Who’s Afraid of Music Criticism?
by Sloane DiBari, Opinions Editor
“lolll they are soooo whack [sic],” indie singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza wrote about Pitchfork in a message to an Instagram group chat this past summer. “I do not understand the inclination to write mean reviews about people’s art — why not ONLY write reviews about art you LIKE? That is way less hurtful!”
This message was sent after De Souza told the chat, composed of thousands of her fans, to write negative comments on Pitchfork’s Instagram post about their review of her newest album Precipice. Fans flooded the comments section, thankfully eschewing outright abuse for the most part. The negative comments that haven’t been removed range from those telling writer Grace Robins-Somerville that she expressed a “bad opinion” to those accusing her of misogyny, AI usage, and being, in one commenter’s words, “void of emotional depth.” Robins-Somerville gave Precipice a score of 6.6 out of 10 — a perfectly satisfactory score.
This is nothing new for Pitchfork. This isn’t even the first time that something like this has happened this year. In May, fans cheered on as indie pop duo Tennis slammed Pitchfork’s review of their newest record over Instagram. In 2020, Swifties attacked Pitchfork writer Jill Mapes over an apparently unsatisfactory review of folklore. The score? 8.0 out of 10.
Though artists haven’t necessarily become more averse to criticism in recent years (see Sonic Youth’s “I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick”), music criticism has nonetheless been defanged. Pitchfork, once (in)famously snarky and iconoclastic, has become kind of…neutered. The reviews section is largely seven-point-somethings, a nebulous score range that has been rendered virtually meaningless. Is the record kinda good? 7.5, easy. Is it kinda good but mostly bad? Somewhere in the low 7 range. Is it very good, but not as good as, like, Radiohead? Solid 7.6. Hell, maybe even a 7.7. Pitchfork hasn’t given a single iconic, destructive 0.0 score since 2007. This is the same publication that, in 2006, bestowed a 0.0 upon Jet’s Shine On, and linked a YouTube video called “Funny monkey peeing in his own mouth EPIC” in place of an actual review of the record. Now linked under that post is a “trending now” video titled “Mariah Carey Rates Love Island, Labubus, and Christmas.”
Pitchfork is far from the only outlet to see this shift towards the lukewarm. On Rolling Stone’s website, I couldn’t find a single review below 3.5 stars for so many pages that I eventually lost count — and this is a year after they decided to bring back their classic 5-star rating system in a move that one would assume would engender sharper criticism. On rating aggregator sites like Metacritic and Album of the Year, albums’ average scores — collected from outlets ranging from small, digital-only magazines like Paste to legendary genre veterans like NME — are mostly in the green, meaning “good.” Everything is “good” now.
There’s a rather cynical impulse to blame poptimism for this development. Music critics were once rockist snobs. When a rock record sucked, it was probably because it was bland and formulaic — like a pop record, basically. Pop was all but unworthy of serious discussion. Around the time music critic Kefela Sanneh’s seminal poptimist text “The Rap Against Rockism” was published in The New York Times in 2004, something shifted. Pop was Serious Music, too. Even Pitchfork learned to love pop. The more pop they reviewed, the softer their criticism became. Just a handful of weeks ago, in The New Yorker, Sanneh wrote, “The idea of poptimism sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people like.” With the acceptance of pop into the category of Serious Music came the assertion that criticizing pop was a dismissal of the genre and therefore a dismissal of the people.
Some music fans have now applied this to indie and alternative music, which was once upheld as pop’s intellectual superior. There’s an expectation that the critic should try to be as “positive” as possible, especially if the work is perceived as profoundly vulnerable. To criticize the work doesn’t just piss off the artist — now, it has moral implications. In 1983, Sonic Youth thought Robert Christgau was a douche and made a dumb song about it. In 2019, after critic and vocal Lana Del Rey fan Ann Powers wrote a mostly glowing review of Normal Fucking Rockwell!, Del Rey tweeted, “I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music…To write about me is nothing like what it is to be with me.” Then, in a later tweet, Del Rey told Powers not to call herself a fan — which Powers is, by all accounts.
And now there is this Indigo De Souza situation. I’d like to highlight one exemplary comment left on the aforementioned Instagram post: “wdym ‘play it safe’ when she’s literally so vulnerable, raw, & creative? this review felt weirdly pointed. women can, in fact, do what they want & doesn’t mean you gotta drag them ??? i suggest listening again and opening ur heart a bit more ❤️” In the age of the raw, relatable, openhearted pop star/indie underdog/tortured emo frontman/whatever, criticism is cruelty. To criticize an artist’s work is to ruthlessly pick apart their very being. If it isn’t outright sadistic, it certainly isn’t polite. At their best, the critic is dumb and annoying or whatever.
This isn’t to say that music criticism hasn’t been and can’t be cruel. In an article I wrote last year about Anthony Fantano’s controversial review of Halsey’s The Great Impersonator, I said that Fantano’s review was sexist and unnecessarily personal — which I still stand by, even if my argumentative writing skills weren’t particularly good back then. The review that inspired Taylor Swift’s “Mean” — which in turn, I suspect, kicked off the trend towards moral outcry we’re seeing now — was actually pretty mean. The volume of insidious sexism and racism in music criticism is its own can of worms.
But it also isn’t the responsibility of critics to be “positive” or to promote the work they’re writing about. It’s true that making music is often deeply personal, and that it probably feels shitty to have someone call the outpouring of your soul “unlistenable” or “derivative” or — worst of all — “mediocre.” But there is a substantial difference that demands to be articulated between a negative review and a personal attack. Critics should strive to exercise some degree of sensitivity, conscientiousness, and awareness of personal biases in their writing. And I would argue that most do — including Robins-Somerville. The review’s thesis was essentially that De Souza didn’t make enough of the bold artistic decisions that mark her best work, not that the emotional hardships underpinning the music were boring…or something. If any of De Souza’s comment section warriors had actually read the review, they would have seen that Robins-Somerville praised De Souza’s explosive emotionality and wished there had been more of it.
Music critics have lost much of their power. A negative Pitchfork review isn’t going to end anyone’s career anytime soon like it could in the 2000s (see Black Kids, Travis Morrison, etc.), nor is a positive one going to help much with record sales. Even Anthony Fantano, Gen Z’s only true tastemaker — for better or for worse — is regularly challenged by his massive fanbase. His 3 out of 10 (complete with the dreaded red flannel!) didn’t keep MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks off any year-end lists in 2024. And Robins-Somerville’s review clearly isn’t putting anyone off from Indigo De Souza — if anything, De Souza’s response is a stronger deterrent.
So why should we care about music criticism? Why should we give a shit about these smarmy assholes who hate all the music we like? Why should they get to publish all their dumb opinions? Do we really need these people to put us on to new music when we have Spotify to recommend us artists that sound like the artists we like? It knows our taste — everyone’s taste — better than any music critic ever could.
Reading about music — music we love, music we hate, music we’re indifferent about — provides us with important cultural context. It encourages us to pay closer attention to what we’re listening to. It engenders a level of appreciation of the music that we might not find elsewhere, whether we agree or disagree with the critic. It starts conversations about music, which is part of what keeps communities around music alive and alert. It’s a way to resist being force-fed algorithm-friendly music by streaming platforms. It’s a way to expand and articulate musical taste, to articulate why we feel the way we do about a given piece of music. And, if you’re like me, it’s fun! It would be boring as hell to read music criticism if every single album received a positive review, or even a middling one. There would be so much less to talk about. When it comes to The Discourse, I love to hate almost as much as I love to love.
Maybe that’s not of interest to everyone. That’s fine. But goading your fans to bully critics into submission is totally antithetical to having a community around your music, or any music. Critics shouldn’t have to fear being attacked en masse for giving a record a less-than-positive review. We must remember that any music critic worth their salt loves music. The adoption of this kind of neutral-to-positive standard of criticism is a passion killer. The music we love deserves to carry weight, to have people engage with it enough to provoke responses at all — and sometimes, that means that Pitchfork will give your AOTY a 6.6.
