Paul Morley interviews fellow music critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This, for The Guardian:
Morley’s post about critics, and meeting Alex Ross, is also worth reading:
I’ve always liked a critic who doesn’t think like anyone else. Someone who takes me so much by surprise with their opinions, approach and rigour that they themselves become a kind of artist. I like a critic who demonstrates that they deserve to evaluate and document the work and art of others by writing in such a way that the work makes more sense, sometimes only makes sense, because of what they write and why they write it. I loved critics, whether it was Kenneth Tynan, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Richard Meltzer, John Updike, Roland Barthes, Pauline Kael, Angela Carter or Lester Bangs, for the way they made it clear, with such evangelical poise, precision and purpose, that without the great critic, the world, and the worlds of those that made up the world, was never properly finished off.