Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you enjoy this newsletter, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history.
The Most Influential Critic
By Chris Dalla Riva
A couple of months ago, music critic Anthony Fantano got into a fight with the pop star Halsey. This fight was not new, though. It centered around Fantano’s pan of Halsey’s now two-year-old record, The Great Imposter.
Halsey has always had a bit of a blustery relationship with critics. In 2020, the “Bad at Love” singer asked her millions of followers on Twitter if “the basement they run p*tchfork out of [can] just collapse already.” “p*tchfork,” of course, refers to the music publication Pitchfork. What Halsey didn’t realize was that Pitchfork, owned by Condé Nast, operates out of the World Trade Center. She later deleted the tweet.
You can turn elsewhere if you want to understand the contours of this internet beef. What concerns me is a comment that the self-proclaimed “Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd” (i.e., Fantano) made to Variety in the wake of the back-and-forth:
I don’t have to prove my track record to Halsey. I have been the most relevant and impactful music critic of my — and any — generation for over 10 years now. You can’t really debate that. There’s no music critic bigger than me who’s had more impact than me for as long as I have, consistently. And if I die tomorrow, nobody’s going to outdo that run.
Anthony Fantano has had an impact on music. In the same way that you can point to the Rolling Stone of yore for creating the hero worship around many classic rockers and Pitchfork for pushing indie into the mainstream, you can give Fantano credit for helping platform certain artist, like Death Grips.
Still, referring to yourself as the most “relevant and impactful music critic” not just right now but in history is quite the claim. I could dive into the particularities of this claim, but Steven Hyden did so with such deftness a few months ago that I figured I’d just quote him:
Now, I happen to despise the word “relevant” in this context, mostly because I don’t know what it means. Does it suggest a certain level of influence in the music industry that goes beyond quantifiable numbers? Does it mean Fantano tangibly impacts the streams of a song or album he reviews? Or does it simply signify that a lot of people watch his videos? If it’s the last one, I’m sure Fantano is right, at least in the modern world … But back to “relevant” for a second: Does Anthony Fantano really matter outside of his (relatively large for a music critic) audience? In the way that a famous critic might have mattered in the days of a more centralized, top-down media? … And, in terms of those videos, what exactly does a “view” connote, anyway? I have “viewed” many YouTube videos in my life, and I don’t know that I’d call the vast majority of them “relevant” or even “memorable.” A “view” seems like a rather cheap commodity, when you think about it.
I happen to agree with many of Mr. Hyden’s points here. But this is a newsletter about music and numbers. So, I decided to see if critical impact was actually measurable.
The Most Interesting Place in Music Criticism
Anytime I head to a Wikipedia page for a particular album, I am almost certain that I will find one name: Stephen Thomas Erlewine. I mean his words are literally all over Wikipedia:
Thriller by Michael Jackson: “Erlewine felt it was an improvement on Jackson’s previous album, although he was critical of the title track, describing it as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘sucked out the momentum’ of the record.”
The Eminem Show by Eminem: “In his review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said the album ‘proves Eminem is the gold standard in pop music in 2002, delivering stylish, catchy, dense, funny, political music that rarely panders.’”
Barney’s Favorites, Volume 1 by Barney: “Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic said that both volumes in Barney’s Favorites, much like the television series, are ‘cute and sweet.’ He stated that the album ‘provides hours of listening enjoyment for small children, although parents might find it a little tiring.’”
If you’re familiar with Erlewine, all of these mentions shouldn’t come as a shock. The critic had a long-time association with AllMusic, the online music database that seeks to catalog, well, all music.
Furthermore, the man is a workhorse. Along with bylines all over the place, Erlewine is very active in his newsletter So It Goes. It honestly feels like if you sing a song in the shower, Erlewine will have a review of it up before you dry off.
Jokes aside, I started to wonder (a) if we could use Wikipedia to judge the impact of a music critic and (b) if there was anybody cited across Wikipedia’s music universe more than Stephen Thomas Erlewine.
To sate my wonder, I first sourced a list of critics from Wikipedia’s respective lists of chief music critics and American music critics, along with those mentioned in a recent newsletter from Embedded titled “The best music critics, according to music critics.”
Next, I built a tool that looked for mentions of those critics across every album page on Wikipedia. My idea was that if the things you say about music are cited regularly, then you are probably influential. So, who is the most influential music critic?