I was probably the most obnoxious 12-year-old to exist. I listened to 3WK Undergroundradio and looked down upon my friends whose Liked Songs on Spotify spanned the short distance from Juice WRLD to XXXTENTACION. Instead, I was passionate about jazz piano. I would sooner listen to 10 minutes of pots and pans clanging together against an ambient backdrop than turn on the latest Taylor Swift album. Simply put, I was an egregious music snob.
As life unfolded from daydreaming in my childhood bedroom to feeling painfully real, I slowly gained appreciation for the pop-y and cliché. Lana Del Rey coached me through my first breakup; “7 Summers” by Morgan Wallen—a horrible person but unfortunately catchy songwriter—still smells like the beach house my friends and I stayed in the week after we graduated high school.
I realized that when I had criticized my middle school peers for their narrow taste in music, I had committed the same sin. By insisting songs had to be complex and misunderstood, I had overlooked the beauty of understated simplicity: sounds that are not revolutionary, but charming and transformative all the same.
In my opinion, the ideal future of the recovered music snob is to listen to “Messy” by Lola Young and embrace Brat summer without feeling the need to justify oneself—to revel in the guilty pleasure. Yet the world of modern music critics has been slow to come to this conclusion.
In a recent review of Steve Lacy’s new album, Oh yeah?, Pitchfork—the “Most Trusted Voice in Music”—belittles Lacy’s expert production and charisma, instead hyperfixating on his simple and childish lyricism. Yes, his lyrics are simple and childish. It is not wrong to criticise that. But the record epitomizes Lacy’s iconic style, where feeling is conveyed through sound over poeticism. Pitchfork has a newfound habit of decidedly overlooking all of the other factors that can make an album amazing for the sake of writing a harsh and clickable review (that is often hidden behind a paywall anyway). The magazine has fallen for the fallacy that harshness can substitute for insight, and that the lovable and uncomplicated must automatically be an artistic failure.
Music criticism’s austerity inevitably risks losing sight of what makes music worth criticizing in the first place: the experience of listening to it. The same song can be inexplicably personal to one listener and, at the same time, be mechanically boring to another. A technically imperfect record can become inseparable from a particular summer, relationship, or stage of your life. Sometimes the most important quality of a song is not its originality or complexity, but its ability to make you feel something you already know how to feel.
That’s not to say music criticism is irrelevant. A good reviewer can give language to the things we hear but cannot articulate. They can pinpoint unheard samples, place an artist in a larger musical tradition, or make us experience a familiar song in ways beyond our intuitive personal connection to the title. But all that can be done without insisting that everything outside of their range of professional appreciation is bad.
Where music reviewers once occupied a necessary spot in the market, informing the public of which albums were worth investing in via CD or vinyl or cassette, the age of Spotify and Apple Music demands music reviewers find a new niche. It is not up to them to dictate what is worth listening to anymore—I can listen to an album for free and decide for myself.
With the democratization of music comes the democratization of the music reviewer. The music reviewer is no longer contained by magazines and corporations; the music reviewer is posting on TikTok, complaining on X, texting you a song recommendation, or laying in bed late at night, listening to the latest Ravyn Lenae album.
Now that the expansive world of sound is at your fingertips, remember: You are your own most trusted voice in music.