Whose Opinion Counts?
Music criticism and who decides which opinions matter.
The podcast Indiecast has a gimmick where once every quarter hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen play a version of fantasy sports (i.e., fantasy football, fantasy baseball, etc.) but instead of picking athletes for their teams, they select albums and for the statistics they use Metacritic.
What is Metacritic? It’s kind of like Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s how Metacritic describes the “Metascore” –
The Metascore is a single score that represents the critical consensus for games, movies, TV shows and albums.
How we create the Metascore
1. We curate a diverse group of highly respected critics and assign scores to their reviews.
2. The weighted average of those scores results in a single number and color, the Metascore.
On an episode a few months ago, Hyden complained about a bad review of a record on his fantasy team bringing his score down. Sadly I do not remember the exact episode in question, but I do remember the gist of the complaint. Hyden was upset because a negative review from some random website brought his score down. He proceeded to speak negatively about blogs and the like. Essentially his argument was that the criticism and opinions of some websites and people were more valid than others because of legitimacy. Then in another episode, Hyden and Cohen were discussing year end lists. One of them, I’m pretty sure it was Hyden, argued that a year end list that does not include any of the "consensus picks” should not be taken seriously. These arguments completely rubbed me the wrong way.
Both of Indiecast’s hosts are professional music critics and in the case of Hyden it’s his shoot job, so in a way it’s not surprising that they would display a gatekeeper-y attitude on the subject. I am not someone who dismisses or devalues expertise. Experts are important and needed. What is not important, needed, or helpful is snobbery.
And, truth be told, I probably took Hyden’s criticisms and complaints a bit too personally.
When my family moved to Oklahoma in 1992, I was headed into my senior year of high school. As it turned out, I only needed one class to graduate but I wasn’t allowed to only take that one class and that is how I ended up on the school’s newspaper. It was in that paper that I wrote my first column about music called The Underground Circus, a name that I pilfered from a community radio show out of Tampa, Florida. As a student at Oklahoma City Community College, I wrote a music column for the school’s newspaper called Psycho Music Babble (which I named after something a professor had said to me once). After that my writing became more DIY through producing and contributing to zines, local music scene websites, podcasts, and blogs. In other words, I have been writing and publishing about music for over 30 years. I bring this up to provide context to both my experience and my irritation with Mr. Hyden.
When he dismissed the work published on blogs or websites that are not well known as your Pitchfolks, Stereogums, and Rolling Stones, as illegitimate, it felt like a slap in the face to all of those people who have written about music over the years, and done it well, for nothing more than the love of it. Myself included. Was it silly of me to feel this way? Absolutely. Did that make what Hyden said any less snobby or gatekeeper-y? No. Just because someone writes for a blog or a website you have never heard of does not automatically mean that their opinions are invalid. Don’t get me wrong, these people could be completely full of shit but why go in with that assumption? Besides, there are times when and subjects where the experts are not the people writing for the big sites.
On the topic of year end lists, I find the ones put out by the major music publications to be rather boring. Every year, they seem to include the same albums in slightly different orders. That’s boring. The lists that I find to be the most innovative, thoughtful, and interesting are the ones from the individuals, blogs, and podcasters.
I have no idea how a site like Metacritic decides which publications get counted in their Metascore. Obviously, it can’t be all of them because that’s just too much for any one person or algorithm to deal with. My point in all of this is that just because someone writes for a blog, on Substack, or for a smaller publication doesn’t mean that that person isn’t qualified or an expert. And just because someone writes for a “professional” music related publication, doesn’t mean that they are qualified or an expert either. Judge the quality of the work and not the name on the masthead. We are talking about music criticism here people, it’s really not that serious.
References
Album of the Year. (n.d.). Album of the Year. https://www.albumoftheyear.org/
Brown, D. (2008, July 26). DIY Journalism. Oklahoma Lefty. https://oklahomalefty.blogspot.com/2008/07/diy-journalism.html
Hyden, S., & Cohen, I. (Hosts). (2020-2025). Indiecast [Audio podcast]. UPROXX. https://art19.com/shows/indiecast
Metacritic Music. (n.d.). Metacritic. https://www.metacritic.com/music