The Death of the Bad Review
Taylor Swift’s new song “Cleveland!” set off a small war online this week, and the fight wasn’t about the song. It was about whether anyone’s still allowed to say they didn’t like it. That’s the real story: music criticism is dying of fright.
Criticism used to be a fair fight. Rolling Stone trashed the first Led Zeppelin album in 1969, called it derivative and overblown, and Zeppelin sold two hundred million records anyway. Nobody showed up at the critic’s house. Robert Christgau handed out letter grades for decades, and Lou Reed answered by ripping him apart on a live album instead of finding his address. Axl Rose once wrote a whole song threatening to fight three specific journalists. Petty, ridiculous, but it was one guy mad at three guys, settled on wax.
Now a negative pop review gets a freelancer messages threatening to dox them. Paste Magazine published a folklore review anonymously to protect the writer. A gentle tweet about Nicki Minaj turned into weeks of harassment for its author. It’s not a critic against an artist anymore, it’s a critic against a fanbase the size of a small country, and that math was never close.
So critics got nicer. Not because the records improved, because honesty stopped being worth the risk. That’s a real loss: a bad review used to save you forty dollars on a record that wasn’t earning it. A critic didn’t need to be right, just consistent, and being consistently wrong about you was still useful. The only useless critic is a scared one.
I think about waiting on a review from Cleveland Scene, back when I was drumming in bands nobody had heard of. You never knew what you’d get, and that uncertainty was the point. Weezer’s own fans voted Pinkerton one of the worst albums of 1996; it’s the record they love most today. Taste takes decades to sort out, and it only works if people are allowed to be wrong about it, loudly, in public.
The Songs
Odie Leigh built her name as an acoustic singer-songwriter, then blew it up on “Miss Leave Me Alone.” This is indie pop-rock with teeth, guitars plugged in and cranked, a total departure from where she started. The energy carries it, and the nerve to sound nothing like her old self is exactly what makes it work.
“Be Happy” leans hard into 90s alternative without copying it, and the Screaming Trees comparison comes fast. The main riff does the heavy lifting, wrapped in feedback and layered guitar texture. It’s the lead single off Put a Smile on for Me, and the rest of the record holds up if this one grabs you.
Dirty Honey kicks ass live, so a ballad feels like a risk, but “Butterfly” earns it. Acoustic guitars, vocal harmonies, light hand percussion, and a solo that goes somewhere: it’s the kind of song that used to be a rock band’s second single, back when bands still wrote them. This one deserves a room full of lighters.
Michigander keeps writing songs that just work, and “YYY” is another one. Polished indie rock with an accessible edge, carried by a voice that sounds better every time he shows up on this show. Straightforward, well-built, no gimmicks required.
