How Lucky Are We? Reviews, Resonance, and Trusting Our Own Taste

I was listening to Forever is a Feeling by Lucy Dacus in the car the other day. Halfway through the second song, Ankles, I felt tears brimming. Admittedly, I’m a sentimental soul. Books, films, music, even vaguely sentimental plots from a vapid sitcom. They all manage to undo me at some point. But there was something about the lyric, how lucky are we to have so much to lose? that just set me off.

Is she being hyperbolic? Maybe it’s a Chandler Bing-style could I be any luckier? Or is it a genuine question: when you have so much to lose, so much that could fall apart, are you truly lucky? Or are you just vulnerable?

There’s a double meaning in that line, one that will resonate differently depending on who's listening and what kind of day they’re having. I hear something new in it with each listen. I love that song. I love the whole album.

But my enthusiasm was apparently not shared.

I was surprised when I read a Pitchfork review that called the album underwhelming. Laura Snapes describes the track Ankles as “briskly demure, lacking lust or carnality or even the guilty stomach flip of a properly obsessive crush you shouldn’t be entertaining.” (Cue another post about chronic overwriting in music journalism.)

However, there are other reviews which seem to disagree with Snapes’ take on the album. Carl Wilson from Slate Magazine names it “one of the best albums of the year.” When you dig into the album reviews all over the internet, it starts to seem like they are playing out some kind of critical competition using the internet as the battleground, arguing in a public forum about something which is entirely a matter of taste.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Critics have a role to play in the debate over artistic merit. They can offer context, insight, or provoke thought, even when we don’t agree. But it does raise a question: how much weight should we give reviews, especially in artistic fields where our own experience of a piece is so subjective?

Should I let that one critical review dull my connection to this album, or should I trust the emotional response I had? For me, the answer is clear. I’ll take my tears over a three-star rating. And I’m pretty happy with that conclusion.

There has always been tension between critical reception and personal resonance. Take The Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien’s seminal work was first published in the 1950s, the reviews were mixed. The critical reception didn’t suggest that it would become the genre-defining fantasy touchstone that it became. Edmund Wilson famously dismissed it as “juvenile trash,” and P.L. Travers complained about its length and elaborate descriptions.

That latter critique is still common today. I’ve met plenty of readers who’ve grown weary of Tolkien’s page-long descriptions of trees. But with a modern lens, we can see how those detailed landscapes contribute to his world-building and support the novel’s broader themes: the tension between industrial growth and the preservation of nature.

In the end, it wasn’t the critics who decided The Lord of the Rings’ place in literary history. It was the readers. By the 1960s, the books had been embraced by the counterculture movement, which found new meaning in Tolkien’s environmentalism and ethos of resistance. They ignored the critics, and they followed their own instincts.

None of this is to say that critics are irrelevant. A thoughtful review can deepen our understanding, challenge our perspective, or introduce us to something we might otherwise overlook. But reviews are not gospel. They are just one voice among many, and not the most important one.

Maybe we should all ask ourselves how much space we give external opinions in shaping our tastes. And when something moves us, quietly or profoundly, isn’t that enough?

I think it is.