ed sheeran doesn’t need music critics

Rolling Stone published an article of cut content from a recent Ed Sheeran feature, in which the pop musician said, “Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it. It’s freely available! Make up your own mind. I would never read an album review and go, ‘I’m not gonna listen to that now.’”

And to some degree, Sheeran is right. Streaming services make music readily available and conjure the illusion that it’s also freely given to us. We don’t “need” cultural gatekeepers – such as, ironically, Rolling Stone – to tell us whether or not the newest song by Ed Sheeran is bad (that’s just a deeply felt sense we hold in our bones, which Spotify or Apple Music can help us confirm at our leisure).

But like most criticism-of-criticism in this vein, Sheeran’s point misses the forest for the trees. We absolutely don’t need critics to tell us whether “thing good” or “thing bad,” but that’s not necessarily why critics even exist in the first place. In addition to that sort of mere qualitative statement, critics exist to help us understand context, like how financially deleterious the very existence of streaming services is to the artists themselves, for example, or how subscribing to a streaming service means that your music collection is never actually yours and can be revoked by the record companies at any time. Critics can help to place Sheeran in his historical context as a contemporary singer and songwriter, or offer more palatable, lesser-known alternatives to his vapid art. Critics could, if they wanted, try to situate Sheeran’s songs in a political context, though I could not tell you how that would shake out to save my life.

Sheeran is not the only person to make that mistake, by any means. The idea that critics are unnecessary today except as objects of derision or agreement is popular, and the idea that criticism is only there to tell you whether “thing good” or “thing bad” is even upheld by people responsible for making sure criticism gets published to a broad audience, like IGN’s executive editor of reviews.

Critics ourselves are often pushed into this narrow view of our field whether we like it or not, not necessarily out of malice but out of the harsh realities of business in the media industry. We watch as our friends and colleagues get fired from their “sure thing” jobs regularly, as outlets shutter and downsize to focus only on that which can get the greatest algorithmic return-on-investment.

Even with service journalism, the underpaid and undervalued field where writers put out dozens of how-to guides on everything from “How do I beat this level in Final Fantasy VII Remake” to “Where can I find the latest blockbuster on streaming,” writers’ jobs are being threatened by the looming mistake of Large Language Model (LLM)-generated content. Why pay someone to write an accurate, carefully considered guide that actually feels like a person wrote them – you know, the appeal of old chestnuts like GameFAQs guides – when you can just get a chatbot (and by extension, forced labor in Kenya) to do the work instead? At a certain level of bullshit jobs-style upper management, what’s considered “efficient” is directly antithetical to human life.

But this isn’t Ed Sheeran’s fault, per se, nor is it really his problem. He’s a point on a graph of a much broader trend.

anti-criticism in the age of disney adults

Poet laureate Karl Shapiro identified the concept of “anti-criticism” in a series of lectures delivered from October to December, 1949.^[1]Shapiro, Karl. “What Is Anti-Criticism?” Poetry, vol. 75, no. 6, 1950, pp. 339–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20591169. Accessed 9 Apr. 2023. He saw “[arguments] against criticism [as] related to a wider and more dangerous anti-intellectualism that in poetics leads to the primacy of the second-rate, and in literary politics may lead to official and controlled art.” In his ensuing Poetry article, “What is Anti-Criticism?” Shapiro briefly examines the history of 18th and 19th century poetry and how it was analyzed, carefully demonstrating the values such structural and interpretive analysis upheld and how they were incompatible with contemporary 20th century poetry – and indeed, its critical apparatus.

The anti-critic takes for his quarry not only the modern symbolist poets but also the old symbolist poets like Blake; not only the modern metaphysical poets but also the old metaphysical poets; and in addition to these the polylingual poets; those who practice typographical or grammatical experiments, past or present; those who use one rhetorical figure at the expense of the other- those who are too abstract and those who are too concrete. The contemporary poet may not be tolerant of all these kinds of poetry himself, but the anti-critic would like to get rid of the lot. His measure, as I said before, is the prose semantic, and any violation of this central canon he regards as a threat to intelligibility and sanity. To the anti-critic any departure from the immediate area of the paraphrasable meaning is, moreover, a sign of wilful obscurantism. […] A highly paraphrasable poetry is equivalent to a highly representational art, and both, in a period like ours, are liable to degenerate into escapist art.

Shapiro describes phenomena that would likely be familiar to anyone who has lived through the last decade of critical discourse around any kind of art you can imagine, from the indiscriminate uplifting of mediocre yet broadly popular “cultural products” to the bashing of art that resists easy interpretation and a sneering attitude toward the critics who attempt to analyze said art anyway. Through Shapiro we see anti-critics in those who endlessly repeat “Let People Enjoy Things” at anyone who doesn’t like a superhero movie, in the throngs of gamers (and the reviewers who enabled them) who refused to let a little systemic transphobia get in the way of their Hogwarts Legacy run, and in Ed Sheeran’s throwaway jab at the critics forced to listen to his pablum for less money than they should be getting for their troubles.

The anti-critic has surely evolved in other important ways away from what Shapiro observed in the first few years after World War II, just as the corporate media/art space has evolved. We see the “enthusiast” subsume more formal critics and critical outlets all the time, coincidentally as a monoculture forms around a few massive entertainment and technology corporations. In one particularly blunt example, critic B.D. McClay notes that a writer for IGN was replaced as the reviewer for the Disney+/Marvel series Loki after a single less-than-glowing review of the show. In a more recent example, replies to longtime film critic Robert Daniels’s tweet panning The Super Mario Bros. Movie ranged from indifferent to derisive, with one reply telling him, “I’ll trust the reviews from people who actual [sic] play the game,” together with a screenshot of IGN’s 8/10 review synopsis.

We might revisit that IGN article that contends the purpose of criticism is to determine whether “thing good” or “thing bad,” as it actually contends something worse: that the wide majority of things even worth talking about in IGN’s eyes are broadly “good” along a sliding scale of quality from “mediocre” to “superlative.” In this case, the criticism isn’t even merely qualitative; it’s meant to be singularly supportive or at worst ambivalent about a given cultural product. It is itself anti-criticism.

McClay (more charitably than I suspect Shapiro would have been) identifies the tendency for largely positive anti-critical writing about mass media as “a world of appreciation,” not necessarily unadulterated fandom, but “essentially, a fan culture.” In this dynamic, there is only people who like the thing, and the thing itself. If negativity in this world of appreciation exists, McClay explains, it does so as part of a binary: “the rave and the takedown.”

an endless content™ jubilee

I remember when I first got into games criticism I heard everyone joke about the “discourse wheel” and how if you spent enough time in the industry you’d eventually find yourself back at the beginning, older, not necessarily wiser, yet experiencing many of the same arguments about a particular game or design concept yet again. The obvious punchline was someone yelling “LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE” and watching everyone in the discord server duck under their desks like an air raid alarm had gone off.

Since then, The Last of Us has gotten a sequel, a PC remaster, a full remake of the first game, and a whole-ass television show with a second season on the way. The discourse around that media franchise has happened in front of me not once, not twice, but like four times at this point. As @autumn wrote, “there’s a new AAA catastrophe that’s weird about trans people and also The Last of Us is relevant again.”

This is perhaps not the worst or wildest example of monoculture forming around us in a suffocating cloud, though. That dubious distinction goes to Disney and Microsoft, probably, as the companies attempting to gather up as much culture as they can to homogenize it, with the former going as far as digitizing actors’ voices for use long after they retire in new portrayals of characters those actors first performed more than 40 years ago. Hell, it’s not even the worst example in the games industry. What iteration number is Call of Duty on? Or Assassin’s Creed? Or fucking Mario? Hell, we’re already two deep into the reboot of God of War.

It’s hardly worth saying at this point that nostalgia fuels so much of the media that we’re given to consume. It’s increasingly difficult to find new art or ideas in a media landscape that puts so much value on callbacks to old forms. If something isn’t another superhero origin story, it’s referencing a meme from 12 years ago. And it’s nearly impossible to resist the ever-present pull of this strictly iterative culture: I can’t lie and say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy both of the above examples.

But we still need to try and cut through the overwhelm for a moment. Disney isn’t a poison to the culture simply because it owns Marvel Studios or Lucasfilm. The reason for its negative impact is because of the absolute crushing presence it has in the film and television industries at large, having bought out major competitors like 20th Century Fox and nearly completely snowed out smaller film studios at the theaters. It doesn’t help that the industry is consolidating in other ways with its move to streaming platforms. As Adam Conover said in a recent video about two different mergers (Live Nation and Ticket Master in the 90s and Warner Media with Discovery late last year), “one man’s whims and preferences dictate which stories artists get to tell and what hundreds of millions of people get to watch.”

The idea that a few rich dudes are in full control of every piece of media we consume and that the number of rich dudes who do so is actively getting smaller all the time sucks, not just for criticism’s purposes but simply as someone who Consumes Content™. To my knowledge, no one has ever been explicitly asked if we want the same shit, year in and year out, only More. Nobody from Game Freak or Ubisoft ever sends out a survey like “hey are y’all tired of Pokémon or Rainbow Six: Siege seasons?” Instead, they just push them out, and let the resulting economic data do the talking: “People want more of this thing because a lot of them bought the thing when it came out.” There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing, especially when we’re less likely (or able) to say no in the first place.

In this light, doesn’t it make just too much sense that Ed Sheeran has a whole mini documentary series coming out on Disney Plus?

towards a guerrilla criticism

So what’s to be done here? Aside from maybe the 🏴 most 🔥🍾 obvious 💣 (and unlikely) answers with regards to the most egregious monopolies, how can critics – who are, as a reminder, less institutionally supported than ever – or criticism even contend with Content™ backed by the most well-funded mega corps on earth and supported by hegemonically anti-critical fanbases?

Here is where I disagree most heavily with thinkers like Shapiro, who believed in retaining an elevated critical class and poetic movement with remove from the masses, and critics like McClay, who said “Opinions will become both more binary and more homogenous, and about fewer and fewer things. […] things will get worse, whether or not they ever get better.” I don’t think our options necessarily have to be “remove ourselves to an academic ivory tower” or “accept that things are the way they are.” We don’t need to dutifully fall into line along the “rave” or “takedown” axis as McClay described.

The kind of criticism I am imagining is a criticism that is inherently and radically skeptical of (especially corporate-backed) nostalgia; a criticism that is not necessarily hostile to fans but antagonistic toward fandom as a system which undergirds larger structures of power; a criticism that is as transgressive and playful in the forms it takes as it is with the words that fill those forms. I believe we are capable of performing criticism that disappoints everyone in delightful ways.

Criticism as a weapon is not a new idea, of course. Marx is famously quoted as saying “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” More modern philosophers and theorists, like the Situationists and Bruno Latour, have written about the decline and possible weaponization of criticism as well. To a degree, that worries me. Talk doesn’t just become action because the talker wishes for it real hard. There’s a real possibility, no, a near-certainty, that anything that comes out of this will result in next to nothing changing. If everything is part of the cycle of discourse, including conversations on how to break the discourse, what hope do we have?

The alternative to facing the leviathan and losing at the moment seems to be more or less doing nothing, which to me is more unbearable than all the pranks of all the cringe-ass culture jammers of the 90s and 2000s combined. At what point does quiet dissent simply morph into complicity?