Even if you are not the sort of person who pores over aggregate album ratings, you may have noticed this changed spirit. By the end of the twenty-tens, people who wrote about music for a living mainly agreed that, say, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” by Post Malone (Metacritic: 79); “Montero,” by Lil Nas X (Metacritic: 85); and “Thank U, Next,” by Ariana Grande (Metacritic: 86), were great, or close to great. Could it really have been the case that no one hated them? Even relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous. “Solar Power,” the 2021 album by the New Zealand singer Lorde, was so dull that even many of her fans seemed to view it as a disappointment, but it earned a polite three and a half stars from Rolling Stone. Some of the most cutting commentary came from Lorde herself, who later suggested that the album was a wrong turn—an attempt to be chill and “wafty” when, in fact, she excels at intensity. “I was just like, actually, I don’t think this is me,” she recalled in a recent interview. And, although there are plenty of people who can’t stand Taylor Swift, none of them seem to be employed as critics, who virtually all agreed that her most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was pretty good (Metacritic: 76). Once upon a time, music critics were known for being crankier than the average listener. Swift once castigated a writer who’d had the temerity to castigate her, singing, “Why you gotta be so mean?” How did music critics become so nice?
When Ryan Schreiber founded Pitchfork, in 1996, pointiness was part of the point. Especially when it came to the indie-rock music he loved, he had detected a certain timidity in the American music press, and he figured that the internet was a good place to be more truculent. His decimal-point scores were provocatively precise, calculated to start fights. “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,” he told me not long ago. The reviews tended to be long and sometimes impenetrable, but people paid attention to the numbers. A clamorous Texas band called . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead earned a perfect ten, and so did Radiohead; the site’s most famous 0.0 review went to an album by the Australian band Jet, accompanied not by a snarky enumeration of the record’s flaws but by a video of a chimpanzee urinating into its own mouth. In 2004, after one of the site’s critics, Amanda Petrusich, panned an album by the alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Adams (“one-dimensional, vain, and entirely lifeless”: 2.9), Adams asked to be interviewed by her. The conversation that ensued was strikingly friendly, given the circumstances: Petrusich, who is now my colleague at this magazine, amicably but firmly declined to recant her opinion, and Adams concluded that “records don’t really hurt anybody, and neither do reviews.”