What We've Lost in Music Criticism

In October, these words appeared in Pitchfork. My opinions on these matters are well-known, at this point, and they are of course contestable. It’s also the case that this kind of framing has become so ubiquitous that it barely seems to reference the real world at all. And yet I would hope that anyone would be able to understand the confusion I felt when I read this. By which I mean, what are indie records? What is “indie”? Which acts are indie acts? What is being referred to, here? Indie rock no longer exists, in 2024. There is no scene. Williamsburg at this point is like a neighborhood-sized artisan coffee shop where the napkins are ethically sourced and the labor non-union. There are no cool clubs anywhere keeping the flame burning, not sufficiently to produce albums that people actually listen to, anyway. No remotely plugged-in person under the age of 50 who’d like to be perceived as fuckable would openly claim to like “indie records.” In the mid-2020s that’s like saying that you’re a fan of the Confederacy. Someone recently emailed to say that when I write about poptimism, I’m just grinding out culture war the way I accuse others of doing. But as I said to him, “culture war” implies multiple sides. Culture war against who?

This Pitchfork writer was guilty of doing what Pitchfork did constantly in its last years: fighting a battle that had been won years and years ago, the battle of pop supremacy against supposedly-snootier challengers like indie or just “rock.” The Pitchfork collective didn’t so much pick a side and fight for it, but rather fought for the quaint notion that there were still other sides left to fight. This is a going concern, in the 21st century - helping people preserve the appearance of various cultural skirmishes after they stop being salient because they feel comforted by fighting them. But Taylor Swift had won a flawless victory, an unqualified victory, long before she decided to start re-recording albums. “Indie rock” would have signaled an unconditional surrender but there was no one left around to do so. In this way, large parts of the music press reminds me very much of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting years after the American victory, unwilling to believe that the battle was over - only here, the problem was not a refusal to believe that they had lost, but a refusal to believe that they had won.

Pitchfork is getting “folded into” GQ, which sure sounds like a polite way to say that it’s dead. Sadly there’s been a bunch of layoffs associated with this, and I hope everyone lands on their feet. In some ways, this development reminds me very much of the recent (temporary?) death of Jezebel - the many people who eulogized both sites were mostly not talking about anything that happened in the past half-decade or so, but instead remembering the good times of years past. This is not to suggest that good stuff was not being published, but rather that the shared social understanding of what Jezebel and Pitchfork meant was formed a long while back. With Jezebel, this fixation on the heyday of the late aughts and early 2010s is at least partially explained by the site’s acquisition by G/O Media, though I think most people would admit that its glory days were long gone by then anyway. With Pitchfork, you have the site’s strange, bifurcated history, split between its period of good-natured snobbery and interest in the then-salient concept of indie music and its sudden, totalizing embrace of poptimism, the school of music criticism that effortlessly colonized the entirety of the music journalism industry starting sometime in the mid-aughts. What’s interesting about a lot of the coverage is that these reminiscences can’t help but reveal that strange and sudden evolution, but most of the people writing them seem uncomfortable with actually describing it. This discomfort, I think, is telling.

In his New York Times piece on Pitchfork’s apparent demise, Sopan Deb doesn’t mention the poptimist turn at all. Neither does Ezra Klein’s. Nor does Casey Newton’s. Former Pitchfork staffer Jamieson Cox maybe waves in that direction when he talks about changes in editorial direction “righting old wrongs,” by which he likely means “bringing the site’s tastes into line with current quasi-political mores.” Fellow ex-Pitchforker Eric Harvey nods to poptimism obliquely, but only by referring to it as a welcome diversification of the staff, not a total ideological overhaul. (The implication that demographic diversification must necessarily steer a publication in a particular musical direction is very common and has always seemed straightforwardly a matter of prejudice to me, but you can’t blame Harvey for repeating it.) This coyness about the single most obvious evolution in Pitchfork’s coverage is bizarre from a straight newsgathering perspective; anyone who has read the site for a long time would have noticed that change, from a font of hipster taste-making to the single most aggressive enforcer of the poptimist consensus. Several of them mention the absurd rescoring of old records, giving old music from diverse artists (whatever that means) pity score upgrades and dinging musicians like Grimes for culture war sins. But they do nothing to inform readers about why that rescoring happened - because at some point music criticism ceased to be about music itself and instead became a vehicle for advancing a particular vision of the self as a worldly and progressive person. Pitchfork was a central cog in the machine that took diverse musical tastes and imprinted on them a political mandate to conform, and most people of the type to read Pitchfork did in fact conform.

I think the reason for these dudes not mentioning or minimizing Pitchfork’s turn towards poptimism is just that - they’re dudes. And while the political upheaval of the past 15ish years has conspicuously failed to make the world more equitable for “marginalized identities,” it has created a palpable fear among certain perpetually-anxious members of dominant groups, a feeling that they should be meek and pliable in how they interact with said marginalized people. I have called this tendency the politics of deference in the past, this Robin DiAngelo-inflected vision of progressive politics that assumes that the essential role of a white or male or straight or able-bodied person is to treat members of minority groups with a vague embarrassment, a sense that we’re sorry for existing in their space and that we will accordingly defer to them as much as possible. The primary problem here is that this doesn’t work and has no ability to create real change and can’t do anything for Black people or women or queer people anyway. Meanwhile, in areas of taste, deference politics are totally corrosive, because they make conformity a political virtue and put everyone who does not conform in the position of constantly having to defend themselves.

I am a particular type of aging dude; I like metal; I think Electric Wizard’s music is superior to that of Blackpink. For most of the history of music appreciation, this would be taken as the most uncontroversial statement of personal taste possible. Today, it’s treated as something like a hate crime. I don’t think that’s progress. But that particular dynamic is more relevant to modern music culture than any artist, album, or label.

It would be facile and wrong to suggest that Pitchfork’s push into poptimism had anything to do with its financial decline and potential demise. As everyone writing on this topic has said, the culprit there is the macroeconomic conditions that are crushing the industry writ large. I have little to say on that score because I am consumed with feelings of constant doom about such things and it gets me too depressed to be constructive. I do think it’s interesting to contemplate Matt Yglesias’s point that the broad poptimist turn in the industry satisfied financial as well as ideological desires; with its rise to dominance in music coverage, writers wanted to be poptimists to be cool and avoid accusations of bigotry, which also connected well with the natural desire of publications to play to the broadest possible audience. But either way, Pitchfork has been absorbed into a legacy men’s magazine because this industry is sick and no one can figure out how to cure it, with Google seeming to work harder every day to make that impossible.

I’m interested less in Pitchfork’s bottom line and more in what the embrace of poptimism meant for discovering music there, as that’s what people have eulogized anyway. I think the influence there is pretty simple: the pop fixation made Pitchfork worse, and could hardly have done otherwise, because in practice if not in theory, poptimism amounts to deference politics for music, elevating one genre over all others for fear of giving offense. Feeling disenfranchised and hopeless about achieving real material change, while empowered within the cultural and intellectual industries, a lot of young liberals became emotionally overinvested in the positive potential of treating artistic consumer tastes as political acts in and of themselves. Aside from the inability of artistic or critical tastes to actually solve material problems - it turns out that the Grammys can’t close the racial wealth gap - this inevitably perverts the most basic function of criticism, which is to recount the honest aesthetic and artistic impressions of the critic, even while leaving plenty of room for political considerations. I think a lot of people in music felt that the sudden orthodoxy that music was politics first and aesthetics fifth or sixth was a bad development. But in the hothouse atmosphere of the social media era and the extreme polarization of the Trump administration, in an industry with notoriously poor job security, I understand why so many of them chose to just go along. Who wants to paint a target on their own back?

The result was stuff like Pitchfork’s roundtable on Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which is legitimately one of the five or so most embarrassing professionally-published pieces I’ve read in 30ish years of consuming written media. It’s a masterclass in the overeducated urbanite investment in artistic consumption as substitute for mass politics that was so central to the 2010s. And because the people involved were all competing to show the most unhinged devotion to a Black woman musician (who never asked to be turned into a master’s thesis on semiotics) it involved some of the most ill-conceived overwriting I can imagine. Here is a writer out so far out over her skis that I’m afraid she’s about to pull a Sonny Bono:

To those currently drafting your thinkpiece about how it wasn’t very #feminist of Rih to torture that poor rich lady: nooooo one cares about your basic-ass, probably non-intersectional praxis. Rihanna doesn’t need to spell it out for you if you still don’t get it yet; time is money, bitch.

A white woman wrote those words, I believe. (She’s not “Rih” to you.) This is the sort of thing that became Pitchfork’s stock in trade, this confused muddle of politics and pop, stuffed with trendy terms from cultural studies and the insistence that liking music was a form of activism. I think you could be a big pop fan and a supporter of social justice politics and still find stuff like this absolutely exhausting. There was acres of such discourse. People like me who said that it was all ridiculous were, naturally, accused of being old, being bigoted, or both.

As always, I can respect an attachment to the original meaning of poptimism, such as that defined in Kalefa Sanneh’s seminal New York Times Magazine essay: pop music is every bit as legitimate as any other kind and deserves to be taken seriously by critics, and there is no inherent seriousness or superiority to rock. This is absolutely correct. We could debate how necessary this message ever really was, given that whether pop records were ever really disrespected remains unproven, but that stuff is pretty much moot now. No, the trouble today is that the idealized definition above is perfectly sensible and absolutely correct, but that definition is not what poptimism actually is in practice. In practice poptimism amounts to the constant valorization of that which is already popular, in our culture industries, and a corresponding disdain for that which is not. And this flips the most sacred duty of a music critic on its head: the most important thing music criticism has done, among other virtues, has been to elevate precisely those artists and albums and songs that were insufficiently known and underappreciated. You see, POPULAR music is already popular and thus does not need a hype man, as the market performs that function already. More challenging or experimental music does need champions. But poptimism fundamentally rewired the perceived purpose of the critic; now, the critic is simply the person who reassures the masses that their tastes are already correct. This is pretty much the opposite of everything I believe about music, criticism, the arts, and the culture industry. It’s also bad news for the kind of music I like, which will never have mass appeal.

There is no reason to worry about “rockism” because there is no more rock music. OK, no, of course there’s rock music being made. But in a little bit of a chicken-egg situation, rock has declined and the broader music culture (particularly Spotify, I’m guessing) simply doesn’t showcase it much. Rock doesn’t matter. Now, this isn’t the end of the world from the standpoint of a rock fan; as a fan of extreme artists like Endon and Pharmakon and subgenres like doom/drone/sludge/stoner metal, I keep happily bobbing along liking music that nobody else cares about. My point is that there is no rival school of musical appreciation, and certainly no mass of people out there who can match the size, passion, and vengefulness of the committed poptimists. And that inevitably bends our understanding of what music is and does and can do, in a way that I think really hurts music criticism as a medium. As in all things, actual diversity of tastes is the most consistent guarantor of interesting and fresh perspectives. The pop obsession has come packaged with an explicit celebration of demographic diversity but has made music culture markedly less diverse in terms of the music that matters. This is why I so often refer to poptimism as hegemonic: because there literally is no alternative. What major music publication, exactly, is going around saying “We’re a rockist publication, and we’re proud!” Doesn’t exist; no one would ever think to create one.

To its credit, Pitchfork continued to review all kinds of adventurous music until the end. I never really developed my musical tastes through Pitchfork, as so many others did - I got into music the old-fashioned way, from listening to my cooler older brother’s albums and then going down various rabbit holes - but you could learn a ton in its digital pages. I appreciate that they paid people money to write about music (I appreciate anyone who pays people money to write about music) and I particularly appreciate that they paid people money to review an eclectic mix of music. This piece will inevitably be seen as attacking Pitchfork, but it’s not meant to be. Any publication that could run reviews of the variety seen in this image, in the span of a couple days, is alright by me. I think that if Pitchfork is really dead as it was once known, it’s a great loss. But I also think that it was truly unfortunate that Pitchfork as an editorial entity became so aggressively, self-righteously dedicated to the mission of elevating pop above all other kinds of music. It cut directly against the publication’s famous dedication to satisfying divergent and idiosyncratic tastes, and produced some of the worst writing that ever appeared in its pages. For me it adds a bitter additional note to the sadness for people who lost their jobs.

Poptimism’s earliest advocates always insisted that its central argument was not the suggestion that pop music was superior to any other, but today, in practice, poptimism is little else than that very suggestion. The trouble is that once thoughtful New York Times essays filter out to the various social networks and publishing platforms of the world, the philosophies discussed have a tendency to get twisted into whatever those receiving them already want. And it turns out that most people in the world, for some reason, harbor a deep insecurity that their tastes are somehow not good enough. As I’ve said many times when it comes to franchise moviemaking, the fear that somewhere, someone is looking down their nose at you is the most powerful force in popular culture. The muscular insistence that any preference for art that does not hold mass appeal is a form of forbidden snobbery, and maybe bigotry, has resulted in some pretty extreme behavior. (Try saying that you think Kpop is overproduced and inauthentic on TikTok, but take care to get set up in a witness protection program first.) I wish all of these people would be healed in their insecurity. But I also wish that publications like Pitchfork could have held the line against the kind of conformity this has all engendered, when instead they spent their last years doing the opposite. That’s a shame, though not, I admit, as much of a shame as the seeming slow demise of music criticism itself.