Poptimism or poptimisn't?
Taylor Swift, Ryan Adams, and the relationship between critics and pop music

Taylor Swift has been in the news a lot this year, and there’s one admittedly minor part of the Swiftie news cycle that really stuck with me: in the wake of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), her fourth re-recorded album, a couple of thinkpieces were published revisiting Ryan Adams’ track-by-track cover album, which came out in 2015, a year after Swift’s initial release. With headlines like “Remember When Ryan Adams Covered Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’? Ew.” and “We Shouldn’t Have Let Ryan Adams Cover Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’”, these pieces were, to say the least, not fond of Adams’ project. Now, I can see why someone writing about Ryan Adams in 2023 might not take a very charitable view of him or his music. After all, this is a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct, and I don’t want to ignore that or bring him up without acknowledging it. But regardless of what one thinks of Adams and whether his music can or should still be enjoyed in light of the allegations against him,1 there are a couple of points that these articles make, and that I’d seen Swifties make even before Adams became persona non grata, that I think are fundamentally flawed. I’ll start with the first and simplest one: that Pitchfork was wrong to review Ryan Adams’ 1989 when they hadn’t reviewed the original.
It’s true that in 2015, when Pitchfork reviewed 1989 (Ryan’s Version), they had never reviewed a Taylor Swift album actually performed by Taylor Swift. The first of Swift’s albums to get a Pitchfork review upon release was 2017’s reputation, and in the lead-up to her 2019 album Lover, the site released retrospective reviews of her first five albums. But I don’t think that their lack of coverage of Swift prior to this constitutes a failure on their part — and I say that as a big fan of Taylor Swift. Pitchfork was originally an alternative and indie music publication, and while I think that it’s a good thing that they’ve paid more attention to pop music in recent years, there’s nothing wrong with a music review site focusing exclusively on a preferred genre or genres. But I can see why Swifties and other pop fans were resentful of Pitchfork in particular, while either accepting or ignoring that other genre-specific publications didn’t always cover pop artists. In its heyday, Pitchfork was influential in a way that other music publications just weren’t, and their reviews could make or break careers. Of course fans thought that their favourite artists merited the attention of the most important music site on the web. But the pop acts that indie publications refused to review were actually in a pretty enviable position: sure, they didn’t get Pitchfork reviews, but they didn’t need them.
Pitchfork aside, Taylor Swift’s 1989 was widely reviewed upon release, and its reception was largely positive. But 1989 would have been a massive hit without a single review from any music critic. The songs, of which five charted in the top 10 and three went all the way to #1, were everywhere in 2014-15, and there was so much gossip and speculation about them. Was “Style” about Harry Styles? Was “Bad Blood” about Katy Perry? Six 1989 singles got big-budget videos, four of which were directed by acclaimed music video director Joseph Kahn, and they racked up billions of views on YouTube and are among the most viewed music videos on the platform — and for good reason. Viewers were captivated by “Blank Space”, which cleverly satirises Swift’s public image, and “Bad Blood”, which features cameos from her many famous friends. No artist was as inescapable as Taylor Swift in that era.2 Everybody knew that she had a new album out, everybody heard the many hit singles it spawned, and a lot of those people liked what they heard and bought it. Despite a late October release date that meant it only had two months of sales by the end of the year, 1989 was the third-highest-selling album of 2014,3 and the best-selling album of 2015.
While few pop artists experience Taylor Swift-level world domination, it’s always been pretty easy to hear new pop music. Just turn on the radio and you’ll hear the latest singles by the pop artists of today. If an artist is semi-popular, you might hear a couple of their songs, and if they’re really big, you’ll hear even more. You don’t need music critics to tell you whether a new pop album is worth buying if you’ve already heard half the tracklist on your local top 40 station. Who are you going to believe, them or your own ears? This also applies to popular artists in genres other than pop, such as Nickelback. They never got great reviews, but their songs were all over rock radio, and enough people liked what they heard and went out and bought their albums to make Nickelback the bestselling rock group of the 2000s. And they didn’t need Pitchfork to get there.4
In 2015, Ryan Adams didn’t really need Pitchfork either. Earlier in his career, Adams certainly benefited from reviews and recommendations by Pitchfork and other outlets, in particular of his solo debut Heartbreaker, which was released in 2000 after the dissolution of his band Whiskeytown to acclaim from a number of publications, including Pitchfork, which gave the album a glowing review and a 9.0 out of 10 score. But by the time Adams released 1989, he was two decades into his career, and he’d built up a decent following and was a significant artist in the world of indie rock and alternative country. In addition, the Taylor Swift connection — not only was he covering her songs, but Swift herself was openly excited and enthusiastic about the project — meant that Adams’ version got more mainstream attention than a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album. He didn’t need a great review from Pitchfork to help his album reach listeners, which is good, because he didn’t get one.
The biggest irony of the 1989 review controversy is that Pitchfork was not impressed by Adams’ interpretation of Swift’s album, calling it “not much fun to listen to” and “ultimately hollow”, and saying that “when the music isn’t simply boring it crosses the line into actively grating.” The only 1989 praised in the review is the original: “At its best, Swift’s 1989 crackles with life, and highlights what it feels like to be young and looking at the world from a very specific moment.” Pitchfork gave Ryan Adams’ 1989 a middling 4.0 out of 10 — barely half of the 7.7 that they would go on to give Taylor Swift’s.
To be fair, Pitchfork was something of an outlier here. 1989 (Ryan’s Version) was praised by many critics, including some who thought he brought something to the table that Swift’s version lacked. And personally, I like his version of the album. The opening stretch is admittedly uneven — of the first six tracks, two are outright successes (“Welcome to New York” and “All You Had to Do Was Stay”), two are just okay (“Blank Space” and “Shake It Off”) and two are kind of bad. The repetitive chorus of “Out of the Woods” works well in a fast-paced pop song, but Adams’ slowed-down six-minute version is a drag, and while I can see why he wanted to change some lines in “Style” — “I got that red lip classic thing that you like” and “I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt” would sound very weird coming from Ryan Adams — his new lyrics aren’t good, and since they’re right there in the chorus, they’re pretty hard to ignore.5
However, Ryan Adams’ 1989 hits its stride at the halfway mark, and the second half of the album is actually really good. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as Swift’s — the only Adams cover that outright improves on the original is “Bad Blood”, mostly because I never really liked Taylor’s version of the song to begin with6 — but it’s distinct enough in its sound to be a worth a listen regardless, at least if you’re into guitar and sparer arrangements.7 It’s also an interesting look at a path that Swift herself might have followed on 1989 if she’d taken the guitar-driven but less explicitly country sound that she explored on several tracks of her previous album, Red,8 in a more alternative direction. Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams even worked together during the Red sessions,9 and one can imagine an alternate universe where she made her indie turn with him, rather than years later with Aaron Dessner of The National.
Surprisingly, the 1989 (Ryan’s Version) retrospectives don’t touch on Taylor Swift’s own indie-influenced albums, folklore and evermore, which, like Adams’ 1989, demonstrate how well her lyricism translates to that style of music. folklore, the first and most acclaimed of the two Dessner-produced albums,10 won Swift Album of the Year at the Grammys, along with a lot of new fans, many of whom previously only knew her pop hits and didn’t see her as a talented songwriter and artist. But the “Taylor Swift wasn’t respected until folklore” narrative doesn’t apply where music critics are concerned. Pitchfork, for example, gave folklore an 8.0 — a positive score, certainly, but lower than it gave Fearless (8.1), Speak Now (8.2), and Red (9.0).11 The highly influential and respected critic Robert Christgau, who had given Swift’s albums from Fearless through 1989 and also Lover A- scores, gave folklore a B+, and Jon Caramanica was lukewarm on the album in his New York Times review.12 This is not to say that folklore wasn’t an acclaimed album, it absolutely was, but the idea that it was a critical success beyond anything she’d released before simply isn’t true. Critics weren’t won over by folklore — they already liked her, and some of them even liked her other stuff better.

The popular narrative surrounding the critical reception of Swift’s and Adams’ respective versions of 1989 is similarly flawed. Beyond Pitchfork’s pan of the Adams album, there’s also Robert Christgau, again, who said that Adams’ version “proves the superiority” of Swift as an artist, and Jon Caramanica, again, who said:
Mostly, this release makes “1989” sound like a Ryan Adams album, which is remarkable only if you believe that Ms. Swift’s source material is somehow less worthy than Mr. Adams’s usual stuff (it’s not) or if you feel more comfortable taking your shots of pain from a tortured middle-aged man than an in-control young woman.
Even glowing reviews of 1989 (Ryan’s Version) mostly praised Swift’s version alongside it. Not all; The Boston Globe’s review is pretty dismissive. But some of the reviews mentioned in The Daily Beast’s retrospective as proof that critics didn’t take Taylor Swift seriously until Ryan Adams made it cool to like her are more positive than the pull quotes suggest. Here’s The Daily Beast’s summary of Ian Crouch’s New Yorker review:
In the New Yorker—which, like Pitchfork, reviewed Adams’ cover album having never reviewed the original—Ian Crouch wrote that “these songs, rearranged by Adams, might sound to some ears more authentic, raw, or genuine.” He opined in the same piece that, “If anything, Adams’s version of 1989 is more earnest and, in its way, sincere and sentimental than the original—suddenly more his than hers.”
That first quote seems pretty damning on its own, but read the paragraph-and-a-half surrounding it, and you’ll see Crouch pointing out some of the limitations of Ryan Adams’ reinterpretations of Taylor Swift.
There may be a temptation among certain fans of alt-country, Americana, or rock and roll to see Ryan Adams’s version of “1989” as a major improvement on the original, a clearing away of the dance-pop flourishes and general polish that Swift settled on, in collaboration with the producers Max Martin and Shellback. These songs, rearranged by Adams, might sound to some ears more authentic, raw, or genuine—suddenly more his than hers. “Clean,” the closing track, is, from Swift, a wistful song of lost love. By Adams, it is a jangly, wistful song about headier topics: addiction, recovery, and loss. Yet the delivery is flat and a bit rushed, as if he had memorized the words in a language he doesn’t speak. Can we trust the feeling?
But, if anything Adams’s “1989” is, at times, too serious or reverent toward Swift’s songs. It leaves out the album’s bravado, cheeky humor, and plain silliness. The blissfully high-energy, goofy, and danceable “Shake It Off” stalls as a brooding and meandering dirge.
Elsewhere, Crouch discusses how Adams’ covers subtly change the meanings of some songs:
In its original form, the synth-pop hit “Out of the Woods” throttles forward even as Swift laments the past. Here, it’s stripped down and stretched out to six minutes, with the incantation of the chorus confronting us with aching regret. Swift’s version makes escape feel possible; Adams imagines being lost, or trapped.
Earlier, I cited “Out of the Woods” as one of Adams’ weakest covers, but I like Crouch’s take on it. When I read album reviews, they’re more often than not about albums I’ve already listened to, so I’m not reading them to see if the critic thinks I should or shouldn’t give the album a go, but for little insights like this.
Nick Missette, who reviewed both versions of 1989 for Forbes, is called out in both the Daily Beast and Junkee articles, in the former for his Adams review — specifically, the line: “stripping that superfluous gunk away (and providing13 his own manufactured sound), Ryan Adams demonstrates that for all of the album’s original pop bombast, these songs are quite good,” (Missette’s aside about Adams’ own manufactured sound was not included when The Daily Beast quoted it) — and in the latter for his Swift review, titled “If Taylor Swift is So Genuine, Why Does ‘1989’ Sound So Fake?” It’s a provocative title, and I agree that his take on the incongruity of Swift standing up to Spotify while also taking her sound in a pure pop direction is odd, but when he gets around to the music, he gives Swift credit for her songwriting, and reserves most of his criticism for her producers: “The record evinces Taylor Swift’s genuine flare for lyrics and melody, sure, but it’s all been hard-pressed against a blustery, homogenized backdrop of Max Martinized pop.” That a critic who liked Swift’s lyrics and disliked her production preferred an album with the same lyrics but different production is to be expected. I don’t share his opinion here, but it’s not like Missette, who had already shared his take on Taylor Swift’s 1989 before Ryan Adams even announced his version, needed Adams to tell him that Swift had value as a songwriter.

Finally, Metacritic, which aggregates reviews of several forms of media, including albums, and gives them an average score, gives Taylor Swift’s 1989 a score of 76 — 7 points higher than Ryan Adams’. These are based solely on contemporary reviews from 2014 and 2015, so they aren’t a reflection of critics changing their minds about Swift post-folklore or Adams post-cancellation. So to assert, as Junkee does, that “in his own weird, self-important way, Ryan Adams covering 1989 forced the industry to acknowledge that yes, Taylor Swift is a good songwriter and yes, she’s worth listening to” is just plain incorrect. I understand that these writers are doing this to defend Swift, but ignoring her career-long critical acclaim actually does her a disservice. This is a woman who won the Album of the Year Grammy for an album she wrote as a teenager, and whose early work was received with:
Where are all the older people who are supposedly making better pop records than Taylor Swift? There aren’t any. In a mere four years, the 20-year-old Nashville firecracker has put her name on three dozen or so of the smartest songs released by anyone in pop, rock or country.
That brings me to the broader relationship between music critics and pop artists. I mentioned before that Pitchfork began including more pop music in its coverage in the late 2010s, reviewing a real Taylor Swift album for the first time in 2017, but they were late to the party — fellow indie publication Stereogum was already reviewing Swift in 2014, and the overall shift began even earlier than that. The school of thought known as poptimism had been on the ascent since the mid-2000s, with Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New York Times article “The Rap Against Rockism” commonly identified as an influential text on the wider poptimist movement. Ten years later, the same paper was publishing pieces about poptimism’s success. So what happened? The conventional wisdom is that music critics were convinced, either by thoughtful arguments like Sanneh’s or simply by the music itself, that pop was as worthy of their attention as rock was. That may be true of some critics, but I don’t know that it’s an accurate representation of the wider shift in pop music coverage.
As with most developments in music this century, I believe that poptimism is first and foremost a result of changes in the way we listen to music in the internet age. The first two decades of the 21st century saw music become more accessible than ever, first via filesharing applications like Napster and LimeWire, then through digital downloads from the iTunes store, and finally on streaming sites such as Spotify. Streaming in particular has made music discovery incredibly easy — iTunes downloads cost money, and the illegal nature of filesharing didn’t sit right with everybody, but streaming gives users access to what can seem like all the music in the world for a small monthly fee that doesn’t increase with the amount of music you play.
This made album reviews far less essential. In the past, reviews helped listeners decide whether an album too obscure to get radio play was worth buying, but when hearing a new album doesn’t cost anything, listeners are more likely to give albums and artists they’re curious about a spin without consulting reviews first. As for discovering that music in the first place, regularly-updating playlists on streaming services now fill that role for a lot of people, and those playlists exist even for genres that were never popular enough for radio. And if you want to hear about music from a real person rather than an algorithm, critics aren’t the only option — there are also online music communities dedicated to specific artists and genres. A random user in any given album release thread probably won’t have the knowledge and expertise that a professional critic has, but in the aggregate, the opinions of dozens or hundreds of commenters can be just as helpful, if not more so, in painting a bigger picture of an album’s reception, and some users have pretty insightful takes.
As the internet made critics less necessary to fans of non-mainstream genres, it also created incentives for critics to cover pop artists. As I mentioned earlier, pop fans have historically been less reliant on critics to discover new music, so there were fewer exclusively pop-focused reviewers. If a rock or indie publication covered a pop act, pop fans weren’t likely to see it if they weren’t reading those magazines or websites in the first place. That changed in the social media era. As the internet became more centralised, with users congregating on large platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr, there was a lot more overlap between different communities, and reviews and articles in any publication could go viral and reach a wide audience of people who didn’t regularly read it. That, combined with the rise of stan culture — dedicated, obsessive, and sometimes unhinged fans of artists, particularly of female pop singers — meant that publications could count on their pop coverage being shared amongst fans and netting them a lot of views. The publications that started reviewing pop largely didn’t abandon their existing genre beats — Pitchfork and Stereogum still mostly cover indie and alternative music — but you’ll find pop coverage on most music sites nowadays.
As someone who likes to read music criticism and enjoys a lot of pop music, I think that this is a mostly positive development. There has been some over-correction, with pop (or at least certain pop artists) being treated as the ideal, rather than as a genre that is no more or less worthy than any other — think the infamous 2013 Grantland piece “What If You Don’t Like Beyoncé’s Album?” which posits that “if you don’t like the new Beyoncé album, reevaluate what you want out of music,” and “no, there probably isn’t any place for people who dislike this album”, and some Taylor Swift coverage also veers into this kind of hagiography — but we’ve gotten a lot of smart and insightful pop criticism out of it too.
The issue is not poptimism so much as it is the revisionist history surrounding poptimism. It’s the kind of thinking that leads people to remembering Ryan Adams’ 1989 being lauded over the original, or Taylor Swift not being taken seriously by critics before she started making music with The National and Bon Iver — anecdotes that fit a narrative that some want to tell about pop music, but are misleading at best. Some of this comes from fans who want to paint their favourite artists as underdogs, and some from critics who want to paint themselves as more enlightened than their forbears. A 2017 Ringer article by Rob Harvilla touched on this:
[Poptimism] is one of those big-picture ideas so jarring and incendiary to many at the time that 13 years later it scans as obvious to the point of mundane. (For critics who felt they’d started out more broad-minded, that epiphany itself might breed suspicion: As current Times pop critic Jon Caramanica puts it, “It’s hard for me to take seriously a movement mostly agonized over by people with closed ears who chose to open them.”)
Determining exactly what critics thought of pop music in the pre-poptimist era is far more complicated than sussing out what they thought of specific Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams releases from the past decade, especially because so much pre-poptimist music criticism is also pre-internet, but The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll is a good place to start. Created by Robert Christgau in 1971 and published annually from 1974 on, the Pazz & Jop poll combined top 10 lists submitted by dozens to hundreds of music critics into one aggregated list of the year’s most acclaimed music. Initially, only albums were polled, but singles got their own list in 1979, followed by EPs in 1980 and music videos in 1983. And conveniently, every poll up until 2007 is available on Robert Christgau’s charmingly retro website, which is regularly updated but still looks exactly the same as it did in 2001.
In the early 1970s, rock music was at the centre of pop music, so we can’t make too much of the very rock-oriented earliest lists. Sure, maybe if they’d had poptimism in those days, you’d have seen David Cassidy and Donny Osmond enjoying the kind of serious critical evaluation that Harry Styles gets today, but hey, the Raspberries — who some at the time deemed uncool teenybopper music — made the 1974 list, albeit with their harder-rocking, Who-influenced final album, Starting Over.
Later in the 1970s, when disco overtook rock as pop’s biggest influence, you start to see some notable omissions, with even acts like ABBA and the Bee Gees, who now rank among the most beloved groups of the ’70s, going unrecognised. Poppier rock bands like Cheap Trick14 and The Cars appear, but the closest thing you see to a disco album in 1978, when the genre was at its height, is a Rolling Stones album with a disco song on it. But 1979’s list shows some improvement on that front; not only does the first ever singles poll include a bunch of disco songs, but Donna Summer and Chic both make the albums list. 1979 also marks the first appearances of both Michael Jackson, who would soon dominate pop music, and hip hop,15 which would eventually do the same.
The 1980s were a much better time for pop on these lists. Pop acts like Michael Jackson, Prince, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Janet Jackson, and George Michael all appear, many repeatedly. In 1983, Michael Jackson had the top album and single of the year, as did Prince in 1987. The pioneering rap group Run-D.M.C.’s sophomore album King of Rock and its title track are both acknowledged in 1985, and the following year, their album Raising Hell took fifth place on the albums list, while “Walk This Way” was the most acclaimed single. 1987 sees other hip hop acts — Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, and LL Cool J — on the albums list, and Public Enemy top it in 1988.16
Rap and hip hop remain well-represented into the 1990s and 2000s, but in the ’90s we start to see more alternative rock and less mainstream pop. A few of the biggest pop acts of the ’80s stick around, but ’90s chart-toppers like Mariah Carey don’t join them. As I got to the mid-90s lists, I started thinking that this must be what poptimism was reacting to, and I expected that I wouldn’t see any pop artists until around the mid-2000s — after all, turn-of-the-millennium pop music was all about manufactured boy bands and teen starlets, and they certainly didn’t get much respect.
Then I got to 1997 and saw “MMMBop” at the top of the singles list! To be fair, if any ’90s teenyboppers would get rockist respect, it’d be Hanson, an actual band who played actual instruments, but “MMMBop” is still a pop song made by and for literal children. Sure, one of those children would eventually form a power pop supergroup with members of Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins, and Fountains of Wayne, but that hadn’t happened yet. Whatever, probably a fluke, moving on.
In 1999, The Backstreet Boys, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears all appeared on the singles list. They were joined by *NSYNC and Destiny’s Child in 2000, and Pink and, amazingly, Nickelback in 2001. I mean, Nickelback are indisputably a rock band so their inclusion has no bearing on the rockism versus poptimism thing, but they never got the kind of critical reappraisal that the pop acts got, so in hindsight, seeing “How You Remind Me” on a critics’ best-of list is very unexpected. Further into the 2000s, you’ll also see Kylie Minogue, Avril Lavigne, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Kelis, Rihanna and Nelly Furtado.
To be fair, these turn-of-the-millennium popstars (and Nickelbacks) are represented exclusively on the singles list, with only two pop artists, Justin Timberlake and Lily Allen, making the album list before 2007,17 so it seems that critics didn’t value pop as an albums genre (at least not a top 10 best albums of the year genre) in the era that poptimism grew out of. But these lists demonstrate that critics’ relationship with pop music has waxed and waned over the years. The biggest pop artists of the 1980s were highly acclaimed for both individual songs and entire albums, whereas pop in the 2000s was treated as more of a singles genre, though one that produced many highly acclaimed hits. Meanwhile in the early-to-mid 1990s, pop was largely overlooked in favour of rock, rap, and Americana. And there were other genres besides pop that critics ignored, including some forms of rock music — the whole Sunset Strip hair metal scene was huge in the ’80s and produced a number of very commercially successful acts, but only its most respectable alumni, Guns N’ Roses, got any acknowledgement from Pazz & Jop.
What I take from all of this is that you can’t really make sweeping statements about music criticism and pop music, because there is no one constant truth about them. Pop’s place in the critical landscape is ever-changing and complex, and there’s a lot to say about it. To quote Taylor Swift — or was it Ryan Adams, or was it boygenius? — I could go on and on, and on and on.
But I’ll stop there.
My take is that there are no moral obligations when it comes to music taste, you don’t have to stop listening to musicians who have done bad things, but if an artist’s conduct, alleged or proven, leaves you unable to enjoy their work, then that is an entirely reasonable response.
Unless you count U2, who forcibly added their album to everyone’s iPhones, but for music that people actually listened to, it was Taylor Swift.
The two albums that sold more than 1989 were the Frozen soundtrack and Beyoncé’s self-titled album, both of which came out in late 2013 and had a whole year’s worth of sales counting towards the 2014 chart.
Pitchfork has never reviewed a Nickelback album, but the top search result when you google nickelback pitchfork is this article about how acclaimed indie singer-songwriter Father John Misty likes Nickelback, and that’s worth more than a positive Pitchfork review in my book.
Adams made some smarter lyric changes in “Wildest Dreams”, where “he” becomes “she” and “say you’ll remember me, standing in a nice dress” becomes “say you’ll remember me, standing in your nice dress.” He could have made similarly minor changes to “Style”, switching the chorus to “I’ve got that James Dean daydream look in my eye, and you’ve got that red lip classic thing that I like.” No need to write entirely new lines that don’t suit the song!
I do like this mashup that pairs it with “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” even combining the songs’ music videos.
I do, whether it’s Ryan Adams’ covering Taylor Swift or Taylor Swift covering Earth, Wind & Fire — another controversial take, it seems.
“State of Grace”, “Treacherous”, “Holy Ground” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic” are good examples of this, and they also happen to be my favourite songs from Red and some of my favourite Taylor Swift songs overall.
That song wasn’t on the original album and wasn’t included among the vault tracks on 2021’s Red (Taylor’s Version). I have no idea if Adams’ cancellation made Swift reluctant to include his work on the re-recorded album, or if the song just wasn’t finished and wouldn’t have made the album in any case.
Though evermore is my personal favourite, not just of those two, but of Swift’s entire discography.
folklore’s score wasn’t high enough for some particularly unhinged Swifties, who doxxed and sent death threats to Pitchfork editor Jillian Mapes, who wrote the review but did not choose the score.
Caramanica also received death threats for his review. Swifties be normal challenge.
Disclaimer: I fixed a typo that appeared in this review, which in Forbes reads “provide” rather than “providing,” but it’s obvious what was meant.
Who first appear on the 1977 list with In Color — a power pop masterpiece, yet not even their best album of that year.
In the form of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, rap’s first commercial hit.
If you’re wondering why I’m going into so much detail about the placement of rap music on these lists when up until now I’ve been talking about pop, that’s because in Kelefa Sanneh’s original rockism-versus-poptimism essay, he identified both pop and rap as genres not respected by those who judge all music by the standards of rock. Certainly there are those out there who disrespect rap on these grounds, but in my experience, those people are mostly boomer dads and “I was born in the wrong generation” YouTube commenters, not professional music critics, and the Pazz & Jop polls definitely bear that out.
The annual poll actually continued after 2007, but without Christgau’s involvement, and a number of critics refused to submit ballots to protest his firing.