Distant Powers: The L.A. Times’ Physically, Emotionally Removed Music Critic

by Jim Washburn

L.A. Times pop music critic Ann Powers has done the impossible: She has made me miss Bob Hilburn.

First, my beef with Bob: He’s an extremely nice guy, not at all full of himself, diligent, and hardworking even in retirement evidently. He did the gig for decades: the first byline I remember is his 1970 obit of Jimi Hendrix. But from that obit onwards, he seemed pretty much out to lunch on the power of music, paying scant lip service to Hendrix’ musical genius and focusing on his image and sexuality. Bob, as far as I could tell, doesn’t get music, and always struck to the lyric sheet or artist’s “controversial” stance in defining them. He also seemed to have erected a journalistic firewall, rarely if ever allowing the inspiration, passion and daring of the artists he wrote about to infect his own writing.

But at least Hilburn was there doing the job. Though the Times doesn’t brag about it, they appear to have reached a deal with Powers that’s unique in journalism, where the music critic of a major city newspaper doesn’t actually live within 2,000 miles of the city she’s writing about. It’s the digital age and all (where you’re only a click away from hearing Kenyan tribeswomen singing to an antelope fertility god that is based on a Jimmie Rodgers 78 that reached their village in the 1930s) but there’s something to be said for boots on the ground. Part of the job of being a music critic in any city of whatever size is to help discover and introduce the local talent to the locals and to the world.

Sure, Bob probably couldn’t write about a Little League game without bringing Bruce Springsteen into it; and sure he tended to safely champion whatever the British music press was championing, but he was also down in the spittle-filled trenches, finding the likes of X and the Blasters when it mattered. These days, the Times leaves it to Randy Lewis to do all the heavy lifting while Powers jets in for the star events or e-pontificates from her Southern abode.

Fair enough, if she weren’t so darned unreadable. Case in point is her lengthy, typically joyless piece on Lady Gaga in this Sunday’s Times. It doesn’t reveal much about Gaga, except how much she fits into Powers’ Big Riff about the convergence of bohemia and the mainstream, which might seem to others to have been a moot point since the 1960s, when the AM airwaves flowed with the barely filtered influence of Brecht, Jarry, Burroughs, Varese and Stockhausen while you could choose between buying a Fugs album or Trout Mask Replica at your local K-Mart. Maybe Powers is a nice, not at all full of herself woman, but her work so often reads as if the subtext is, “Hey, look at me, as bohemian as can be, deigning to bring my superior intellect to your mainstream rag. A-ha! Another proof of how correct my thesis is!”

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