Pitchfork, Seriously
Where Music Journalism is No Laughing Matter
On Sunday, I texted the greatly admired Elizabeth Nelson: writer/critic/humorist, master of the X Twitter review-as-Zen koan, golfer and golf journalist, and leader of the group The Paranoid Style, whose new album, The Interrogator, arrived today in the mail. On Sunday, Jan. 14, Elizabeth had written the Sunday album review of a pre-Pitchfork era recording, Bob Dylan's Desire. She has a very distinctive writing voice, so I was curious about what the editing process at Pitchfork was like. She was fine with the give and take. (She also has a Substack which she calls Please Take My Advice, which she writes infrequently, but I always do take her advice.)
A few days later, it was announced that Pitchfork was being devolved, if not yet dissolved, by parent company Condé Nast (New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair). The intentionally imprecise corporate speak of no-less-than Anna Wintour indicated that many staff editors and writers were being dismissed, and that Pitchfork would somehow be subsumed, or united in its afterlife, with GQ. I’ve yet to find a sentient being familiar with both publications who have said, “hey, way to go, Condé! Epic move!” This shotgun wedding seems like murder.
I am sad for the Pitchfork writers and editors who lost their livelihoods. Another black arrow in the heart of the media biz, rock music division. That it was once a seemingly thriving online-only publication (augmented by live music festivals) that could not survive the evolution of the internet was one of the extreme ironies, not missed by commentators such as Substack’s own deep thinker on such crucial topics,
, who wrote about the collapse of music criticism, and the unraveling of music-related jobs at Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify and other streaming services on his hugely popular ‘stack, The Honest Broker.I wrote “Pitchfork, Seriously,”when I only had 139 subscribers. Now I have ten times that many, and I’m so grateful to you. I can afford free subscribers right now, though I prefer, of course, if some of you paid. Pitchfork did not charge for subscriptions, and as a result, it is little surprise that Condé Nast eventually had to say: “Show me the money.” Anna Wintour, if you are reading this (of course she is, it’s what’s on her phone during Paris Fashion Week, is it not?), Critical Conditions by Wayne Robins is available for purchase, and would dearly appreciate being added to the Condé Nast collection of brands. The article below was first published June 21, 2021, and was my seventh post. It has been updated.
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.)
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 bands, for women rock bands, and especially and most overwhelmingly, for people who are essentially solo artists but who have names that are either pseudonyms or sound like the names of rock bands. Think St. Vincent. Think Waxahatchee. Think especially Justin Vernon, performing as Bon Iver, the hovering guru, the patron saint, of all that is Pitchforkian. In recent years, it has expanded its remit, more rap, more women, more from the non-English speaking world. The style remains stubborn in its conventions.
But to read the reviews, written by very smart people, is to despair of finding a phrase that elicits a smile, a cool pun, a jokey aside, or a shared wink at some counter- or counter-counter-culture. I look forward to the Sunday Review, reviews of older albums, sometimes 2,000 word exegeses on what Pitchfork, self-referential and self-important to bizarre extremes, describes "a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible."
Sunday's blast from the past was Sinéad O’Connor's The Lion and the Cobra, written by associate editor Sam Sodomsky, a very skilled and educated writer (MFA in nonfiction writing, Columbia) who does a fine job explaining O'Connor's career, drilling down in to the album in question, examining her faith. But having read it twice, I couldn't help feeling that it was exactly what might be written by an outstanding grad student who has not challenged himself, or labored beyond the pietiies required to succeed in grad school. Withheld: any sense of the writer's personality.
I use Sodomsky, whom I admire precisely because of this skill, as an example. He's so smart that I want to know what he really thinks, what he believes, how he feels, what he might say if chatting over a beer in a Brooklyn pub. (Brooklyn is the magnetic North Pole of Pitchfork culture.)
Pitchfork is devoid of personality to a startling degree, especially in a pop culture magazine. The institutional voice ruined what was once appealing about Rolling Stone until 1976, when the mag announced it was leaving left San Francisco, where the oddballs and free thinkers were, and moved to New York, where the advertisers were, not to mention the high society ladder which Jann Wenner desired to climb.
Pitchfork started in 1996, in the Minneapolis suburbs, with no use for boomer humor, and moved to Chicago in 1999, where it still holds an annual music festival. Through the 2000s, it expanded its base from white indie rock to more varied fare, sometimes by accident. A 2003 April Fool's Day "joke" was reviewing a Kylie Minogue album. You can understand why they shy from humor. One of its most negative reviews, a rare 0.0, was given to an otherwise well-received Sonic Youth album. A decade later, the writer, a Chicagoan, admitted being driven by an anti-New York bias, but that's a hell of a bad rationale for doing prejudiced music criticism. Pitchfork is no longer a Chicago product; it's now a product of New York's imperial power Condé Nast. (Congratulations to all CN workers, including those of Pitchfork, whose union won by threatening a strike.) Its address is One World Trade Center.
Pitchfork's purchase in 2015 by Condé Nast (Vogue, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair), was a turning point for the brand. CN chief digital officer at the time, Fred Santarpia, as reported by Vice, based on a report in the Times, said that Condé Nast, in acquiring not just PFs readers but its events business, was bringing "a very passionate audience of millennial males into [Condé Nast's] roster."
Twitter Planet 2015 thought this hilarious, and "passionate millennial males" became a meme for a few days. The Vice story contained some cute tweets, none more to the point than this warning to watch out for "passionate millennial males in your area, looking to argue over who knew about the band Beirut first."
It also covers hip-hop, Latinx music, "world" music and various other styles with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and though it has a substantial amount of she/her readers and a good number of women writers.
That does not mean writers don't occasionally break through the banality of the ordinary in successfully completing their homework assignments. Jayson Greene (whom I don't think is still writing for PF), with whom I worked at eMusic.com and its content spinoff Wondering Sound, is a great writer, thinker and stylist. Reviews editor Jeremy D. Larson himself has a wild wit and the ability to leaven with encyclopedic free association the most prosaic of albums, meaning Fear Inoculum by Tool. In a review published 5 September, 2019, Larson began:
"Tool are just King Crimson in Joker makeup. They thrive in an enormously popular world of polyrhythms and prurience; of Jungian philosophy and Bill Hicks memes; of pewter dragon statues with orbs in their mouths and guys telling you that DMT is actually a chemical in your brain."
It's a precious chip off the old Creem block, nearly Lester Bangs-ian in its reach and nutty embrace of the internal logic of Tool's inanity. It's also a complete outlier from Pitchfork business as usual. The album received a precise grade of 5.4, and one of the saving graces of Pitchfork, but also its curse, is its grading system using the metric scale and one decimal point. Sodomsky's review of the O'Connor album carried a 9.1, which seems slightly overgenerous; I'd give it an 8.8, but who's counting?
But Pitchfork is always counting. Staff writer Marc Hogan, saying farewell in a column in Rolling Stone Jan. 18, 2024, referred to the “mock-scientific precision” of Pitchfork’s 0.0 to 10.0 scoring of albums.
The secret sauce for Pitchfork's success is its lists, rolled out daily in its utterly utilitarian email blasts. Below, I'm going to list some of my favorite or not Pitchfork list headers, along with some ringers that I invented. They should be easy to tell apart, but maybe not.
• 6 New Albums You Should Listen to Now
• 7 Great Lorde Live Performances
• 5 Albums Out Today
• 5 Albums You Should Listen to Now
• 9 Great Soccer Mommy Tracks
• 8 Reasons Weezer Are Better Than the Beatles
• The 51 Most Anticipated Albums of Summer 2021
• "Breaking News: Lorde Announces Tour, Reveals Release Date and Tracklist for New Album"
• 6 New Albums You Should Listen to Now
• Either, Neither, or Both: Bon Iver, Bon Jovi
• The History of the Pitchfork Reviews Section in 38 Reviews
• 7 Ways The Melvins Are Better Than Iron Butterfly
• Nick Cave To Play Nic Cage in Biopic
• The 123 Albums That Received A "10.0"
• Albums That Received 10s When They Were First Released: 11
(Tracking began in 2016. Hint: The first three were by 12 Rods, Walt Mink, and Amon Tobin)
• Or Is Nic Cage Playing Nick Cave in Biopic?
• 9 Albums That Received 0.0, including Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, and Liz Phair
• The Case For Nickelback
• The Incredible Lightness of Being Soccer Mommy
• Sunday Reviews and Reissues That Received 10s (127)
Includes two each by Bruce Springsteen, Talk Talk, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, and Weezer
• 7 Best Icelandic Artists Not Named Bjork
• When Is the New Soccer Mommy Album Coming Out?
A few hours ago, there was a new email from Pitchfork: "Subscribe to 10 to Hear, Pitchfork's Weekly Reviews Newsletter." No punctuation, as usual in these blasts: The subject is "10 to Hear":
Every Saturday, we’ll send you our 10 highest reviews of the week to help you catch up on all the best music. Sign up below to start receiving 10 to Hear in your inbox this weekend.
It's all about the lists, the way baseball has become all about metrics, ridiculous metrics. I don't know where Pitchfork's rigid uniformity of style comes from, or who is responsible, or why. Emphasizing the brand over the individual voice may be a successful business model in publishing (Time magazine writers didn't even have bylines until the late 1960s or 1970s.) But the utilitarian prose sometimes leaks in totalitarian group-think. There isn't a single critic at this magazine that has a distinctive, look-forward-to-reading style or personality. And I bet you could make a substantial list with names of writers who are capable, but for some reason can't, or won't, let their freak flag fly.
Brings to mind the word "arch."