Pitchfork and Me

Twenty years on, I can't disentangle the site from my own career, or life

(Hi. This is the first post on my new Substack. This is who I am. I’m going to write something soon introducing this blog/newsletter, but in the meantime, this is a good introduction. Subscribe if you want more of this kind of thing, I guess?)

Sometime in 2003, one of my students introduced me to Pitchforkmedia.com. He liked cool music, had started a band on campus with his girlfriend, and if memory serves (Internet Archive is no help), he pointed me toward a post on the site where Ryan Schreiber was discussing the weird similarities between two different album covers? It was a running feature of some sort? No clue. Anyway, I became a fan. And I became a fan right when the site took off in the public imagination as the place that launched Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, and then became evidence for How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. I “bookmarked” the “website” on my “web browser” and started visiting it every morning. The first album I bought because of a review was Constantines’ Shine A Light (the review was removed when its author threatened some sort of lawsuit against the site when it sold to Condé Nast in 2015 but hahaha whoops we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves).

I was teaching documentary and video production at a small liberal arts college in Indiana right after flaming out of the non-fiction TV industry, and I was looking for another outlet, and writing about music felt like a good idea. I’d been keeping notebooks of thoughts and ratings and other arcana about music since I was 12, and I just applied for grad school, too, my entrance essay was on 24 Hour Party People, and it was the first longform piece of criticism I’d ever written. I got the bug. Another one of my students had just introduced me to SoulSeek. Which, oh no. I started downloading everything I wasn’t buying or checking out from the library. That university let me teach a Winter Term course on punk rock. And another History of Rock one. I was delving into the archives, connecting all the dots, talking about music all the time.

In 2005, I started an mp3 blog after reading about “mp3 blogs” in, of all places, Rolling Stone magazine. I tried to do the “post an mp3 and write a paragraph or so about the music” thing that Fluxblog and Said the Gramophone had mastered, but I was also looking for a writing outlet that wasn’t grad school seminar papers (I was accepted, by the way), and I started merging the theory texts I was devouring in class with my thoughts on the industries that were collapsing and morphing into one another in strange ways, and some people kind of liked it! I was dropping links to my blogs in the Stereogum comment sections and linking out to other likeminded souls on the elbo.ws mp3 blogger messageboard, which was populated not with writer nerds like me but with younger kids who loved like, Bishop Allen and started blogs as a form of excitable fandom. I met a ton of really nice and smart people from 2005 to 2006; as I finished up my MA and moved on to the PhD, and was deeply grateful to have such an awesome cohort of fellow grad students, I had also made a whole other virtual network of music blogging friends and colleagues and musicians online—some of whom I’d eventually meet, others I still regularly email with, and some I have no clue what happened to.

Back to Pitchfork. Pitchfork didn’t really like mp3 bloggers that much. Well, some of them were cool (mentioned above), but the masses of strivers who were just aiming to get listed on the Hype Machine were viewed as naive industry tools, sockpuppets for savvy indie PR agents to use as astroturfed hype-pods for new music. Pitchfork called it “blog rock” as a perjorative synecdoche for the often bland but mostly perfectly fine indie rock that always bubbled up through those sites, but they would occasionally put their stamp of approval on one of them, and then The Pitchfork Effect would happen. I definitely identified with the music critic bloggers and Pitchfork writers more than I did the eager-beaver early twentysomethings posting the We Are Scientists mp3 with the PR text pasted out of the publicist’s email.

I never liked blog rock as a genre (Cold War Kids? Really? That’s your music revolution?), and after a few months or so of blogging I didn’t see any point in posting the same mp3s everyone else was posting, but in writing longer thinky stuff. Looking back now, a lot of that stuff strikes me as juvenalia, a junior scholar-in-training trying to stake a space online, saying stuff that was smart, maybe? But least was different from just about every other blog. I wrote a bunch about Pitchfork and taste and cultural capital. Deep in my masters’ exams reading Henry Jenkins using De Certeau to describe fans as “textual poachers,” I wrote a big essay about online music fandom that made its way around a bit. I made friends with other bloggers like Matthew at Fluxblog and Maura Johnston, who brought me on to Idolator to try some Gawker-style content grinding (Maura and Jess Harvell were masters of the form, I was incredibly mid). I was chatting with Maura and Matthew like every day about music, just cramming in AIM sessions between whatever other bullshit we had to do at the computer anyway.

In 2006, Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef reached out to me over email. He and some of the other Pitchfork editors had seen some of my blogs and a long piece I reported for Todd Burns at Stylus about Domino using “social networking” to break the Arctic Monkeys. They were going to hire a bunch of new staffers in 2007 (if I remember correctly that’s when all the brilliant ex-Stylus guys came aboard), and asked me if I wanted to join up. Of course I did! At first I was reticent to say much on the Pitchfork staffboard—here were all the people I’d been reading for the past few years on the site and elsewhere, measuring my own work against, etc.—but Scott, along with editor Mark Richardson and my favorite critic, Marc Hogan, were incredibly welcoming, and I felt at home immediately.

Scott and Mark let me write just about whatever I wanted in those first few years, especially long thinky essays about music and technology. They, along with Amy Phillips and Chris Kaskie, and a few other important people I’m no doubt forgetting, were instrumental in professionalizing the site. I’d heard stories about Ryan texting a writer the night before for a review that he’d just toss up the next afternoon, and it definitely wasn’t that, but I could still ping Scott on AIM and say “hey, do you want a piece on how Hitchcock used pop songs as a narrative element in Rear Window,” and he says yes, and it runs like two weeks later and at some point I got a check for $75. They gave me a column that year and I wrote about a local classic rock radio station. I liked writing reviews of music made by musicians I was deeply familiar with or an out-of-nowhere thing that hit me in a good way, but the thing I hated was getting assigned something by a relatively unknown musician who I was “meh” on. You have to write honestly, but you also take into consideration that you’re maybe going to make more on the review than the musician will from physical sales that month, or year? You crank out 500 words of meh and move on and all involved are worse for the wear.

I was reading for my PhD exams when I wrote this piece, which some colleagues found useful as a teaching tool and which got me a couple radio interviews, but which now is kind of cringey to me in its optimism. Oh, and the response to it got me onto Twitter for the first time to see what that was all about. Then Mark asked me to update that piece for the streaming era, and it was going to be the first sort of fully bedazzled newfangled interactive presentation that the site was going to privilege now with a new redesign, and ended up winning a Webby. The brilliant and tireless Ryan Dombal edited all 15,000 words of that motherfucker like a champ, and Mike Renaud oversaw the sick interface design that miraculously still works.

While I was working on my dissertation and placing academic scholarship in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, I was also really active as a writer from 2007 to about 2013, a bunch of forgettable album reviews and a lot of features and reviews of reissues and catalog material. I wrote about the Quiet Storm radio format, a Bob Dylan bootleg, the entire Sugar catalog, the best album of 1992, everything from the Zombies except Odessey and Oracle, Kanye West’s chaotic form of communication (in 2013), and the impact of Twitter on music, and the overrated impact of smart speakers, eulogies for the Hipgnosis guy and the “Thriller” guy, a list of the best pre-MTV music videos, a stupid TV show with a stupid name, and interviewed my friends and colleagues about their books. Hell, even my own book debuted as an article in The Pitchfork Review and soon after, on the site itself.

I still go to the Pitchfork Music Festival every year—I’ve been to all of them since 2006 but one, when my stupid friend just had to go and get married—and it’s always a highlight of my summer. It’s kind of amazing how many friends, some very good, I’ve made just through writing for Pitchfork—I’ve watched their kids grow up, they’ve seen me shuffle through partners, we’ve smoked tons of weed together, we’ve watched the area around Union Park get incredibly gentrified, we’ve drank and frantically gabbed about music for hours. Some of the best times of my adult life have taken place at that Fest, with music people—writers, editors, staffers, musicians, agents, label people. The Fest itself, I really hope it continues—it’s still put on by the same folks who’ve done it since 2006, and they do a terrific job of booking acts from the local area, keeping prices lower than just about any other comparable festival, and treating artist performers well. I have an entire separate blog I could write about the Fest. Maybe an oral history. We’ll see.

I’m not really sure what’s going to happen to Pitchfork, but it doesn’t look good at all. If you’ve read this far you probably know that the site, which was kind of shockingly sold to Conde Nast in 2015, is now being absorbed into GQ, somehow, probably as a “music vertical,” and definitely to the detriment of music criticism as a whole. Amanda Petrusich, the best music critic ever produced by the site, called today’s news a “death knell for the record review,” which is hard to deny, at least in the review’s longform, read-by-a-ton-of-people sense. There is still good music criticism out there, lots of it. Much of it better than anything on Pitchfork. But none of it has the cachet of the Pitchfork imprimatur that, not overstating things really too much, has played a significant role in holding together the indie record, merchandising, and small-scale touring industries for much of the 21st century. Guitarist William Tyler can relate.

Since the Condé sale, the site has gotten both better and worse. Hiring Puja Patel as the Editor-in-Chief after founder Ryan Schreiber left was an absolute masterstroke. The site has radically diversified its staff in the years since. When I was active there, the site was embarrassingly white, straight, and male. Every single stereotype of the “rock critic,” on full display. Over the past several years under Patel’s leadership, the masthead much more closely resembles the people who make the music covered on the site: there are far more women, queer people, and people of color. Over the last decade, the site has nurtured a couple dozen great reporters and critics, and the site’s canon has shifted accordingly, as these things should always do. Filmdom’s Jeanne Dielman is 90s pop’s “Fantasy (Remix),” etc. Which of course makes Pitchfork’s ostensible absorption into Gentleman’s Quarterly (and its millennial males) all the more chef’s kiss-gesture, as the site’s features editor Jill Mapes noted.

The majority of the writing I’ve done for Pitchfork over the past few years has been Sunday Reviews, the feature the site unrolled in summer 2016 that has produced (current author excluded) some of the best longform feature writing about music published anywhere. For a while now, it’s been capably steered by Jeremy Larson, a fellow midwesterner who is a solid dude and a really good editor. The ones I’ve personally written are some of my favorite music writing, as are the quick turnaround album-focused pieces I wrote in a few days and Jeremy polished up and published. Along with Mark Richardson and Ryan Dombal (who edited all of my features going back to 2012), Jeremy is the best editor I’ve worked with at Pitchfork. Not for nothing, but the best thing that happened after the Conde sale was the dramatic improvement in editing and fact-checking, especially for the Sunday Reviews. When it was launched, that feature felt like a business-side decision (let’s capture more traffic) that was turned into the last major forum apart from 33 1/3 books for (at least how I imagine the form) mini-cultural histories of important albums. I could write a million of those things. I’d write one for you, right now. I was literally working on a new one when the news broke yesterday.

But the business-side impositions that’ve been infecting the site since the Condé purchase are nearly uniformly bad, in my opinion. The reviews were moved below the fold, and the scope of the news section was broadened beyond recognition. We’re covering the Chili Peppers and Jamiroquai now? Okay? Pitchfork never really had a uniform voice as a site back in the earlier eras, but even after finally embracing hip hop and chart pop, it did have a whole lot of stuff it just didn’t talk about—like, Jamiroquai and stuff. When it started talking about everything even kind of related to music in popular culture, not for editorial reasons but for search engine optimization reasons, the site lost a lot of what made it unique. And that’s not the editors’ fault; there’s no denying that kind of thing came from above. As did the site’s stupid new slogan: “The Most Trusted Voice On Music.” Or something like that.

But that’s nothing compared to the nauseating “powered by Spotify” component of the site’s “Reviews Explorer” feature it launched in 2021. Condé decided to use the scores from the reviews (minus the wild-west-years reviews languishing in the Internet Archive purgatory version of the site) as the seeds for a fancy new data visualization that made Pitchfork look like, yes, a fancy streaming platform of some sort. It’s not just that such a feature fundamentally misunderstood the function of the numerical ratings, but (see that screencap above) that it required contracting out the “similar artists” function of the editorial to fucking Spotify? That Pitchfork, a site ostensibly devoted to making judgments about musical meanings—you know, criticism—would do such a thing did not bode well for its future, to say the least. Building a new site out of a complicated and dude-centric old one is hard, and not all new ideas were good. Like when the staff decided to re-review albums from its own archives, which, while done in good faith, was a terrible idea, and a surefire way to alienate critics from wanting to write for your site, wondering if your work would be thrown to the wolves once the next editorial vision took hold.

But at this point, who gives a shit? None of those people have jobs anymore.

All of us could, in retrospect, kind of see this coming. A few dozen great and talented editors and staffers who made the site what it is, answering to new leadership’s demands to…well, to scale. To appeal to every single person who had a single thought about music ever, and give them something to Google. That’s the whole point with platforms, right? Scale over everything. Pitchfork was being progressively enshittified, until it didn’t mean anything anymore to anyone except the two or three people who understood the site as a big box of valuable data instead of an archive of imperfect and passionate human labor. And if Pitchfork’s Conde ownership really wants to make the site into a streaming music app with words, they’re running the right play. But fuck them at this point.

There were no new reviews or any news posted this morning, the day after the announcement. Looks like we might be done here, folks, at least with Pitchfork as we’ve known it. And here I am, 20 years after first bookmarking the site, my old blog long gone, I have tenure now and live in Michigan, and I’m posting this on Substack as a newsletter—which is a blog, but also Uber.