How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge

Music writers were once known for being much crankier than the average listener. What happened?

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There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?” One of the era’s best-known critics, Lester Bangs, specialized in passionate hyperbole. In a 1972 review of the Southern-rock band Black Oak Arkansas, for the magazine Creem, Bangs called the singer a “wimp” and suggested (“half jokingly”) that he ought to be assassinated—only to decide, after more thought, that he quite liked the music. “There is a point,” he wrote, “where some things can become so obnoxious that they stop being mere dreck and become interesting, even enjoyable, and maybe totally because they are so obnoxious.” Something similar could have been said about Bangs and the other early critics of what was commonly referred to as “popular music”—a usefully broad term, although sometimes not broad enough. In 1970, Christgau ruefully conceded that some of his favorite groups, like the country-rock act the Flying Burrito Brothers or the proto-punk band the Stooges, might more accurately be said to make “semipopular music.” Over the years, “critically acclaimed” came to function as a euphemism for music that was semipopular, or maybe just unpopular. This magazine’s first rock critic was Ellen Willis, who in 1969 wrote presciently about the way that rock and roll was being “co-opted by high culture”: fans, as well as critics, were trying to separate the “serious” stuff from the “merely commercial.” One of her successors was the English novelist Nick Hornby, who eventually grew curious about the chasm that separated the records he loved from the records everyone else loved. In August, 2001, he published a funny and audacious essay titled “Pop Quiz,” in which he listened to the ten most popular albums in America and relayed his thoughts, some of which would not have sounded out of place coming from an opera box in the Muppets’ theatre. He didn’t mind Alicia Keys but was bored by Destiny’s Child and depressed by albums from Sean Combs (then known as P. Diddy) and Staind, a neo-grunge band. One need not hate this music to enjoy Hornby’s acerbic survey of it: whenever I think of Blink-182’s pop-punk landmark “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket,” which is often, I think of Hornby wondering just how everything had got so stupid. “My copy of the album came with four exclusive bonus tracks, one of which is called ‘Fuck a Dog,’ but maybe I was just lucky,” he wrote. In a sense, he was lucky: back in 2001, fans who wanted to hear “Fuck a Dog,” a brief but well-executed acoustic gag, had to seek out one of three color-coded variants of the CD. A number of other writers were exasperated by Hornby’s exasperation. In an essay in the Village Voice, the critic and poet Joshua Clover accused him of suggesting that “pop music is beneath discussion, if not quite beneath contempt.” It turned out, though, that Hornby’s essay was the beginning of the end of an era. In the years that followed, music writers grew markedly less likely to issue thoroughgoing denunciations of popular music and more likely to say they loved it. In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred—on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score—0.0 out of 10—since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.” Even if you are not the sort of person who pores over aggregate album ratings, you may have noticed this changed spirit. By the end of the twenty-tens, people who wrote about music for a living mainly agreed that, say, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” by Post Malone (Metacritic: 79); “Montero,” by Lil Nas X (Metacritic: 85); and “Thank U, Next,” by Ariana Grande (Metacritic: 86), were great, or close to great. Could it really have been the case that no one hated them? Even relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous. “Solar Power,” the 2021 album by the New Zealand singer Lorde, was so dull that even many of her fans seemed to view it as a disappointment, but it earned a polite three and a half stars from Rolling Stone. Some of the most cutting commentary came from Lorde herself, who later suggested that the album was a wrong turn—an attempt to be chill and “wafty” when, in fact, she excels at intensity. “I was just like, actually, I don’t think this is me,” she recalled in a recent interview. And, although there are plenty of people who can’t stand Taylor Swift, none of them seem to be employed as critics, who virtually all agreed that her most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was pretty good (Metacritic: 76). Once upon a time, music critics were known for being crankier than the average listener. Swift once castigated a writer who’d had the temerity to castigate her, singing, “Why you gotta be so mean?” How did music critics become so nice? At the time, critics in thrall to the sound and ethos of rock and roll—loud guitars, sweaty authenticity—were sometimes accused of “rockism,” a musical prejudice. “I remember being called ‘rockist’ as far back as 2001,” Schreiber told me. In 2004, when I was a pop-music critic at the Times, I wrote about rockism, suggesting that critics in search of scruffy rock-and-roll energy might be missing out on the considerable charms of pop, R. & B., country, and other genres that sounded too slick, too commercial. In the years afterward, some people started using the word “poptimism” to describe a more inclusive sensibility that critics might adopt instead. Schreiber says that the debate made him rethink Pitchfork’s approach. Throughout the aughts and into the teens, the site expanded its coverage, reviewing more hip-hop and pop music. “I never, ever wanted to cover Taylor Swift,” he told me. “I just thought it was not part of our scope.” This was, of course, a matter of taste: he found her music “extremely bland and uninteresting,” but most of his colleagues disagreed. In 2017, Pitchfork changed its policy to permit (and perhaps require) Swift’s albums to be reviewed, starting with “Reputation”: 6.5. It is surely no coincidence that, as Pitchfork became more open-minded, it also became kinder. “I think part of that was because Pitchfork was having somewhat of an identity crisis,” Schreiber says now. (He left the site in 2019.) Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it—or else. This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with. As the magazine world shrank, much professional reviewing was done not by all-purpose critics like Christgau, who covered just about everything, but by freelancers, who might be assigned reviews based on their affinity for the performer, which created a built-in positive bias. The virtual intimacy of social media slowly erased the distinction between talking about somebody and talking to them. In 2020, after Pitchfork gave a 6.5 to an album by the pop star Halsey, the singer asked, on Twitter, “can the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already.” This wouldn’t have been noteworthy, except that, by then, Pitchfork had been purchased by Condé Nast, which also owns this magazine, and had moved into 1 World Trade Center—a building that most people hope will not collapse, despite the fact that a handful of pop critics work there. Some writers who criticized Taylor Swift reported that they and their family members had been threatened, harassed, and doxed. “We started to get a lot fewer pitches for negative reviews, particularly of artists with huge fan bases,” Schreiber recalled. Perhaps the most infamous review of “The Tortured Poets Department” was published in the music magazine Paste. It had a cantankerous opening sentence that Lester Bangs might have enjoyed (“Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!”), but no byline; the magazine said that it wanted to shield the writer from potential “threats of violence.” For similar reasons, the Canadian publication Exclaim! declined to identify the author of certain articles about Nicki Minaj, whose fans can be ferocious. Often, I suspect, writers have decided to keep their most inflammatory views to themselves. “I think sometimes I can tell when a writer politely demurs, without saying as much,” one editor told me. “They’re just, like, The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.” The word “poptimism” implies lighthearted fun, but much of the criticism of the twenty-tens was earnestly concerned with justice and representation. One review of an album by Janelle Monáe, a retro-futurist R. & B. singer, noted that she was “a queer, dark-skinned Black woman in an industry historically inclined to value her opposite” (Pitchfork); another praised her as “not afraid to address systemic inequality in all its pervasive forms inside and outside of her music” (New York). One of the few big names to get consistently negative reviews was Chris Brown, a lithe heartthrob whose critical reputation never recovered from the fact that, in 2009, he attacked Rihanna, who was then his girlfriend, and later pleaded guilty to felony assault. In this atmosphere, there was no such thing as a strictly musical disagreement. It had seemed like good fun when, in 1978, Lou Reed insulted Christgau on a live album. (Reed derisively asked the audience, “What does Robert Christgau do in bed—you know, is he a toe-fucker?”) But the stakes were much higher when, in 2016, the R. & B. singer Solange suggested to Jon Caramanica, a white Times critic who had discussed her on his podcast, that he be more careful when talking about Black music. She pointedly tweeted at him, saying that her father had been “hosed down and forced to walk on hot pavement barefoot in civil rights marches in Alabama.” The idea of poptimism sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked, whether it be a pop song or a superhero movie or a romance novel. This is not a new idea—on the contrary, it evokes the Latin adage “De gustibus non est disputandum” and its modern analogue, repeated by kindergartners and, less excusably, by people who are no longer kindergartners: “Don’t yuck my yum.” The idea that people’s tastes have a right not to be criticized is, of course, quite fatal to the idea of criticism itself, as many critics have noticed. In the literary world, where reviewers are often authors themselves, writers have long complained about excessive coziness. “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene,” Elizabeth Hardwick observed, in 1959. In more specialized fields, like dance, complaints about the quality of criticism (not long ago, a German choreographer attacked one of his critics with dog feces) seem less urgent than complaints about its quantity: there are hardly any professional dance critics left in America, a situation that The Atlantic has called “a blow to the art form itself.” Meanwhile, film critics have had to contend not just with disgruntled directors and actors but with the fandoms that emerge, online, to defend their favorite characters or franchises. A. O. Scott, in his farewell column as the Times’ chief film critic, argued that this culture was “rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior.” That’s not a bad evocation of a sold-out concert, as long as you also mention the camaraderie and the joy. In pop music, unhinged fandom is not an unfortunate mutation—it’s the essence. Maybe that’s why, compared with some other kinds of nitpickers, pop critics can seem especially extraneous. Literary criticism is often seen as indispensable to intellectual life, perhaps because the form matches the content. (An essay about literature is itself literature.) And dance critics and their subjects seem to belong to the same fragile ecosystem. (With its own peculiar dominance rituals, apparently.) But few people think of pop-music critics as pillars of American intellectualism, and even fewer think of pop stars as an endangered species. Unlike movie critics or theatre critics or restaurant critics, pop critics can’t even claim to be saving their readers time or money: listening to a song is often easier, quicker, and cheaper than reading about it. One task for a pop critic is to help readers make sense of the musical free-for-all they encounter in their day-to-day lives. Another is to remind readers that nothing is so obviously silly, or so self-evidently important, that we can’t form strong and antagonistic opinions about it. I think, for example, that “Shake It to the Max (Fly),” the dancehall hit by MOLIY, is brilliantly hypnotic, but there are doubtless some listeners who instead find it tiresomely repetitive—although, these days, they may be too shy to say so. And I suspect that musicians themselves sometimes miss having critical critics around, if only as foils. The Taylor Swift song “Mean” is a righteous blast of indignation, aimed at a pompous writer who enjoys “pickin’ on the weaker man”; it sounds less righteous if you know that its target seems to have been Bob Lefsetz, who was not an all-powerful writer for a mainstream publication but an industry gadfly who shared his thoughts in an e-mail newsletter. Fifteen years after that song’s release, Swift is more powerful than just about anyone—and also more scrutinized than ever. Some of the same forces that inhibit criticism surely make it harder for musicians themselves to say what’s really on their minds, lest they trigger a social-media avalanche. At a time when everyone is shouting at everyone else, there is a paradoxical pressure on all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people to be on their best behavior if they want to stay above the fray. Fantano doesn’t mind playing the villain from time to time, and so he is able to deliver the kind of pungent, memorable put-downs that his writer peers have largely abandoned. He once described the popular British band Sleep Token as making “metal for Disney adults,” and looked genuinely distressed during a recent review of the country singer Morgan Wallen, whom he accused of using too much digital processing. “I feel like I’m listening to a redneck robot singing underwater,” he said. You can savor the description even if, like me, you have a fondness for this particular drawling cyborg. Sometimes Fantano channels the spirit of his nineteen-sixties forebears. He is something of a traditionalist: fond of noisy rock and feisty hip-hop, and deeply skeptical of the contemporary music industry. Just as critics before him worried about the dominance of radio, and then of MTV, Fantano deplores the algorithmic programming of platforms like Spotify and TikTok; in his view, these companies are replacing the old variety of the internet with a more “homogenized” musical landscape. “I think there is a subset of stuff that is just bland, uninspired algorithm trash that basically sounds like a machine made it,” he told me. “I think Alex Warren sort of fits that.” Warren is a twenty-four-year-old TikTok star who had a breakthrough hit this year with “Ordinary,” an earnest love song with a rippling beat and an overbearing gospel choir. (“The angels up in the clouds / Are jealous, knowing we found / Something so out of the ordinary,” he moans.) I don’t think Fantano is necessarily wrong to call the song trash, but I do think he’s wrong to imply that there’s something intrinsically bad about songs that are designed to fit an algorithm, or a market. Product-market fit is what makes pop music pop. The only way to separate good product from bad product is to listen closely—and, perhaps, to argue about it. Those musical arguments tend to be most fruitful when they’re about more than just music, and rockism stuck around for so long because it helped critics tell a compelling story about righteous authenticity versus fabricated fakeness. After its decline, critics needed a new story to tell. One solution was to frame musicians as heroes or villains in a fight for social justice. Another was to lean in to poptimism, focussing broadly on popularity, or, more narrowly, on pop as a musical genre. But fans of mainstream pop, as you may have noticed, tend not to be reliably “optimistic” about music, let alone polite: they are, on the contrary, viciously factional and unapologetically fickle, finely attuned to the subtle difference between a hit and a flop. Last year, fans and critics alike cheered on three inventive and ubiquitous pop stars: Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Charli XCX. At the same time, Katy Perry’s album “143” became one of the worst-reviewed albums of the decade. (New York called it “a contender for the pop flameout of the year.”) The unanimity was rather unsettling, but at least the acerbity was refreshing. Earlier this year, the rapper Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter VI” earned a similarly hostile reception. Are we entering a more critical era? Rolling Stone has reinstated its star system; on the other hand, the Times recently announced its intention to move its cultural coverage “beyond the traditional review.” Last year, Condé Nast shrank and rebooted Pitchfork; as both a colleague and a friend of some of the people involved, I’m hoping for the best. Perhaps, after the honeyed twenty-tens, music writers and their readers are rediscovering the pleasures of vinegar. This is an ongoing project. Even in the old days, critics were battling the forces of creeping niceness, and not always winning. Music magazines combined reviews with feature stories and interviews, which tended to be friendlier. The same Rolling Stone that helped end Andrew Ridgeley’s career was also infamous for giving indulgent reviews to veteran rockers (Paul McCartney, “Tug of War,” 1982: five stars). Kurt Loder was a revelation to me as a kid, but from a different perspective his move from Rolling Stone to MTV, in 1987, might have been a sign that music criticism was losing ground to music videos. Robert Christgau recently turned eighty-three, and he still delivers an astonishing stream of sharp criticism on his Substack. But he essentially stopped writing negative reviews more than a decade ago, later saying that he found them “intellectually and spiritually exhausting.” Schreiber told me that he, too, has felt himself growing less venomous over the years; even Fantano, who still puts on his red flannel shirt from time to time (Benson Boone: “light three”), has learned to live with the knowledge that some people will always love the music he hates. “I mean, if it’s bringing joy to somebody, that’s not inherently a bad thing,” he said. I know how he feels. In the early two-thousands, I wrote plenty of negative reviews, but nowadays I feel less inspired to rail against, say, the most recent Lady Gaga album. It strikes me as awkward and effortful, like someone trying to start a dance party in an empty night club, but why commit that judgment to print, when, instead, I could wait to see whether it will grow on me, as awkward-seeming albums sometimes do? Not long ago, I stumbled on an unauthorized YouTube compilation of Statler and Waldorf’s greatest hits. No skits, no songs, just thirty-seven minutes of corny jokes, delivered by two gray-haired Muppets who hated everything they saw. Or almost everything. When I watched the clips in context, I noticed something I had missed as a child: although they mercilessly roasted the Muppets in the cast, they were careful not to criticize the guest stars—who were, after all, both guests and stars, and therefore doubly off limits. It turns out that even a pair of fictional cranks can be seduced by the considerable power of celebrity, or perhaps constrained by the exigencies of having to book A-list talent for a weekly show. In one episode from 1978, the guest is Judy Collins, who sings an interminable version of “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” When it finally ends, the camera moves up to the opera box, so the old guys can deliver their reviews. “Wonderful,” Waldorf says, glancing at Statler. And Statler agrees: “Wonderful!” ♦