"What did we caused by deserve Pitchfork?" Richard Beck asks at one point in his exhaustive review-slash-indictment with the indie-music behemoth with this month's n+1. His answer, involving unfavorable assessments of Pitchfork, indie-rock music, along with the twentysomething populations of most major American cities, just isn't available on the web; instead, Vulture did the heavy reading and picked out ten representative quotes to provide you with a taste of what goes on each time a Brooklyn literary journal assumes on the Internet's biggest music site. One quick note before the harshing: In a very nod to Pitchfork tradition, Beck assigned your website a numerical rating to accompany his review. That number? 5.4. We're somewhat afraid to assume how a 2.9 would read.
Around the site’s early hip-hop coverage:
Examining the archive, watching Pitchfork start to discover thoughtful, politically liberal rap groups as being a Tribe Called Quest and Jurassic 5, I felt a surprise of white suburban recognition. In 1998, Lang Whitaker gave a 7.1 for the Black Eyed Peas, speculating by purchasing “a line-up that appears straight beyond a Benetton ad,” maybe the group could “assume their mantle as hip-hop’s street saviors.”
Around the site’s “Edenic Phase”:
It should have been nice to write on the internet and feel that the sole people paying attention were your mates.
About the 10.0 report on Radiohead’s Kid A:
Needless to say, the review told you little about Radiohead’s music which you couldn’t often hear yourself, but it mentioned everything in what form of cultural company Radiohead was designed to keep. It became Pitchfork’s signature style.
Around the site’s deficiency of commenters:
Perhaps Schrieber sensed that because Pitchfork’s reviewers were themselves amateurs-in another context, commenters-a commenting feature would have threatened the fragile suspension of disbelief that powered the Pitchfork machine.
On whether indie rock “sucks”:
As opposed to producing music that challenged and responded to those of other bands, they complimented the other person in interviews, each group “doing its very own thing” and appreciating the efforts of others. So long as they practiced effective management of the hype cycle, these folks were given a free of charge overlook their listeners to lionize childhood, imitate the earlier versions, and respond to the Iraq war with dancing.
On Pitchfork’s inability to make a “significant critic”:
Pitchfork couldn’t develop intelligence for the individual level since the site’s success depended largely on its function as form of opinion barometer; a stable, reliable, unsurprising accretion of taste judgments. Fully developed critics have a tendency to surprise themselves, as well as argue together, and not just over matters of taste-they fight about the real stuff. This may have undermined Pitchfork’s project.
For the site’s critical style:
Up against readers who desired to learn how to be fans on the net age, Pitchfork’s writers took over as the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption. Pitchfork’s endless “Best Of” lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions from the Billboard sales chart.
Around the site's “obsession with identifying bands’ influences”:
Whenever a pop critic discusses influences, he’s seldom talking about the historical growth and development of musical forms. Instead, he’s discussing his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive-he is congratulating himself, like James Murphy in “Losing My Edge,” on as being a good fan. While Pitchfork may be invaluable just as one archive, it can be worse than useless as being a forum for insight and judgment.
On Jay-Z:
However for each of their corporate success, rappers knew in which the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, being an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that they wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at the Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. “What the indie rock movement does right now is extremely inspiring,” he said with a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau.
On indie rock fans:
Within the last decade, however, indie rock has classed up, steadily abandoning these lower-class fans (with the mid-sized cities they live in) for the young, college-educated white those who now populate America’s major cities and media centers. For these folks, indie rock has offered a means to ignore the fact that part of what makes your dead-end internship or bartending job tolerable is always that you can leave and visit law school while you want.
And a bonus, mind-bending footnote about M.I.A. and Lynn Hirschberg:
Lynn Hirschberg, writing to the Nyc Times Magazine in May 2010, finally made some of these points in a profile called “M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop,” but the best critique of of M.I.A. wasn’t produced by a critic. It appeared inside the lyrics to some song by Vampire Weekend, in which frontman Ezra Koenig sings about a young woman attending what it seems obvious in my experience can be an M.I.A. concert.
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