veraville: (via agrammar):

“…most of us will, for instance, read just as much about politicians we can’t vote for (or against) as we will for our actual representatives. Because, well: we want to know what’s going on. The same thing held for print music magazines, which didn’t come with “back” buttons: stuck on a bus with a copy of one, you’d be a lot more likely to read about the genres and bands you didn’t like. Not just out of boredom, but to have a better idea of what surrounded the stuff you did like — what other people were listening to, or the ways they talked about it, or just what kinds of sub-trends and mediocrities and bad ideas were floating around your preferred genre, and what interesting conclusions might be drawn from them. All this is just an attempt to argue the obvious: that reading a couple interesting things about music you don’t want to hear can be useful and actually even fun. It can even, in the end, make you more efficient at figuring out what you do want to hear — you might wind up with a better perspective on the territory, rather than just a laser focus on acquiring things that are already to your tastes. You might wind up with better ideas and tools for thinking about stuff. Or, yes, maybe you’ll just read a review of something you don’t care for but browse away thinking “oh, that was an interesting idea in there about X.”

Also this, from the post to which the above is a response:

What I do is try to put something in every review I write that I think is actually an interesting point or idea whether or not you care about the band or are ever going to hear the record. I don’t always manage it but that’s the idea. Probably it says something awful about the times in which we live that I have to think of ideas as ‘easter eggs’ like this, but oh well!

I think too often critical writing is seen as a matter of just designating things as good or bad, and in that way review sections (whether in print or online) become kind of a battlefield in a war on taste. Which, like most wars, is going to drag on and on and never have a clear winner but bring a lot of good people down in the process. It’s more enjoyable and more constructive and more stimulating to think of criticism as a matter of sharing ideas. Even before I worked at a magazine, I read reviews not to decide what album I wanted to buy next, but just because I liked reading, which is in itself about an exchange of ideas, not just getting happy or getting angry because someone did or did not write something you agree with about something you’ve likely already formed an opinion about (although, yeah, that still comes into play).