“They don’t build statues of critics”, read the words emblazoned across Charli XCX’s chest in neat pink lettering, in a paparazzi shot taken in March 2022. This was the week of release for her fifth studio album Crash, a concept album the artist has since denounced, in which she portrays the role of a “hypersexualised” self-bubblegum beats and monosyllabic lyrics define the album. Deemed “too straightforward” (NME) and “oddly joyless” (The Guardian), the public, however, loved it. Those who understood it as a satirical “major label sell-out record” bowed in deference to such a masterful caricature of modern ultra-commercialised pop.
The same slogan found itself being repped by Katy Perry, on the same shirt, in 2024. Support was more stifled this time. The rollout and reception of Perry’s seventh studio album 143 was a festival of online ridicule, the commercial AND critical consensus being that it was, well, bad. Perry garnered little praise, but much sympathy, as the online sphere denoted her as entering (another) “flop era”. An upsetting turn of events for any artist, but one worth blaming these abstract figures – critics – for?
What really is the significance of this slogan-ly saying, “they don’t build statues of critics”? Is it just a cope for artists releasing subpar work and then dealing with the inevitably negative response? Or is it pertaining to a deeper, more meaningful truth? Maybe, that critics are irrelevant? I mean, when was the last time you read the NME? For me, it’s never, if it weren’t referenced on the “Career” subsection of Charli XCX’s Wikipedia page.
As is tradition for any discussion of The Music Industry Now™, we must consider “The Internet”, and “Streaming”. In today’s culture, music can be listened to immediately upon release, aided by features such as Spotify’s very own countdown pages, impatiently ticking away the seconds until the awaited single drops at 12:00 GMT.
Long gone are the days of waiting diligently outside record stores until opening hours, all for the honour of listening to an artists’ newest work at the earliest possible opportunity. As such, public reaction to new music is also immediate, and readily accessible across virtually any social media platform. In less than 2 minutes post-release, you can find out if Twitter user @SwiftieTilDeath thinks the newest Taylor Swift album is up to scratch – how is Mr. Serious Music Critic at the Independent meant to keep up?
Jessica Karl of Bloomberg identifies this phenomena as proof of the “broken” nature of music criticism in 2024. For example, following the release of Taylor Swift’s thirty-one (that’s 31) track album The Tortured Poets Department, innumerable reviews set the internet alight with a flurry of stars given-or-not; Lindsey Zoladz of the New York Times called it “sprawling”, and in need of editing. The same could be said for a lot of hastily published music criticism, desperately needing to ride the waves of online discourse before the terrifying tide of “irrelevance” begins to turn. So, no-one’s really giving their best and most-considered views in the context of a cruel restless internet, hungry for the next debate.
The music critic hosts of The New York Times’ Podcast often chat jovially about the death threats they receive in the wake of publishing a less-than-positive review of Stan Twitter’s beloveds. It’s common practice for critics to turn off all notifications, avoid the internet, and generally take safety measures paramount to witness protection in order to protect their privacy and sanity from fans, stans, and internet tyrants.
It’s an odd by-product of stan culture, perhaps – this new era where an artist’s (subjective) failures are played out on the global stage of the internet, where comment is free, and comments are mean. Tribes rejoice in the fall of another’s leader; Matty Healey being criticised in The Times is a legitimate offence. Arguably, armchair critics have surpassed the professional critics – those who have a difficult job, for which no-one seems to care to listen to how difficult it is.
They really don’t build statues of critics, but then again, they probably won’t build a statue of Charli XCX in Bishops’ Stortford either. The message Charli XCX and Katy Perry are trying to get across isn’t one of seriousness, or any stony-faced snipe at music journalists the world over – instead, maybe it’s just kind of funny to give the critics some criticism. It’s ironic, it’s camp, it’s pop. At the end of the day, it’s just a T-shirt…
Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash.