This is the way a hype train ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper. On Sunday, February 5th, 2023, Turnstile lost out on all three Grammys that they were nominated for, meaning that we have to delay the seemingly-eventual nickname shift to “Grammy Award-Winning Hardcore Band Turnstile.” It would’ve been the biggest win for subculture since Three Six Mafia took home an Oscar for their work on Hustle And Flow, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, we got some photos of Turnstile on the Red Carpet and some content on Twitter, just like we did a few years back when Code Orange was nominated for a Grammy.
In the lead-up and fallout, the internet hardcore community posted conflicting viewpoints on the mainstream appeal of hardcore. Doja Cat mentioned that she wanted to make a “hardcore punk” album, likely unaware of the firestorm that using that label could brew. This prompted general outcry from the Worst Guy You Know, the guy who has no identity outside of being The Hardcore Guy. He lashes out at anything that might affect general perception that he’s dangerous. This is in the vein of the same argument that This Guy has been making against the accessibility of hardcore.
At the same time, a lot of people were seemingly upset at the idea that Turnstile didn’t win those Grammys. I wasn’t invested in the win but I thought it’d be nothing more than a passing subject at the water cooler of the content mines. The accessibility of hardcore and its recent moment in the spotlight has been a fun thing to talk about, but general trust in institutions goes against everything I learned from this genre. I’m not sure it meant anything that Turnstile lost, but I’m sure that winning would not make them any more legitimate.
After the dust settled, all was quiet on the western front until Steve Albini posted a full twitter thread to say that Steely Dan sucked. As a white Brooklynite in my 30s who once experimented with legal marijuana, I can say that I like Steely Dan quite a bit, but I’m siding with Steve. They do suck! Compared to most things I listen to, day in and day out, I don’t really want to listen to Steely Dan. They don’t have any riffs. Not a single one. You’d think out of such a big discography, there would be one riff, but no! Their albums always tend to trail off after they hit the b-side and I usually switch to another album before we get there. That’s not to say that I can’t sit back on a nice night and relish in the wine-tip cigarillo’d elegance of Aja, but I do have to be honest with myself and recognize that they kinda suck!
In that thread and its response, I noticed that Steve had done something that I felt was missing from the current punk and critical landscape. He did some actual, genuine, effective hating. It wasn’t a callout of the band from a moral high ground or anything, he just said they sucked and called them dorks, and then he called all of their defenders a bunch of dorks. That’s hating! That’s pure fun catharsis in talking shit! It’s what the internet was made for!
Hating in criticism seems to have fallen straight off of a cliff when discussing music as of late. I don’t see the hater qualities I remembered from a younger internet. I’m guilty of it, too, in a quest to purge all of the bile from my spleen. I attempt to live a positive life on and off the page, digital or physical, and I find my outlook to be perpetually sunny for the most part. I put myself in the shoes of the other man. I understand his actions. I empathize and grow and work with my own emotions on my own time. But damnit, sometimes I want to be a hater. I want to be able to say that something sucks and mean it. Every once in a while, I see something so outrageously bad only to find out that the scores from critics can be described as “middling.”
I wanted to see if music criticism itself was waning in this regard, so I went and found some datasets of all of the Pitchfork scores from 1997-2022. I know that Pitchfork isn’t the vanguard for music criticism, but it does have a bunch of scores that you can reliably put into a spreadsheet and average. A lot of people have done this, so most of the work was done for me, but using this data, I was able to get the last three and a half years. I’ll spare you the big crunch, but from 1997-2017, the average score was a 7.3. And from 2018-2022, the average was around 7.3. So, no, Pitchfork isn’t getting softer like I may have thought, but I think it’s deeper than numbers.
Looking through the lowest scores from the past few years, the artist list is a veritable rogue’s gallery of Guys We Should Hate. Comethazine, 6ix9ine, Lil Pump, Mark Kozelek, the list is almost entirely composed of Rappers Who Shouldn’t Be Rapping. The lowest of low scores seem to be reserved for people who were already on death row for the crime of being tasteless. I don’t disagree with the scores, but c’mon, where’s that good old-fashioned HATING???? Where’s a 4.3 for another boring-ass National record in 2023? Where’s the 3.2 for some vacuous Taylor Swift slog? Where’s a 0.0 and a monkey peeing into its own mouth for the dreadful new Lil Yachty album? I have a bloodlust for calling out some straight up garbage when I see it, and it has not been quenched.
Hating on a guy for sucking is easy. It’s part and parcel of the way we’ve broken down our communication to superhero tropes in our daily lives. There is a good guy (presumably us or the people we like), and there’s a bad guy (Jack Harlow, Asher Roth, et al). Everyone you know or like is already on your side. You’re always on the right side of history in this regard. There’s nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Even worse, we’re aligning bad artists with people who have genuine moral failings, and that’s not fair, either. Hating on something for being bad but with perfectly likable people involved is a lost art.
Even worse than losing the critical eye, we’re missing out on something incredibly fun. Hating on something mediocre in likeminded company is a pastime I grew up on in basements across the midwest. Try it out. Bob Dylan introduced me to the phrase “dog ass” to describe TV shows and there’s nothing like calling The Last Of Us a “dog ass tv show.” I heard everyone talking about how beautiful that third episode was, so I watched it, and y’all were crying about an hour-long libertarian version of the first 10 minutes of Up. For SHAME.
And so, I usher in a responsible new era in hating. I welcome you all into talking that mess about anyone and everyone. The next time you go to a gig, give it your best shot. You had to listen to some boring-ass opening band play for 30 minutes and do a whole bit about how “everyone in this room is here for the same reasons?” Tell your friends that we’ve got Modern Life Is War at home. Someone wastes your time telling you to check out a local shoegaze band? “I wish everything bad in life happens to you and only you.” The mainstream music media suggests that you listen to a new release from a pop singer that “Challenges everything you know about (Artist)”? “That sounds about as pleasant as giving my cat his ear drops.” Release your inner Statler and Waldorf. It’s nothing personal.
Shit I love this newsletter. T.S. Eliot, clean data, hater energy.
I was afraid to get on twitter and rip Steve Albini in defense of Steely. I would have reminded everyone 'Albin' is a derivative meaning "of white." Alas, I don't want to be chased out of Chicago with torches, so I'm glad someone is saying this.