#i was literally analyzing that 1.5 minute song for 2 hours

[bittersweetresilience]

i'm still laughing about this... i love isa...

[smitheeblog]

Against Music Criticism

Hat tip to my friend Aidan O’Gara, who is not very online, but who had the incepting idea for this post.

Imagine the scene: you’re a young artist, your music has just gotten popular enough to be reviewed by someone with a following. Maybe this person has a YouTube channel, maybe a blog. They listen to your music, and…they hate it. They exhaustively explain to all of their disciples why they dislike your music. Now, thousands of people, many of whom probably would’ve liked your music if they’d given it an unbiased listen, will never listen to it, and have newly formed negative opinions towards your music.

Modern Music Criticism 

Music criticism seemingly had its heyday in the days of Lester Bangs, long-haired rockers, and that movie Almost Famous about some kid who doesn’t actually want to be a Rockstar, but wants to spend months following them around with a notebook.

But the new age of music criticism, spearheaded by YouTube icons like Anthony Fantano, is farther reaching than Rolling Stones could have dreamt of. Fantano has over 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and millennial music review page Pitchfork gets 1.5 million unique visitors each month.

Bangs

Fantano 

Fantano and Pitchfork take similar approaches to music review: flowery verbiage that seek to cast their subjective preferences as absolute truth. The primary vehicle for this objectification is the 1-10 rating that Fantano and Pitchfork give all albums and tracks they review. Pitchfork, annoyingly enough, often goes farther, drafting ad hominin accusations and insults at artists. In one review for Jack Antonoff’s Gone Now, Pitchfork went as far as to call the album “The epitome of a vanity project.”

It’s probably true that Pitchfork’s writing room is a bastion of pompous flair and self-righteousness. It’s also probably true that these writers believe that the Pitchfork mantle insulates them the basic social norm of being nice to people. It’s also probably true that Pitchfork writers get a certain perverted delight from spending 20 minutes dismantling the art that somebody else took years to make.

(I’m seemingly not alone in my criticisms of pitchfork) 

Why Music Criticism is a useless school of thought 

Despite its deep-rooted pretension, my beef is not with Pitchfork, my beef is with music criticism as a whole. 

As far as I can tell, music criticism does three very negative things, all with one goal in mind.

1.     Music critics hurt the ambitions of would-be artists by negatively reviewing their work before anybody actually listens to it. People who casually peruse Fantano or Pitchfork probably have a large set of opinions about music they’ve never heard.

2.     Music criticism paints listening to music as an evaluative activity, rather than an act of appreciation and emotional vulnerability. I don’t like this. At risk of sounding Marianne Williamson-y, music is about self-expression, and good self-expression should be healthy and positive. Evaluating someone’s emotional outlet is annoying at best and cancerous at worst.  

3.     Music criticism has created an extremely toxic culture of music “intellectuals” who hail some artists as darlings and others as pariahs. The upshot of this is a community of mostly millennial white dudes who parrot the opinions of online music critics to be a total dick to people about their music tastes. 

(Popular fantano-verse meme, Really hard to understate the misogyny that’s baked into the online music scene) 

As far as I can tell, the sole goal of all of this is to inflate the egos of the critics and their disciples.

Why Music Criticism is a particularly bad form of criticism 

One thing you might be thinking is “Isn’t this true of all criticism of everything? Should we simply stop reviewing things?”  

I think criticism of art (movies, music, books, etc.) has two general purposes.

The first purpose is to explain. I think this is a laudable goal. A lot of art is very complex, and I appreciate people who take the time to break it down. Allan Pollack is a musicologist from Brooklyn who is best known for musically analyzing every Beatles song, and he’s awesome. People who view music through the lens of a museum curator are to be celebrated.

        The second purpose of criticism is to evaluate things to help less-informed people make decisions about where to spend their time and money. Yelp helps me find a mechanic who won’t rip me off and The Michelin Guide tells people where to find great food in a new city. The goal of explaining what things are good and which are bad is often a good goal, and this service is probably the main reason why critics have survived as an occupation into the modern era.

And even though the opinions of critics are subjective, they’re on average pretty helpful in situations where it’s costly to evaluate something yourself. It takes 2 hours of my life to watch a movie and a few hundred dollars to hire a mechanic, so if a critic can mildly improve my odds of picking a good one, that’s worth it.

But music is different because the cost of listening to music is so low. Songs are rarely longer than 5 minutes and can often be listened to as a secondary task—on a train, while washing dishes, etc. Most of the time, you don’t even need to listen to a whole song to decide if you like it. If it takes me 2 minutes to decide if I like the new Billie Eilish song, it makes more sense for me to listen to that song than to listen to some white guy in a flannel wax poetic about it.

And I will totally concede that some music takes 10-20 tries to really appreciate, and some music sounds bad at the beginning but you can learn to love over time. I think there’s a place for people to tell me which of these rabbit wholes are worth going down, I think there’s close to zero value of Fantano telling me what music isn’t worth listening to further. 

This gets to the upshot of this whole thing. There’s a lot of music out there. Without people telling me which music is good and which is bad, how in the world could I know where to find new music? How could I navigate the literal millions of songs on Spotify?

My proposal: if you’re someone who people trust to talk about music, only talk about music when the music is good. Granted, this advice is somewhat based off of the maternal saying “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” But truly, if every music critic only spent their time attempting to highlight good music instead of spending their time abusing bad music, I think that would be better for everybody. I would still be able to find good music while also being able to make my own judgements on the music I listen to. At the very least, people should be given judgement-free range to explore music without fear of judgement from neo-warlock-scholars at Pitchfork. 

In closing, if you work at Pitchfork and you want to tell me how Taylor Swift’s Speak Now was the only thing that energized you after a breakup, I’d love to hear it. If, instead, you want to rhapsodize about how “uneven” the album is, fuck off.