The Real Reason Music Critics Got Nicer

Hint: It's related to how music criticism also got better

Last year, I wrote a response to a pair of crappy “state of music criticism” thinkpieces. At the start I made a big show about how I don’t like to talk about this sort of thing publicly, because I’m sensitive to readers who (rightly) could not care less about the inside-baseball shenanigans of my profession. But I’m obviously a liar, since I am right back in this newsletter with a fresh diatribe about yet another “state of music criticism” thinkpiece.

[Geriatric Michael Corleone voice] Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in!

In my defense: This is the Cadillac of “state of music criticism” thinkpieces. It was published in The New Yorker, one of the few remaining publications that still employs (I think? As of this minute anyway?) multiple music writers. It was written by Kelefa Sanneh, and the headline is “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge.” Damn, as an employed (I think? As of this minute anyway?) music critic myself, you might as well call me James Murphy.

(Can I just say: Not the best timing for a piece like this! So many things are threatening the “having opinions about music” industry. There’s the looming A.I. crisis, there’s Google and social media platforms burying links, and now David Remnick is coming for our asses. Anyway, I digress.)

Sanneh’s piece opens with a pocket history of music criticism going back to the 1960s. The New Yorker is a general interest publication, and for most people “Lester Bangs” is a fictional character portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2000’s Almost Famous, so the contextual preamble is necessary. The paradox is that the people most interested in this extremely niche subject matter (i.e. music critics who have lost their edge) already know the history by heart, so those folks might as well skip the first four paragraphs.

In the fifth, Sanneh finally gets to the heart of the matter:

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?

So nice! This isn’t exactly what the “state of music criticism” thinkpieces from last year were about, but it’s in the same ballpark. The gist is this: There was a time in the distant past when critics spoke truth to power (specifically, pop stars and their mindless minions), and now they are (pathetically, embarrassingly) deferential. The cranks of old have given way to easy-to-please stans. And that’s a problem.

But is it though? The other thinkpieces insisted that critics now only care about enormously popular pop stars, and ignore the underground upstarts they used to champion. (Which isn’t true, not even remotely, as I explained in that link in the first sentence.) Sanneh isn’t making that case, specifically, but his article nonetheless has the same flaw as all the the other op-eds: He focuses on a narrow (and rhetorically convenient) set of examples to feed his own confirmation bias.

For example: In the passage above, he cites Metacritic scores for all of the artists and their corresponding albums except for one: Lorde and her middling 2021 release Solar Power. Instead, he gestures toward a “polite three and a half star” review from Rolling Stone. This is a curious editorial choice, given that the Metacritic score for Solar Power (69, speaking of nice!) is easily worse than any of the numbers he did cite. Now, Metacritic scores are a very problematic and incomplete snapshot of critical consensus, but in this case it nevertheless suggests that music writers weren’t exactly fawning over that record.

In my original “state of state of music criticism thinkpieces” post (I know I know, I’m part of the blowhard epidemic, bear with me), I wrote about “real” vs. “feigned” ignorance, which “refers to any information that the writer does not acknowledge which may undermine his argument. Sometimes, this information is unknowingly overlooked, i.e. ‘real’ ignorance. But other times, it is deliberately left out, i.e. ‘feigned’ ignorance.” Sanneh is a persuasive writer and a very smart person, so I find it hard to believe that he excised Lorde’s mediocre Metacritic score by accident. He didn’t mention it, I suspect, because it didn’t line up with his (predetermined) thesis.

He is, in short, feigning just a teensy weensy bit.

The same can be said of his observation about how Pitchfork “hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score—0.0 out of 10—since 2007.” Yep, that’s definitely true! It was also true that O.J. Simpson never murdered a former romantic partner and her restaurant waiter friend (allegedly!) after the summer of 1994. But is that really evidence that he “became so nice”? Or am I merely pointing out the most extreme form of negative behavior as a signifier of all negativity, another deceptive rhetorical device? In just the past few months, Pitchfork has published scathing reviews of Benson Boone (3.7), Maroon 5 (2.4), and Chance The Rapper (5.9), to name just three high-profile releases. Now, those aren’t straight up 0.0’s, but if you read Jeremy Larson’s viral 1.6 review of Greta Van Fleet’s Anthem Of The Peaceful Army back in 2018, you know it might as well have been a 0.0.

But what about Sanneh’s overall point? Is music criticism too nice now? Defensive critics online reacted to the New Yorker piece by pointing at all the things currently wrong with the profession — the lack of job security, the insane fanbases that harass writers with impunity, and the overall decay of media generally and the criticism profession specifically. But they didn’t, at heart, really dispute his central argument. (Maybe because they’re too nice.)

I don’t either. Not exactly, anyway. What I dispute is the framing as well as the utility of the “takedown” pieces that Sanneh laments not seeing enough of these days. Modern music writing has a lot of problems — most of my DMs are devoted to complaining about/making fun of those issues! — but lack of negativity (to me) doesn’t come close to making the Top 10. In fact, I would argue that this so-called niceness is really a byproduct (perhaps unintended) of what’s GOOD about music writing now.

Allow me to do a history lesson of my own: When I started reading music criticism as a teenager in the ’90s, the general-interest critic was common. This was a writer who wrote about anything and everything, regardless of whether they were knowledgable about the particular genre or even enjoyed it. The most famous example was Robert Christgau, the so-called “Dean of American Rock Critics” installed at The Village Voice. Now, I don’t want to be accused of being a cherry-picking “feigned ignorance” guy, so I’m going to preface what I’m about to say by pointing out that Robert Christgau virtually invented the job I have. He’s written about tens of thousands of albums, and he continues to work into his 80s. He is, indisputably, an industry titan. All due respect to him.

He’s also mentioned six times in Sanneh’s article, mostly as a shining example of how critics used to really go for the jugular, no matter the status of the artist. At the height of Whitney Houston’s fame, he referred to her as “the most revolting pop singer in Christendom.” In his review of the 1986 metal landmark Master Of Puppets, he dismissed Metallica as “male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better.” Around the same time, he also took a hatchet to Paid In Full, the 1988 hip-hop masterpiece by Eric B. & Rakim, which he said was the product of “wannabees stealing pop hooks in the basement.”

Fans of invective might read this and delight in Christgau’s way with a vicious insult. But if you’re a fan of music, these takes probably seem … a touch uninformed, maybe? Actually — again, I say this with all due respect to a legend — they’re pretty dumb.

That’s the thing that Sanneh doesn’t address in his piece: The prime of the hilariously mean music-critic takedown stemmed largely from writers opining on artists and genres they had no feel for. That’s why they were so mean — it’s not just that the media was in better shape or that fanbases didn’t have the ability to mobilize online. Writers back then were emboldened to sound off on things they knew little or nothing about. Peruse Christgau’s online archive of reviews and look for pretty much any historically significant hard rock or metal band, and his takes are uniformly negative. The Dean of American Rock Critics did not care for this kind of music, at all. And, sure, sometimes that disdain could be pretty funny. But if you happened to like these sorts of bands, it was also tiresome and not particularly helpful or interesting.

I don’t mean to pick on Robert Christgau. Like all of us, he was a product of the times he worked in. (If I’m lucky, some punk will criticize my old takes in 40 years.) But in the 21st century, times have changed. The general-interest critic has declined, and the specialist critic has ascended. Today, if you read Pitchfork or any website, the metal record will be reviewed by a metal expert, just like the pop record will be reviewed by a pop connoisseur and the hip-hop album will be reviewed by a hip-hop scholar. And in that state of affairs, the chances of someone just unloading all of their best quips, insult-comic style, goes way down. Even if the specialist critic doesn’t like the record in question, that person is more likely to state their opinions thoughtfully and with a degree of nuance, because they actually feel invested in that corner of the music world (often because general-interest critics used to take so many dumps there).

The oddest omission from Sanneh’s article is the author’s own role in this evolution. In 2004, while on staff at The New York Times, Sanneh wrote “The Rap Against Rockism,” probably the single most-cited article about music criticism in the past 25 years, in which he makes the case that non-rock genres should not be judged by the aesthetics of rock. “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star,” he writes disparagingly, “lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.”

Sanneh mentions this 21-year-old article in passing, in just one sentence, in The New Yorker piece. Perhaps he was being modest. But “The Rap Against Rockism” has had the most influence of any “state of music criticism” thinkpiece, by far, this century. And it was a major step toward the so-called “nice” era we’re in right now. Maybe he doesn’t see it that way. (Or want to see it that way.) But as I hinted earlier, I think it’s a good thing that people who care about metal and know about the genre inside and out are writing about metal records, rather than a general-interest critic inclined to hear them as just dumb, sexist noise.

And the same goes for any genre that has traditionally existed outside the usual vortex of “critically acclaimed music.” Critics of modern music criticism (again, I’m acknowledging the blowhardiness of my enterprise) like to bang on about the pernicious effects of poptimism, and whenever I read a ridiculously self-serious assessment of a thoroughly ridiculous “bop” I sympathize with them. But this specialization has helped a lot of non-pop artists, too, from metal to hip-hop to emo to pop country to whatever music used to exist in a “safe to dump on” zone. It’s not a perfect solution — connoisseur-driven criticism can be insular, difficult to access for neophytes, and overly beholden to fan-community conventional wisdom. Sometimes, a drive-by observation from a more casual listener can bring fresh and unexpected insights. But it is a better alternative, I think.

If Sanneh had reframed his article slightly, and pitched it toward the actual issue with contemporary music writing that annoys me the most, I would have endorsed it whole-heartedly. To me, the problem with music criticism now isn’t the lack of negativity, it’s the lack of a sense of humor. A cultural shift in this industry — which is true of the media on the whole — that’s occurred since I started in 2000 is the dominance of graduates from elite colleges, mostly on the East Coast. Why someone would pay to attend Harvard or Yale or NYU and then decide to become a culture critic utterly baffles me. It’s like handing over $1 million for a Happy Meal. But a lot of these people come out of their expensive schools and start writing about music like they’re mounting a dissertation. They lard on impenetrable jargon and various forms of academic theory in a manner that completely sucks the joy and life out of the prose. (To quote my favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman character, “They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb.”) It’s hard enough to get people to read album reviews. Do we really have to punish and brutalize the precious few who do?

Meanness can be very entertaining. I’m not above enjoying a good hater’s rant every now and then. But smartness can be very entertaining as well, if you do it with the occasional joke or clever metaphor. And the smart reviews age way better than the mean ones. When you stop romanticizing “golden era” music criticism and start reading it, a lot of it just seems poorly considered. (To be fair, the same can be said of music criticism in 2025, though for different reasons.) Besides, are we really missing out on cruel dismissals of popular music right now? In 1987, condemning a ubiquitous pop star like Whitney Houston as “the most revolting pop singer in Christendom” carried a cathartic charge in a mostly polite, top-down media environment. But in the social media era, writing a bitchy takedown is like selling sand at the beach. Criticism that provides actual nourishment, on the other hand, feels like a rare oasis.

LINKS THIS WEEK

• I wrote a huge thing about my favorite Black Sabbath songs.

• I also wrote about my favorite music of August 2025.

• On Never Ending Stories, me and the guys talked about the greatest rock album of all time, just in time for the 60th anniversary.