Pitchfork’s authenticity problem: the critical reception of Vampire Weekend and Lil Wayne

Abstract

This article turns a critical eye on the arguments deployed by Pitchfork, one of the most popular music websites, when reviewing two artists: Vampire Weekend and Lil Wayne. Rhetorically analyzing the reception of these two artists is illuminating because both had indie breakouts in 2008, both release genre-spanning music, and both have had over a decade of commercial success. However, Vampire Weekend’s whiteness enables them to benefit from authenticity tropes that are unavailable to Lil Wayne. The analysis will show how Lil Wayne is essentialized as a rapper who is unauthorized to move beyond that genre. Overall, this article examines authenticity as the rhetorical move by which exclusion is constructed and highlights how assumptions about the relationship between race and performance are key to arguments about artistry.

Race and Genre Ambiguity in the Critical Reception of Popular Music

“…Many notable studies in the sociology of culture have shown how intermediaries—including literary, food, music, and film critics—subtly devalue categories associated with non‐white producers (Childress and Nault, 2019; Chong 2011; Gaultieri 2021) and others highlight the obstacles black performers face in crossing racialized genre boundaries (Erigha 2019; Murray 2021; Orosz 2021; Schaap and Berkers 2020). In contrast, we consider how this is inconspicuously manifest in the discourse of popular music critics when they assign genre labels to musicians and their records.…”