<\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThere 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<\/em> 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<\/em> column called \u201cConsumer Guide,\u201d in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who \u201cconsidered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn\u2019t like grades either.\u201d He described the music of Donny Hathaway as \u201csupper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz\u201d (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a \u201choarse dork\u201d (\u201cDark Horse,\u201d 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone<\/em>, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cSelf Portrait\u201d by asking, \u201cWhat is this shit?\u201d One of the era\u2019s 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<\/em>, Bangs called the singer a \u201cwimp\u201d and suggested (\u201chalf jokingly\u201d) that he ought to be assassinated\u2014only to decide, after more thought, that he quite liked the music. \u201cThere is a point,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwhere 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<\/em>.\u201d Something similar could have been said about Bangs and the other early critics of what was commonly referred to as \u201cpopular music\u201d\u2014a 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 \u201csemipopular music.\u201d<\/p>\nOver the years, \u201ccritically acclaimed\u201d came to function as a euphemism for music that was semipopular, or maybe just unpopular. This magazine\u2019s first rock critic was Ellen Willis, who in 1969 wrote presciently about the way that rock and roll was being \u201cco-opted by high culture\u201d: fans, as well as critics, were trying to separate the \u201cserious\u201d stuff from the \u201cmerely commercial.\u201d 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 \u201cPop Quiz,\u201d 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\u2019 theatre. He didn\u2019t mind Alicia Keys but was bored by Destiny\u2019s 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\u2019s acerbic survey of it: whenever I think of Blink-182\u2019s pop-punk landmark \u201cTake Off Your Pants and Jacket,\u201d which is often, I think of Hornby wondering just how everything had got so stupid. \u201cMy copy of the album came with four exclusive bonus tracks, one of which is called \u2018Fuck a Dog,\u2019 but maybe I was just lucky,\u201d he wrote. In a sense, he was<\/em> lucky: back in 2001, fans who wanted to hear \u201cFuck a Dog,\u201d a brief but well-executed acoustic gag, had to seek out one of three color-coded variants of the CD.<\/p>\nA number of other writers were exasperated by Hornby\u2019s exasperation. In an essay in the Village Voice<\/em>, the critic and poet Joshua Clover accused him of suggesting that \u201cpop music is beneath discussion, if not quite beneath contempt.\u201d It turned out, though, that Hornby\u2019s 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 \u201cData Colada\u201d 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\u2014on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for \u201cgood.\u201d Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for \u201cmixed\/average,\u201d or red, for \u201cbad.\u201d The music site Pitchfork<\/em>, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn\u2019t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score\u20140.0 out of 10\u2014since 2007 (for \u201cThis Is Next,\u201d an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone<\/em> abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, \u201cInstant Classic\u201d and \u201cHear This.\u201d<\/p>\nEven 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, \u201cHollywood\u2019s Bleeding,\u201d by Post Malone (Metacritic: 79); \u201cMontero,\u201d by Lil Nas X (Metacritic: 85); and \u201cThank U, Next,\u201d by Ariana Grande (Metacritic: 86), were great, or close to great. Could it really have been the case that no one<\/em> hated them? Even relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous. \u201cSolar Power,\u201d 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<\/em>. Some of the most cutting commentary came from Lorde herself, who later suggested that the album was a wrong turn\u2014an attempt to be chill and \u201cwafty\u201d when, in fact, she excels at intensity. \u201cI was just like, actually, I don\u2019t think this is me,\u201d she recalled in a recent interview. And, although there are plenty of people who can\u2019t stand Taylor Swift, none of them seem to be employed as critics, who virtually all agreed that her most recent album, \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department,\u201d 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\u2019d had the temerity to castigate her<\/em>, singing, \u201cWhy you gotta be so mean?\u201d How did music critics become so nice?<\/p>\nWhen Ryan Schreiber founded Pitchfork<\/em>, in 1996, pointiness was part of the point. Especially when it came to the indie-rock music he loved, he had detected a certain timidity in the American music press, and he figured that the internet was a good place to be more truculent. His decimal-point scores were provocatively precise, calculated to start fights. \u201cI wanted to use the full range of the scale, and to have hot takes, to be daring, to surprise people and catch them off guard,\u201d he told me not long ago. The reviews tended to be long and sometimes impenetrable, but people paid attention to the numbers. A clamorous Texas band called\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead earned a perfect ten, and so did Radiohead; the site\u2019s most famous 0.0 review went to an album by the Australian band Jet, accompanied not by a snarky enumeration of the record\u2019s flaws but by a video of a chimpanzee urinating into its own mouth. In 2004, after one of the site\u2019s critics, Amanda Petrusich, panned an album by the alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Adams (\u201cone-dimensional, vain, and entirely lifeless\u201d: 2.9), Adams asked to be interviewed by her. The conversation that ensued was strikingly friendly, given the circumstances: Petrusich, who is now my colleague at this magazine, amicably but firmly declined to recant her opinion, and Adams concluded that \u201crecords don\u2019t really hurt anybody, and neither do reviews.\u201d<\/p>\nAt the time, critics in thrall to the sound and ethos of rock and roll\u2014loud guitars, sweaty authenticity\u2014were sometimes accused of \u201crockism,\u201d a musical prejudice. \u201cI remember being called \u2018rockist\u2019 as far back as 2001,\u201d Schreiber told me. In 2004, when I was a pop-music critic at the Times<\/em>, 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 \u201cpoptimism\u201d to describe a more inclusive sensibility that critics might adopt instead. Schreiber says that the debate made him rethink Pitchfork\u2019s<\/em> approach. Throughout the aughts and into the teens, the site expanded its coverage, reviewing more hip-hop and pop music. \u201cI never, ever wanted to cover Taylor Swift,\u201d he told me. \u201cI just thought it was not part of our scope.\u201d This was, of course, a matter of taste: he found her music \u201cextremely bland and uninteresting,\u201d but most of his colleagues disagreed. In 2017, Pitchfork<\/em> changed its policy to permit (and perhaps require) Swift\u2019s albums to be reviewed, starting with \u201cReputation\u201d: 6.5.<\/p>\nIt is surely no coincidence that, as Pitchfork<\/em> became more open-minded, it also became kinder. \u201cI think part of that was because Pitchfork<\/em> was having somewhat of an identity crisis,\u201d Schreiber says now. (He left the site in 2019.) Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate<\/em> it\u2014or 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<\/em> them. In 2020, after Pitchfork<\/em> gave a 6.5 to an album by the pop star Halsey, the singer asked, on Twitter, \u201ccan the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already.\u201d This wouldn\u2019t have been noteworthy, except that, by then, Pitchfork<\/em> had been purchased by Cond\u00e9 Nast, which also owns this magazine, and had moved into 1 World Trade Center\u2014a 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. \u201cWe started to get a lot fewer pitches for negative reviews, particularly of artists with huge fan bases,\u201d Schreiber recalled. Perhaps the most infamous review of \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department\u201d was published in the music magazine Paste<\/em>. It had a cantankerous opening sentence that Lester Bangs might have enjoyed (\u201cSylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!\u201d), but no byline; the magazine said that it wanted to shield the writer from potential \u201cthreats of violence.\u201d For similar reasons, the Canadian publication Exclaim!<\/em> 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. \u201cI think sometimes I can tell when a writer politely demurs, without saying as much,\u201d one editor told me. \u201cThey\u2019re just, like, The juice ain\u2019t worth the squeeze.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\n\u201cThe winner\u2014my son!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nCartoon by Jon Adams<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
The word \u201cpoptimism\u201d 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 Mon\u00e1e, a retro-futurist R. & B. singer, noted that she was \u201ca queer, dark-skinned Black woman in an industry historically inclined to value her opposite\u201d (Pitchfork<\/em>); another praised her as \u201cnot afraid to address systemic inequality in all its pervasive forms inside and outside of her music\u201d (New York<\/em>). 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, \u201cWhat does Robert Christgau do in bed\u2014you know, is he a toe-fucker?\u201d) But the stakes were much higher when, in 2016, the R. & B. singer Solange suggested to Jon Caramanica, a white Times<\/em> 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 \u201chosed down and forced to walk on hot pavement barefoot in civil rights marches in Alabama.\u201d<\/p>\nThe 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\u2014on the contrary, it evokes the Latin adage \u201cDe gustibus non est disputandum<\/em>\u201d and its modern analogue, repeated by kindergartners and, less excusably, by people who are no longer kindergartners: \u201cDon\u2019t yuck my yum.\u201d The idea that people\u2019s 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. \u201cSweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene,\u201d 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<\/em> has called \u201ca blow to the art form itself.\u201d 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.\u00a0O. Scott, in his farewell column as the Times<\/em>\u2019 chief film critic, argued that this culture was \u201crooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior.\u201d That\u2019s 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\u2014it\u2019s the essence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on \u201cThe Muppet Show\u201d were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers who sat in an opera box, delivering instant reviews of the action onstage. (One logically unassailable judgment, from Statler: \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1978526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[354164,22008,354165,343871],"class_list":["post-1978525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-a-critic-at-large","tag-magazine","tag-paywall-subscriber-only-content","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/How-Music-Criticism-Lost-Its-Edge.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1978525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1978526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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