Beyond the review score

For context, Pitchfork’s headquarters are located at One World Trade Center in New York City. In a sense, Halsey basically called for a second 9/11. On one hand, this was concerning. On another, a kind of iconic moment for the singer. Of course, Halsey went on to issue an apology for the tweet, but this is only one out of many instances where music critics clash with artists.

That got me asking: what about fanbases? With the rise of social media in the 2010s – and most Gen Z coming of age on them – surely that has affected the way fans and music critics interact. The relationship between artist, critic & fan is without a doubt complicated. I would argue that said complexity reflects wider social discourses. In times of uncertainty and the decay of neoliberalism, Gen Z is looking for certain answers about the problems of the world – and that follows in the way they approach art.

First of all, how does that connect to music critics? To answer this question, it would be useful to treat music critics less as individuals and more as an institutional body that either legitimises or rejects records. This means that they are not immune to conditioning from structures like neoliberalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and so on. Music critics are then, not unbiased observers. They are very much capable like all of us to resort to bias of race or gender. The fight of rockists (those who see rock music as inherently authentic, and therefore “real” music) versus poptimists (those who see pop music as equally worthy of respect) would be a useful event to use as an example, but that would mean ignoring the impact of electronic music in recent years (with notable examples, SOPHIE, the P.C. Music label and Charli xcx’s 2024 album BRAT). What is true, is that the previous generation of music critics are slowly being replaced by new ones, with their own theoretical frameworks and biases. Rather than a goal of impartiality, the language of bias just changes.

But that is about music critics. What about the fans? They are at the crossroads of artist, critic, and general public. That means they might have power in shaping the discourse around a record. Online spaces such as “stan twitter” are a great example of that, especially nowadays when more people are on social media than ever before. This is partially because these fan spaces and the general public now exist together in the digital dimension, alongside artists and critics. The chain of communication is much shorter now: a critic’s analysis circulates faster and the response from artists or fans generate discourse faster. And said discourse is not organic, but reactionary. In other words, the way all agents (fans, public, critics, artists) talk about art shifts from analysis with substance towards generating attention towards someone, either a critic with a polarising opinion, or fans trying to leverage public perception of an artist.

So what does that mean about the future of music criticism? Of all art? It’s true that we live in uncertain times, but I would be inclined to disagree that said times are unprecedented. For one, we can look at the clash between popists and rockitsts to determine how to guide Gen Z in approaching art. What resulted from their clash was a reproduction of the issues they both aimed to solve. Rockists created the conditions that allowed for poptimism to rise, and vice versa, poptimism ended up regurgitating the arguments of rockists. Perhaps the answer lies in looking at music critics not as impartial agents of art criticism, but as individuals who are brought up into social systems that influence their analysis. Thus, it is important to look both at the arguments they are making and what kind of biases they have.