Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. As outlets across the country downsize, change hands, and consolidate, critics have often been among the first to go. After Alden Capital took over The Chicago Tribune in 2021, the paper lost Phil Vettel, at the time, the city of Chicago's last full-time restaurant reviewer. Late last month, Peter Marks, a respected theater critic at The Washington Post, took a buyout, taking at least for now, the paper's DC theater beat with him.

A couple of years ago, The Post laid off Pulitzer Prize winner, Sarah L. Kaufman, one of the country's few remaining dance critics. Then there is the world of music writing, which has been bleeding out for years. In October, Bandcamp, a marketplace for independent music and home to a stable of sharp writers, cut half its staff. This week, Conde Nast laid off much of the masthead at Pitchfork, the iconic music publication, and announced the site would merge with men's magazine, GQ. In other words, the end of an era. Started in 1996 by Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork grew into a unique tastemaker known for highbrow writing about indie music of the aughts and onward.

Ann Powers: Ryan Schreiber really stands as an avatar and embodiment of the blog era.

Micah Loewinger: Ann Powers is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music.

Ann Powers: He is a guy who was working in a record store who started this site to publish reviews and publish opinion on music that he loved. Pitchfork was very associated with indie rock music at that time. The very opinionated reviews, the scoring system that became notorious, where they give a number score to new releases, and that blog-like constant stream of content is what made Pitchfork so important, and gave Schreiber and his team a chance to make it the influencer that it became.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and tell me a little bit about some of the bands and genres that were elevated because of Pitchfork, or at least were the favorites of the cast of writers in its heyday.

Ann Powers: Well, Micah, I'm curious, what bands do you associate with Pitchfork? I bet you're a Pitchfork reader.

Micah Loewinger: I was a big Pitchfork reader when I was in high school and in college. The bands I associated with it were Spoon, or Phoenix, or Radiohead.

Ann Powers: Broken Social Scene?

Micah Loewinger: Animal Collective. Yes, Broken Social Scenes.

Ann Powers: Yes. Arcade Fire would be another one. These are really the leading "indie" rock bands of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Coming out of the indie rock tradition that in previous generations had given us bands ranging from REM to Nirvana. Really Pitchfork was the 21st-century flag bearer for the kind of music that Rolling Stone would've covered in the '60s and '70s, and Spin Magazine would've covered in the '80s and '90s. Pitchfork's strong association with that kind of music in the early 2000s is what made it such a potent brand and gave it that foothold that allowed it to truly show its influence.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and to put even just a finer point on it, there was a 2006 piece in Wired titled "The Pitchfork Effect" that described the make-or-break power it had over that era of bands.

Ann Powers: Let's put this in the historical context of music magazines. Going back, even before the rock era, in the jazz world, for example, you had DownBeat. Its annual polls, its reviews, its articles had the similar effect on the jazz world.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you, though, about the style of writing, the voice. It wasn't just their curation, it was something else about how they wrote. Can you describe it?

Ann Powers: Well, the basic unit of Pitchfork is the album review. What is an album review? This is a philosophical question, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: What is an album review, Ann?

Ann Powers: Well, it can be something as small and simple as a little blurb that says, "Hey, you're going to like this," or it can be as long as a couple thousand words and really become an essay that considers music in many different contexts, or possibly, it could be a vehicle for personal expression, for memoir, for expressing ideas from a very opinionated place. I think one of the things that makes Pitchfork so important is that Schreiber and then the other editors, they have allowed writers to really develop a voice.

Micah Loewinger: Sometimes that voice was mean.

Ann Powers: [chuckles] Yes. Negative reviews. They're like the Thor's hammer of Pitchfork. Writers there and the editors there would wield those negative reviews as a way of proving their influence and a way of generating discussion.

Micah Loewinger: Some memorable ones that I've seen writers bringing back up in the recent days was its review of Shine On, the Jet album from 2006. This is like a meme basically. Here is this Australian pop-rock band that is on MTV, has generated a lot of buzz in the US, Pitchfork gives their album a zero. The review has no text. It's just an embedded YouTube video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. Which is funny, but is that criticism?

Ann Powers: Again, I think we think of Pitchfork as inventing these forms, but if you go back and look at old issues of Rolling Stone from the '60s and the '70s, they were equally irreverent. This is a side of criticism that's existed since criticism has existed.

Micah Loewinger: Some of those 0 out of 10 reviews haven't aged so well. Matt LeMay had given Liz Phair's 2003 self-titled album a zero. At the time, he, I think, was maybe 18 or 19, and he didn't like that Liz Phair, who was an indie musician, had come out with a more pop radio-friendly album. Then in 2019, LeMay returned to his review and described it as condescending and cringey. He tweeted, "The idea that indie rock and radio pop are both cultural constructs, language to play with, masks for an artist to try on, yes, I certainly didn't get that. Liz Phair did get that way before many of us did."

Ann Powers: Kudos to Matt LeMay for engaging in some very constructive self-criticism, and kudos to Pitchfork, because I think one of the best things that Pitchfork has done in recent years under the guidance of Puja Patel, the editor-in-chief who was recently let go as part of these layoffs, is they have revisited old reviews. They have created a whole feature that allowed for them to review records they'd ignored from genres they weren't as interested in.

This self-examination and confrontation with the limits and problems of the Pitchfork approach, to me, that is one of the most inspiring aspects of what's been happening in music writing in the past decade or so. We have a much more diverse field of music writers now. Many more women, many more people of color, many more LGBTQIA people writing about music. That diversity has totally changed what we do, and I think it's great. Pitchfork has been a huge part of that.

Micah Loewinger: You've mentioned that as the publications aperture has expanded, they now cover a much more varied range of musicians. How has that affected the editorial experience, you think?

Ann Powers: Pitchfork covers pop, but they mostly cover pop and very mainstream artists in their news section. Yes, they will review a Taylor Swift record, for example, and certainly, a Beyonce record as any of us would. They are also covering very obscure electronic music, avant-garde jazz or avant-garde classical music, or Americana music. I think it's that diversity that makes the reviews section particularly so valuable because it is like going into a great, huge record store where you could hop in upon something you didn't expect. Let's be real, there's so much more to music than the cool new bunch of dudes in tight pants or whatever.

Micah Loewinger: Playing some growling guitars in Brooklyn.

Ann Powers: Look, I love that stuff, but I think it's great that Pitchfork grew up. Many of my favorite writers who've come through Pitchfork in recent years, they're diversifying the field. That to me is so crucial.

Micah Loewinger: Not everyone has been on board with the changes at the site. Writing in The Guardian this week, Laura Snapes responded to critics of Pitchfork who have "lamented Pitchfork's poptimist shift over the past decade." Poptimist. What is she referring to there?

Ann Powers: I'm glad you brought up that term, Micah, because it's one that drives me crazy. The word poptimism originated in response to an essay that Kelefa Sanneh wrote in the New York Times called "The Rap Against Rockism." Kelefa's criticism of the world of music writing was that it was dominated by straight white men who liked guitar-based rock music made by straight white men, and that this had created a hierarchy within the music industry, but quickly, this critique created a space for some of us to say, "Hey, let's also take mainstream pop music seriously.

Let's take dance music seriously. Let's take these fields that happen to be dominated by African-American artists, by women. Let's make a space for that." Carl Wilson also wrote a really important book. It was about Celine Dion, but it was really about how our tastes form.

Micah Loewinger: Oh yes. This is A Journey to the End of Taste. Is that what it is?

Ann Powers: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: It's a fascinating premise. He basically says, "Celine Dion, one of the bestselling artists of our time, I hate her music, why."

Ann Powers: He was saying, "Okay, from my standpoint, as a fan of indie rock, as a white guy, et cetera, what am I bringing to the table when I listen to a Celine Dion record? Why do I think this is 'bad music?' Why do so many other people think it's great music?" That's the essence of what the poptimist project really was. It was not to promote mainstream music, it was to take seriously music that is very popular, music that rock critics scorned historically. I think Pitchfork's evolution from a site that embodied that scorn, to one that was fighting against it, was one of the most beautiful things that's happened in media in the past few decades.

Micah Loewinger: It's been interesting to see the evolution of Pitchfork land between all of these competing interests. I'm thinking of the 2020 review of Taylor Swift's surprise indie folk album, Folklore, written by Jillian Mapes, who wrote a pretty positive review of the album, but ultimately the site only gave the album an eight. She was sent death threats, constant harassment online.

Ann Powers: Jill was one of the people who was laid off this week, a terrible loss to the publication. Some fans were attacking her even now. What can I say? I've gone through this myself. I published a piece on Lana Del Rey, on one of her albums that insufficiently praised her or that she misunderstood. I went through a lot of online harassment for years, I have to say, after that review. This is truly something that does plague critics, reporters, media commentators now, organized attacks by fans. It's something we have to live with and sometimes it goes to horrible extremes. That's a separate issue in my view than whether or not poptimism is a valuable or even sustainable way of doing criticism.

Micah Loewinger: It's just fascinating to me that on one hand, you have people who bristle at the very fact that Pitchfork is reviewing Taylor Swift, and on the other, fans of Taylor Swift aren't happy with a critical review about her.

Ann Powers: The critic has always been an embattled figure in our society, both revered and utterly disrespected, both considered a nothing who only lives through the works of others, and someone that supposedly makes people tremble when they walk in the room. In a strange way, the critic is in a parallel relationship with the musician, who also is revered and scorned in our society. All of this says something about how we treat culture.

On the one hand, there are these attempts to sportify it, to quantify it, to make hierarchies, which always inevitably fail because encounters with art are personal. On the other hand, there is such a thing as aesthetic judgment. There is some value in saying, Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest artists who ever lived and this is why, because he could write amazing melodies, because he was one of the most technologically advanced musicians of his time, because he was both funky and sweet and cutting in his greatest songs all at the same time.

That's an aesthetic judgment as well as a personal one. I think that that combination of stepping back and being close at the same time, it's a complicated way to talk about culture, and it can be upsetting to some.

Micah Loewinger: Honestly, just hearing you speak right now makes the case for why cultural criticism needs to exist.

Ann Powers: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: The fact is, with this alarming downsizing at Pitchfork, coupled with recent layoffs at Bandcamp, another site that helped support independent musicians that also hosted very, very smart, interesting writing about all kinds of music, much of it below the radar, it's hard not to feel that this criticism and its home on the internet is shrinking. Amanda Petrusich, who's a music critic at The New Yorker, wrote on X/Twitter that the Pitchfork News was "a death nail for the record review." Is this the end of music reviews as we understand it?

Ann Powers: The considered encounter between a devoted, intelligent listener, who is also an excellent writer, and a work of art, that will live on forever, because what a review does, is it creates space for a reader to have an encounter with a work that is guided by the encounter that the critic had. It guides you into a wider understanding. Maybe it's going to make you think about how the Boygenius record reflects attitudes about friendship in the 21st century. Maybe the reviewer can point out something that was just on the tip of your own tongue.

Then you have that aha moment, and that's what the beauty is of a review, is walking into the space of appreciating and loving art with a kind and thoughtful guide, and [laughs] maybe a kind of cruel guide. You can say, "Yes, this is BS." That role, I think, we still want. What form it takes as media changes, I can't predict, but I still think people want that time and space to think and feel with another person who also loves the art they love.

Micah Loewinger: Ann, thanks so much.

Ann Powers: It was great talking to you.

Micah Loewinger: Ann Powers is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music. She's the author of several books, including the forthcoming biography, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, which comes out in June. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender and Candace Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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