Though in 1996 this might have sounded like a late conservative mea culpa (Camille Paglia certainly thought so), another 30 years on, Sontag’s admission sounds positively quaint. The internet has now had about three decades to hobble print journalism, scatter established criticism to the wind, and reduce almost everything else to advertising. Most of what passes for film, literary, or music criticism these days is deathly afraid of offending what little audience it has left, while internet commentators nearly always suffer from that debilitating blogosphere tendency, to evaluate art by whether it appropriately offends the opposing side of the culture war, or else placates their own (e.g. “One Battle After Another is bad because Woke Hollywood loves it”, “Sinners has pointed racial allegories, therefore it’s a great movie”). That transgressive Boomer counterculture Sontag once championed may have devolved into a thousand marketable Gen-X subcultures by the Nineties, but since then neurotic Millennials and dissociated Zoomers have had little but identity tags, brands, and message boards around which to orient artistic taste. 

Sontag wrote about everything that made her own era a period of such dramatic cultural upheaval — Pop Art, Happenings, avant-garde theater, postmodern novels, Civil Rights, world cinema. Everything, that is, except for the era’s centermost axis: the music. With the Rock Revolution came a new, upstart criticism, which aimed to take exactly those “lower” music forms — pop, rock, blues, R&B — and apply to them the same loving, discriminating attention which had previously been reserved only for High Art. Magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, and Melody Maker made the reviewing of rock and pop records a distinct department of journalism and the magazine industries. Eventually that culture even bled into other media, with MTV, by which point, in the Eighties and Nineties, magazines like NME, Spin, and The Source had become the hipper alternatives to the old Boomer mainstays. Many of these are still around. But none of them quite managed to survive the end-of-millennium transition to the new digital ecosystem with anything like their previous cultural cachet intact. Only one fledgling publication truly managed to define itself in the ensuing digital world of the new millennium: Pitchfork.com.

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While Sontag was writing those words in 1996, a young man named Ryan Schreiber was founding that website from his bedroom in Minneapolis. Within the next 10 years, Pitchfork would go on to become the internet music review site par excellence, averaging one million monthly readers, credited with making the careers of unknown artists, and even breaking those of others. In 2006, Pitchfork even managed to create its own significant music festival in Chicago (and later in Barcelona, too), while its sometimes harsh and frequently flippant snobbishness marked it as an essential center for Millennial Hipsterdom, perhaps the last time anything like an identifiable “counter-culture” existed (at least in terms of its generation’s consumption of music and culture on the internet). Just as the last 15 years or so of pop culture can be seen as an aggressive overcorrection against that stereotype, of a particular kind of obsessive snob (which the website came to embody in its reviews), Pitchfork itself has spent the last decade and a half slowly winding down into post-Web 2.0 irrelevance. In 2015, Condé Nast bought the site, and the next few years saw a considerable change in tone and editorial direction, sanding down its last edges until Anna Wintour promptly folded the company into GQ two years ago. 

On 20 January 2026 — 30 years into its reign as the last bastion of genuine music criticism — Pitchfork announced it would be transferring to a subscription model, allowing its users to generate their own reviews, and aggregating them, á la Rotten Tomatoes, while putting the entirety of their archive behind a paywall, like every other media operation still limping along online. This move is a perfect symbolic death knell for music criticism in the Internet Age — the final gasp of a culture in which the popular art millions of people regularly consume might be handled with even a partial version of that “seriousness” all art forms deserve. 

The idea that a group of discriminating obsessives might gather in one place to argue vociferously for good taste, and for music which would otherwise never have a chance (and, also important, to argue against music they perceive as deleterious or fake) — this vital idea seemingly has little place left on the internet. Perhaps very few people really bemoan its passing. But when the rest of the web has been winnowed down to only endless marketable content and reviews which are really just covert advertisements for said content, people will soon find themselves nostalgic for the days when the music snobs swooped in with their poison pens, to declare some unheard-of band’s new record brilliant, or some pop star’s latest project an unredeemable piece of shallow trash. If we don’t already, we’ll miss the days when critics had teeth and the gall to actually dislike things everyone else liked — not to simply acquiesce to every internet fandom’s lamest dictum: “Just let people enjoy things.”

In this way, Pitchfork’s slow descent into irrelevance really does mirror the general progression of popular music in this century: the waning subcultures of the 2000s (ending in that stereotype of the Millennial Hipster); the subsequent rise of streaming services in the 2010s and the ensuing struggles of all but the biggest artists to profit from massive changes in the industry; and, finally, the increasing hostility of massive fandoms and media outlets to any kind of unforgiving criticism. In its heyday, Pitchfork was frequently lambasted for its system of assigning points to its reviews (as one of the great Onion headlines read: “Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8” ). But even more than this, it was the site’s willingness to be harshly dismissive of certain artists, while being hyperbolically supportive of others, which made its reputation. Brent DiCrescenzo’s wild 2000 review of Radiohead’s Kid A for the site famously garnered a bit of negative, mocking attention — yet the fact that the site awarded the album its rare perfect 10.0 rating, and later named it the greatest album of the decade, played no small part in the record’s popularity and success with critics over the years. The site’s ecstatic review for Arcade Fire’s debut 2004 record Funeral had a similarly sizable impact — some people have gone so far as to say it actually made the group’s career. 

But the opposite was also true. Many of their negative reviews drew considerable ire. Even today, some people point to the site’s 3.3 review of the Jacksonville indie band Black Kids’ first record — which consisted of a single picture and a frowning face emoji, along with the word “sorry”— as a major reason for the band’s failure. Perhaps the most infamous of all Pitchfork reviews was the 0.0 rating it awarded to the Australian band Jet’s 2006 record Shine On: the review consisted solely of a video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. Though most of the time their pans were hardly so bitchy or dismissive, still the attitude was important. Schreiber and co. weren’t afraid to appear snobbish, yet neither were they afraid to be overly sincere about the music they loved. They rarely reviewed records by major pop stars and if they did, they tended to pan those, too. And when they set about in the 2000s making their own lists of the greatest albums or songs of previous decades, they were keen to canonize the music they saw as especially influential on the underground, experimental, forward-thinking indie rock, hip-hop, and electronic music they usually championed.

Over time this earned them the rather unfair reputation of being biased toward largely white, male indie rock acts — while being a tad dismissive of female musicians, or even primarily black styles of music. Cherrypicking certain reviews could possibly support this argument, but I’ve never quite bought the critique. Until the site began deliberately to combat this perception of its own chauvinism, it was if anything simply engaged in an older Gen-X-style rooting out of inauthenticity — trying to spot and designate fakes, sell-outs, or poseurs. But after the 2000s, the climate of the blogosphere was quickly growing more concerned with themes of empowerment, social justice, and a general cringey Millennial desire to stamp out all offense. The idea that popular music could be criticized for being shallow or fake was increasingly anathema to a neurotic generation which tended to seek out its own self-esteem and identity via the unthinking worship of pop stars and enormous movie franchises, while conflating all criticism of cultural products as criticism of the kind of people who liked it. 

Selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 only pushed Pitchfork further along this line. Schreiber himself left in 2018, replaced by Puja Patel, who served as general editor until 2024. In 2019, the site began issuing extremely positive reviews of old Taylor Swift albums, which it had never bothered to review in the first place, nakedly framed as an apology for all that erstwhile snobbishness and failure to be properly deferential to mega-pop fans. Two years later, it offered an editorial — maybe the lowest point in the site’s entire history — entitled “Pitchfork Reviews: Rescored” in which the editors offered about twenty re-dos of old reviews, rescinding their pans of a few records and demoting others they’d praised highly. The funniest of these being the much lower adjusted score for Grimes’ record Miss Anthropocene, released only a year earlier — reflecting widespread distaste for the pop star’s ridiculous and very public relationship with Elon Musk. As it shifted further toward music news, away from committed editorials, Pitchfork also started to re-do several of its “Greatest Songs” lists, ostensibly to reflect a newfound commitment to pop music. In 2002, the site had declared the great cult band Pavement’s yearning slacker classic “Gold Soundz” the best song of the Nineties: in 2022, it was now Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” — and not even the original but, inexplicably, the even duller, inferior Remix version. Between the tops of these two lists lies the whole silly history of music criticism in the 21st century so far.

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As of this January, to go back and actually read any of this history now requires a $5 subscription. What was once important enough to share with everyone has been conveniently priced at the equivalent of your average cappuccino. And what was once the last true outsider voice — the last reliable alternative to the crush of endlessly proliferating online content — has been rendered definitively toothless and irrelevant. Is there any hope that another site could spring up to take its place? There are certainly endless blogs and magazines which still run music reviews, gather industry news, and attempt to break new artists. Places like The Quietus and Gorilla Vs. Bear have had their own excellent writing from time to time; many old behemoths like Rolling Stone itself still soldier on, trying desperately to keep up with a culture that is only growing more and more fragmented, cheap, and difficult to parse. But none of these places have anything insightful to offer, and all are far too deferential to the whims of the markets. Is there any place left for the kind of criticism that might actually tease out a cultural narrative from the music of our time, or defend some sort of standard of artistic “seriousness”, or champion the tiny unsuccessful artists too obscure to break through to bigger audiences? 

I would be lying if I said the chances weren’t low. And yet, anytime a cultural vacuum opens up, it tends to reveal the need people previously took for granted. Surely there are still hundreds of thousands — millions, even — of passionate music obsessives out there, in the world and online, dissatisfied with only the streaming catalogs, genuinely interested in encountering something new, something innovative, something that feels as if it’s pulling the culture forward, not merely trafficking in cliches which even the best popular music can never truly avoid. One of the sad facts that most defines our current period is the obvious lack in it of any viable artistic counterculture. But this is a state of affairs which can only go on so long, before “serious” music lovers begin to itch for an actual alternative to gather around. Whatever form that takes — counterculture or no — will be what fills that same vacuum, offering up an actual challenge to the current generation. Hopefully, it will take the demise of Pitchfork as its example, and learn its lessons: 1) That a critic should always trust their own obsessions over any identity, brand, market demand, or audiences; and 2) That “snob” isn’t such a bad thing to be called, if the people saying it happen to be philistines.

Take Roberto Bolaño. When he first appeared on the American scene in 2003 with the English translation of By Night in Chile, he was hailed by Susan Sontag as a major voice of Latin American literature. But it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 that he became a household name among the smart set. That novel, a towering work of literary virtuosity, would go on to be a national bestseller. Bolaño, who’d died in 2004 at the age of 50 from complications due to a liver condition, became that rarest of breeds — the writer who goes by a single name.

In 2008, his short stories began to appear in The New Yorker, and the same year saw the English translation of Bolaño’s masterpiece, the 900-page 2666, completing the cycle of his major works. But the publishing world was hungry for new Bolaño, whether he was around to write it or not. More than fifteen books have been published since 2666, the most recent in February 2021. Just when you think the last novella or half-finished short story collection has been unearthed from his hard drive, another one is announced. Like Charles Bukowski, Bolaño has found a fame in death he would’ve scoffed at during his life, which he spent as a struggling poet in Chile, Mexico and Spain.

Bolaño is worthy of his place in the canon, but he would’ve had a harder time earning it had he been an American. For the US literary establishment, Bolaño’s foreignness was central to his appeal. At a time when the literary Jonathans — Franzen and Safran Foer — and what remained of the old white males reigned supreme, here was a dead Chilean poet whose seedy, often macho stories of Latin American depravity offered white liberal readers a chance to wallow in grit and grime.

Wokeness wasn’t yet a factor then, but the winds were blowing in that direction. Bolaño offered an outlet for New Yorker readers who wanted some of the “toxic masculinity” — sex, violence, and machismo — that they’d previously gotten from the likes of Roth and Mailer. Bolaño, a foreign noble savage, was the perfect guy for the role.

Bolaño’s stature has only grown over the past 20 years, even as the literary world became increasingly feminised; both readers and editors are now mostly women. It’s a trend that’s been picked up on, and even lamented, by the Times, the TLS, and the Observer. It’s almost impossible to find debut novels by American men, and especially white men, about the plight of heterosexual males.

With foreign writers, it’s a different story. Like Bolaño, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and his Norwegian contemporary Karl Ove Knausgård, have epitomised the rise of the literary noble savage. These two have built careers on “problematic” subject matter that would get an American-born writer cancelled. Why are imports allowed to thrive?

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A European like Knausgård, perhaps the whitest man in existence, can still be embraced by the publishing industry. His autobiographical My Struggle novels, which chronicle his everyday life in tedious and often brilliant detail, are almost pathologically self-indulgent. They are also, to put it lightly, controversial. The narrator, a Knausgård stand-in named Karl Ove Knausgård, rants against political correctness and feminist parenting, describes his attraction to his students while teaching at a high school, relates his anger at being falsely accused of rape, and, in general, details his sexual proclivities and hang-ups in all their quotidian repulsiveness.

But one gets the sense that the books are popular among elites not in spite, but because of the way they muck around in male sexuality. Take one look at the grizzled and handsome Knausgård and it’s obvious that there is a psychosexual element at play here. Wokeness requires a degree of repression, which in turn necessitates an outlet for release. The sexual itch must be scratched in a non-problematic manner, and since the noble savages are foreign curiosities who can’t be expected to internalise the progressive ways of America, they get a free pass. The elite reader can be titillated by Knausgård’s grubby masculinity while keeping his or her conscience clean.

The American male novelist, by contrast, is despised not for his toxic masculinity but because he ought to know better. Unlike the noble savage, the American male is expected to understand what is and isn’t problematic — he went to college, after all. For him, masculinity is something to be condemned and renounced. The embodiment of this emasculated ideal is Ben Lerner, a master of self-flagellation whose 2019 novel The Topeka School “decodes white male rage”. Pull up any picture of Lerner and he looks just about ready to weep.

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American men who deviate from the Lerner school are treated like Callan Wink, whose debut, August, a coming-of-age novel set in Montana and Michigan was panned in the New York Times in no small part due to its flirtations with masculine bravado. “Despite his abundance of literary talent,” the reviewer teases, “we’ll be sure not to mistake [Wink] for some effete literary type.” The reviewer’s problem, of course, is that Wink, who lives in Montana and writes about Western men, is far too close to the American savages of old. Wink graduated from an MFA program and has published stories in The New Yorker. That means he got the memo, which makes his defiance unforgivable.

The case of Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz is another cautionary tale: this time about what happens to writers who make the leap from noble savage to upstanding member of the American literati. Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, became a celebrity in 1996 with the publication of Drown, a short story collection documenting the gritty island life of his homeland. But as his fame grew, and especially after he won the Pulitzer for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, something funny happened: he was civilised. He landed a teaching gig at MIT, and even if he still spat out his patented Dominican slang at readings, it was clear that he’d been domesticated. Diaz was an American writer.

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But with Americanisation comes cancellation. In 2018, Diaz became the subject of a #MeToo campaign, led by former students and writers whom he had mentored. He was accused of overstepping boundaries, pushing himself on female writers and getting handsy. Blinded by the awards and the fawning press, Diaz failed to realise that the sort of behaviour that was indulged in a Dominican was off-limits for a Yank.

Bolaño is still pumping out books nearly two decades after his death, but many a noble savage has joined him in recent years, including his countryman Alejandro Zambra and the Argentinian César Aira. And they just keep coming. The latest in the genre, The Women I Love, by the Italian Francesco Pacifico, came out in December, and is described by the publisher as “a provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity”. That’s publicity speak for: a noble savage Italian dude fucks around for 300 pages, magnificently unafraid of committing a microaggression.

For American novelists, the news is bleak but not hopeless. You may need to neuter your writing. You may need to show exquisite sensitivity to the ever-shifting rules around race and gender. You may need to conduct your personal life with the utmost progressive decorum. But if you change your name and flee the country, you can write whatever you want.