How Music Criticism Has Changed

Let's talk about what we write about when we write about music

The other day a friend asked me if I liked being a music critic. “Music critic?” I repeated. “I’m not a music critic.” And I really meant it. Yes, I write about music. Yes, I give you my opinion on certain things. Yes, I recommend songs that I enjoy. But I don’t think I’m a critic in the same way that

Greil Marcus

or Jessica Hopper or

Steven Hyden

or

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

are critics. I’m not giving you deep insight into particular pieces of music. I mostly write about trends.

Nevertheless, I love music criticism. So, when I came across a huge database of album reviews from the last two decades, I knew I had to start crunching some numbers. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.

A Critical Look at Critical Writing

“It started in my bedroom,” Ryan Schreiber told Slate in an oral history of Pitchfork, the music criticism website he founded in the1990s. When Schreiber and his buddies were publishing their first reviews, they probably didn’t realize that they would become one of the most powerful tastemakers in the industry. Bands they championed, like Bon Iver and Arcade Fire, would go from indie darlings to industry stalwarts, taking home Grammys and featuring on songs with pop stars. Those they trashed, like Black Kids and Travis Morrison, could see their careers collapse overnight.

Given the cultural power that Pitchfork had throughout the aughts, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they began to face backlash from artists and readers alike. People bemoaned the site for its pretension, for abandoning the indie rock they built their reputation on, for being unnecessarily cruel, for embracing pop music, for selling to Condé Nast, for publishing umpteen greatest of all-time lists. In fact, basically everything Pitchfork did or didn’t do eventually came to face some sort of criticism. I grabbed a dataset of over 22,000 reviews published between 1999 and 2021 to try to understand how the site changed and how the way we write about music in general changed.

We’ll start with some basic facts. First, Pitchfork grew considerably during the 2000s. In 1999, they published just over 200 reviews. Within five years, they had grown the number of reviews over 400%, publishing over 1,000 per year in each of the next two decades. The length of those reviews also increased, going from around 300 words to 400 words. But things get interesting when you look at the words they chose.

Did Pitchfork Ditch Rock Music for Pop Music?

Last year, I published an article about how the overlap between Pitchfork’s year end lists and Billboard’s year end lists has been pretty consistent for the last two decades. In other words, Pitchfork always had a penchant for pop music. Nevertheless, we can see what types of music Pitchfork was reviewing outside of their yearly favorites.

Though some genre coverage has been pretty consistent since the website’s inception — jazz, for example, accounted for 4.1% of reviews in 1999 and 4.3% in 2021 — others have changed radically, especially since 2010. Rock music was (and remains) Pitchfork’s most covered genre, but that coverage has shrunk considerably. In 1999, 61.8% of reviews were for rock albums. By 2021, that had fallen to 31.5%. While pop coverage has grown in that period, namely from 5% of reviews in 1999 to 14.9% in 2021, hip-hop has grown even more. In 1999, only 1.4% of reviews covered the Bronx-born genre. By 2021, 18.1% did. So, yes, Pitchfork is covering less rock music, but the shift has focused a bit more on hip-hop than pop.

Did Pitchfork Become Less Critical?

In 2007, The Onion published one of my favorite headlines: “Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8.” What’s doubly funny about this satirical headline is that it isn’t that far off from reality. Between 1999 and 2021, the average rating for a new album by Pitchfork was 6.99. If we look by year, the average rating has increased slightly from a 6.8 to a 7.2. You could argue that ratings got even higher after the site was purchased by Condé Nast, but I think that would be overstating things.

We can also look at how often Pitchfork named an album “Best New Music” to gauge this. “Best New Music” was launched in 2003 as a way for the site to highlight “the finest music of the current moment.” Between 2003 and 2021, between 3.5% and 5% of albums received the the “Best New Music” badge in each year. In other words, Pitchfork’s level of criticalness has been pretty consistent over this period.

Did Pitchfork Become More Snooty?

Since Pitchfork came online in 1996, they’ve awarded eleven albums the coveted score of 10.0 upon release:

• Gay? by 12 Rods (1996)

• El Producto by Walt Mink (1996)

• Bricolage by Amon Tobin (1997)

• OK Computer by Radiohead (1997)

• I See a Darkness by Bonnie “Prince” Billy (1999)

• The Soft Bulletin by Flaming Lips (1999)

• Kid A by Radiohead (2000)

• Source Tags and Codes by ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (2002)

• Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco (2002)

• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West (2010)

• Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple (2020)

If you dig into these reviews, you’ll find some of the most illuminating writing you’ve ever read on music. You’ll also find stuff like this:

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.

This passage is insane. But it highlights why among all of the musical publications that cropped up since the 1990s, Pitchfork earned its reputation as the snootiest. But did they become more snooty as time went on? There’s actually a way we can gauge this: readability tests.

Readability tests assess sentence length and word complexity to judge how difficult a passage is to read. Two of the most common are the Flesh-Kincaid test and the Gunning fog test. Each of these tests uses a simple formula to gauge what grade level you need to be reading at to understand a passage. What we see is that while Pitchfork was always around a high school reading level, it’s reviews became a bit more complex from a readability perspective between 1999 and 2003. Since then, it’s generally been written at a level accessible to a high school senior or college freshman. Thus, I’d say it’s level of snootiness has been pretty similar for a long time now.

Did Pitchfork Change How They Write About Music?

Up to this point, much of what we’ve discussed is specific to Pitchfork itself. But the reason I became interested in this data is for the content of the reviews themselves. 22,000 reviews by hundreds of writers over 20+ years is going to capture shifts in how we write about music. Writing about music is a reflection of how we talk about music, which is itself a reflection of how we think about music.

To understand how musical thinking has shifted, I had to process the reviews a bit. First, I grouped words so that different inflections were put together. As a specific example, that means that the words “sings”, “singing”, “sang”, and “sung” would all be counted as the word “sing.” Then I expanded all contractions. Finally, I removed less interesting words, like “the”, “and”, and “a”. With this process complete, two words or phrases jumped out at me: “producer” and “feel like”.

In 1999, 6.4% of Pitchfork reviews contained the word “producer”. By 2021, 35.2% did. Similarly, 5.9% of reviews contained the phrases “feel like” or “feels like” in 1999. By 2021, the presence of those phrases had risen to 34.7%. I think both of these shifts are not only important but related.

In the early-20th century, the most important behind-the-scenes musical professional was the songwriter. That’s why you likely know the names of songwriters from that era, like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. In the last 40 years, not only has the line between songwriting and production become blurred, but producers — like Dr. Dre and Timbaland and Pharrell Williams — have outstripped their peers who are purely songwriters. With that in mind, it’s not a shock that producers and production have come to factor more regularly into albums reviews. To understand how this is connected to a rise in the phrases “feel like” and “feels like,” let’s look at some recent usage of those phrases.

• star-crossed by Kacey Musgraves (7.7): “On star-crossed, Musgraves stands by herself, taking no comfort in this type of insight. This album's "Breadwinner" feels like a dark counterpart to ‘High Horse,’ with a muted dance beat that plays like steady rain from a gray sky.”

• Glow On by Turnstile (8.4): “As with older songs like ‘Real Thing,’ ‘Gravity,’ or ‘Fazed Out,’ Glow On's best riffs initially sound sourced straight from the lizard brain—the sort of thing a teen might play when they get their first distortion pedal. That same teen might also remember how the intro to ‘Waiting Room’ made them feel like dunking themselves through a basketball hoop once the beat dropped.”

• OK Human by Weezer (5.8): “And yet, Weezer songs most often feel like self-driving cars on cruise control until Cuomo decides to steer the thing off a cliff—throwing in an ill-considered rap cadence, a reference to BLACKPINK or the Morton Salt girl that immediately questions whether Cuomo is writing for anyone other than himself. It's the Hollywood adage of ‘one for them, one for me’ playing out on a second-by-second basis.”

As you can see, these phrases are used to capture ephemeral qualities of songs. And those ephemeral qualities are often related to production decisions, to how the people behind the song chose to make it sound. Describing sound is hard. As someone somewhere once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Similes, metaphors, and strange comparisons are often the best way to capture a sound. Still, writing of this style can quickly devolve into nonsense. My hope is that we use this language to expand our understanding of music rather than obscure it.

A New One
"Never Been in Love" by Lo Fi Ho Hum
2024 - Indie Rock

What do I like about “Never Been In Love”, the debut single from Lo Fi Ho Hum? I want to tell you how I like the chipper “come on, come on” back-up vocals on the middle eight. I want to tell you how I like the subtle humor of the relationship missteps in the lyrics. I want to tell you how I like how the vocal captures those lyrics so well because it feels like it was tossed off in one take. But if I told you all of those things, I’d be ignoring the warm guitar tone, something that doesn’t take up enough space in our critical consciousness as rock music has receded.

An Old One
"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child / Where Could I Go But to the Lord" by Elvis Presley ft. Darlene Love
1968 - Gospel

There are tons of classics with the phrase “feel like” in the title. Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman”. Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin' Love”. Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”. Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman”. But I think the most powerful number with that phrase is the 19th century spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”.

Many a famous voice has taken on this song. Mahalia Jackson. Prince. Odetta. Van Morrison. Sarah Vaughn. Darius Rucker. Harry Belafonte. Despite all of these versions, my favorite comes from Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback Special. Presley doesn’t sing the song, though. It is performed off-camera by Darlene Love before The King gives a rousing rendition of “Where Could I Go But to the Lord”. The back-to-back songs are a clinic in the passion needed to properly perform gospel music.

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