Pitchfork staff last week did not expect to receive a memo announcing that the long-running music website was folding under the GQ banner. They also probably did not expect the memo to come from Dame Anna Wintour herself.
Much has been written about Pitchfork’s legacy as a mainstay of independent music criticism, as a guiding light in a vast digital world keen to reconfigure how music can be dissected and considered – and a considerable amount about the site’s storied give-and-take relationship with wider culture.
Music criticism is stuck between being organically grassroots and also the most openly corporatised. Pitchfork, somehow, managed to tread this line for years as the rare intermediary between the two.
Pitchfork was a symbol of a previously optimistic internet, where arts media could thrive without the gatekeepers of the traditional print industry. An ecosystem of messageboards and blogs grew in its wake, eager to provide curation, recommendation, and personal experience. Taking the internet’s intentions pure heartedly, the communication within this ecosystem was very human. It livened music discourse, created micro-stars out of independent musicians, and gave valuable insight into what people think and how people feel when encountering new music.
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But this reflective relationship with music struggles to exist now. The internet has been........