Though in 1996 this might have sounded like a late conservative mea culpa (Camille Paglia certainly thought so), another 30 years on, Sontag’s admission sounds positively quaint. The internet has now had about three decades to hobble print journalism, scatter established criticism to the wind, and reduce almost everything else to advertising. Most of what passes for film, literary, or music criticism these days is deathly afraid of offending what little audience it has left, while internet commentators nearly always suffer from that debilitating blogosphere tendency, to evaluate art by whether it appropriately offends the opposing side of the culture war, or else placates their own (e.g. “One Battle After Another is bad because Woke Hollywood loves it”, “Sinners has pointed racial allegories, therefore it’s a great movie”). That transgressive Boomer counterculture Sontag once championed may have devolved into a thousand marketable Gen-X subcultures by the Nineties, but since then neurotic Millennials and dissociated Zoomers have had little but identity tags, brands, and message boards around which to orient artistic taste. 

Sontag wrote about everything that made her own era a period of such dramatic cultural upheaval — Pop Art, Happenings, avant-garde theater, postmodern novels, Civil Rights, world cinema. Everything, that is, except for the era’s centermost axis: the music. With the Rock Revolution came a new, upstart criticism, which aimed to take exactly those “lower” music forms — pop, rock, blues, R&B — and apply to them the same loving, discriminating attention which had previously been reserved only for High Art. Magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, and Melody Maker made the reviewing of rock and pop records a distinct department of journalism and the magazine industries. Eventually that culture even bled into other media, with MTV, by which point, in the Eighties and Nineties, magazines like NME, Spin, and The Source had become the hipper alternatives to the old Boomer mainstays. Many of these are still around. But none of them quite managed to survive the end-of-millennium transition to the new digital ecosystem with anything like their previous cultural cachet intact. Only one fledgling publication truly managed to define itself in the ensuing digital world of the new millennium: Pitchfork.com.

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While Sontag was writing those words in 1996, a young man named Ryan Schreiber was founding that website from his bedroom in Minneapolis. Within the next 10 years, Pitchfork would go on to become the internet music review site par excellence, averaging one million monthly readers, credited with making the careers of unknown artists, and even breaking those of others. In 2006, Pitchfork even managed to create its own significant music festival in Chicago (and later in Barcelona, too), while its sometimes harsh and frequently flippant snobbishness marked it as an essential center for Millennial Hipsterdom, perhaps the last time anything like an identifiable “counter-culture” existed (at least in terms of its generation’s consumption of music and culture on the internet). Just as the last 15 years or so of pop culture can be seen as an aggressive overcorrection against that stereotype, of a particular kind of obsessive snob (which the website came to embody in its reviews), Pitchfork itself has spent the last decade and a half slowly winding down into post-Web 2.0 irrelevance. In 2015, Condé Nast bought the site, and the next few years saw a considerable change in tone and editorial direction, sanding down its last edges until Anna Wintour promptly folded the company into GQ two years ago. 

On 20 January 2026 — 30 years into its reign as the last bastion of genuine music criticism — Pitchfork announced it would be transferring to a subscription model, allowing its users to generate their own reviews, and aggregating them, á la Rotten Tomatoes, while putting the entirety of their archive behind a paywall, like every other media operation still limping along online. This move is a perfect symbolic death knell for music criticism in the Internet Age — the final gasp of a culture in which the popular art millions of people regularly consume might be handled with even a partial version of that “seriousness” all art forms deserve. 

The idea that a group of discriminating obsessives might gather in one place to argue vociferously for good taste, and for music which would otherwise never have a chance (and, also important, to argue against music they perceive as deleterious or fake) — this vital idea seemingly has little place left on the internet. Perhaps very few people really bemoan its passing. But when the rest of the web has been winnowed down to only endless marketable content and reviews which are really just covert advertisements for said content, people will soon find themselves nostalgic for the days when the music snobs swooped in with their poison pens, to declare some unheard-of band’s new record brilliant, or some pop star’s latest project an unredeemable piece of shallow trash. If we don’t already, we’ll miss the days when critics had teeth and the gall to actually dislike things everyone else liked — not to simply acquiesce to every internet fandom’s lamest dictum: “Just let people enjoy things.”

In this way, Pitchfork’s slow descent into irrelevance really does mirror the general progression of popular music in this century: the waning subcultures of the 2000s (ending in that stereotype of the Millennial Hipster); the subsequent rise of streaming services in the 2010s and the ensuing struggles of all but the biggest artists to profit from massive changes in the industry; and, finally, the increasing hostility of massive fandoms and media outlets to any kind of unforgiving criticism. In its heyday, Pitchfork was frequently lambasted for its system of assigning points to its reviews (as one of the great Onion headlines read: “Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8” ). But even more than this, it was the site’s willingness to be harshly dismissive of certain artists, while being hyperbolically supportive of others, which made its reputation. Brent DiCrescenzo’s wild 2000 review of Radiohead’s Kid A for the site famously garnered a bit of negative, mocking attention — yet the fact that the site awarded the album its rare perfect 10.0 rating, and later named it the greatest album of the decade, played no small part in the record’s popularity and success with critics over the years. The site’s ecstatic review for Arcade Fire’s debut 2004 record Funeral had a similarly sizable impact — some people have gone so far as to say it actually made the group’s career. 

But the opposite was also true. Many of their negative reviews drew considerable ire. Even today, some people point to the site’s 3.3 review of the Jacksonville indie band Black Kids’ first record — which consisted of a single picture and a frowning face emoji, along with the word “sorry”— as a major reason for the band’s failure. Perhaps the most infamous of all Pitchfork reviews was the 0.0 rating it awarded to the Australian band Jet’s 2006 record Shine On: the review consisted solely of a video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. Though most of the time their pans were hardly so bitchy or dismissive, still the attitude was important. Schreiber and co. weren’t afraid to appear snobbish, yet neither were they afraid to be overly sincere about the music they loved. They rarely reviewed records by major pop stars and if they did, they tended to pan those, too. And when they set about in the 2000s making their own lists of the greatest albums or songs of previous decades, they were keen to canonize the music they saw as especially influential on the underground, experimental, forward-thinking indie rock, hip-hop, and electronic music they usually championed.

Over time this earned them the rather unfair reputation of being biased toward largely white, male indie rock acts — while being a tad dismissive of female musicians, or even primarily black styles of music. Cherrypicking certain reviews could possibly support this argument, but I’ve never quite bought the critique. Until the site began deliberately to combat this perception of its own chauvinism, it was if anything simply engaged in an older Gen-X-style rooting out of inauthenticity — trying to spot and designate fakes, sell-outs, or poseurs. But after the 2000s, the climate of the blogosphere was quickly growing more concerned with themes of empowerment, social justice, and a general cringey Millennial desire to stamp out all offense. The idea that popular music could be criticized for being shallow or fake was increasingly anathema to a neurotic generation which tended to seek out its own self-esteem and identity via the unthinking worship of pop stars and enormous movie franchises, while conflating all criticism of cultural products as criticism of the kind of people who liked it. 

Selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 only pushed Pitchfork further along this line. Schreiber himself left in 2018, replaced by Puja Patel, who served as general editor until 2024. In 2019, the site began issuing extremely positive reviews of old Taylor Swift albums, which it had never bothered to review in the first place, nakedly framed as an apology for all that erstwhile snobbishness and failure to be properly deferential to mega-pop fans. Two years later, it offered an editorial — maybe the lowest point in the site’s entire history — entitled “Pitchfork Reviews: Rescored” in which the editors offered about twenty re-dos of old reviews, rescinding their pans of a few records and demoting others they’d praised highly. The funniest of these being the much lower adjusted score for Grimes’ record Miss Anthropocene, released only a year earlier — reflecting widespread distaste for the pop star’s ridiculous and very public relationship with Elon Musk. As it shifted further toward music news, away from committed editorials, Pitchfork also started to re-do several of its “Greatest Songs” lists, ostensibly to reflect a newfound commitment to pop music. In 2002, the site had declared the great cult band Pavement’s yearning slacker classic “Gold Soundz” the best song of the Nineties: in 2022, it was now Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” — and not even the original but, inexplicably, the even duller, inferior Remix version. Between the tops of these two lists lies the whole silly history of music criticism in the 21st century so far.

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As of this January, to go back and actually read any of this history now requires a $5 subscription. What was once important enough to share with everyone has been conveniently priced at the equivalent of your average cappuccino. And what was once the last true outsider voice — the last reliable alternative to the crush of endlessly proliferating online content — has been rendered definitively toothless and irrelevant. Is there any hope that another site could spring up to take its place? There are certainly endless blogs and magazines which still run music reviews, gather industry news, and attempt to break new artists. Places like The Quietus and Gorilla Vs. Bear have had their own excellent writing from time to time; many old behemoths like Rolling Stone itself still soldier on, trying desperately to keep up with a culture that is only growing more and more fragmented, cheap, and difficult to parse. But none of these places have anything insightful to offer, and all are far too deferential to the whims of the markets. Is there any place left for the kind of criticism that might actually tease out a cultural narrative from the music of our time, or defend some sort of standard of artistic “seriousness”, or champion the tiny unsuccessful artists too obscure to break through to bigger audiences? 

I would be lying if I said the chances weren’t low. And yet, anytime a cultural vacuum opens up, it tends to reveal the need people previously took for granted. Surely there are still hundreds of thousands — millions, even — of passionate music obsessives out there, in the world and online, dissatisfied with only the streaming catalogs, genuinely interested in encountering something new, something innovative, something that feels as if it’s pulling the culture forward, not merely trafficking in cliches which even the best popular music can never truly avoid. One of the sad facts that most defines our current period is the obvious lack in it of any viable artistic counterculture. But this is a state of affairs which can only go on so long, before “serious” music lovers begin to itch for an actual alternative to gather around. Whatever form that takes — counterculture or no — will be what fills that same vacuum, offering up an actual challenge to the current generation. Hopefully, it will take the demise of Pitchfork as its example, and learn its lessons: 1) That a critic should always trust their own obsessions over any identity, brand, market demand, or audiences; and 2) That “snob” isn’t such a bad thing to be called, if the people saying it happen to be philistines.

The cliché of the artist as outsider remained an essential part of the pop mythologies of several generations. Even some of the most wildly successful musicians of the late 20th century — The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, even Madonna — became broadly admired not just for courting enormous audiences, but for their consistent unwillingness to compromise. The masses might still gobble up whatever was served to them but they were kept partially in check by discerning and knowledgeable obsessives and critics, insistent on at least some kind of standard for artistic integrity. Even the most kitsch-hungry audiences still maintained a sense that great artists were by nature opposed to the mandates of the cynical corporate bottom line of the music industry itself. As the last young people of the 20th century, Generation X summed up the ethos perfectly: there was nothing less cool or less authentic than “selling out”.

Now, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, it seems clear that almost every vestige of the sentiment has been summarily obliterated. The reigning value system of the arts in this century — sped along by the internet’s uncanny ability to fuse micro-celebrity with social media styles of personal brand management — has been one of increasingly unabashed obsession with wild financial success, naked greed, grifting, and cynical re-branding. Beginning in the 2000s, and ramping up to a fever pitch with megastars like Lady Gaga, Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ed Sheeran, pop music became a field of nakedly-corporate brand ambassadors and stars happily turning themselves into avatars of narcissistic self-actualization. 

Gaga and Swift, for instance, have developed armies of loyal fans by crafting broad messages of inclusivity and churning out vicarious anthems of personal achievement. Beyoncé has turned herself into an empty symbol of political and cultural revolution. Singers with little interest in art, from Ariana Grande to Doja Cat, have carved out huge successes by presenting themselves as simultaneously ultra-perfect and ultra-relatable. The message everywhere is the same: the greatest artists of our time are the most famous; they have everything, and they deserve everything. To say otherwise is not only snobbish but discredits the mass popularity into which millions of distracted, depressed, and over-stimulated people have invested all their attention and aspiration. 

The usual name for this strangling monopoly of the mega-famous is “poptimism” — a phenomenon that crossed over to massive TV shows, film franchises, and fashion lines. At first an obscure internet discourse conducted mostly by critics and journalists, the term has come to signify the reigning ideology of our day, in which the old values of the avant garde are dismissed as out-of-touch and elitist (and, of course, trashed as too white, straight, and/or masculine). In the meantime, pop is associated with an enlightened sense of inclusivity, conveniently ignoring the many forward-thinking avant-garde cultures historically associated with LGBTQ artists and racial minorities in Western countries. 

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One accepted starting point for this contemporary discourse is music journalist Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New Yorker article, “The Rap Against Rockism”. In the article, Sanneh defended the aspiring popstar Ashlee Simpson after a disastrous SNL performance. Simpson’s backing track had faltered, and people quickly realized she had been lip-syncing; the blowback essentially cost Simpson her music career. But what Sanneh articulated — which he opposed to the stereotypically old-white-guy rhetoric of an early-2000s “rockism” — was a defense of Pop as product, and popstars as patently commercial projects. His defense became central to the rhetoric of many internet critics after him. What began as a fairly anodyne plea for a more open-minded idea of “authenticity” in a music industry dominated by capitalistic necessities, became a steamrolling social ethos in which artists were valorized for their business savvy and their ability to represent popular dreams of self-actualization and economic domination. Naysayers were merely snobs and bigots, to whom the response was always the same: “Shut up and let people enjoy things.” 

But it is 2025 now — and the high days of poptimism are over. Just a few months ago, Sanneh himself penned a remarkably unselfconscious article called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”, bemoaning how toothless music writers have become in a world that rewards valorizing the most popular, while disincentivizing critics from championing lesser-known artists, knowing a review of the newest popstar’s record will generate more web traffic and revenue. Sanneh himself sounds wearied by the paradigm he helped usher in two decades ago. “Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it.” he writes. “This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with.”

The first sign of this slackening grip may in fact have come from Charli XCX’s Brat. Like her contemporary Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX was a confusing figure in the 2010s. Both were initially “indie”-coded artists who went through heavily-corporatized windows of popularity, before settling down to work with specially chosen producers, honing distinct internet-savvy aesthetics. They positioned themselves on the edge of genuine stardom, and yet maintained a delicate sense that they were still first and foremost creatives, willing to make occasional sacrifices to preserve their own right to self-direction. It wasn’t unusual to find listeners and critics with a lingering distaste for poptimism, who were quite willing to make an exception for them: Charli and Lana represented an interesting compromise between poptimism’s valorization of striving stars and older ideals of artistic integrity and autonomy.

On the surface, Brat was ostensibly a victory for the poptimist ideal of self-marketing — though if anything, there was something old-fashioned about the record. Even that spectacularly successful campaign and rollout saw Charli going against suggestions from all sides, releasing the album after a rough renegotiation with her label, with little concern for whether the record would be considered commercial enough. What resulted was an exciting cultural moment that was at least as exciting because of the music itself. Like Madonna bringing voguing to the masses, Brat came close to mainstreaming subgenres of hyperpop and 2010s electronic club music, the closest things to actual underground subcultures in that decade. Still, Brat wasn’t quite the monocultural success many wanted it to be: it made next to no dent on the US Billboard Singles Chart, it was denied album of the year at the Grammys, and a year later the streaming numbers are still nowhere near that of much bigger stars. But this only helps to preserve a sense of cool. Brat Summer became cringe quickly but it hardly took Charli XCX to the same heights as Taylor Swift. This is ultimately a good thing.

The question all of this begs is just what will fill the vacuum: what will the popstar of the near-future look like? The younger generation of up-and-coming popstars all seem cannily aware of their era. Singers like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Addison Rae are all savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet “aesthetic” curation, and eager to declare themselves the vigilant students of previous popstars and eras. They’ve learned the lessons of Lana and Charli, working with specific producers (often Jack Antonoff, or The 1975’s Dan Nigro), rather than massive teams of rotating writers and engineers. And they each stand in unique relation to poptimist notions of “authenticity”. 

Two of these women have already reached levels of popularity to rival their forebears. Eilish initially seemed the most likely to become musically and aesthetically interesting, though she’s since backed away into far more conventional pop territory. Rodrigo has worked almost exclusively with Dan Nigro on both of her albums. And though she started off as something of a Taylor Swift copycat, her most recent record GUTS felt different. Compared to the ultra-compressed sound of contemporary pop, GUTS did spectacularly well without sacrificing great production and an actual dynamic range: certain tracks could’ve passed master on a Nineties alt-rock station. Sure, it’s pure throwback music, and the ballads are maudlin; there’s really nothing even vaguely experimental or new to be found anywhere on any of these young artists’ albums. But the anthems sounded bigger and better than just about anything else on Top 40 radio in the US or the UK Rodrigo became the first Zoomer starlet to make something that felt like good, solid, old-school pop-rock from a different time.

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This same kind of Zoomer nostalgia for the late 20th century also marks Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan’s music as well. For all Roan’s dramatic drag costumes and theatrical performances, the music is pure Eighties synth-pop and feels more cohesive and sounds better than any regular radio fare. Carpenter’s newest album Man’s Best Friend — which caused a firestorm of backlash online for its possibly-sexist album cover — is filled with lyrics straight out of the current internet discourse on dating woes and heterosexual resentment; but the music itself is pure Seventies AM radio, country, and the occasional Prince-lite Eighties disco track thrown in. Even if it’s relatively insubstantial, it still feels more “real” than most of the anonymous processed songs we’ve been subjected to for the past two decades. 

Strangest of all is Addison Rae — the massively successful TikTok dance star — who earlier this year released her debut album Addison to astonishingly good reviews, becoming the ultimate poptimist redemption story. She released a slew of grainy MTV-referencing music videos, rebranded herself as a fervent student of Madonna, and hunkered down with producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser to produce a record full of Nineties house, trip-hop throwbacks, and obvious nods to Brat. Infuriatingly, it sounds fantastic. Rae’s savvy turn was clearly meant to dazzle doubtful audiences with its sense of curated cool, and it worked: comments online are full of listeners in awe of the change, saying things like “this is how you rebrand”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a particularly strong singer, or whether she actually wrote a single line. What matters to people is the sense that she played the re-brand game the smart way. Rather than chase the anonymous sounds of the charts, Rae pursued something that felt cohesive, and gestured toward an older sense of cool. It shows that the future for aspiring popstars like her may lie in cultivating good taste.

This is the strange legacy of the last days of poptimism. What began as a rejection of previous standards of cool has left us with decades of empty pop music, uncritical critics, and huge fandoms deeply resentful of anyone who suggests that the pop idols they worship are not brilliant simply because they’re massively wealthy and successful. The decline of poptimism has opened space for aspiring popstars to define themselves by their taste again. This is a step in the right direction. Still, the return of really exciting and adventurous pop music requires the return of authentic subcultures, too. This is going to be difficult: the victory of poptimism hampered the ability of subcultures to protect their sense of cool, just as it strangled the ability of critics to argue for anyone other than the most popular musical artists.

“The only alternative to criticism,” the great film critic Pauline Kael once said, “is advertising.” We have lived for many years now in a world that has increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the two. The job of critics now has to be to reject the market; to advocate again for neglected artists, and a sense of cool, and to push back against stan culture. But this also means recognizing and celebrating better pop music when it appears. If the young popstars are any indication, and the years of poptimism are giving way to a slight chance at a change for the better, then what artists need most is to be empowered to shift towards making good music for its own sake. This can only be done through the establishment of trustworthy critical voices. Such trustworthiness can only appear when enough people insist that art is not better simply because it’s more popular, and that commerce will always be a partial enemy to art. Do so long enough, and history tells us that audiences will eventually adjust. And it is at this point, when audiences really begin to adjust, that popular artists become free to make something truly new.