The Trouble With Tastemakers
Why music curators are bad at telling us what's good
In 1997, a young rapper from Puerto Rico named Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodríguez released her debut album, En Mi Imperio, under the stage name “Ivy Queen.” The album was a mix of hip hop and a new-ish genre called reggaeton, which had spent roughly the last decade spreading across the Latin American world. Brash, raunchy, and powerfully danceable, reggaeton was as beloved by Puerto Rico’s youth as it was reviled by the island’s well-heeled political elite.
En Mi Imperio was a hit with the former, and soon after its release, the local Artista Magazine anointed Ivy Queen as the “People’s Favorite Rap Singer,” cementing her place in Puerto Rico’s music scene. Meanwhile, the album was largely ignored by the mainland U.S. The critic site Allmusic was one of the few places to mention En Mi Imperio, and it rated the album three out of five stars.
I think about En Mi Imperio whenever I encounter new think pieces about the resurgence of tastemakers in the music media landscape. Maybe you’ve seen these articles too; they usually go something like this: music fans, tired of the repetitive slop that streaming algorithms feed them, are craving music curation with a more “human” touch. Sites like Substack are on the front lines of this trend, with well-informed tastemakers generously offering suggestions about the albums and artists these fans should listen to. In the barren wasteland of computer models and Spotify Daylists, these humble curators are restoring taste to the wilderness.1
It’s difficult to know how seriously to take these pieces, not least because they’re generally written by the tastemakers themselves. Personally, I’ve never looked at the issues plaguing music media and concluded that the root cause was a shortage of people on the Internet telling others what to listen to. But even taking these claims at face value, they make me uneasy. Even in their heyday, tastemakers have had some serious blind spots, and it’s not clear to me that the new wave has fixed them. To see what I mean, compare Artista Magazine and Allmusic’s relative treatment of En Mi Imperio.
The problem isn’t that a mainland American music site gave an album a bad review—you could fill several Substack Notes feeds with grievances by fans that feel their favorite album was undervalued by critics. The problem is that the critic site — and the larger mainstream music world — failed to recognize the value of an entire genre that had been turning heads and moving feet just south of them for almost twenty years. En Mi Imperio was a great album in a style of music that tastemakers in Western cultural centers like New York didn’t understand, and as a result, it was essentially passed over by the people who are supposed to be educating their readers on what music they should be aware of.
From our vantage point in 2025, we can see how big a mistake that was. A couple of years later, Daddy Yanky’s 2004 single “Gasolina” smashed its way through the charts, and suddenly everyone was paying attention to reggaeton. Today, the genre is globally massive, and its reigning scion — another Puerto Rican who goes by Bad Bunny — is so immensely popular that he’s been tapped to play next year’s Super Bowl. Yes, reggaeton has come a long way since the 90s, but are you really telling me that none of the self-professed music experts writing words at the turn of the millennium could have seen this coming?
The Puerto Rican banger that broke reggaeton to the world
If it was just reggaeton, maybe we could paper it over as a one-time oversight, but it’s not. Two of the most dominant music genres in the world are arguably rock and hip hop, and both were dismissed by the tastemaker class for the first decade or so of their existence. The handling of hip hop was especially egregious. Pitchfork, the site that’s become basically synonymous with culture-shifting declarations of taste, is known to have under-covered rap artists well into the 2000s.
This has also happened to more niche sub-genres that have achieved critical and/or commercial breakthroughs in the past few years. Footwork was an obscure regional scene until a British label started putting out compilation albums. Raptor house was a dance floor pariah until producer Nick Leon tapped DJ Babatr for “Xtasis.” Baile funk still hasn’t been given its due. When gqom was making its way out of South Africa, Western tastemakers were writing ridiculous things like, “it seems unbelievable that a sound this potent could have developed without anyone noticing.” No, actually, it’s quite believable. That shit happens all the time.
In many cases, these scenes didn’t just suffer from a lack of attention; they were actively cast as “low-brow” art forms by people with more “refined” listening palettes. This 2008 Time Out article on footwork, which was previously (and tellingly) called “ghetto house,” sums it up well: “Until recently, big club promoters wouldn’t touch ghetto house with a ten-foot pole; most dismissed it as teen music.”
This quote is trenchant but incomplete. It’s not just that this music was mostly made by young people looking to have good time. Genres like juke and rap and reggaeton were all established and elevated by working class folks. Urban elites largely disparaged them until something substantial—a breakthrough hit, a hip label co-sign, a general upswell in grassroots popularity—made them impossible to ignore.
Bangs & Works Vol. 1, the first in a series of the compilation albums by the British label Planet Mu that catapulted footwork to critical acclaim
The trend is pronounced enough to indicate there’s something more systemic going on. There is, for example, an apparent tendency for a (mostly white) music tastemaking industry to dismiss genres that were popular in communities of color. I don’t plan to make this case, though, partially because it’s been made before, but also because I don’t think it’s the full explanation.
The case I am making is this: the majority of genres that are globally popular today were initially created by working class communities, and tastemakers — who are rarely embedded in those communities — have historically been slow to recognize the value of these genres. If the music world is intent on welcoming tastemakers back as a bastion against algorithmic fatigue, then it’s important to talk about these past failings so we can be clear where the blind spots are — and maybe start coming up with ways to fill them in.
Not all self-proclaimed tastemakers may agree with this. Some might argue that their job is to recommend artists and albums, not entire genres; that they’re not tasked with identifying which new genres are poised to “make it big,” but rather to herald those genres onto the scene once they’ve contribute something of objective artistic value; that tastemakers can’t be expected to provide guidance on music coming from places and communities they’re unfamiliar with, and we should let them focus on the areas of art that they know enough to write about.
These objections are understandable and, to some extent, have merit, but they still ring hollow to me. Art’s cultural relevance has been an implicit criteria in music criticism since the industry embraced poptimism in the mid-2000s, and the idea of “objective artistic value” gets slippery when trying to evaluate art that comes from a different cultural context than your own. At some point, it becomes necessary to look outside your own frameworks of value and pay attention to what music is culturally important to those making it, both for its own sake and for its potential impact on the broader culture in the future.
In other words, if an entire community/country/continent is moving to a new sound, it’s probably worth drawing attention to that sound. Chances are those kids are onto something, and if history is any guide, you might be moving to it soon as well.
The list of genres and sub-genres that fit into this category is not short. It includes, in no particular order: drill, shaabi, singeli, famo, house, gengetone, raï, jazz, champeta, zamrock, reparto.2 Of course, not all of these genres will achieve the same level of popularity, and regional differences in music preferences will prevent all of them from “going global.” But this incongruity with mainstream music forms seems like it should, if anything, make them more appealing for tastemakers to champion. After all, these kinds of left-field choices are ostensibly the reason those tastemakers’ audiences are choosing them over algorithms in the first place.
The house track “Jack Your Body” hit #1 in the UK in 1987, a relatively fast rise for a genre that began in the early 1980s.
Frankly, these types of insights into emerging genres are where a “human” touch is also most salutary. Algorithms are actually fairly good at finding new bands that sound like old bands I already listen to. What algorithms can’t do is recommend music I would never have found because it’s made in a style I didn’t know existed, and then provide me with the context I need to understand why this music is significant and worthwhile even if it doesn’t jive with my past listening habits. If it’s not the tastemakers’ job to do this, then whose job is it?
As far as I can tell, this job today is mostly being done by Bandcamp, with occasional support from a handful of electronic music publications and a loose federation of bloggers and Substackers. This is better than nothing, but it seems insufficient if tastemakers are going to be an alternative (or even a supplement) to streaming algorithms as the primary way that people discover new music. I’m not saying that tastemakers need to stop writing about the music they know and love, but as we build out a new ecosystem of human music curators to combat the robots, it would help if that ecosystem was a bit less myopic than it’s been in the past.
Doing so would require a set of investigative muscles that internet commentators and, increasingly, the actual music publications aren’t used to stretching. It requires music writers to be curious about music they don’t understand and make an effort to talk to the people that do. It means spending less time sharing opinions and more time asking questions. It would push tastemakers to reach out to music communities where they’re not experts and dutifully communicate the perspectives and experience of those communities to a wider audience.
Ideally, it would involve tastemakers actually going to the places where this music is popular so they can see the energy that music has in its natural setting, an energy that might not be as easily felt listening to mp3s in your bedroom. Obviously, this is difficult to do in a media environment that’s already resource-constrained to the point of imminent collapse. The days when Rolling Stone could dispatch a staff journalist to Jamaica to cover a burgeoning reggae scene are probably over.
But that doesn’t mean this type of work is impossible. One of the great things about the Internet is that it’s easier than ever to lean on the expertise of people based in every corner of the world, who are willing and able to share dispatches from their particular corners. In other words, maybe music journalism should become more like general journalism, working with local experts to get insights on emerging regional scenes so that artists like Ivy Queen don’t slip through the cracks. Maybe what the music media needs is fewer tastemakers and more reporters.
As for Ivy Queen, she eventually got her flowers. Her third album, Diva, arrived right around the time that “Gasolina” was introducing reggaeton for new audiences. Diva received rave reviews, including a coveted 8.0 score on Pitchfork. However, that Pitchfork review didn’t come until 2020, when the site released it as part of an ongoing effort to revisit significant albums that it missed the first time around. Here’s hoping the next set of genre pioneers don’t need to wait as long.
I primarily use the term “tastemaker” here to refer to people that curate music recommendations for a broader audience, which is the way it’s mostly used in the linked articles. This is a slightly different function than music criticism, which is more about assessing the artistic value of a particular piece of music. “Tastemaking” encompasses both of these functions, but this essay mainly focuses on the former.
There are, fortunately, some notable exceptions. Punk and grime were both critically lauded fairly soon after the scenes pioneers became active. Amapiano took a minute, but it doesn’t seem to have faced the same elitist backlash as other genres. And K-pop is an entirely different beast that deserves its own post.