pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

also though "like the Arcade Fire review was basically the most important record review of the 2000's" -- what? why? was this what broke the band or something?

Many people have tried to rewrite history that this were true, it wasn't, but it screws on nicely to the "Pitchfork ruined Travis Morrison's solo career" rejoinder

the one band they absolutely broke was Tapes n Tapes, who were so obscure that they actually played a gig with my nowhere band the DAY the pitchfork review came out....a month later they were playing the Pitchfork festival

xp well I think in the US it's largely true. I know up north they were already known but I first heard of them during the big Funeral swell of attention, and as everybody knows, I am on the cutting edge at all times, really I'm a cultural bellweather for this age

I don't care, I'm only piping in here because Whiney is perpetuating a spurious rewriting of 00s history

do you think Arcade Fire would have had a similar career arc if, in 2004, Pitchfork had given them a 6.5 or something? i'm not sure either way, i'm honestly curious, but its seems like the timeline of their career would have been different at least.

actually all i wanted is the little black and white photo of the writer with an awkward smile.

i was also like 14 or something then... i wasn't there so i don't know the actual history.

I kinda wonder if the whole LCD Soundsystem explosion was pitchfork's doing in some way

It didn't hurt that Arcade Fire and LCD are/were absolutely great live acts. Word of mouth may have been accelerated by the review, but few left those shows unimpressed. Vs. say Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who sucked live.

I don't care, I'm only piping in here because Whiney is perpetuating a spurious rewriting of 00s history

bear in mind Whiney thinks Colin Meloy is a Masonic plot to destroy freedom. OTOH he is otm on that one

Pitchfork's insistence with LCD Soundsytem is what turned me off for so long, now it is one my favorite bands.

It is fair to say that the Funeral's review cemented Pitchfork has a force in the music industry, it probably helped Pitchfork more than Arcade Fire in the end.

bear in mind Whiney thinks Colin Meloy is a Masonic plot to destroy freedom. OTOH he is otm on that one

Hm. I thought Meloy was a Nixonian bit of ratfucking.

for counterfactual example to arcade fire, see this 2005 BNM review, bylined by Schreiber himself, where he explicitly attempts to place the album in "the big picture"; nevertheless it failed to take off

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8791-wilderness/

What Wilderness really seem to signify-- and what makes them important-- is a shift back towards the more cerebral end of the rock spectrum. Every extreme has its antidote, and just as it's been rewarding to see artists loosen up, enjoy themselves, and have some fun for once, it's also refreshing to hear them aspiring, just as passionately, to music of a more serious persuasion. In an environment that's reveled so long in the comfortability of tradition and flavor-of-the-month transitiveness, this kind of substantive art-rock is ripe for exploration. If Wilderness aren't quite kings of the mountain yet, it might just be that few others have yet traversed their fertile domain.

It is fair to say that the Funeral's review cemented Pitchfork has a force in the music industry, it probably helped Pitchfork more than Arcade Fire in the end.

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, April 11, 2013 2:32 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this nails it; they are good at sniffing out something on the verge of taking off and they hitch a ride on it/amplify it, initiating a sort of reciprocal cred cycle positive feedback loop. Doesn't always work, for every Arcade Fire there's a Wilderness/Rapture/Trail of Dead

that wilderness article is an interesting artifact. i wonder if the album would have done better if pitchfork gave it another .5 points, and like, really threw their weight behind it. the rhetoric in the review is effusive but 8.5 seems more mixed.

i guess, going with that, is the sense that pitchfork's number scores sometimes speak louder than the articles themselves, at least to a certain kind of reader.

oh, a discussion about pitchfork

anyway, pitchfork has actually emphasized individual writers recently

they moved bylines up to the top of the page, which now link to individual writer pages with a custom url and everything

they even link to tumblrs and twitters so you can get to know your favorite writers even better http://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/

also they published individual lists last year

well I think they owe a large part of their success/influence to their numbered scoring system

it certainly helped them become a popular 'consumer guide' but when people say that i wonder if they realize that virtually everybody else that reviewed albums before PF also gave numerical ratings, often on a scale of 1 to 10 (or practically the same thing, with a 5 star system measured in half stars)

dude, half of ILM wasn't born yet

There's like a ton of mansplainy n+1 and wired articles that already cover this ground, but i'll bite:

The Funeral review was the first to cement people's belief that Pitchfork was "making bands."

There was a New York Magazine article on the band in 2007 that said -- and this is an actual quote -- "It was a symbiotic event: Pitchfork made Arcade Fire, and Arcade Fire made Pitchfork"

Whether that's true or not (there was also a New York Times Music Section front page piece by Kelefah that surely helped, tho P4k was a month out the gate first), it created that narrative for a lot of people.

It was a moment indicative of "HOW WE LEARN ABOUT MUSIC NOW" because it was
A. On the internet, not SPIN or RS or Entertainment Weekly) because it moved faster and spoke directly to a niche audience (especially the white media types who dislike "pop music" and are responsible for the majority of navel-gazing "narratives" like the one you're reading about).
B. Was the first internet-driven indie rock "Hype Cycle" that was rewarded with a much-ballyhooed CMJ or SXSW show (ie, see the way we cover Surfer Blood, Savages, et al)
C. It was democratized because it took a movement that was already happening ("The Shins will change your life") and democratized it, putting it in the hands of a small website and a small but influential audience of website readers instead of a big "tastemaker"

The rise of music blogs was happening at the same time, and this just crystallized the way people were finding out about bands now.

Whether these things are true or not, that's how things are perceived.

Also, again, didn't hurt that Arcade Fire was actually good and really good live.

no I mean pitchfork's adoption of absurdly specific decimal point number ratings. I think it taps into the casual reader's desire for structure/hierarchies, but also I think it was a subtle and easy way to signal that they were more thoughtful and in-depth than other reviewers: "we are so thoughtful we have evaluated that it is actually an 8.3 rather than an 8.4 or 8.2"

People didn't think those fine aesthetic calibrations on the difference between 3.0 and a 3.5?

it's not about the actual greater thoughtfulness of the reviewer it's the authoritative impression it gives the casual reader

pitchfork should score to the the thousandth and provide error bars

that wilderness record is great if you have a big PIL jones like i do

xpost: honestly that's the idea; subtle pseudo-scientific signaling that their reviews are definitive/capture objective measure of quality

i'm pretty sure i agonized over the difference between 3.0 and 3.5 on several PF reviews, because they sent me the shittiest promos ever

I love Wilderness but they are a much tougher sell than Arcade Fire. (You can't honestly think that rock radio in 2013 would be populated by a bunch of bands trying to put a drama-club spin on Wilderness's deconstruct-it-all aesthetic a la Imagine Dragons and all the other ho-heyers are right now?)

Ugh sorry about my weird mid-sentence edit rendering that a bit incoherent

But I mean for real, without Arcade Fire's success on the indie level, the rock (and even pop!) radio landscape would be a very different thing at the moment

there's a rock radio landscape?

"comfortability"?
"transitiveness"?
"substantive"?

I didn't mean to say Wilderness and Arcade Fire had the same ceiling. It came to mind mainly as a contrast because the push on that review seemed oddly strong: a BNM tag with all that big picture narrative written by the boss himself, yet it didn't seem to gain even relative traction.

Cool response, Whiney, thanks.

I'm not denying that this connection hasn't been reported, and repeated, by many sources. Nor am I denying that a positive review from Pitchfork affected that band's trajectory, or at least, gilded it. But this thesis relies on the notion that AF hadn't had any major success until then, when they'd had loads. Massive amounts. Canada and otherwise. They'd already been subject to an (indie) bidding war, sold out Bowery (with huge excess demand), even featured on there non-CAN magazine covers before the pitchfork review-- you could easily argue that Plan B, feature for feature, was the more prescient publication for indie music. As for the crowds and the guarantees, they went up a bit, but not nearly as much as they did, say, as they did when management was hired in 2005, or the Spike trailer, or any number of other events that made them The Thing They Are Today

selling out smallish venues in nyc is not as tough a prospect as it seems given the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF INDUSTRY here. i am v rarely impressed by nyc sellouts as a barometer of anything save self-sustaining buzz cycles

Wilderness were kind of a weird non-entity even in Baltimore, although i only heard one of the later albums so maybe i just missed what the excitement was actually about

but yeah maura otm, i'm much more impressed when a band can sell out in a smaller market than in nyc

But good point about "who's the author?"

arcade fire/pf feels very 'print the legend' at this point

But Maura they went from Bowery pre pitchfork to Irving post pitchfork, it wasn't a big move. It seems ridiculous to consider this stuff ~now~ but they weren't a huge band in 2005 by any means

If anything Wilderness is the purest counterexample I can think of that a big pfork push on its own doesn't bestow success in the absence of other support (did Wilderness get pushed by anyone else?)

I love Wilderness so much. Fav of 2005 for me, and honestly I may have missed them if not for that review.

Sometimes the taste-making that happens comes from a collection of BNM selections when the albums aren't as accessible and strong as an Arcade Fire all by themselves.

strawman: is metacritic arguably as/more important as a tastemaker than pitchfork?

no

do people even read metacritic