One Week, One Band: Longform Music Criticism on Tumblr
If there’s one thing that most music blogs have in common, it’s the pursuit of the new: the latest fad, the hot new single, Kanye’s most recent outfit. But there’s also room for long-form, in-depth criticism of music outside the hype cycle. And so, each week for the past year, 27-year-old German MBA student Hendrik Jasnoch has handed over the keys to his blog — One Week // One Band — and invited music critics and fans to delve into the catalog of a single artist. The musicians span the gamut (ABBA, Fugazi, Lil Wayne), and yet the writing is nearly always thoughtful, colorful, and reverent. We chatted with Jasnoch about music blogging, fandom, and why he thinks there’s still a place for long reads.
Why start a blog devoted to longform music criticism?
I sort of fell into the music critic crowd on Tumblr, where people kept discussing the evolving nature of music blogs and lamenting shortening buzz cycles and impersonal listicles. That gave me the idea to create a collaborative space that would allow for an in-depth, personal discussion of any kind of music, not just the latest mp3s. In the age of Spotify and YouTube, I don’t really need to explain to anybody what a song sounds like — but detailing why I like it, and where it sits in the wider web, seemed like something worth sharing.
