You can never go home again
One of the weirdest things about my media diet is I read Pitchfork every day. I do this not because I like Pitchfork, but because it is there, it is easy, and sheer mind-blinding inertia makes me feel like I have to. Here is how I read Pitchfork:
- I check the score of the first album they’ve posted.
- I read any reviews listed under electronic, experimental, techno.
- I skim the news.
- I close the tab.
This is not structurally nourishing in any sense that is actual. It is something I do because I have always done it, brain turned off. Pitchfork recommends new albums to me that are actually good approximately once every other year. But it does allow for a vague sense that I’m tapped into what’s happening in music writ large. I know some names in pop. Fine.
I started reading Pitchfork when it was written here, when I knew where the offices were, when I was pals with a few people who worked there or wrote for them. I read it in college, during the formative time everybody has when they figure out what music they like and usually never change. I went to their music festival lockstep for 20 years, until it was killed off by people who didn’t know what its spiritual function was.
Over the past quarter century, music has become more niche. Name a genre and there is probably someone writing about it, passionately & continuously, even if it’s just on a little subreddit. Name an artist and you can immediately find 50 others just like it on a streaming platform. For my own media diet, there’s the Wire, the Quietus, record stores Boomkat & A Number of Small Things, and the year-end lists that keep getting quietly posted to the Silent Ballet. I follow a few dozen labels, about a thousand artists, and never stop exploring.
One of the key components of music criticism is confidence. You should take a stand, in the moment, and recognize that you will sometimes be wrong, horribly wrong. Pitchfork have, in the past, been rather famously horribly wrong. So have I! Tastes change. We relitigate the past. This is how culture works.
And now, maybe in response to all of that, Pitchfork is asking people to provide their own numeric ratings to the albums they review. “We don’t trust our own judgment,” says the judgment site. This breaks the fundamental contract of music criticism, gutting the thing that gave Pitchfork its soul in the first place, in the name of higher numbers & rageclicks. It is not the point of music or of having opinions.
But it is a gift. Look around, right? They already boiling-frogged Pitchfork into a space of irrelevance that we check out of obligation. Now this. We have an opportunity to focus on those who seek a correct relationship to music, including those who left. They are out there. You must seek them.