Secretly, we want some music slander

A particularly scathing review of Måneskin's new album went viral this week - but what does it say about the state of music criticism in 2023?

The Internet thrives off opinion. It devours the left-field hot takes and relishes negativity. The conditions were perfect, then, for Pitchfork’s review of the new Måneskin album, Rush!, to go viral, yet it still feels like an exceptional thing to have happened.

Here’s the TL;DR: Pitchfork’s reviews director Jeremy D. Larson handed the record a meagre 2.0/10 and went on to eviscerate every aspect of that album in a way I’ve not seen any writer do in a long time. “Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it,” he writes. I don’t necessarily share all his opinions on the album, but that isn’t what matters here. However you feel about the album, there’s a lot to appreciate about how Larson writes – it’s lively, it’s acerbic, it’s daring and it’s undeniably entertaining.

One section on Måneskin’s manner of writing about sex is deliciously critical: “Beginning with the cover art featuring the band’s mixed reactions as they peer up a schoolgirl’s skirt, Måneskin’s libido never achieves that leery, pansexual, transgressive quality they aim for. Every line about orgasms and fluids and oral sex feels like it was suddenly AirDropped to you on the subway. This is not a puritanical sex-negative reaction to songs about fucking so much as a design problem: Rush! was produced by the band along with megawatt pop songwriter Max Martin and a long list of radio hitmakers whose glossy work is insoluble with Måneskin’s uninhibited, over-torqued dick rock. The production sounds so cramped, digitized, and swagless that it seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom.”

When was the last time you read such a damning indictment of an album? While I’ve encountered plenty of stinkers in the years I’ve been reading the music press, this is on a different level, not least for the way it’s written, but for the size of the outlet and the size of the band it criticises. Album reviews don’t go viral. For one reason or another, most reviews slant towards the positive, some more than others, and to an extent, this is only natural. Most albums are, at least, good – a 7/10, in critic terms, and there’s nothing radically new about saying nice things about a decent record. A select few every year will be exceptional, but even then, the most glowing reviews don’t spread like wildfire across the internet.

I speak from experience – generally, most albums I review are 7s or 8s (or three-and-a-half to four stars, if you review that way), some are 6s, a smaller majority that get me properly giddy will get a 9 or 10. However, the ones that have had the most attention on Twitter have been the most negative. I had a few slightly shocked reactions when I gave Avril Lavigne’s album Love Sux 2/5 (or 4/10, depending on the system you use) for Stereoboard last year, for example, and attracted some anger for not being so keen on Blood Red Shoes’ recent album Ghosts On Tape. Twitter, in particular, loves outrage, rants and everything that generally falls under the umbrella of negativity, so while it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that I got more traction for the less than complimentary things I’ve had to say about these albums, I think it also points to something deeper.

I’ve heard it said that music criticism nowadays is just not critical enough. Without constructive, artful deconstructions of what makes the less than stellar albums unworthy of repeat listens, reviewing becomes homogenous and safe. Consequently, the positive reviews start to mean less. There’s less of a reason to get intrigued and click a link if every reviewer is saying the same thing. While most albums might still fall into that 7-8 range, the 4s or 5s might get revised up to 6s in an effort to dilute the acidity of an unimpressed critic.

I’m inclined to agree, and I’ve generally always been of this opinion, but the more time I’ve spent as part of the music press, the more I’ve understood why that is. For one, if a publication is running a feature on an artist, particularly a big one, it looks jarring if a scathing review is printed alongside it. I’ve had a handful of more negative reviews that haven’t seen the light of day because of this – generally albums from big, well-loved bands that I just haven’t liked - and it’s fair enough.

It's also down to the reviewers themselves. I’ve known people for whom criticising an album gives them that nasty squeezing feeling that erupts in your chest when placed in an uncomfortable situation. They feel bad – they think of the artists who will see the finished piece and feel defeated. Worse still, I’ve known of odd anecdotes of smaller artists who have sent their stans on a war of words against the critics they perceive to have wronged them, or have gone on to attack them themselves (yes, Ronnie Radke, I’m looking at you).

There are other relationships involved too, specifically that between publicists and journalists, and when you correspond with and see each other enough, friendships form. Naturally, that isn’t a bad thing in itself, but criticising your friend’s client’s music therefore feels impolite, even if it’s wholly necessary for the sake of honesty and integrity.

In a bit of online discourse, another journo suggested to me that because music writers have limited time in which to review albums, they’re more inclined to agree to review something they know they’re going to like. After all, there is something soul-shrivelling about listening to an album that’s boring, cringeworthy, generic or all of the above. I’d never thought about this journo’s argument before, but I think she definitely has a point. Plenty of us don’t write about music full time – the vast majority do 9-5s in other industries because music writing just doesn’t pay enough (another topic for another day…), so why waste time and energy on music that threatens to drain the life from you? It’s not the way I personally operate, potentially as I do have the luxury of writing about music full time (though I didn’t think it would be possible), but it makes sense as to why someone else would.

But in this climate, I believe there is a craving for blunt honesty, which might also explain why that Måneskin review travelled as far as it did. It reminds me of a conversation with another industry friend, who said she appreciated my own honesty when I reviewed a band at a festival less than favourably, though I balanced it out by pointing out that they were still a bit green and would improve in time with more live experience. Larson’s piece was attention-grabbing because it was an antidote to the sorts of criticism we’ve been accustomed to reading. It was brave. Although it’s not a silver bullet, and there are nuanced reasons for how we’ve got to the place in music criticism that we have, it is necessary for us as writers to swallow our reservations, and speak with undiluted honesty. That way, maybe, occasionally, we can have some eloquently argued music slander as a treat.