pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

Hard to say:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/metacritic.com#

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pitchfork.com#

I use Metacritic for movies; that's about it.

so basically people go to metacritic to read about video games

What's funny to me is I often see the average score on metacritic practically match pitchfork's exact score.

I look at Metacritic's music section regularly but mostly as a handy list of recent/upcoming releases.

heaven is a place on earth with you

Wilderness were the shit, I keep checking their Wiki to see of they have new stuff coming

Derivative? Oh yeah they were but SFW

I've purged my physical music collection tons of times but just don't have the heart to rip/sell the Wilderness CDS

Though even if you did you could buy them all back second hand for maybe $7.

All together.

derivative AND safe for work!

AND pitchfork approved! this is like the holy triumvirate

http://web.archive.org/web/20011121175939/pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/h/handsome-boy-modeling-school/so-hows-your-girl.shtml

Old review of the first Handsome Boy Modelling School album. Do you even underground, bro?

haha that was one of the first pf reviews i ever read

In the wake of the fatal car crash that claimed the former Princess of Wales, concerts across a grieving U.K. were cancelled en masse-- including a handful of Primal Scream dates in London, the promoter of which claimed the band were kiboshing “out of a mark of respect for Diana.” This came as news to the band, who issued a reactionary retort claiming, “We wanted to play... We have no respect whatsoever for Diana Spencer or any member of the English Royal Family. We are totally opposed to the monarchy.”

i am being a pedant but just in so many ways this is not a "reactionary retort"