The market has spoken.

Washington City Paper: Ad Nausea: "We're left with this sad fact: The only high-profile rock criticism consistently worth reading can be found in a magazine whose mascot is a fop looking at a butterfly through a monocle. The New Yorker published a Lethem memoir about listening to Brian Eno that offered more insight into its subject than any of his so-called criticism. And the magazine respects in-house rock critic Sasha Frere-Jones enough to give him room to write long. He's allowed to follow his ear, covering everything from semi-obscure grime to MF Doom to Keren Ann, all of which he's required to make accessible to an audience that's probably more likely to buy The Mussorgsky Reader than any book about Wilco.

Even better, he doesn't blow a big word-count on recollections of high-school dances or dedications to Billy Corgan on his birthday. He's become one of the most thoughtful rock commentators around, and he's never even written a novel."

This an article decrying the lack of good, extensive rock criticism--kind of ironic to blow 1,000 words on the subject rather than use the space for, well, a long review. A few comments:

First, I'd say Robert Christgau has proven that penetrating insight on an album can be done with a few hundred words.

Second, the market doesn't want long criticism. A signficant reason for this is the utter lack of need for 1,000 or more words of in-depth wankery on 99.99% of the 40,000 titles released every year. Most of pop music isn't high art, even incidentally--it doesn't command in-depth, exploratory criticism, it doesn't inspire it, and even when it does, there's no market for it. There is so much being released that most reviewing outlets defer to quanity of reviews in order to cover a wider scope. This is a logistical issue as much as anything else.

Third, most critics are so busy trying to wade through the avalanche of records put in their mailbox that they don't have time to spend a couple of days writing one review that won't get read.