Pitchfork

The most difficult part of writing a review of Pitchfork is the fact that it means that I need to read one of their reviews to get some background knowledge. Unfortunately, after the first sentence of most of them, I instinctively attempt to read what's on the ceiling above me. If you can make it through an opening paragraph with gems like:

"Used to be, people would sit down and listen to that lengthy piece of music from front to back in one sitting, resisting the urge to jump to their favorite parts or skip over the instrumental interlude that served as grout between two fuller compositions. These antiques were called CDs. Here's a story about the last of its kind."

without wanting to smack the author in the face with a Pink Floyd box set, then this blog post probably isn't for you, since you'll be a bit busy at your day job of being the most non-aggressive person on the planet. It's become a cliche at this point to say that Pitchfork takes themselves too seriously, because it's such an obvious fact that it's seeped deep into our DNA. When the Commies finally let loose their nukes and only a few people on some South Pacific islands will still be alive, their children's children will know for a fact that, whatever something called Pitchfork is, they're a bunch of assholes.

It's almost too easy to copy and paste a quote from a review of a Radiohead album, since I'm pretty sure that even the editors that work in what has to be the most exclusive office building in Chicago have quoted lines from the original Kid A review to each other and snickered. (If you're one of the few that hasn't seen it, go read it. It really is that entertaining.) This obvious fact is counterbalanced by the other fact that they re-reviewed a few Radiohead albums last week and still had the same slobbering prose that usually comes from a Magic the Gathering player who just saw a Batman movie. Partially aside from their devotion to incredibly boring bands such as the aforementioned, everything they write, whether it's a piece of news about the latest Jay-Z album or a review of a compilation of Nigerian funk, is from the perspective of Radiohead fans. For example, the first line of the first review from the most recent day (Taken By Trees - East of Eden):

"Feels so unnatural-- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, too. The late qawwali legend has earned the admiration of singers as different as Jeff Buckley, Eddie Vedder, and Devendra Banhart. On 1989's The Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack, he also worked with Peter Gabriel, who ended up releasing six of Khan's albums on his own Real World label. With so much indie culture these past few years stuck in the 1980s, Gabe fave raves Vampire Weekend are simply the most collegiate of recent bands returning to Toto's "Africa" for inspiration. Khan's native Pakistan has been comparatively overlooked."

The statements in this that I can actually comprehend (about half), along with Wikipedia, lead me to believe that the woman who made this album travelled to Pakistan to record some songs that were influenced by the absolutely adorable people there. Oh look, and they make music, too! Pitchfork doesn't really give a shit about any kind of music unless it directly influences, interacts with, or is otherwise intersecting with indie rock. To be fair, the album in question actually does have a cover of an Animal Collective song, with vocals by Panda Bear... wait, why the hell does that make this better? It just reinforces the fact that, for all their pretensions about being an all-inclusive music site with their biweekly review of an electronic dance music compilation and weekly hip hop review (7.2 and 6.4, respectively), they care about indie rock and that's it. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with being a site that specializes in one genre, but at least acknowledge it. It's especially important since, like it or not (I do not), they are by far the most influential voice in music criticism at the moment, despite the fact that this criticism is unreadable.

For those of you who don't read it obsessively like I do, a little background knowledge: instead of a sensible system of categorizing music, such as "this is good" and "this is not good," it's on a one to ten point scale to the first decimal place, because there's such a huge difference between a 5.3 album and a 5.7. In practice, though, they think anything under a seven is awful; thus, the vast majority get somewhere in the range of a seven, with a huge spike around 7.5 through 7.9. At some arbitrary point of "good" between 8.1 and 8.5, an album will be given "best new music" and quadruple its sales. If an album got an 8.4 but not best new music, well, sucks for your label because you can't move those with a UHaul.

They even make up trends, then talk about the death of that trend. There was no trend of lo-fi distorted rock over the past couple years, idiots, it's always been there. It's been there for a decade. You just started to pay more attention to it recently. In the review of the last Vivian Girls record, they talk about how it's faded away. The hell are you talking about, pitchfork? Just because every song you're reviewing is a semi-electronic summery song that sounds like you can take it home to your grandma, garage rock is still being made. Seriously! Go look! It's not a trend if you just decide you'd rather review a different style of music. Since the site is so influential, it's also pretty likely that if, say, they reviewed a polkacore album and gave it their maximum score for non-Radiohead albums (8.7), the genre would pick up steam among the thousands of music blogs that no one reads, thus calling more attention to other artists in the genre. Voila, trend.

And that leads to the newer part of the site: individual track reviews. They invented a new, innovative scale for these: instead of an album that can get rated 8.2 (if it's a band's debut), 7.4 (the follow-up) or 5.7 (the solo project after the band breaks up), individual songs can get rated anywhere from a 6 to an 8 using only whole numbers. Wow! It even has the added bonus of using a music streaming service that makes you register after you've listened to three songs. Fantastic.

As far as the only thing on the site that anyone actually reads, the lists: they used "ebullient" to describe Hey Ya!. I have no idea what that word means, and neither do you. Despite the fact that their end-of-year lists are a randomly-selected assortment of pop, r&b and mainstream hip hop singles sprinkled in at exactly a 2.5/10 ratio to indie rock (with none of them ever making the best albums list unless it's truly mediocre enough to appeal to them, like Lil Wayne), their taste is, often, pretty good: if you look at one of their "best of the decade" lists and criticize a large part of it (unless it's something like including too many rock albums), there's a good chance you're just really ignorant. Furthermore, they've popularized a good number of legitimately good bands. However, that really doesn't make up for horrible prose, a biased outlook and a complete lack of perspective.