Every time a new subculture or musical genre erupts into being, there’s a period of in-fighting and argument about authenticity. People love to ride a bandwagon, and trend-followers will flock to what was until recently a small and fiercely devoted musical world, upsetting the original devotees. Every newcomer is accused of being a poser, and the rules of what defines your subculture gets litigated and re-litigated endlessly.

It’s hard to imagine today, but Pearl Jam once fell victim to this dynamic. As reported by the AV Club, even lead singer Eddie Vedder expressed feelings of guilt that his band enjoyed explosive success seemingly at the expense of bands that had been part of Seattle’s grunge scene for far longer. Yardbarker notes that a lot of music reviewers weren’t terribly impressed by Pearl Jam’s debut, “Ten.” Many regarded the band as pale imitations of other grunge bands.

As explained in “Not for You: Pearl Jam and the Present Tense,” the most scathing review came from NME, which accused the band of being cynical hucksters riding a trend and “trying to steal money from young alternative kids’ pockets.”

“Ten” went on to a slow-burn mega-success enjoyed by few albums, and is regarded as one of the foundational records of the grunge era. In other words, if the band was trying to steal money from kids, it was spectacularly successful at it.

The Beatles have attained the rarefied air of true legend — even if you’re not a huge fan, you know the band and you know at least a handful of their songs. And a few of their albums have become fixtures on any list of greatest records — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” and “Abbey Road,” for example, as well as the messy, ambitious “The Beatles,” aka “The White Album.”

As noted by BBC Culture, this 1968 double album still inspires debates even among hardcore Beatles fans, but there’s a real argument that it’s their best. Contemporary reviews were largely positive — often strikingly so. Jann Wenner wrote in Rolling Stone that the album represented “the history and synthesis of Western music,” and considered it the band’s greatest album.

And then there’s Mike Jahn. Writing for the New York Times, Jahn… didn’t get it. He called the album “hip Muzak, a soundtrack for head shops, parties and discotheques,” adding “the album has nothing new and very little that is even recent.” He concluded his review by flatly stating that Blood, Sweat, and Tears was a better band than the Beatles. That may be the one line from a music critic’s review that has aged the most poorly of all time.

Getting things terribly wrong is a persistent danger for any critic — there are plenty of examples of music critics who simply didn’t get a record that turned out to be incredibly important (or simply great). Robert Christgau is no exception. In 1990, the Los Angeles Times argued that Christgau was an important critic because he “writes with the same reckless independence and ferocious eccentricity that fuels our most valuable pop artists,” but also noted his flaws: reviews that could be hard to follow and the injection of his personal taste into too many reviews.

One of the worst examples of Christgau getting things wrong is his 1981 review of U2‘s debut album, “Boy.” Christgau gave it a C+ (which is extremely bad in Christgau terms) and wrote that the album was “as bubble-headed as the teen-telos lyrics at best, as dumb as Uriah Heep at worst.” The Los Angeles Times describes his review as a “grouchy dismissal,” and notes he added “Their youth, their serious air, and their guitar sound are setting a small world on fire, and I fear the worst.”

Even Christgau’s peers knew he was way off base on this one, as the album was voted number 18 on The Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop Critics Poll that year. Today it’s regarded as one of the strongest debut albums of all time (via Rolling Stone). Christgau just didn’t get it.

The New York Times isn’t always known for being on the cutting edge of pop culture — you don’t earn the nickname the Gray Lady for being hip. But Jack Gould’s 1956 assessment of the King of Rock and Roll stands out as a particularly clueless piece of music criticism, and one that hasn’t aged well at all.

As noted by the Elvis History Blog, Presley was seen as a real threat to the status quo and to the innocent youth of America, and his appearances on television in 1956 sparked a backlash. History explains that Presley’s appearance on “The Milton Berle Show” on June 5, 1956 caused a scandal because his whole body was shown, without a guitar to obscure the, er, energetic motion of his hips. In the age of twerking this might not seem like much, but in 1956 it caused an uproar.

Gould got to work, writing “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability… for the ear he is an unutterable bore.” Gould went on to add that “his one specialty is an accented movement of the body” — that is, the iconic Presley hip-thrust. In 1956 you might have been forgiven for not realizing how thoroughly Presley would change pop music, or that he would go on to be one of the most important pop singers of the 20th century, but this review is one of the most clueless ever written.

Lester Bangs is one of the most famous music critics of all time. There’s a reason he was memorably immortalized by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film “Almost Famous,” after all. The New Yorker says that Bangs “had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation, uneven and erratic as it was.” And Bangs was known for his hilarious harsh takedowns in bad reviews — he was a man who loved rock music so much he got angry when it failed him.

But even Bangs got it wrong sometimes. Take, for example, his scathing Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath’s debut album in 1970. It starts off with Bangs saying “Well, they’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them.” Then he begins to dig in with classic Bangsian fury. “Vocals are sparse,” he writes, “most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days.” He concludes his acidic review with the cheerful line “just like Cream! But worse.”

Today the album is regarded as innovative and as one of the best debuts of all time. In fact, Rolling Stone revisited the album 34 years later, giving it five stars and concluding it would “would influence almost all the future bards of the metallic arts.”