What is it exactly that qualifies an authority on anything?
Is it years of tireless dedication and experience in a field?
(not this kind)
Is it the possession of countless vinyls and vintage items of band paraphernalia? Or could it simply be the ownership of high quality sports stores with competitive prices (it worked for Sports Authority ...)?
It's another one of those "everybody's right!" essay prompts the bozos over at the SAT's just love to bang out. Yet it's an important question, especially when a cultural hub like Pitchfork has grown into such a persuasive force in the dictation of musical trends and preferences.
Since 1995 Pitchfork has provided youts of above average cultural savv with commanding opinions on modern music and critical prose so rich they're known to bring on chest pains. Over the past fifteen years, the site has helped to break numerous acts and, also, quite literally "break" bands unfortunate enough to face the gallows of their damning low scores.
Yet groups like Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (... I'd rather not) have all benefitted immensely from Pitchfork's not-so-hidden hand. These three are among a number of successful indie stalwarts who have told familiar tales of near-overnight promotion and sales success via the site’s musings. Veteran Rolling Stone writer and master-cynic Christopher Weingarten recognized the sheer ubiquity of the site’s sway in his speech delivered at the 2009 Characters Conference. “If you guys know bands like Deerhunter, Dan Deacon or Vampire Weekend, a lot of people probably heard about them first in Pitchfork or Spin magazine.”
Mitchell J. Fork, founder and chief editor of Pitchfork (and you thought hipsters made tight jeans kewl ...)
It’s nice when a media outlet can help hard-working artists, and what respected musicians today aren’t, get their due in a very fickle business, but it becomes problematic when such a source tries to impose its expertise (or lack thereof) on subjects on which it has no such credibility.
It's true that Pitchfork acceptably covers more than just their genre of choice (dipping into hip-hop, electronic, avante-garde, and any music of substantial loftiness), but there is a particularly uncomfortable area in their rotation, one that bulges out awkwardly like last year's blackberry from a pair of snug hipster pants—
I'm referring to metal.
Tragically Un-hip
Across the span of its enlightened rule, Pitchfork has periodically dipped the edge of its baby toe into the worlds of metal, prog, and alt rock with great apprehension. Unsurprisingly, these foreign waters have left many a writer cold.
Perhaps in the interest of covering the full scope of the modern music landscape, the site has entertained the notion of reviewing material far outside of its designated comfort zone. It's a commendable approach, at least on paper. Unfortunately, someone along the way spilled a cup of organic passion chai on that blueprint.
Few things are as stylistically kryptonic to an indie community as metal. As Jewel once said in her early 90's hit, Foolish Games, "you were fashionably sensitive, but too cool to care."
She wasn't addressing Devin Townsend.
Metal is often off-puttingly direct with its messages, its followers are miles behind the current fashion trend, and it's historically a genre devoted to losing your cool. That's the point: it's a catharsis. There are plenty of metal singers that sound like they don't give a shit, but it's rarely apathy without further ado: maybe a spell of dejection, defeated complicity, or silent, seething hatred (the "if we lived in a less civil society, I'd use this tennis racquet to serve you in a very different way"- kind of hatred)
There are a number of reasons why the two cultures are incompatible, but for a cause that remains very much a mystery, the prime minister of Pitchforkia made a peculiar decree on the matter: every third Tuesday of every fourth month one of their indie heads has to suffer through one of these childish works of alleged music.
To compensate for the baseness of this material, Pitchfork pulls out an ever-effective crutch: writing in the style of a collegiate, tweed-sporting douche.
“Not only does this track fail miserably as an attempt at multi-dimensionality, but it's so chockfull of pretension that one might expect a grinning, fawning Burt Bacharach to emerge from the bombed-out rubble of Kamdahar.”
-Grayson Currin, Botch – An Analogy of Dead Ends EP, Nov. 2002
It isn't hard to use big words and extended metaphors; in fact, you should use them from time to time, but never to "show-off" or convince your readers of your importance. Good writing accomplishes those aims without taking either into consideration.
The simple fact is metal, itself, is full of pomposity (gotta’ fill my big word quota here-): the themes, the lyrics, the shred, and, more than anything, the copy. Metallese writing, the unholy sticker text on metal albums or magazine promos, is the art of hyperbole broken down to a pseudo-science. It isn’t hard to sound like a moron when writing about metal. Pitchfork adds insult to injury.
"Oh, a BULLSHIT ARTIST"
Music criticism may be institutionalized bullshitting, but if your average review is a shit-sandwich, then Pitchfork's are bullshit soufflés.
“Save for beat-scene wunderkind Baths' misguidedly low-key and maudlin take on "French Cuffs", the guests that have been rounded up add personality to the schizo-phonic stew”
-Larry Fitzmaurice, Daedelus – Bespoke, April 2011
This might not be a total dig. The fact is many of the motherforkers have a more than impressive grasp of the English language and they generally show it in their work. A music critic would like to think he's not writing to your average idiot, but to a crowd of opinionated, forward-thinking readers who are willing to do their share. All the same, your average non-idiot ain't particularly interested in hearing an enriching meditation on your life story thus far, at least in a CD review.
Few writers on the site were better due for this advice than wind-bag extraordinaire and music writing anti-Christ, Brent DiCrescenzo—that was until the readership and music community at large pulled a Arab Spring on the shit-typing tyrant in 2004.
Hyphenated facts about BD: "womb-like," "string-laden," "super-smart aliens or something"
DiCrescenzo, made infamous for his “unique” assessment of Kid A, a work referred to by ripfork.com as what "may be the funniest review ever written," popularized the progressive style of writing about oneself instead of the topic of review.
“I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky.”
-Brent DiCrescenzo, Radiohead – Kid A, October 2000
… o k a y, man.
This is but one example. Instead of explaining why it was that he felt Tool's critically heralded, Lateralus, worthy of a score a decimal point below a 2 out of 10, the guy proceeded to tell a fictional story about some kid named "Crispin Fubert."
As DiCrescenzo writes in satirical tone intended to lambast the uber-pretentious band and their unflinching fanbase of zitty, mall-employed nerds, he unwittingly spits in the face of his own flowery nonsense. There's nothing wrong with finding Tool a little stuffy, (we probably won't be friends) unless, of course, you come off as snobbier than your snubject of snobicule.
The acclaimed Los Angeles Times pop critic Ann Powers said in the preface of Best Music Writing 2010, "There's also the problem all writers on the arts face: an arm's length away from those who "really create," we wonder if our own creativity counts."
It’s a delicate balance, to be sure. Again, no music writer wants to be a music writer without further ado. We certainly want to get the job done, but we also want to make our mark in a way that is unique to the individual. Unfortunately, a lot of that effort amounts to very little, especially if you’re talking out of your ass. Pitchfork critic Isaiah Violante captures much of this idea in one of those rambling intros Dicrescent rolls loved so very much:
“Sadly, for many of us at Pitchfork, our brand of journalism is often reduced to pounding sand and pissing in the wind-- particularly where metal is involved. With metal, so much effort goes into pasteurizing the product, congealing an intrinsically harsh and offensive form of expression into G-rated drivel, that our wind swallows the sound. What results seldom resembles the melodic and thematic content of sometimes brilliant modern metal albums, and instead focuses on the critic's unquenchable need for primal screams directed at a genre he/she simply doesn't get.”
-Isaiah Violante, Mastodon - Leviathan, Dec. 2004
Bingo.
Without trying quite so hard: Pitchfork works half-heartedly to make metal and other abrasive forms of music palatable and academic-sounding to a crowd that would much rather recite poetry in a coffee house than throw punches in the pit.
This approach is hardly unique to metal reviews on Pitchfork (check out that Radiohead review); it is simply most obvious in these writings where such "primal/thematic/intrinsic" blah is presumably necessary.
Working within the confines of a niche as specific as music criticism can be stifling, for certain. Readers want innovation, unique insights; they want to see the kind of work that illicits care regardless of the topic. Landmark writers like Gay Talese shattered the common conception of how music writing and journalism, in general, could be handled with their incorporation of narrative structures into non-fiction pieces (hence, the "new journalism" movement of the 60's- See Frank Sinatra Has a Cold- it's ballin'.)
Out of Taste- Out of Mind
An "arm’s length" would be a generous description of Pitchfork's connection to their outer genres of review. Whether in the irrelevant writing on Tool referenced above, the scrapped 5.0 of an earlier Porcupine Tree release (they got a little too hip for a >7.0), or the humorous pit of rabid hate mail comprising the site's lone Deftones review- a taste bias becomes apparent.
These leanings have characterized much of the site’s work on albums outside of their "in crowd" coverage, but this changed to a surprising degree in 2004. It was in that year that Mastodon struck unlikely gold in an even unlikelier place: the indie community.
In their landmark release, Leviathan, the group produced an impressive work that took everything dorky and over-the-top about metal and compacted it into a lovable 46-minute romp. Mastodon had become the Huey Lewis of the metal world. They were "hip to be square" like none before: crazy beards, hilariously epic album covers, flashy, technical songs, and an enduring appreciation for old-school video game systems—they were ironic as fuck.
Never let it be said that MD wasn't one hip whale
The hairy Georgians may have opened some eyes and ears in the community, but a slightly greater regard for distortion and the more guttural dimensions of the human voice, don't hide a problem that has always existed in Pitchfork's writing: an air of unshakable pretension that is neither devastating, decrepit, nor any other multi-syllabic d-word; it simply sucks.
To this day, metal reviews still surface on Pitchfork, but now with ratings that usually reflect some degree of numeral fairness. Yet even with 7's and 8's, these pieces are still littered with the glitzy writing disorders and clunky nonsense (1990's alterna-wavelengths, medieval doom madrigal, XFC-metal (?) ...) that have always been present in such articles.
"Spider-webbing from folk-rock smolder to mid-tempo thrash, from hair-metal guitar workouts to dirge-like chants, "The Watcher's Monolith" plays like an unpredictable, seamless mixtape of Agalloch's strengths."
Grayson Currin, Agalloch - Marrow of the Spirit, Dec. 2010
Ughh.
These writers are still pretty high on themselves, but they're maybe willing to admit that the music they have to assess isn't so bad either. In fact, their criticism might be getting marginally better as a result. However, as one of Pitchfork's more cutthroat readers, not so long ago, remarked, "music DOES sound better inside your own ass."
Once you've been there, it's never the same. The acoustics sound off in the open air; the songs no longer feel like personalized odes to your own intelligence—it’s plain weird.
In that same, scathing, profanity-laden speech referenced at the beginning of this article (check out the condensed, “swear-only” version on youtube!), Chris Weingarten reports on and analyzes the spirit of Bonnaroo, perhaps the premiere summer festival for the Pitchfork enthusiast. His words bear a staggering relevance to the media outlet, itself.
I’m having a great time. I’m having so much fun. This band is great for me. What a fun show I’m having. It was all very self-centered. And no one was trying to convince anyone to see anything. No one said why these bands were great, No one stopped to say, “Everyone at bonnaroo, you should see my favorite band because….”
The because he mentions has become me.
It’s not about what chord Band A plays here or what they do at the 3:30 mark of the fourth track, it’s about the wild, knotty tapestry the writer weaves around it all—the little world he creates. Anyone can state an opinion, but it takes a college education and a steady supply of weed to make your thoughts more important than anyone else’s. The writers at Pitchfork have clearly had their share of both.
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