The wikifeet thing is an Albummer reference. From the Q&A episode. If I recall correctly, someone with the username Nathan from Tumwater (or something like that) submitted Emily's social media pics. Or something along those lines.
I'm primarily a hip hop guy. I know where to look when I want to find new rap releases and the algorithms generally do a decent-to-OK-to-meh enough job of steering me towards what it knows I want. But I also want to be exposed to music I'd normally never listen to otherwise. It's important to me to be adventurous when it comes to my music, if only for the fact that I know I'll get bored listening to the same kind of stuff over and over again, and I know what my limitations are in knowing how to assess other kinds of music I didn't spend my adolescence obsessing over.
So music reviews play a pretty important role in my life. But I will say there are a lot of qualifiers and caveats. Mainly, and this speaks to the critic-as-artist point someone in the episode made, the thing that's going to get me to listen to something is not a rundown of an artist's technical ability or praising the mastering or anything like that. It's the ability to describe how those aspects inform how the music made them feel. That's why most of my preferred reviewers these days are on youtube and social media and random people on Rateyourmusic or whatever. Areas where individual personalities matter more than the institution they may be working for.
One of my favorite albums last year was the self-titled album by For Those I Love. It wasn't a review from a huge institution that got me to listen to it. It was a "smaller" youtube channel called Deep Cuts describing how cathartic a listen it was. It's an album about the artist's best friend who took his own life, and while such a subject sounds like a heavy listen, the guy who runs the channel describes how it uses dance music to make the experience feel genuinely nostalgic. Like you're remembering the good times. I gave it a shot and I loved it, and I never would have found it on my own.
So yeah, music reviews good. People talking about music on the internet in a healthy manner good. But Drew has some genuinely good points. When so much music is at your disposal, the option to just jump in is certainly a valid one.
EDIT: On a similar note, I checked out that album Jeremy recommended. A Crowd of Drunken Lovers by Robert Sarazin Blake, and it's great!
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