zero point zero
the end(?) of pitchfork, and the beginning of my writing life
A memory: me and Ethan sitting at a table against the wall inside Long’s Drug Store, trying to guess what score Pitchfork is going to give Random Access Memories. It’s a Saturday in May 2013. The site has just run a big Daft Punk feature, and the album comes out Tuesday. I’m guessing an 8.4. He guesses 8.8 and he turns out to be right. This is the kind of stuff we talk about, over burgers we bought with the last of the money we didn’t blow at the record store.
A memory: spending a beautiful day inside during a beach vacation, poring over Pitchfork’s just-released reader poll of the best albums of the site’s first 15 years. It’s 2012, I’m 16, still new to this world, the one beyond metal magazines and classic rock radio and the CDs I can get at the library, feeling stupid and thrilled about how much I don’t know.
A memory, many memories, indistinct and unstuck in time: at a party or a bar, defending Pitchfork for what it is, trying to explain that, from everything I’ve heard, picking the score is more complicated than the writer just throwing out a number, and anyway the score doesn’t really matter if you read the review. But that’s dumb. Of course it matters.
A habit: I’ve read Pitchfork almost every day for more than a decade. Usually before I get out of bed. Sometimes before I go to bed. Back when I was up late every night, especially, and even more especially if it was 1 a.m. on a Friday (or before that, a Tuesday) and something big was coming out. Sitting there and refreshing every few minutes until the new set of reviews populated the homepage.
You don’t need to tell people this. Most people, in sheer demographic terms, don’t know what Pitchfork is and wouldn’t care if they did. Of the ones who do, a lot flash to connotations of it as pretentious or snobby, the place that didn’t even bother to review their favorite record or, worse, gave it a 6.7; or else they have benign but decidedly detached feelings toward it, because they haven’t read it regularly in years; either way, you can see them cringe a little. And then there’s the people you don’t need to tell because they do it too, and you’re already way past that. Their routines may be different, but the understanding of what Pitchfork is there for is mutual and unspoken. It’s an inflection point between the underground and pop culture, accessible enough to read without being an expert in anything but rangy enough to be a reliable discovery tool, driven by individual tastes but crucially cohesive in its institutional voice. It’s the internet’s music section.
That’s what it was for me, anyway. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I’d pretty much decided that I could write at least as well as the guys doing the reviews in the backs of British import rock mags like Metal Hammer. I figured that if I was going to commit to music criticism, I should probably read more of it, should probably be more obsessed with a wider range of new stuff. The first thing I remember reading on Pitchfork was Ian Cohen’s famous evisceration of Childish Gambino’s Camp. I liked the record at the time — I was a dorky teenager who didn’t listen to much rap and loved Donald Glover on Community — and Cohen’s first sentence roasted me personally: “If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp.” Of course I was going to pay attention.
When I think of my musical coming of age, I think about the records I learned about from Pitchfork in that era: Attack on Memory. Celebration Rock. Visions. Kill for Love. For a while, just before Spotify hit critical mass in the U.S., the site had a music-premier feature (“First Listen?” I can’t find it on google), with exclusive streams of albums a week or two before official release. It got Sunbather during the first week of summer vacation after my junior year, and I remember sitting in my parents’ living room, June sun pounding through the windows, headphones plugged into a brick of a laptop, listening to it 10 or 15 times in a row. My other main streams of influence were the Ultimate-Guitar.com forums, where albums like Snowing’s Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit were considered modern classics, and the sweltering, sardine-packed house shows I was going to, and when records from the emo revival started getting positive notices on Pitchfork, I felt victorious: The scene I was part of, however tangentially, had made the jump.
I read and listened way beyond Pitchfork, but it always felt like a home base for me, even when the site’s taste diverged from mine. This has something to do with what I wrote about last week, about becoming more comfortable in my taste and, at the same time, more open to being genuinely surprised and delighted. That the site could praise or pan stuff I liked, and vice-versa, only made it more interesting to me.
I kept coming back for the writing, too, especially the Sunday Review section from the past few years; I don’t think there’s been a more important contribution to the music writing ecosystem over that time. And I kept coming back even as I quit the dream of writing about records for a living. I tried to listen to 250 or 300 new releases every year up through my first couple of years in college, until I realized it was driven more by obligation than curiosity and, thus, burning me out. I was also being drawn toward other types of writing. But Pitchfork got me at a time when my brain was still plastic, and I will never be able to turn off my inner music critic. I know I annoy the people around me sometimes with my pathological inability to leave it at “I like this” or “I don’t like this,” but figuring out why is how I relate to music. It’s why I write the way I do. I can’t imagine it another way.
***
Pitchfork did this for a whole generation of writers, in unquantifiable numbers, and it looks like it won’t get to anymore. The site still exists, at least in the short term. But my corner of the internet has been unanimous in treating Wednesday’s news that Conde Nast is folding the site into GQ and demolishing its staff as a mortal wound. Anna Wintour’s note to Conde Nast staff, first reported by Max Tani, depicts this as “evolving our Pitchfork team’s structure,” meaning “some of our Pitchfork colleagues will be leaving the company.” That’s one way to say it. Former staffer Larry Fitzmaurice called it an “absolute massacre.” Jill Mapes, a laid-off features editor, described a “full-department gutting.”
Many who lost their jobs have been intrinsic to Pitchfork’s history and voice since before I started reading the site: Ryan Dombal, Amy Phillips, Evan Minsker, Jenn Pelly, Marc Hogan and many others. Gone too are top editor Puja Patel and much of the staff she hired in the past few years, who helped shift the site’s canon from one that was different in content but just as white-male-American in makeup as Rolling Stone’s to one that was more diverse, more international and, frankly, probably a little nicer.
Not that “nice” is a prerequisite for “good.” Pitchfork was often accused of snobbery, but there’s a lot to be said for staking out your taste, defending it vociferously and raining hell on what reeks of bullshit. And every so often Pitchfork still launched an old-fashioned tactical nuke at Greta Van Fleet or Maneskin. What it got better at over the past few years was understanding its own role in the music ecosystem — the days where a bad review there could ruin a career have been over for a while, but the latest iteration of the site knew that it was virtually pointless to pan small acts, that a good review there still counted for a lot, and that it was worth it to identify the holes in its coverage and work to fill them.
For as much mourning of Pitchfork as there’s been over the past few days there have also been a lot of mean-spirited comments. Some of them decried the website as the same snobbish monolith it had always been. Others said it had changed too much — too mainstream, too poptimistic, or (as I saw at least one mask-off commenter say) too female. These seem like opposite complaints, but the people making them are really one in the same. The problem those people have isn’t that Pitchfork did or didn’t change, it’s that they didn’t. They got stuck in the past.
The other pejorative often lobbed in Pitchfork’s direction is “pretentious,” which I always thought was wrong in two directions. For one, it suggests that daring to critique is beyond the pale. That analysis and opinion, unless uniformly positive, constitute an attack. As if the point of putting art into the world isn’t to generate — to demand — a response. As if criticism is about violence, when really it’s about care.
For another, what’s wrong with pretending? People especially love to rag on reviews from Pitchfork’s early days, and it’s true that a lot of the stuff published there before, say, the mid-00s reads today as gimmicky, florid, comically grand. So what? Pitchfork only had to pretend it was the most important music publication in the world until it actually became the most important music publication in the world.
***
It feels right that when I heard the news Wednesday, I went to Twitter, the other website I used to check every day. I created an account there in 2013, the year after I started reading Pitchfork, and my earliest follows were mostly bands and music writers. I spent more time there Wednesday than I have in months, and the funereal tone reminded me of the day Elon bought Twitter: It wasn’t technically the end, but we all knew it was the end.
As with Twitter, and with the perpetual bulldozing of the rest of the internet, the imminent demise of Pitchfork doesn’t seem to have much to do with whether or not it’s good at what it does. Wintour’s justification for rolling Pitchfork into GQ — that both “have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism” — betrays a vast (or, hell, willful) misapprehension of what both titles are for. It’s also not about readership, nor any care for what readers want: Conde Nast’s Claire Willett tweeted Wednesday that Pitchfork gets more site visits and unique pageviews than any other Conde publication. It’s really about page margins and cutlines. Per Tani, “this was a business side decision, advertising is stronger at other Conde brands like GQ.”. Pitchfork can’t sell you a $10,000 watch; it can’t make you convince yourself that you’d look like Jeremy Allen White if only you’d shell out $400 for a tank top.
All of this makes me feel really bad about the future of music criticism. Not that there won’t be people doing it — it’s happening on YouTube and TikTok and podcasts and newsletters, probably in numbers far greater than I could guess at, and surely in forms that test the notions of what “music criticism” is. What worries me is the dissolution of institutions. There are still smaller sites and blogs, passion projects where one or two people may eke out a partial living (but more likely not), and there are great critics at big institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker. But the little guys don’t have reach or influence, and the big ones can only cover so much and it has to work for a general audience. The middle needs to exist but it’s crumbling: the Pitchfork news comes on the heels of the Bandcamp debacle; Rolling Stone doesn’t have much to do with music anymore; Spin isn’t anything at all; The Fader, which seems to be striving to reclaim what it used to be, lost so many years to an identity crisis. Stereogum may be the last place standing, with a distinct voice and taste now mostly funded by subscribers, and this week has seen renewed calls for a worker-owned music site in the mold of Defector or Hell Gate. If it happens, I’ll be the first in line.
But a diffuse critical landscape is a dangerous one. Because it would functionally deprofessionalize the pursuit, making it arduous for writers to find paying jobs, editing, collegiality, institutional support or the cultural capital needed to make it work — relationships with publicists, early access to releases, that kind of thing. Because individuals are less beholden to the ethical guidelines that allow institutions to build trust, and more vulnerable to external pressure and payola. Because it would concentrate the power of discovery and tastemaking with streaming platforms, a handful of publications more worried than ever about artist access and the bottom line, and the most major artists and labels themselves.
In some sense this would be a victory for those who appreciate music as a transaction primarily between an unassailable artist and a receptive listener. This strikes me as a rather capitalist way of looking at art — it is not “letting people like what they like,” it’s letting the market decide what people like.
***
I never did wind up getting to write for Pitchfork; I pitched something a few years back but never heard anything, and really I didn’t expect to — I was doing news by then, well past the days when I was writing a lot of criticism and listening to everything, when I could play at being an expert. But my friend Nadine did. We met as teenagers, around the time I started reading Pitchfork; she let me write for her blog, the first place I’d been published outside my high school newspaper; for more than a decade we’ve been raving and arguing and prognosticating about music, and that dialogue is always sharpening my mind and challenging my assumptions. She started contributing to Pitchfork a few years ago and, for my money, has been one of the site’s most valuable voices on rap and country — everyone should go read her Sunday Review of Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac. Watching her do this has been, to put it simply, extremely cool. It’s the kind of thing we talked about doing as kids, and she’s doing it, and every adult knows how rare that is. And that’s what I’ve been thinking of the past couple of days, reading people reminisce about how they wrote blogs or zines for years before they wound up at Pitchfork and suddenly it became a career, or how they never wrote for Pitchfork but had their writing shaped by it, or how even if they don’t write at all Pitchfork is part of the reason they listen the way they do, how they found some of the music that means the most to them. And it occurs to me that this is what makes it so amazing while it lasted — that it lasted. It was only ever a teenage dream.