I'm Ready to Read Some Negative Album Reviews

a.k.a. The overwhelming—and insincere—positivity of the music press.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Many of us heard some version of that phrase growing up, and for good reason. Children have almost no filter, and while they’re still figuring out the dynamics of interpersonal interaction, they often need to be taught (or at least reminded) that not every thought is worth sharing, especially if it’s going to hurt someone else’s feelings. It’s a lesson of tolerance, and as a guiding principle, our collective willingness to strategically bite our tongues has proven essential to the functioning of countless workplaces, classrooms and families.

The adoption of this principle by music journalists, however, has produced some far less encouraging results.

That was one of many lessons I took away from an eyebrow-raising piece by writer Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, who took a blowtorch to contemporary dance music in a new essay for The Baffler. Taking particular aim at the culture’s faux-revolutionary stance, racial essentialism and subservience to the interests of capital, it’s one of the most thrilling critiques I’ve read in quite some time, and it merits a deeper response than I can provide today. (In my defense, I only came across the article yesterday afternoon.)

Nevertheless, Adjei-Kontoh’s thoughts on the dance music press—and specifically its tendency to push puddle-deep political sloganeering while simultaneously courting corporate sponsorships and promoting a culture that primarily revolves around a “well-heeled party class” and “clubs that rely on expensive tickets and exorbitant drink prices to keep their doors open”—immediately hit home, and got me thinking about exactly what the job of a music journalist ought to be.

That’s a big question, and while there are any number of possible answers, Adjei-Kontoh’s wide-ranging critique did highlight one component of the job where journalists have effectively retreated from what was once one of their main duties. “I dare you to find a negative review of any artist on any website dedicated to electronic music,” he wrote. Though his observation isn’t a new one—in 2021, I myself penned an essay here in First Floor about the dwindling number and relevance of electronic music reviews—the phenomenon has become pervasive.

Surveying the online portals of major electronic music outlets Mixmag, DJ Mag and Crack, their review offerings have either disappeared entirely or slowed to an mere trickle. Following a pandemic-induced slowdown, Resident Advisor has encouragingly bolstered its reviews section during the past year or so, but aside from a couple of lukewarm takes on singles from Jamie xx and Thomas Bangalter—both of which are extremely safe targets—its recent writeups are essentially an endless lovefest. More critical balance can be found at The Quietus and The Wire, and both still commission plenty of reviews. But given those publications’ more experimental bent, their impact on the wider electronic music sphere is limited, especially with The Wire sticking the vast majority of its content behind a paywall.

When it comes to reviews, Pitchfork is still the outlet whose brand remains most intimately tied to the form. In the wake of the layoffs and restructuring that hit the site back in January, its features and other forms of long-form content have been eliminated or cut back significantly, but Pitchfork continues to publish multiple reviews every weekday. We’ll see how long that lasts—much of the industry still expects the site to fully implode at any moment—but for the time being, its reviews remain the closest thing to a critical benchmark in the music world. That, of course, is also why it’s so disappointing that those reviews continue to be so overwhelmingly positive.

Since the beginning of March, Pitchfork has tagged 17 of its new album reviews as “electronic,” and their average score is 7.4. (And that’s not including last week’s retrospective Sunday review of Photek’s 1997 debut LP, Modus Operandi, which received an 8.8.) Only one review, Chal Ravens’ assessment of Logic1000’s Mother, was given a score lower than 6. And while I don’t mean to pick on Logic1000—her song “I Won’t Forget” actually landed on my list of 2021 favorites—I can’t deny that reading that review of her latest LP felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air.