FEATURE:
Major/Minor
PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels
Has Music Journalism Become Less Critical?
__________
WHEN I asked that question…
PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels
I was thinking ‘critical’ as mean or less positive, rather than detailed and in depth. It is true that the language and structure of reviews has changed through the years. Look at album reviews from the 1990s and 2000s and I do think that there has been a shift. Maybe altering to suite the Internet age and the way we digest media, I do think there have been some positive changes. I got into music from reading music reviews in publications like Q and NME. Few of those great music magazines are around today. MOJO is perhaps one of the last of those established greats. Pitchfork used to have a reputation for being very mean and edgy. They would rate albums out of ten and score most pretty low. I remember reading a review for Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature that was very insulting. Maybe critics equating being edgy and dismissive with being popular and relevant. Perhaps mirroring what was happening in film and culture. Perhaps a cynicism that mirrored political events or something rank and unseemly. I have read so many interviews from as recent as the mid-2010s that are deliberately unpleasant and try and grab you by their gall and front rather than the quality of language and criticism! I know music critics are meant to be critical when they should be, though I find there was this vein of nastiness that ran through a lot of journalism. Maybe as far back as the 1960s. Recently, I wrote a feature where I asked why albums do not get negative reviews like films do. I mean, you do get albums that get a one or two-star review, but it very rare. That was not the case years ago. Can we assume that music is better or, more likely, critics are less willing to be negative about music? It takes a particular misjudged album to get a one-star review, whereas film critics still dish them out. If not a kindness, there is an unwillingness to return to the past and a style of journalism that did see critics savage albums when required.
PHOTO CREDIT: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels
The reason I am returning to this subject is because of a new article from The New Yorker that asked if music criticism has lost its edge. Is it a case of more positive or fewer negative reviews meaning an edge is gone, or are journalists more aware of modern culture? So much negativity and hatred online, is it piling on or too much to add to that? You can be objective about music without having to be nasty. I guess you do not get the same sort of cutting or slightly sarcastic reviews as before. Critics giving an album one or two stars and throwing in some humour and bite. Is that a good or bad thing? I myself avoid reviewing albums I do not like because I can’t bring myself to be unkind. You can be honest, though I think at a certain point you tip into being actually critical. I do not see any albums reviews like that now. I do think that many critics are actually adding a star or positivity to their reviews compared to what they actually want to do so that their words do not come back to bite them. People going after the reviewer! I will continue in a minute. However, I wanted to take parts of that excellent and thought-provoking article from The New Yorker:
“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.
There is another argument to ask whether we actually need music criticism. People are online and have this forum to voice their opinions. However, music journalists have this particular talent and ability to judge and describe music in a way your average music lover cannot. They have experience and this passion that means their opinions are important. I think so, anyway. Are music journalists, in their zeal to be less critical and needlessly sharp, losing perspective? One positive thing is the fact there are more websites and avenues where you can read music criticism. Get various perspectives on an album. However, I do feel that the tone and approach to reviewing has changed. Only very occasional when you get very negative reviews or an album that gets scathing or edgy attention. Websites like Pitchfork that once normalised a much more judgemental approach and rarely gave out positive scores for albums have changed their tune (slightly):
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?
There is also this generational thing. Maybe a certain style of writers that found it normal or expected to be ‘honest’. Without filter. Many of those who were in their twenties or thirties when they started have either retired, left music journalism or have softened their approach. Perhaps knowing about musicians and struggles with mental health and the realities of being an artist has opened their mind and changed how criticism operates. If an album is objectively poor or bland, critics using less spiky and acidic language. Less directed at the artist and maybe a more muted or balanced language that is more aimed at the music and aesthetic. Even massive artists who are overhyped or release a terrible album not given a booting as once they would. In my previous feature, I gave the example of Katy Perry and Will Smith who have recently released pretty insipid and unimpressive albums. In spite of a few one-star reviews, the critics of today have written differently and less critically than they would, thirty, twenty or even years ago. The New Yorker made an interesting point when they highlighted how fan culture and these tribes are a lot more powerful and notable than decades ago. They can go after a journalist if they insult their favourite artist. The Internet gives them an outlet to find that journalist, or at least trash the publication or website. Share the review in question and cause issues. There is a lot to consider before you type a word of a review now.
Are critics playing it safe through fear of fans’ backlash, offending an artist or being seen as aggressive or unkind at a time when we need to be more positive and together? It is an interesting line of discussion I would like to hear other people’s opinions on:
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”.
I shall leave it there, as this is a bigger subject than I can do proper justice to. I was fascinated by the feature from The New Yorker. I have noticed how there are way more four and five-star albums reviews. The language, whilst perhaps not as colourful, idiosyncratic and fascinating, is nicer, deeper and perhaps not aimed to make headlines for the wrong reason. No longer cool or desired for critics to be edgier or curmudgeonly. Some might bemoan that, though I do think that there are two things to note. Music is experiencing this wonderful peak, so it is natural that reviews reflect that. I would like to see more bite and some subjective criticism for more albums rather than critics pulling punches. The way social media can mobilise criticism against journalists; fans are so protective of artists, and that has affected a lot of things. Critics worried about the effects of being attacked. Despite there being few characters like before where you would get these caustic or negative reviews that were entertaining to read, there is a kinder approach. I think that critics are going deeper with the music and there is this thoughtfulness and open-minded approach that was not there as much before. In my view, music criticism is…
PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels
BETTER for it.