The Gods Have Fallen (and They’re Freelancing for Exposure Now)

There was a time — gather ‘round, children — when a 6.4 from Pitchfork could end your band’s career faster than a broken van transmission. When Tiny Mix Tapes read like scripture and blogspot links were currency. Critics wore their cynicism like leather jackets, their word counts like machetes. We feared them. We argued in comment sections. Some of us even wanted to be them.

But now? Pitchfork got bought by GQ’s dad. NME is just a Twitter account with merch. And the last surviving music blog is run by a guy named Kev who only posts on Thursdays because he shares Wi-Fi with his neighbor and the signal drops if it rains.

The music critic, as cultural gatekeeper, is dead.
And who killed them?

You did. With your memes. With your threads. With your 3 a.m. “hot takes” typed while listening to Mitski and spiral-eating dry cereal.

Meet Your New Editor-in-Chief: Username_420_luvs_deathgrips

Let’s be real: critics had it coming.

They spent years describing distortion as “visceral” and calling anything vaguely experimental “Lynchian.” They wrote 1,200-word essays on the emotional nuance of a song called Pizza Slut. They threw around terms like "post-post-ironic" like it was seasoning.

Meanwhile, the fans were getting louder. Smarter. Funnier. More unhinged — in the best way.

Now, entire discourse tornadoes spawn from a single TikTok comment like:

“idk this new album sounds like the inside of a vape pen but in a good way.”

Reddit’s reviewing albums in real time with flowcharts, graphs, and sentences that start with “as a neurodivergent leftist...”
Letterboxd-style music logging is a thing. YouTube essayists are psychoanalyzing Kid A like it’s Dostoevsky.
Hell, even Spotify Wrapped has stronger editorial voice than Rolling Stone right now.

Critics Got Replaced by the Feed — and It’s Kinda Beautiful?

The algorithm doesn’t care what Anthony Fantano thinks. Neither do Zoomers who found Loveless via Minecraft edits and now explain shoegaze to their philosophy class.

Music criticism isn’t gone. It’s just… everywhere. Fractured. Memeified. Reassembled into TikToks that start with “No one’s talking about this…” and proceed to emotionally dismantle an entire genre in 18 seconds while dressed like a Victorian ghost.

We’ve traded gatekeeping for group therapy.
No more “objective” 3-paragraph intros about an artist’s hometown. Now we get Twitter threads with 300 quote tweets, each adding more lore.
We get fans who’ll write 10,000 words on the emotional arc of a drum fill.
We get teenagers who make Spotify playlists more coherent than most editorial calendars.

And let’s be honest — it’s more fun.

Pour One Out for the Condescension

Look, I’ll miss some things. The excessive metaphors. The refusal to call a snare drum just a snare drum ("the song’s percussive spine punches like God’s typewriter"). The weird internal rating logic (8.1 = masterpiece, 7.9 = certified mid).

There was a kind of poetry in that chaos. A rhythm to the pretension. A charm to the disdain.

But there’s a new poetry now — and it’s posted at 2 a.m. in a Discord called Coreheads Anonymous by someone who says things like “this slaps harder than my seasonal depression.”

Long Live the Unqualified

The ego is dead. The monoculture is dead. The old gods have left the room — probably to write a Substack no one reads.

And what’s left?
Noise. Passion. Shitposts. An entire internet full of half-baked opinions and sincere obsession.

The critic may be dead.
But the criticism? It’s alive. Loud. And sometimes, weirdly moving.

And honestly? That’s a 10.0 from me.