The Racket: Rolling Stone, grow up, be a hater

“Can the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already,” Halsey tweeted in 2020. 

Ignoring that the “basement” Pitchfork is operated in is the World Trade Center, which led to an ensuing controversy where Halsey had to apologize for calling for “9/11 part two,” the sentiment that criticism is just people “hating” has taken over in the last decade.

People love to hate a hater, and music critics are being chased out of the industry on the premise of “letting people enjoy things.” 

This is why Taylor Swift’s chameleonic yet deeply awkward “The Life of a Showgirl” is getting five out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which called it “Taylor Swift hitting all her marks.” 

Rolling Stone Philippines more aptly calls it “Tumblr-core cringe.”

Swift has gotten lazy since the release of her album “Midnights” in 2022, her lyrics becoming cliché and bland at best and downright embarrassing at worst. The muddled synth-pop she releases is uninspired, even in the “Taylor’s Version” releases of her previous albums which were originally clear and soaring. 

Swift, like all artists, is at her best when she has something to prove. From her Rolling Stone review to “The Life of a Showgirl” breaking the record for most albums sold in the modern era, it’s clear that she no longer does. 

It’s not just with Swift or her uber-popular contemporaries. Album reviews are getting nicer across the board.

Metacritic, a website that creates aggregate scores for albums based on professional and user reviews, was once filled with diverse red, yellow and green colored ratings. Now, most albums score in the green. In 2017, none of the 787 albums analyzed received a red score.

Even albums that the artist and their fans have since distanced themselves from get this grade-inflationist treatment. 

“Solar Power,” a 2021 Lorde release that in retrospect made her realize the “wafty” and “chill” persona she created for herself on the album was not authentic, still received a middling 3.5 stars from Rolling Stone. 

Artists are no longer required to develop the self-awareness that Lorde possesses, and it’s not just artists. The death of music critics means that fans also don’t have to analyze why they like songs. 

Pitchfork, an online music magazine named for its goal of “no-holds-barred” reviews, has given in to this new “poptimism” that dominates the industry. 

Ryan Schreiber founded the magazine in 1991 after watching the timidity of American music magazines when reviewing. 

“I wanted to use the full range of the scale, and to have hot takes, to be daring, to surprise people and catch them off guard,” Schreiber said in an interview with The New Yorker. 

In the early 2000s and into the 2010s, many reviewers and magazines, like Pitchfork, were accused of being “rockist” or only taking rock music seriously. This was an era when sweaty earnestness and guitars could be found in the basement of every college house, inspiring documentaries like “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” 

Bad rock music was everywhere, bad indie music was everywhere and there was always some hipster ready and willing to praise it. 

Schreiber talks about Pitchfork attempting to be a respite from this to hold up a mirror to these bands. However, he couldn’t escape the criticism. 

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the magazine began expanding its coverage to include the albums of major pop stars. 

In the 1990s and 2000s, fans of pop music pushed for a “poptimism” ethos in music magazines. At first, this was a call to take pop seriously, but it became a push to celebrate it or else. 

Between the 1960s and 1970s, music journalism was at its peak. NME, a music magazine, was selling 800,000 copies a month, and Rolling Stone was selling millions. 

Now, magazines make most of their money through ads on their websites and paid partnerships, which means the days of “who cares who you piss off” are over. 

Swift, among other stars, doesn’t need Rolling Stone to reach her hundreds of millions of Instagram followers, and the magazine knows it. 

Starting in the 2010s, Pitchfork saw fewer pitches for negative reviews. Critics feared fan reactions to their reviews and the loss of future jobs that could result from not being advertiser-friendly. 

Critics of pop stars like Swift have been doxed and harassed by fans to the point that Paste magazine released a negative review of her album “The Tortured Poets Department” without a byline, which opened with “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” 

Similarly, Canadian magazine Exclaim! has left much of its reporting on Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion without bylines to protect writers from Minaj’s fanbase. 

The industry is changing. Critics don’t want to be put in danger, and magazines want to maintain their relationships with artists so they can get that next scoop. Magazines also have fewer permanent staff members, so they hand off reviews to writers pigeonholed as “fans” of the artist. The reason that they do this is, once again, the money.

A magazine would rather not get in trouble with a musician’s public relations team, and the reviewer doesn’t want to throw away their chance of working on that PR team when they’re barely scraping by on their per-word paycheck. 

It’s not necessarily true that being paid a living wage would bring back the age of the critic and make us all smarter, analytical a–holes, but it could, and maybe that would be a good thing.