Pitchfork challenged a generation of music listeners. Is there still a place for it?
The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.
Still, this week’s news that Condé Nast is making drastic changes at Pitchfork highlights that “indie” continues to represent something important—and something frighteningly endangered, especially in the music world.
Yesterday, Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour, announced plans to merge Pitchfork into the men’s magazine GQ. “This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” she wrote in a staff memo. On social media, many of the site’s key writers and editors, some of whom had been on staff for more than a decade, announced they’d been laid off. Much is still unknown about Pitchfork’s future, but music fans have reason to worry we’re losing the most important culture publication of the 21st century.
I’ve been checking Pitchfork more or less daily since the early 2000s, when it caught my attention by bashing my favorite album. The heavy-metal band Tool had melted my high-school brain with Lateralus, which Pitchfork rated a 1.9 on the site’s 10-point scale. The review was largely written in the satirical mode, from the point of view of a fictional 14-year-old mall worker who thought angrily of his boss while listening to Tool’s dark riffs. In other words, Pitchfork was directly attacking teenage fanboys like me. But the critic’s descriptions of each song showed he had listened closely. I was offended—but also intrigued that someone could hear what I heard and have such a different take.
A lot of my generation’s music fans have a similar tale to tell, about being drawn to the site for its voice, rigor, and at-times-brutal candor. Founded by the record-store clerk Ryan Schreiber in 1996, Pitchfork sought to be Rolling Stone or Spin for the dawning internet era—and some combination of timing and tone made it stand out amid a crop of similar web zines. Soon it was synonymous with a larger cultural wave, “indie,” defined by heartfelt, idiosyncratic acts such as Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom, and Bon Iver. These artists came to be hip symbols, but Pitchfork’s painstakingly written reviews focused on music as art, not fashion. Its integrity was demonstrated by its willingness to trash its former darlings—or, somehow more damningly, give them a lukewarm, low-7 review.
Read: Pitchfork, the reluctant men’s magazine
The Millennial indie wave receded in the 2010s, partly because of mainstream absorption (all those microbreweries), partly because of political critique (did indie just mean “white”?), and mostly because of technology. Streaming platforms such as Spotify rendered obsolete one of the fundamental objectives of record reviewing: describing music that listeners couldn’t easily hear for themselves. But as tastes and consumption methods shifted, Pitchfork evolved while maintaining its core proposition, even after Condé Nast’s takeover. It expanded to further cover hip-hop, metal, pop, dance, new classical, and jazz. This diversification brought backlash—but most readers, confronted with unfamiliar artist names every time they open the site, know that the accusation that Pitchfork sold out to pop is nonsense.
The irony of Pitchfork is that although it has long been thought of as a keeper of cool, the site itself has never been particularly cool; one admits sheepishly to reading it. This is not just because of its reputation for snobbery and its sometimes exasperating prose. It’s also because to absorb the logic of Pitchfork is to believe in the authority of each individual’s ears and brain. Saying you’re a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.
Lately, the site’s ideals have come to seem more radical. The streaming ecosystem tends to promote music based on notions of utility (is this song good to work out to?) and identity (does this band represent you?). But music critics argue that songs matter for reasons—originality, beauty, meaning—that aren’t so easily categorizable. Perhaps this is why stans (fans who show cultlike loyalty to their artists) treat Pitchfork like a referee, stacking their artist’s Pitchfork scores against those of rivals’ during social-media flame wars. Such stans will often rail against Pitchfork as being elitist, but it is clear that they, and many other listeners, crave an intelligent arbiter in an era when music culture is so deeply shaped by algorithms, tribalism, and celebrity.
How Pitchfork’s independence can survive a merger with GQ is tough to imagine. Though a storied publisher of great journalism, GQ is fundamentally allied with the mainstream cultural industry. Celebrities have shown a thin skin for criticism in the internet era, and so a magazine that relies on landing artists as cover stars is hardly incentivized to publish hard-hitting reviews. Plus, will a men’s magazine support Pitchfork’s recent diversification, which has refreshingly upended the boys’ club that ruled music criticism for decades? Perhaps Condé Nast’s reshuffling is just a behind-the-scenes organizational change—but then again, a number of the writers and editors who made Pitchfork what it was have now been dismissed.
The music industry’s future certainly seems a little drearier. Every day, my email inbox is filled with pitches from publicists for talented, under-covered musicians who would benefit from media attention. No one outlet could hope to evaluate all the songs that come out every week—but Pitchfork has made an incredible effort to listen broadly, listen seriously, and champion the underdog. Music recommendation will fall, ever more, to software built with opaque motives. Or it will fall to individual influencers (on TikTok, Substack, and elsewhere) constrained by resources and reach. Today there are more songs to listen to than ever before. Why does it feel like there are fewer and fewer places to talk smartly about them?
Pitchfork’s Importance Shouldn’t Be Underrated
4
0
19.01.2024
Pitchfork challenged a generation of music listeners. Is there still a place for it?
The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.
Still, this week’s news that Condé Nast is making drastic changes at Pitchfork highlights that “indie” continues to represent something important—and something frighteningly endangered, especially in the music world.
Yesterday, Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour, announced plans to merge Pitchfork into the men’s magazine GQ. “This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” she wrote in a staff memo. On social media, many of the site’s key writers and editors, some of whom had been on staff for more than a decade, announced they’d been laid off. Much is still unknown about Pitchfork’s future, but music fans have reason to worry we’re losing the most important culture publication of the 21st century.
I’ve been checking Pitchfork more or less daily since the early 2000s, when it caught my attention by bashing my favorite album. The heavy-metal band Tool had melted my high-school brain with Lateralus, which Pitchfork rated a........
© The Atlantic
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
Nikkei Editorial
