pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Though this is more comparable to instances where we've polled the results of previous ILM polls, as they didn't actually go back and take down those old reviews, but rather looked back on them.

And most of the time these type of anniversary exercises often get forgotten years down the road in favor of the original reviews anyways.

just a thought:

sometimes, things don't have to persist and evolve and grow and become larger and more influential to more and more people. websites, messageboards. starbucks. what if things just slowly died out, without intervention, when they were ready to die? it makes sense to try to preserve your own life and the continued existence of those you love. but maybe ilx/ilm doesn't need 1000 autopsies and an influx of young people. maybe it's just supposed to be a bunch of older people arguing about increasingly petty things until they don't, at the end

nah

regrading old scores hilariously petty and in-character

yo is it true interpol got sonned by a pitchfork after a aol beef??????

not being able to gatekeep or tastemake or "thought lead" isn't a pitchfork problem, it's a mainstream music writing problem. gatekeeping, tastemaking and thought leading is happening on tik tok, welcome to 2021. teenagers in their bedrooms aren't reading gorilla vs bear like they were when i was a teenager in my bedroom... they're scrolling thru tik tok and shazaming songs they keep hearing in algorithmically privileged videos. pitchfork can't wrest that power away. which also isn't to say that there is no room for tastemaking journalism on a smaller, more micro level, servicing a niche set of readers who aren't interested in tik tok virality or bad bunny or fireboy dml or playboi carti or whatever. but doing so isn't going to employ dozens of ppl at morally justifiable (and union negotiated!) salaries.

was pitchfork really that popular among teens during the era when were reading it as teens tho? other than a super narrow slice of precocious kids, i remember only a few other ppl i knew who read it or were aware of it. it seemed more for people in their 20s and 30s. i don't think the young ppl scrolling tik tok today are the equivalent of ones who were reading p4k and gvb in 2008, it seems like a different market segment

The influence that Pitchfork had, particularly in the early aughts, is often "outsized" retrospectively— only after the mainstream success of certain bands that have already been mentioned did P4k really start becoming more of what it is today. That happened around the time I graduated from college, 2007-2008 or so, when MPP was released.

It's worth noting that in 2005, Animal Collective were still playing shows to basements of 100 college kids. Same with Ariel Pink— in fact, I saw Ariel Pink open for AnCo in April of that year.

It was mostly read by older music nerds and/or kids who went to liberal arts schools then moved to Brooklyn, which tracks.

here's some data. organic search traffic has been on the upswing (for some reason the historical data only goes back to 2012) for a long time (generally). But they are getting over 5 million hits from search monthly.

https://i.postimg.cc/tJ90PvB8/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-14-27-PM.png

in terms of what's bringing people there, it's almost exclusively hip hop and R&B stuff (mostly rap), here are the top keywords, outside of riley gale from power trip and daft punk it's pretty much exclusively hip hop and weighted heavily towards new hip hop

this does not count any direct traffic (people typing in pitchfork and going there on their own, not through search) so it's far from a complete picture of the traffic. but overall, i would think that their audience is MUCH younger and much less indie rock focused than ILX generally assumes.

https://i.postimg.cc/g2X7wPYn/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-15-15-PM.png

https://i.postimg.cc/fWq5YgqX/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-19-38-PM.png

also the recent years change in what they cover and the focus of what they cover is probably a whole lot more to do with the analytics and less about any kind of anti-rockist agenda or w/e

did dmx die

non-hip hop/new rnb/modern pop terms in the top 100 (in order)

daft punk
riley gale
lorde
glitchcore
electric guitar
erykah badu
led zeppelin
bluetooth speakers
jack antanoff
blink 182
bjork
linkin park
bon iver
etta james
eddie vedder

Hard not to read that list in the “we didn’t start the fire” cadence

or The Tubes' "Telecide".

most of the comments here are otm

I just remember it being a project ran by/for late-era gen x’ers and early millennials who didn’t necessarily have broad tastes, but felt there was some need to review things outside of their remit as an aspiring music website

the sneering bit is really a vestige of that demographic’s insecurity and a need to dunk on or joke about music they didn’t really want to understand

now pitchfork basically reads to me like any random mainstream music magazine of the late 90s, maybe a bunch of blind spots but a lot fewer niches that are really explored

well, that and the incessant need to create a new canon for past decades every few years

The secret is capitalism: pitchfork is run to gin up ad sales and ilx is only about spurning hat washing

― When Young Sheldon began to rap (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 6 October 2021 16:29 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Unless its Spiritual Hat washing.

was pitchfork really that popular among teens during the era when were reading it as teens tho? other than a super narrow slice of precocious kids, i remember only a few other ppl i knew who read it or were aware of it.

but every one of them started a snarky website

my anecdotal evidence that i, a real life teenager during "the early days", really did read it every day, along with lots of my friends, is undercut by the anecdotal evidence that i later moved to brooklyn

I read it daily from 2001-2007 or so, then moved over to RA and here, for the most part.

we're an over represented sample -- posting in a message board thread about pitchfork -- but my point is less a 1:1 comparison between teenagers who read pitchfork in 2005 vs teenagers who post on tik tok in 2021 and more a general statement about the way that music flows between ppl in each of those time periods. maybe teenagers weren't reading pitchfork in droves but if arcade fire first trickled down to you bcuz your friend's older brother heard them playing at a college party, it can still be traced back to pitchfork, or in a more general sense the concept of traditional media tastemakers/gatekeepers that no longer exists, if in actuality the patient zero in this hypothetical scenario was rolling stone, spin, college newsppaer, local radio station, whatever.

it's also not a binary, teenagers reading pitchfork today are also prob plugged into tik tok which has plenty of micro scenes dedicated to music that intersects w/ the tastes of pitchfork, be it queer indie rock singer songwriters, hyperpop etc. it's not all ppl doing synchronized dances, there's other (smaller) ways that music is incubated on tik tok. the flow of information was far more constricted when pitchfork was kingmaking bands overnight, now everyone from consumers to artists to publications to vloggers to tik tokers is swimming in the same ocean

Pitchfork remains part of the scrim of undergrads who buy, like, Turnstile and Wolf Alice albums -- small segment, sure, but it was small in 2005 too.

Also: so long as college radio stations exist -- the number diminishes -- Pitchfork still exerts influence.

^ ^ ^

very true.

ILM is a "mainstream poptimist message board"?

this is not what i think it is.

yeah, i hate Taylor Swift

poptimist doesn’t mean you think all pop is good, only that you’d evaluate on an equal platform with non-pop music iirc

I probably knew of pitchfork by the late 90s, wasn’t really tuned into music coverage until y2k or so, and by the time I left university in 2003 most of my friends in local indie bands, their friends, extended social scene regularly checked it out

then by the mid-late 00s I kind of shifted gears and figured out my interests were more at the edges of the wide net of interests and I don’t think I’ve looked at pitchfork more than twice a year

I don't even know who's left on ILM who still writes for Pitchfork besides a handful.

it's also not a binary, teenagers reading pitchfork today are also prob plugged into tik tok which has plenty of micro scenes dedicated to music that intersects w/ the tastes of pitchfork, be it queer indie rock singer songwriters, hyperpop etc. it's not all ppl doing synchronized dances, there's other (smaller) ways that music is incubated on tik tok

ya that's a good answer, i am pretty much ignorant of this and only see the synchro dancing part and amateur comedy side

here's some data. organic search traffic has been on the upswing (for some reason the historical data only goes back to 2012) for a long time (generally). But they are getting over 5 million hits from search monthly.

in terms of what's bringing people there, it's almost exclusively hip hop and R&B stuff (mostly rap), here are the top keywords, outside of riley gale from power trip and daft punk it's pretty much exclusively hip hop and weighted heavily towards new hip hop

depends on how you want to interpret it but imo i'd wand to see this weighted this by the total volume of search traffic for those terms. like say 100m people search xxxtentacion and 1% click the pitchfork link, that 1m, versus if 500k people search bon iver and 90% click the pitchfork link. there's an aggregate scale effect that would put similar numbers on any website's search. explains why 'led zeppelin' and 'electric guitar' are in the top 5 among non-hip hop terms

The electric guitar search is going to one of those advertorial "guide to buying your first guitar" things

The far right number is the total monthly search volume then the number two columns to the left is how much traffic goes to Pitchfork from that term at so you can see

ILM is a "mainstream poptimist message board"?

pretty clearly not, judging by recent years' poll results

We can’t even find enough pop for a Rolling Pop 2021 thread!

this place couldn't pop a balloon

Got to be honest with you all here: I was never into pitchfork, so me throwing shit at them is unfair because I’ve never been invested in them.

I’ve always been 90% more about finding music that aligns to my interests than thinking or reading about it, so usually what I look for in a magazine is to find a writer (or group of them) with similar musical interests to mine. Sure I’ll read what they have to say about the music itself but if I’m not interested in the musical environment they’re usually pushing - as has always been the case with pitchfork for me - then I’ll probably be looking for my music fix elsewhere, even if you have the best writers in the world.

To put an example of how little I cared about writing about music as opposed to finding new music: The years I was the most active in music research (2005-2010) I spent probably only one day of the week - usually Sunday - actually reading about music. My two favorite go-to sources were Dusted Magazine and Stylus. I think I’d sometimes give pitchfork and a couple of other zines a glance. On the other hand I spent at least three hours of every weekday listening to radio/podcasts like beatsinspace, dr.dk, vela, resonance, surgery and a really long list of mp3 blogs that I visited religiously. Not saying mp3blogs didn’t have good writing, some of them had some great writing - some like saidthegramophone, moist works, shakeyourfist, fluxblog had really good writing - but I was mostly coming back to those because I really liked their music taste.

Then there's of course ILM which is probably the most interesting spot for me to read opinions and get recommendations because it's incredibly diverse and counts with a rotating cast. I think I've been around here almost weekly for 15 years now?

With pitchfork idk… of course sometimes our musical interests would overlap - like per example they were really hyping The Books in their first couple of albums and they’re one of my favorite acts of the 00’s… but then pitchfork is dumb #18273554 and gives their best album a meager 7.0 and they have me shaking my fist at the sky and of course they pretty much completely forgot about them and changed their narrative by the end of the decade. Idk… we never seem to fully agree, we share some moments here and there at the party but at the end of the night we both end up going with someone else.

My two favorite go-to sources were Dusted Magazine and Stylus

aw

Fuck do I miss Stylus

Stylus had some of my favorite features of any zine I’ve seen: the format for “thesinglesjukebox” is genius and I wish every zine out there had a version of it, “seconds” is a beautiful way to revisit and review moments in a favorite song… this is a concept my favorite feature in a music magazine ever…the “top 10” lists were usually very creative and fun to read. Playing God too.

And hey, I think they also beat pitchfork with having a constant feature to reassess past albums with the “On Second Thought” section.

otm

* this is as a concept

The “Playing God with…” articles were AWESOME!!

Dusted Magazine

Apparently still exists :)

It's a tumblr page :(

singles jukebox is also still around

good morning!

I don't even know who's left on ILM who still writes for Pitchfork besides a handful.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 6, 2021 6:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was just thinking that it's kind of weird to talk about the site's self-conscious course corrections in the last few years as though it's still the same indie-rock guys from the early 2000s being like "Fuck, I guess we need to cover Bad Bunny now." Looking at the masthead, I think there are three staffers who started before 2010: Amy Phillips, Marc Hogan, and Ryan Dombal. The EIC (Puja Patel) is a woman of color who came over from SPIN in 2018 and was nine years old when the site started. The current staff is cognizant of the site's legacy and wants to build on it in a way that feels truer not just to the current cultural moment, but to their own unique perspectives.

(I should say: "I expect that the current staff is..." I don't have direct knowledge of that.)

I like to say with some pride that former Stylus people who moved to Pitchfork in 2007-2008 changed the site's ethos gradually.

I think the prevailing attitude on ILM in 2005 was poptimist in its original sense of being antirockist…This is different from a more recent critical mode that Whiney has called Poptimism 2.0, which praises pop through a new set of values that can be as limiting as old-school rockism.

…but maybe ilx/ilm doesn't need 1000 autopsies and an influx of young people. maybe it's just supposed to be a bunch of older people arguing about increasingly petty things until they don't, at the end

Admittedly my poptimist analysis was based mostly on the recent Top Ten Songs of the 1980s thread (which I can’t even find now). The issue is mainly subjective tho and Whiney’s take seems much more comprehensive than anything I have to offer.

Even if this were an issue of concern it’s not clear anything could be done about it, there’s no editorial board here. But I don’t want ILM to die because at this point there’s really not much else for a guy like me. Maybe if I was 20 years younger I would just be on TikTok, as is my only real alternative now is Twitter and that’s pretty fucking bleak.

Here you go

The 10 best songs from the 80’s

The dumb that keeps on giving:

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/pitchforks-25-next-list/