The Evolution of the Critic: A Conversation with Mark Richardson

As the former Editor-in-Chief of Pitchfork, Mark Richardson has been one of the foundational music critics of the 21st century. Over an hour, we spoke about what it means to be a critic today.

If you were a music fan in the 1960s and 1970s, you came up reading critics like Lester Bangs,

Greil Marcus

, and

Robert Christgau

. But if, like me, you came of age a few decades later, the critic you turned to was

Mark Richardson

.

From the late-1990s through 2018, Richardson held various roles at Pitchfork, including Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor. While there, he helped turn Pitchfork into the 21st century’s go-to source for music criticism. Since his departure, he’s become The Wall Street Journal’s rock and pop critic, along with starting his own newsletter, Beauty Blew a Fuse. Over an hour, Richardson and I talked about the evolution of music criticism, why it’s so hard to pan an album, how to review The Beatles, and so much more. If you want to hear more from Richardson, subscribe to his newsletter by clicking the button below.

A Conversation with Mark Richardson

In a recent oral history of Pitchfork, you said the following: “Once all music became accessible, music criticism was really for people that like to read music criticism. It’s not for the general public anymore, and I don’t think it ever will be again.” Can you tell me how you think the job of a music critic has changed throughout your career?

I've been writing music criticism for about 25 years. For a long period of the history of criticism, it functioned as a buyer's guide. Like in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, you’d go to the reviews section in the back of a magazine or newspaper to figure out what you should buy at the record store. For a long time, that was the primary purpose of reviews. When Napster came along, and eventually streaming, people felt like they didn’t need someone to tell them what was worth spending money on. They could just check it out for themselves. At that point, the audience for music criticism began to change. It went from a general audience looking for stuff to buy to one that just liked reading about music.

During the time I was involved in the reviews section at Pitchfork, you saw many companies try to navigate this change. For example, Spin magazine was a pretty direct competitor to Pitchfork in the early-2010s. They decided to try putting most of their reviews on Twitter. These were short, 140-character reviews that basically just said if something was good or not in a sentence. A few years ago, Rolling Stone tried getting away from rating albums because you can't rate art. They just added them back a few months ago, though.

Spin’s short-form reviews from the early-2010s

I bring these changes up because this was everyone trying to grapple with what a music review was in the internet age. Should they be short so we don’t waste people’s time? Should they have numerical ratings? What I learned at Pitchfork is that the people reading reviews are people who just like reading about music. Like we would publish these long, 3000-word reviews of classic albums on Sundays and people would spend a ton of time reading them. Music criticism in this day-and-age isn’t really for people who want 140-character reviews. People who read music criticism today want deep dives. They want context. Criticism is a way to enrich a piece of art.

Of course, people do still look to reviews for recommendations to some degree. That’s why Pitchfork names things “Best New Music”. If you see that or see an album get an 8.5, maybe you’ll check it out. But recommendation isn’t the primary role of music criticism anymore.

In 2018, you taught an Arts Criticism course at the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Given this evolution of criticism, what would you try to teach your students?

I tried to teach them exactly what I’m talking about now. Teaching arts criticism isn’t easy, though. The kind of criticism that I’m talking about is built on your ability to notice things and communicate it with an audience. That can be hard to learn. It’s much easier for young writers to fall back on the idea of just giving their opinion on if something is good or bad. I don’t find that very interesting.

Do you think the skills that make a good music critic are the same skills that make a good film critic or art critic?

I think they are similar. I spent most time in that course on music because that was my expertise, but we also addressed film and television criticism. In fact, one of the books we read was Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which was about how you look at and think about paintings. It’s a beautifully written book. We read that and applied the ideas to lots of other art forms.

One of my favorite music critics is

Steven Hyden

. In one of his columns, he wrote about what he termed “the decline of the general-interest music critic.” What he meant by that was that back in the day, a newspaper might have one critic who had to cover every genre. That idea seems to have died over the last few decades as critics have specialized in certain genres. You, for example, are currently The Wall Street Journal’s rock and pop critic. Do you think that critics should largely stick to specific genres?

There’s a few different components to that. When I was growing up in Michigan, our local paper was the Lansing State Journal. They had an on staff critic who would go to shows, review albums, and interview artists. And they did it for every genre that the paper’s general readership might be interested in. People in this profession often feel a real sense of loss because that job doesn’t exist anymore. Newspapers don’t hire music critics to write broadly for all of the readership.

At The Wall Street Journal, for example, almost all of the critics across music, film, and television are freelancers. And all of those critics are pretty specialized. At the beginning of my time there, I said I wanted to write about a new jazz record. I think it was by Sons of Kemet. At Pitchfork, I’d written about jazz quite a bit. My editors were like, “Oh, our jazz critics will cover that.” Because of that specialization at The Wall Street Journal, you’ll notice that whenever I review something for Pitchfork these days, it’s usually a jazz or experimental release.

Mark Richardson’s recent reviews for Pitchfork. 66% are reviews for jazz albums.

I think the idea of sticking to your particular experience has actually gone further than genre, though. We now often think of the background and the identify of who the critic is. For example, The Wall Street Journal had me review Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Lots of people would look at that review and say, “You’re a middle-aged white guy. Are you really the right person to speak to this album?” Had I been assigning the review at Pitchfork, I probably would have picked someone else. But I’m the pop critic at The Wall Street Journal, so I’ve got to give it my best shot if that’s what I’m assigned.

I want to turn more specifically to your criticism and discuss it from a few angles. I was able to pull a database of Pitchfork reviews that contained almost 600 reviews written by you between 1999 and 2024. First, let’s talk about your review of tUnE-yArDs’ 2009 debut BiRd-BrAiNs. How do you approach a review when the artist is not only new to you but the artist is seemingly new to the world? That was their first album.

I remember writing that review very clearly. Did I give it a 6.8?

I’m impressed. You did.

When that tUnE-yArDs’ album came, it was fairly easy to connect it to a lot of other things going on in indie music at the time. So, it was a new artist, but it was something that had much broader context. I was able to tie it into what was currently going on and also what earlier music might have inspired it. Occasionally, you’ll come across something that doesn’t really fit with anything else. But that isn’t as common. You can usually trace an artist or an album to its influences and then write about if what the current artist is doing is distinct or not.

Richardson’s 2009 review of tUnE-yArDs’ debut album

Now, I want to turn to your rave review of Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam. When you reviewed this album, Animal Collective had been making music for years. How does your approach change if you are familiar with the artist’s earlier work?

Interestingly, the world of Animal Collective is one that I would have also connected to tUnE-yArDs early on. But Animal Collective was so interesting because they tried to do something different on every album for quite a while. One album might be very abstract and focused on noise music. Then the next might be all acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies. So, following them during the 2000s was very exciting for me. With each review, you had to try to figure out what their approach was and how to convey that. Then you might also speculate what else there was for them to do next.

Richardson’s 2007 review for Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam

Earlier this year, you tweeted 13 albums to get to know you by. One of those albums was Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, an album you actually did a retrospective review of for Pitchfork in 2005. How does your approach change when you are not only familiar with an artist and an album but when you have a deep emotional connection to that record?

That was the first album I ever bought. I know some people start buying records when they are seven or eight years old, but I didn’t buy my first until I was a teenager. I have a clear memory of writing about that album because it was so much fun. You’re trying to bring a ton of associations and feelings and ideas that you’ve had about an artist over 25 years and convey that to people in a single review. You don’t get many opportunities to do that in your career. At this point, I almost never get two decades to digest an album before writing about it.

Richardson’s 2005 of Born to Run, one of his favorite albums

Relatedly, in 2009, Pitchfork undertook the daunting task of reviewing The Beatles’ discography. You wrote reviews for the entire box set they released, along with specific reviews for The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. What is your approach to reviewing music that is bigger than life itself? Like what is there possibly to add to Beatles’ discourse?