Pitchfork, Seriously

Where Music Journalism is No Laughing Matter

I subscribe to Pitchfork. I get an email blast every day from Pitchfork. I look at Pitchfork, I scan Pitchfork, I  will listen to an occasional recommendation from Pitchfork. I scroll Pitchfork, at times, intrigued by their bread-and-butter: Lists, endless lists, every day, with odd and often-changing numbers of things to check out on the most influential online rock magazine today. But it’s hard to actually read much of Pitchfork. It is often that dull.

You have to go to Commentary under Norman Podhoretz to find a periodical that takes itself so seriously. (Commentary was the early launchpad for writers from what the Village Voice once called the Military Intellectual Complex. My Pulitzer Prize-winning aunt, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a longtime mainstay of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, was a charter member.)

Of course, Commentary had a Cold War to cheer for––it was neocon, anti-Communist, to a fault. Pitchfork, to its credit, is the last bastion for guitar rock, for indie rock …