I'm Wesley Morris and this is Cannonball.

Today, hated it.

Last month, Taylor Swift released her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl. And for me, the most interesting thing about it didn't really have so much to do with the music

itself. It was how critics treated it. The aggregation of reviews were mostly

enthusiastic, but, you know, they also included assessments that I'd describe as unimpressed,

a little exasperated, kind of weary. I'm somewhere between those two camps. Enthusastically

exasperated, is that a thing? That's me.

But that's not my point.

My point is that critics rolling their eyes at Taylor Swift is a noteworthy shift,

not just from reviews of Taylor Swift's music, but lately from pop music criticism in general.

For the last decade or so, popular cultural criticism and music especially

has seemed scared of its own shadow.

Or maybe more to the point,

scared of the fan armies ready to attack

anybody who dares to question their preferred stars

and what they might be up to

with, you know, whatever they've

just put out.

And so, as the reviews came in, I thought, and I don't want to get too carried away here,

but this actually might represent a kind of return to form to the mean old days of music

criticism where you could just say what you felt.

All of that made me want to talk to my fellow homie in criticism, Kellefa Sane.

...