Pitched fork

They weren’t relevant until they were. They were controversial until they weren’t. They were savage until they became anodyne. They were underground until the underground became overcrowded, and the whole thing inverted and now the underground is everywhere.

Eulogy or mere exegesis? Nobody really knows. Half of the staff is fired, including the editor-in-chief and some names that I liked reading, and now the rest of them all report to a men’s lifestyle publication, which feels so comically out of alignment with their own true purpose that it must be some sort of joke. At the same time, they’re still publishing. Those who remain are saying that everything will continue like it normally does, which nobody believes but in practice has indeed happened for, like, a week.

The music festival, sacred space for me for 19 years now, claims to be ongoing, probably because it is reliably profitable. It is the one summer weekend that I fully hard block, just in case. I have had almost as many formative experiences at that music festival than I did at college. It must be protected, and yet nobody expects it to return for the 20-year anniversary in 2025.

It started as a by-dudes-for-dudes sort of thing, but music is not a men’s pursuit, full stop, and they eventually got conscious to that and did what they need to do to recenter the dynamic. Then they stopped doing what they were known for, which was to relentlessly shit on people they didn’t like. The controversies they fomented were fundamentally of a masculine relational dynamic that no longer serves the collective. Sometimes, the men apologized in their small, unread spaces. Readership numbers dropped because we all like to magnify the bad; everybody who loves drama left.