Punched on TV by an Irish toff: how criticism worked before Taylor Swift, Morrissey and Oasis

Anyone know if Taylor Swift has any plans to release new material?

I’m hilarious. Bearded eremites living without electricity in the Outer Hebrides know that, last week, the Pennsylvanian grievancemonger released an eight-hour album, The Tortured Poets Department. No doubt someone travelled to North Uist and yelled summaries through the hermitage’s window. Someone thinks you can’t be rich and be tortured! There is a debate about whether the title needs an apostrophe. No, really.

Amid all the pointless noise something mildly interesting did happen over at Paste magazine. The music publication announced, for reasons that will surprise nobody aware of how Swift fans roll, that it was posting its negative notice anonymously. “There is no byline on this review due to how, in 2019 when Paste reviewed Lover, the writer was sent threats of violence from readers who disagree with the work,” the editor explained on not-Twitter.

Clare Martin, who wrote that review of the earlier Swift album, confirmed the story to Dave Hanratty on the No Encore podcast last week. “All of a sudden all the hate came in,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Oh, this is a lot.’ I remember that day. I ended up crying on the phone to my editor, Stephen. What a dude!”

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This sort of ranting has always gone on in private. Every now and then someone may even have dragged out the Basildon Bond and written a letter in emerald ink to the editor. But the free availability of immediate right of reply on social media has now flung the fraught response directly into the journalist’s virtual face. You get a certain amount of this with movie reviewing. Followers of the amiable director Zack Snyder were at it again last week when, upon the release of his reliably awful Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver, critics descended like Byron’s wolf upon the fold. All those reviewers were biased. They were in the pay of somebody or other. The usual stuff. The cults that gather around franchise movies will settle for nothing less than full compliance. Abuse against critics (women in particular) opposed to Batman led to at least one prominent film site puling its comments section well over a decade ago.

[ Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department track by track review – A manifesto for all the believers who will try at love one more time ]

It seems, however, that the abuse is worse still in the music world. Much attention is directed to the disproportionately female fan bases of acts such as Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Swift, but, over the past decade or so, the most aggressive responses I’ve encountered – worse than anything concerning the Marvel Cinematic Universe – have followed disobliging comments on Morrissey and Oasis.

Music has always generated a more tribal response than has film. The medium gets straight into the id. The singer, arranged before a devoted crowd, indulges in a class of mass manipulation not wholly dissimilar to that practised by politicians. The mods and the rockers brawling on Brighton Beach half a century ago didn’t fall out over attitudes to Jean-Luc Godard. Pop remains the most persuasive of factional motivators. The Beatles vs the Stones. Blur vs Oasis. Beyoncé vs Taylor.

It would be wrong to suggest critics have never before faced violent retribution. Way back in 1963, Bernard Levin, the famously waspish critic and commentator, had barely begun his segment on the satirical show That Was the Week that Was when a richly voiced toff interrupted him. “One minute, Mr Levin,” he said. “Before you begin ... It won’t take a minute. Would you stand up?” A few more words were exchanged before the lofty intruder took a swing at the undersized critic. This was the Anglo-Irish polymath Desmond Leslie, husband of the great cabaret singer Agnes Bernelle, and he was taking pugilistic offence at Levin’s review of a recent performance by his wife.

What is now most remarkable about the footage is Leslie’s staggering politeness. No doubt one would rather read a rude note on the social than be punched in the face by a former Spitfire pilot, but the exchange still seems eminently more civilised than the digital bellowing that characterises contemporary dissent.

Anyway, we have reached a bad place if reviewers feel the need to cloak themselves in anonymity before daring to express mixed feelings about a singer’s epic evisceration of recently discarded boyfriends. Of course critics can be up themselves. It hardly needs to be said that those who hand it out should be able to take it back. But none of us is (I hope) following readers to work and biffing them on the nose. A glut of communication media has allowed human beings to reveal their worst instincts with a promiscuous relish not seen since we pelted petty criminals with rotten vegetables in the town square. Get used to the new awful.