pioneering efforts, twenty-three-year-old female college graduates could have expected (or would have wanted) to make a living commenting on the intellectual themes arising from rock videos.

Sorry, I should have said “music videos.” Until fairly recently, “Music” in respectable journals used to mean fellows like Mozart and Beethoven. In The Gazette’s and most other arts pages now, “Music” means The Dead Presidents and Niggaz With Attitude, and Wolfgang and Ludwig have been reclassified as the specialist sub-genre “Classical Music.” Before Seldes was born (1893), a distinguished music critic was someone who had studied sonata form and soprano passagio. Since Seldes’s death (1970), a distinguished music critic has been someone who has studied the social significance of rap lyrics and the postmodern attitudinal irony of grunge haircuts, and can tell you which recording studio Tupac’s producer was shot dead outside of.