Criticizing the Critics' Criticism of Criticism

We would just like to point out that the next time you see a professional music critic get up on their soapbox about how negativity in music criticism, that is to say criticism that actually criticizes, is pointless, or mean-spirited, or a waste of time, we urge you to go and see how they reacted to Maroon 5's super bowl performance a few days ago, or Greta Van Fleet. It's acceptable to criticize those bands because the magazines and websites they write for won't be adversely affected by making fun of Maroon 5. The artists in their world are sacrosanct (until they aren't--there's actually a slow, backing away process that occurs when a band sticks around too long and starts to suck, a nervous eyeing of each other until it gradually becomes acceptable to question the music superiority of, say, Taylor Swift or Arcade Fire).

Almost every single paid piece of music criticism is produced by an industry shill who is trying to sell you something.  You probably already knew this. But the next time someone urges people to be positive, and mocks someone (almost always a music fan or a non-paid critic) for getting "so worked up about" an artist/song/album. Or wonders aloud to their community who would take the time to bother writing about things they don't like, why people don't just listen to something else, go back to the first week of February and pull up their tweets about Maroon 5, an irrelevant band playing a  show during the halftime of an event that has more to do with organized war than with music, and remind yourself that it's all a shell game. In 2019, the job of a paid music critic is to prop up a music industry that has very little to do with actual music. They're there to manufacture excitement for whatever editors and publicists and labels tell them to, using a set of criteria that literally shifts from one record to the other. To be a paid music writer in 2019 is to champion a female post-punk-sounding band for their fierce feminism one minute, and then champion a hip-hop artist with misogynistic lyrics the next day for their fierce "realness," then the next week calling out a male artist the following week for their problematic comments they made about woman musicians in an interview. It's a hell of a job, one that would make Orwell proud. But then late-capitalism, with its dwindling resources and endless acceleration, makes hypocritical jackasses of us all.