Frank Kogan

Actually, the way you've put this, I think my own formulation is backwards; in your examples above, Reynolds/K-Punk can often bring classroom terminology, a sense of "I've done my homework already, so I don't need to examine this particular problem even if my homework doesn't apply," to do pure hallway bullying and/or dismissal (usually the latter; if they're bullies, they're not very good at actually getting under skin the way true bullies do).

What I mean by the opposite formulation, the classroom hierarchy of rockcrit, is something I actually just kind of floated for the first time in the comment there, but I guess what I think it means is that there is a sense of Importance imparted to the enterprise of music criticism that strikes me as a kind of "take your medicine" mode of engagement: Carl Wilson's Celine book can dip into this, though it doesn't primarily reside here, and I see it as an integral part of the evolution of Pitchfork's house tone. Roughly it's a kind of studious examination that rarely actually has much of a pulse but is also lacking in, e.g., the most basic academic discipline that, dry as it may be, at least has stuff like a methodology, a process of inquiry, etc. So it's a deadness that's distinctively classroom, but the problem is that there are unanswered questions, the key one being "why is this important" (so what). That can often be an intellectual exercise that requires some outside-the-classroom thought, the classrooms for rockcrit being borrowed from all over the place, be it codified assumptions about what kind of music gets to convey what kind of information (this music is for the head, this music is for the body) or more direct influences from academia and cultural studies ("we must examine this because it really is a thing that ought to be examined"). I still haven't worked all of this out in my head yet, though.