As a professional culture critic, I’ve been sworn to protect these trade secrets. However, circumstances have compelled me to be the Edward Snowden of pop criticism. At the risk of imprisonment in music-critic jail, I must be a whistleblower and leak this highly effective and oft-used three-point plan. Invent a genre that only critics care about or even know how to define. (This applies to dad rock, but also chillwave, seapunk, backpack rap, hipster metal, alt-country, or anything attached to the suffix “-core.”) Construct the criteria for the made-up genre in such a way that it applies to
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