In many ways, it's been an incredible year for pop music. The breakout of the holy trinity of Charli XCX, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter was fun and refreshing; Charli and Carpenter have been grinding it out for a long time, and Roan's dedication to speaking out about creepy fan behaviour has helped facilitate a crucial cultural conversation.
It's one that a memorable piece by Sinéad O'Sullivan in The New Yorker calls to mind. Published after the reviews came pouring in for Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department, "Why Normal Music Reviews No Longer Make Sense for Taylor Swift" saw the journalist argue that the pop star's "musical franchise" was like the Marvel Cinematic Universe: so inundated with layers of lore that it can possibly only be appreciated by expertly-trained stans.
"The tepid music reviews often miss the fact that 'music' is something that Swift stopped selling long ago," O'Sullivan wrote, noting that many of the TTPD reviews accused Swift's latest record of sounding too much like her previous work — while Swifties argued that that was the whole point. Of course, with a fan army like this at hand, many publications feared naming critics or even publishing reviews at all; I blocked my VPN when I gave Midnights a (in hindsight, overly generous) 7 out of 10. Doxxing is a very real fear for writers publishing on the internet, who are, in fact, actual people too.
And some pop stars contribute to this monstrosity. When celebrating her first No. 1 hit, Carpenter strangely used the moment to call out a listener who criticized her; that person was quickly driven off social media by stans. And I watched in dismay as Halsey shared pull quotes from Pitchfork's 4.3 review of their new album, The Great Impersonator, in a social media graphic with reviewer Shaad D'Souza's name on it. While the artist possibly thought they were doing a good and important thing by pointing out the positive parts of an overwhelmingly negative review, Halsey's previous viral tweet about hoping the basement they run Pitchfork out of collapses — inadvertently calling for the destruction of the One World Trade Center, where Conde Nast is located — has very much poisoned the well here.
Naturally, their stans are issuing threats to D'Souza's credibility — and life — all over Twitter. The main argument here (other than dredging up other reviews the writer has written in an effort to say they have poor taste or whatever) seems to be that Halsey's album should be exempt from critique because they wrote it when they were very sick with lupus and a rare form of cancer, thinking it might be the last album they were able to make; as if the very circumstances of its creation preclude it from being engaged with critically.
There's plenty to be noted about how society views chronic illness patients who present as women (and disability more generally) in The Needle Drop's Anthony Fantano diagnosing Halsey as having "main character syndrome" on the album, but that's for another time and place. What's particularly remarkable in Halsey's case, when a certain breed of fan can see their fave as incapable of doing wrong, is that they have quite literally commented on how some of their fans are "hands down meaner to [them] than any other people on the planet."
While the undiscerning devotion of stan armies often becomes the monolith, there is another level of fan that still wants to hold their favourite artist to a higher standard, like the Swifties who unsuccessfully begged Swift to speak out about Palestine. Having a working knowledge of what an artist has historically been capable of, musically and otherwise, is of benefit to music criticism, with time-honoured depth obviously situating a musician's work far better than a few hours of research ever could.
In the case of someone like Swift especially, a vague understanding of some of the lore is critical to even enjoying her lethargic, Easter egg-laden synthpop as of late. What really stood out to me about the very mixed critical reception of TTPD was not only seeing revered music journalists embody these different fan postures — like Rolling Stone's shameless pandering to Swifties or NPR's thoughtful lyrical analysis that was maybe too generous, but fuelled by goodwill from the singer-songwriter's back catalogue — but Swift herself reacting to them.
She posted links to glowing reviews of TTPD on her Instagram story, tagging the journalists with lyric-referencing comments and emojis, adding to the the muddled public understanding of what music criticism is supposed to do. For writers, it presents two diverging roads: a) praise her work with the possibility that she'll share your review (if you're writing for a publication of a certain stature, of course), enabling celebration, praise, and page views, or b) criticize it and face the wrath of the Swifties, who will quickly have your head on a stake. My colleague gave TTPD a 4 out of 10, prompting a range of social media backlash — from someone telling him that he'll "start coughing in three days," to Exclaim! repeatedly being accused of being paid off by Scooter Braun for giving it a bad review. (We'd love some free money, but sadly that's not the case.)
If it requires being put in layman's terms, music critics aren't in it for that — and if we were, we'd be extremely misguided. Shockingly, we are in it for the love of music. We want to understand why certain things move us and others don't, and what moves the needle culturally and why; how things like context and a marketing rollout can impact an album's reception; what's missing when an artist has all the potential to make something that connects with us, or even push their own craft forward, but doesn't manage to do so.
I wrote a review earlier this year that I was afraid of publishing for reasons more directly related to this raison d'être than to potentially having a stan army bully me off of Twitter. However, it happened to be for an artist who — like Halsey, or many smaller indies with similar perspectives — sees Pitchfork and the like as Public Enemy No. 1. I think I was able to successfully get to what it was about the music, which I seemed to be very much amongst the target audience for, that prevented the proverbial sticky hand toy from grabbing me and holding on.
The personal breakthrough for me as a writer for being able to articulate that, as well as being brave enough to give a harsher critique, was very much overshadowed by how I felt after it went up online. I have no idea if the artist read it at all, let alone if they talked shit to their friends or cried or had a panic attack about it, any of which would be a reasonable response to someone saying not-nice things about your art. Pop stars too, then, are entitled to these feelings, but it's unreasonable for them to forget who they are, and how many eyes they have on their verified social media accounts.
Nothing is black and white here; not what fandom looks like, and not music reviews. However misconstrued that Halsey graphic about D'Souza's review was (and may have been intended to be), it at least revealed a very important truth to hold onto about music criticism not being an all-out gush-fest or unadulterated hatred. While some music can certainly provoke either extreme in any of us, it's our job to be both critical and thoughtful. We want to validate something you noticed in an album or, better yet, reframe an aspect of it that allows the work to develop new layers of meaning for you. If we're really shooting for the moon, maybe what we write about an artist you've never heard before can even convince you to listen.