Why Does Pop Criticism Make Everyone Insane?

Criticism of criticism of criticism

Happy August. I was in the New Yorker this past weekend, in the Weekend Essay, on why everything is “Eras” now in pop music. The piece covers a lot of ground—the new Charli XCX, Jay-Z, fans getting amnesia at the Eras Tour, Madonna, Ariana Grande’s current tour, the Backstreet Boys live at the Sphere, and more. (For good measure, there’s also Billy Joel and the criminally underrated Cotton Mather—the band, not the reverend.) I’m proud of how it turned out. It starts as kind of a “trend piece” but opens out onto broader questions about pop music’s mania for periodization. It also features this fantastic illustration by the immensely talented Bratislav Milenkovic:

Art by Bratislav Milenkovic, for my New Yorker essay

I’ve been very gratified by the response to this piece for the most part, but I did make the mistake of venturing into the comments on the magazine’s Instagram and Facebook posts about the article, where people were not impressed. I’m used to getting all sorts of flak online for my writing. There seems to be no real correlation between my attitude toward a subject and the amount of beef people have with a piece. Some of you might have read a very critical 2023 essay that I wrote about Jack Antonoff for The Drift; that one made a lot of people mad. For a bit Antonoff himself was fielding questions about it in interviews; I feel a little sheepish about that, but he handled it gracefully. (He didn’t read the piece, but his dad did. Good media hygiene that many of us, including me, can learn from!) Earlier this year, I wrote about the return of BTS, also for the New Yorker; I was mildly negative about their new album but mostly pretty ruminative and matter-of-fact about the current state of play in the K-pop world as the genre enters its truly global age. Fans were wrathful, but I missed most of the fallout; I was in beautiful Western Massachusetts playing bluegrass guitar with my dad. I wrote about Big Star, one of my favorite bands, a couple of years ago, and a certain acclaimed novelist took to BlueSky to say I was giving short shrift to their imitators, such as Teenage Fanclub (also one of my favorite bands!). When I wrote about the bizarre rollout of Taylor Swift’s last album last year—no doubt more treacherous territory—I got a piece of hate mail so weird and sad that I was compelled to respond with genuine concern and well wishes.

You can’t please everyone. Criticism involves, or at least should involve, an act of position-taking that is going to set your account of an object against others’. You have to walk the notorious subjective-objective tightrope, presenting your impressions as if they are universal and all rational people should share them—Kant is still right; taste really does work this way—while also signaling, both explicitly through signposting and indirectly through style, that your impressions come from you, a specific person whose experiences are formed in a particular contingent historical soup, and that they are not being conjured from nowhere by an act of God. If you do criticism, people will take exception with either the content of your judgements or the style through which you make them; you have to develop a thick skin about this. Dispositionally I am a people-pleaser, which is unfortunate for this line of work. For some reason, though, I’ve never taken much of the negative reaction personally; if we’re talking base motives, I think my inner contrarian edgelord overrides my inner people-pleaser in most cases.

Last year, Kelefa Sanneh, who remains one of the greatest critics working today, wrote an excellent and much-debated essay arguing that music critics have become too soft in recent years. Sanneh attributes this in part to stan culture: understandably, music writers might be hesitant to write a pan of an artist whose legions of online fans stand ready to descend on them, harass them, and maybe even doxx them. I think this is true in that the median review across outlets is tepidly positive, though Pitchfork in particular never lost its appetite for a knives-out pan. (Jeremy Larson’s pans are some of my very favorites.)

But shying away from all-out negativity does not really indemnify a writer from backlash, as even my (very mild, compared to what some of my colleagues have had to put up with) experience shows. Sanneh brushes up against this point near the end of his essay when he writes:

“But fans of mainstream pop, as you may have noticed, tend not to be reliably ‘optimistic’ about music, let alone polite: they are, on the contrary, viciously factional and unapologetically fickle, finely attuned to the subtle difference between a hit and a flop.”

Sanneh frames this tendency as the possible leading edge of a new turn back to acidic criticality. Maybe so. But I think I’d put the relationship a bit differently, less as a turn from one extreme to another than as a matter of an internal dialectical tension in the broader field of pop reception that includes both critics and fans. What interests me is that, in a time when criticism is being more or less fairly accused of going soft, pop criticism seems to be making people angrier than ever. Why is that?

Because I am a creature of the millennial internet, my first instinct in trying to answer this question was to make a list. Here are the five most common objections I see to pieces of pop criticism, loosely organized from the petty to the existential. The first two can be made more or less evenhandedly, or maybe more accurately offhandedly, though they are often made pretty aggressively. The last three, however, tend to be incredibly affectively heated. You can feel the frothing rage through the screen (it’s always through a screen) when you encounter these kinds of comments.

Without further ado:

1. The thing you say is new is actually old!

In a way it’s heartening to see people wanting more long-range historical arguments, more criticism that acknowledges music history and pushes back against the amnesia of the streaming age. I think we should hold each other to account for presenting facile or potted or truncated versions of history that don’t give the reader proper context for whatever is under discussion. But a lot of the time, to me, this reaction comes off more like an allergy to diagnosing stuff that’s developing in the historical present. Someone objected in response to my piece from this weekend that Beethoven had “eras.” So, I guess, did Josquin, and so did the lyrists of antiquity. You can stretch a concept until it encompasses everything and means nothing. There is nothing wholly new in culture—just new combinations of existing elements that sometimes produce effects of emergence, where something appears that seems to be more than the sum of its parts—and it is tedious to point this sort of thing out.

2. You forgot about [ARTIST/ALBUM SONG] / You are actively erasing [ARTIST/GENRE/TRADITION] / You neglected to address [COUNTEREXAMPLE].

This one comes up in response to more synthetic/trend/zeitgeist-focused pieces rather than reviews. The idea is that the writer is either fatally showing their ignorance by not mentioning an artist/album or (less commonly) deliberately not mentioning an artist/album that would be a fatally damaging counterexample to their argument. Someone pronounced my “eras” piece invalid because it doesn’t mention Beyoncé. Any kind of argument that abstracts from a wide range of evidence is open to this kind of counterargument, but I think the bar is pretty high for proving that one particular omission totally invalidates an argument that points out a broad trend or tendency or historical arc.

3. This is a disingenuous hit piece from an [ARTIST I LIKE] anti / This is a disingenuous puff piece from an [ARTIST I DON’T LIKE] stan.

Now we’re getting into it. Now that pop fandom has become a competitive sport, or at least a kind of fantasy football without money on the line (though with the expansion of prediction markets into the pop charts, I guess there is money on the line after all), the discourse on the highest echelon of artists has gotten pretty manichaean. Either you are a stan or an anti. (And really antis are just stans of another, rival artist: the Swifties vs. the Livies; ARMY vs. the Blinks, and so on.) And so if you are even mildly critical of an artist with such a stan army, you are pronounced an anti with a vendetta. On the other side, the actual antis stand ready to pounce on anything resembling a positive comment on an artist they’re sworn against—for them, anything less than unsparing critique is proof of your undercover standom.

This is stan hermeneutics. Not only is the artist’s every word to be exhaustively pored over and decoded in the classic paranoiac Swiftie fashion—criticism must be subjected to the same scrutiny as well. Every critic, even every poster or commenter, is telling you exactly who they are, where they stand in the great struggle; you just have to recognize and decipher the signs. At the same time, once the foes are found out, their writing becomes radioactive; the fellow stans must be shielded from it. The comments sections on my BTS piece were filled with stans saying “ARMYS DO NOT CLICK!” (Stans have an unparalleled feel for the attention economy; they know what a click is worth.)

4. You are endorsing [ARTIST I DON’T LIKE] by virtue of taking their work seriously and devoting column inches to it / You are mean-spiritedly tearing down [ARTIST I LIKE] by virtue of taking their work seriously and devoting column inches to it.

This is a more generalized version of #3, and I find it comes up more in response to a particular kind of essay that tries to look beyond music to broader social phenomena. Outside the conspiracy-theory world of standom, I have started to see these two opposing—but surely connected—reactions to the bare fact of an artist’s being covered in a publication. Taylor Swift in particular seems to trigger these kinds of feelings. On one side, those who are understandably tired of hearing about her feel that any coverage of her is a tacit endorsement, an act of giving her discursive oxygen. A lot of people seemed to take my “eras” piece as a celebration of Taylor and her amazing showbiz innovations, when it was simply pointing out that the Eras Tour has been a flashpoint in the recent history of stadium pop tours. On the other side, there are those who take any kind of coverage that doesn’t repeat PR talking points or speak reverentially about an artist’s achievement, their journey, etc., as a mean-spirited attack. In this vein, someone called my “eras” essay a “hatchet job.” (For what it’s worth, I do not really like Taylor Swift’s music, but I suspend that opinion every time I try to write about her significance in the broader pop landscape.)

I think this one is at least partially down to a confusion about what type of judgment a critic is making. I’ve quoted this passage from the conclusion to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism elsewhere, but it’s worth reproducing here. Jameson distinguishes among three kinds of critical judgments:

“‘Taste,’ in the loosest media sense of personal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be nobly and philosophically designated as ‘aesthetic judgment’….. ‘Analysis’ I take to be that peculiar and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that constitutes the specific task of literary and cultural study; to describe this further as the investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of specific forms may perhaps convey the way in which these twin perspectives… can be said to constitute their object and thereby to be inseparable…. [And] ‘evaluation’ which… tries to keep alive (or to reinvent) assessments of a sociopolitical kind that interrogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individual work of art.”

I think a lot of people get mad at music criticism when they mistake analysis or evaluation for straight-up judgements of taste. Take a passage like the following, from this NYer piece I keep bringing up:

“The morbidity implicit in the Eras Tour has become explicit in other marquee post-COVID pop tours. The performances on the Weeknd’s mega-selling After Hours til Dawn Tour issue from a ruined post-apocalyptic cityscape; the singer, flanked by red-cloaked dancers reminiscent of imperial guards from “Star Wars,” dons a mask and acts out a vague story line that plays his career loosely in reverse. Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour, performed on an infinity-sign-shaped stage, imagined a campier apocalypse: a cyborg version of Perry fights an evil A.I. that is exterminating the world’s butterflies, summoning her classic outfits and set pieces along the way. Unlike Swift, these artists use narrative devices to give some connective tissue to the succession of hits. These devices seem to share a conviction, however vague or coded, that the present is a wasteland bereft of life and color. The only hope for redemption is to borrow vitality from the past.”

The way I see it, there are no judgments of taste in this paragraph. There is just analysis—of the emerging form of the Eras-ish tour—and a hint of evaluation, about this emerging cultural form’s encoded attitudes about history and the present. To me this is an evenhanded account of some interesting things that are happening in pop right now! But if you see the last part especially as a judgment of taste—these tours are aesthetically/morally bad because they are pessimistic about the present—you might take exception.

Jameson discusses this confusion in the conclusion to Postmodernism; he’s puzzled that people read the earlier essay version of the book as a diatribe against the ills of postmodernism. My favorite part of the conclusion comes when he almost exasperatedly lays out some of his judgments of taste about different mediums of postmodern culture: he likes the architecture, the music and poetry are “not bad,” he finds the novels “weak,” and so on. As Sianne Ngai notes, he seems to lay all this out for the purpose of bracketing it, as if to prove that his taste doesn’t really have a bearing on the analysis and evaluation that make up the bulk of his argument. Still, Jameson does have an overall orientation, a kind of guiding sensibility that is a sort of taste: he identifies himself as “a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism.” I think this particular Jamesonian cocktail—affective enthusiasm mixed with some pretty bitter-sounding evaluations of the social dimensions of art—is hard for a lot of people to swallow. Certainly it’s a mode of writing not a lot of people are used to reading, and that is especially susceptible to misunderstanding.

5. It’s not that serious / What is the point of this?

This brings us to the most existentially charged kind of response. I’ve seen, with dismaying and increasing frequency, comments that amount to why bother writing this? The charge that pop is not worth taking seriously is the dialectical flipside of the charge that it’s not taken seriously enough. (Neither charge is new, but they’re laminated together in weirder ways than ever lately.) I think behind both positions is a hostility to seeing things translated into a different language. Pop’s native language is the language of PR, breathless reportage, access interviews, triumphal mythologizing. Any kind of criticism that tries to find a different language for pop phenomena risks sounding out of touch, or even worse, sophistic. This pisses people off.

Pop is the art of immediacy. Its pleasures come from the way it seems to share all its secrets with you, with anyone. Everyone thinks they are an expert in pop music, and in a sense they are right. Reading writing that tries to make the immediate feel weird and frictional, that doesn’t simply praise or decry it but rather tries to explain how it works and what it might have to say about the forms of social life from which it arose—this is unsettling to that sense of immediate mastery. It is maybe also annoying. Anyone who has a wacky, out-there, structural account of pop is saying, maybe, that they know your pleasures better than you do. Where do they get off?