pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

like to be clear this is an unexpectedly good move and he's very much hypergarbage thread material

okok fine I'll give him a whirl

Haven't heard the album, don't know the artist, but it's a very very good review by Alphonse Pierre. Very informative, analytical, and just very well-written. Hope stuff like this doesn't go away.

Pierre's not a hack.

I'm assuming that in these transitional times, BNM is probably going to mean "Stuff that Alphonse Pierre really likes".

Current headlines on pitchfork.com:

- Grammys 2024 Ballot: Vote Here
- Oscars 2024 Best Picture Nominations: See the Full List
- André 3000 Announces New Blue Sun Live Tour
- Oscars 2024: Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” “I’m Just Ken,” and More Nominated for Best Original Song
- CSS Announce First North American Tour in 11 Years
- The Killers Announce Las Vegas Residency, Playing Hot Fuss in Full
- Frank Farian, Boney M. and Milli Vanilli Founder, Dies at 82
- Oscars 2024: Oppenheimer, Poor Things, and More Nominated for Best Original Score
- Sunny Day Real Estate Announce Diary Anniversary Tour

Tbf, there are a lot of numbers, which is very on brand.

whoa didn’t realize frank farian died. hall of fame music industry scum bag

MarkoP at 7:53 24 Jan 24

I'm assuming that in these transitional times, BNM is probably going to mean "Stuff that Alphonse Pierre really likes"

it could do and has done a lot worse

I wrote about Pitchfork in this week's Burning Ambulance newsletter.

I have never written for Pitchfork. I used to pitch them once in a while, but none of my emails were ever answered, so I stopped. I once appeared on the radio with site founder Ryan Schreiber, debating the merits of Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Other than that, I was just a reader, and an intermittent one at that. I’d visit the site every day, but rarely find anything aligned with my interests. But unlike some of the assholes currently celebrating Pitchfork’s de facto destruction by parent company Condé Nast, I don’t view that as a failure of the site. It was vast, and my interests are relatively narrow.

The thing you need to realize and remember about Pitchfork, as it collapses (almost all of the staff have been let go, including people who spent close to two decades shaping it), is that it was never one thing. Indeed, all this past week, as people griped about the site on social media, you could tell when their impression of it was fixed. Some of them still thought of it as a place where white dudes offered snarky judgments of indie rock albums, as it was in the early 2000s. Some thought it had sold out its indie rock purity in order to cover pop music for girls, which is what people were saying in the 2010s. Still others thought it was a bunch of earnest kids filtering music criticism through “woke” identity politics, which was a common complaint a few years ago.

Pitchfork was all those things and more at one point or another. Its editors and contributors threw a lot of ideas at the wall, and they balanced coverage of “indie” “rock” with coverage of “mainstream” “pop” and hip-hop and metal and country and jazz and modern classical and noise and just about everything you can imagine. They even reviewed one of the albums on my label (though it was on more than 40 other labels too, and they credited it to Phantom Limb). Sometimes they could be dilettantish — for a while it seemed like Vijay Iyer was the only jazz artist they’d heard of — and they’d develop enthusiasms (we’re gonna cover metal now!) that would be abandoned after a while as though they’d never occurred at all.

Like I said, Pitchfork was vast. It was the hub of popular music criticism of the last 20 years, in terms of size, in terms of audience passion, in terms of real-world impact (from how its reviews could buoy or sink an album or even a band, to the Pitchfork Festival), in terms of how it shaped the way writers wrote about music. If it wasn’t all good, well, what is? And who cares? It was important. It was necessary. And it sucks that it’s going away. Yes, the brand name still exists. Yes, some staffers remain. Yes, it will continue to publish. But don’t kid yourself, Pitchfork as it was is dead.

What does that say about music journalism as a whole, though? I’m gonna be optimistic (or at least stoic) and say, Nothing. There are as many people interested in reading intelligent writing about music today as there were yesterday. Condé Nast doesn’t see enough profit in that audience to continue giving them what they want. That’s all. The question “is this a thing worth doing?” and “is this a thing I can get paid to do?” are not the same question. So yeah, someone else will have to start rolling the rock back up the hill, doing the work to establish the next big must-read spot. And in the meantime, a million niche blogs and newsletters (like the one you’re reading) will keep on keepin’ on.

But don’t kid yourself, Pitchfork as it was is dead.

Time will tell.

Nah, I think the 'as it was' part is dead on.

Some of them still thought of it as a place where white dudes offered snarky judgments of indie rock albums, as it was in the early 2000s. Some thought it had sold out its indie rock purity in order to cover pop music for girls, which is what people were saying in the 2010s. Still others thought it was a bunch of earnest kids filtering music criticism through “woke” identity politics, which was a common complaint a few years ago.

not sure it's been mentioned but this week's NYT popcast features an enjoyable interview with Ryan Schreiber & Chris Kaskie on the history of Pitchfork

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/arts/music/popcast-pitchfork.html

The question “is this a thing worth doing?” and “is this a thing I can get paid to do?” are not the same question

yep

There are as many people interested in reading intelligent writing about music today as there were yesterday. Condé Nast doesn’t see enough profit in that audience to continue giving them what they want.

This resonates. Pitchfork is dead will never be as it was, but the energy of the people who made it what it was, both readers and writers, still exists.

yeah, and tbh i really do think some Defector-style site could wildly succeed, they've just get out there and seize the opportunity.

carpe patreon

and tbh i really do think some Defector-style site could wildly succeed, they've just get out there and seize the opportunity.

― omar little, Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:24 PM (thirty-one minutes ago)

not a criticism of this post specifically but i think in general when people bring up defector they have to remember a couple of things

1. deadspin was a part of a group of websites where what would now be called something like "community building" was prioritized from the very top of management and threaded through everything the company did. writers were encouraged to interact with and cultivate relationships with commenters, commenters were encouraged to write blog themselves, the line between writer and reader was constantly being blurred, the connection between the two was to be as tight as conjoined twins

2. the deadspin staff quit in a highly publicized event, amid arguments w/ comically evil bosses, during the trump administration, when people (liberal website readers, the press) were highly attuned to stories about i.e. malfeasance of power, people being silenced for their political opinions, unions etc

3. so when they walked off the job you had an easily packaged news story that hit hot button sociopolitical topics (bernie sanders tweeted his support) *PLUS* a very loyal readership base that had been built up over a decade-plus who were ready to follow an equally loyal set of writers & editors to the ends of the earth to keep the website alive

this combination of leveraging a sizable and passionate audience as well as catching run off subs from people who saw supporting defector in the same light as subbing to the washington post, or who maybe just read about the drama in the news and liked the idea of an independent sports site, is very hard to impossible to replicate. a group of writers banding together to start a new music site would have a really big hill to climb that the defector guys, to their immense credit, had already spent 5-10 years scaling

It's also possible that Pitchfork won't change as much as we assume.

you're correct on all those points, which created a perfect storm, and also i'm sure there was a lot of righteous anger remaining from those who had followed the gawker saga and wanted to support a group of writers who were related to that site and to an extent represented the best aspects of gawker media.

he energy of the people who made it what it was, both readers and writers, still exists.

― beard papa, Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:17 PM (one hour ago)

i'm of two minds of this. i think this is somewhat true, and i also feel excited by the future of a return to blogging for music criticism, i think it will lead to some really good coverage that would not fit in a more institutional setting. no bells already a great example of this

by the same token, if there's no money in music writing, it will continue to be a young person's game, even accelerating along that path, and young music writers are good for a lot of things, like translating culture and surfacing new artists and being canon breaking shitheads, but they are also bad at a lot of things, like being stewards of history, bringing real life experiences to their writing, being good writers... etc

so i think there will be a lot that we lose even as we possibly gain some stuff in whatever rises from these ashes

I've been seeing this like this pop up on social media: A new music magazine (via Broccoli)

Also, Defector and Pitchfork are fundamentally different things because people's relationship to sports (the way they think about it, the way and the degree to which they argue/obsess over it) is fundamentally different from their relationship to music. Just look at how music people talk about the Super Bowl halftime show (scoffing, shrugging) vs how sports people talk about the Super Bowl (the most important thing to ever happen).

J0rdan S. otm, just also want to chime in with the so-obvious-it-barely-needs-restating fact that sports coverage is historically way more popular than music coverage. Feels relevant to the Defector story

xp

looks like i xp-ed with unperson making the same poitn more eloquently

and I've got old-timer friends who lament what ESPN did to sports reporting

Just look at how music people talk about the Super Bowl halftime show (scoffing, shrugging)

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF inducion... which do generate a lot of scoffing & shrugging, but also online chatter among "music fans" (although not so much here)

and I've got old-timer friends who lament what ESPN did to sports reporting

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:40 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

these are pretty prevalent opinions especially since ESPN switched over to a Stephen A. Smith hot take format for the most part

The RRHOF is so stupid but it was the catalyst for Loutallica.

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF induction

Fair enough. I muted the word "Grammy" on Twitter several years ago because I felt so bad for all my putative peers having to pretend to give a shit (or, worse yet, actually getting excited) about that shitshow.

That explains why you missed my tweets offering you $50K to help promote Grammy Crackers, my new snack product

i also think that sports journalism was more easily able to adapt to having less access to talent, as well as that talent becoming more media trained and less interesting, than music and other celebrity journalism. people consider the analysis of sports to be part and parcel w/ the basic act of consuming the sport -- every TV broadcast of every game has multiple people training a critical eye to what is being broadcast, synthesizing information for the audience in real time etc. sports journalism has been pretty hard hit (check the LA times and ESPN layoffs) so i don't want to go too far, but the idea that you watch the game and then read (or watch or listen to) analysis about it is simple muscle memory for most sports fans. sprouting from this is the idea that deadspin -- whose motto was "sports news without access, favor, or discretion" -- could not just survive but thrive in a role where the lack of access is highlighted as a selling point.

the same just isn't true for music... there's a much, much smaller portion of music listeners who hear a new song or new album and then, to put it in a sports parlance, think to themselves "my experience here is not complete without a post-game break down." so the market for analysis is just not as robust even as a matter of percentage of interest w/in this readership bubble, which puts more emphasis on the need for access -- a music publication "without access" is, essentially, a blog, and we're pretty aware at this point that you can't employ 12-15 people by running a music blog. so if you were trying to run a business (as defector is) you would need some level of access, but who is going to give access, good access, to a fledgling music site? which musicians are even open to giving a good quote? and anyway what is even the point of the access? (everybody in culture journalism knows the answer to this now: there isn't one)

once you start thinking about music writing as a business it's really hard to bridge some of these gaps in the way that lay people just intrinsically think of the product that this entire journalistic apparatus exists around

Just to reinforce the point that Deadspin had writers whom readers were eager to follow elsewhere: Drew Magary has 173K Twitter followers, and David Roth has 137K. Both of them have their own Wikipedia pages. Meanwhile, of the people listed on the Pitchfork masthead before last week, it looks like the one with the most Twitter followers is Philip Sherburne with 26K, followed by Puja Patel with 25K. Neither of them have their own Wikipedia page (nor, as far as I can tell, do any other former staffers, including Ryan Schreiber).

a music publication "without access" is, essentially, a blog, and we're pretty aware at this point that you can't employ 12-15 people by running a music blog. so if you were trying to run a business (as defector is) you would need some level of access, but who is going to give access, good access, to a fledgling music site? which musicians are even open to giving a good quote? and anyway what is even the point of the access? (everybody in culture journalism knows the answer to this now: there isn't one)

You may not be able to run a successful mainstream pop music website anymore (for multiple reasons, from lack of access to big stars to fear of stan armies and on and on), but it's my belief that there's absolutely room in the world for smaller, more niche music websites. If you narrow your focus to just, say, country music, you'll a) still be able to get access; b) reach a devoted audience, even if that audience only numbers in the thousands; c) quickly earn respect within the industry if you do the work properly. The same is true of jazz, and within jazz there's a hidden economy — music schools and instrument manufacturers do heavy ad buys in DownBeat and Jazziz (and, once upon a time, in Jazz Times, before that magazine was bought and set on fire by its insane new owner). Look at AllAboutJazz, a website that just keeps plugging away year after year. No one in the broader media ecosystem is paying attention to it, but it's self-sustaining, and therefore successful.

but the idea that you watch the game and then read (or watch or listen to) analysis about it is simple muscle memory for most sports fans.

I literally spend a week listening to sports talk radio and podcasts and reading articles about the upcoming Vikings game, then watch it, the spend the next day reading articles and listening to podcasts about the game that I just watched.

A nice post by Mark Richardson, reminiscing about some of the Pitchfork staffers who were let go:
https://markrichardson.substack.com/p/early-encounters-with-future-pitchfork

xpost MetalSucks still stays afloat too, it seems

(to unperson)

Just to reinforce the point that Deadspin had writers whom readers were eager to follow elsewhere: Drew Magary has 173K Twitter followers, and David Roth has 137K. Both of them have their own Wikipedia pages. Meanwhile, of the people listed on the Pitchfork masthead before last week, it looks like the one with the most Twitter followers is Philip Sherburne with 26K, followed by Puja Patel with 25K. Neither of them have their own Wikipedia page (nor, as far as I can tell, do any other former staffers, including Ryan Schreiber).

I know it was previously mentioned that there's really no such thing as a "household name" music critic, but it does feel to me that p4k, as good as the writing could be, didn't often publish writing that overwhelmed the institutional voice, if that makes sense.

It had a lot of great, admired writers, but doesn't really have a "break-out" voice like Magary or Roth, or like Charles Aaron in Spin, or even like the AVClub writers a decade ago. Not sure if this was an institutional prerogative, or if it's the difference between how Pitchfork related to its readers, compared to Gawker/Deadspin (as J0rdan S. described) or AVClub.

for the record i'm not saying i wish that p4k was more like the circa-2010 avclub

I mean that was essentially The Dissolve.

"Pitchfork" wasn't even a "household name" tbf

i've been thinking this week about an interaction i had a pitchfork festival some years ago where a random kid in the crowd noticed my VIP bracelet and asked me how i got it, and when i said "well, i write for the site" he said "what site?"

straight out of a Greta Gerwig script

A music Defector would need to be more like the columns section of Punk Planet than PFork, developing the personalities and engagement through snark.

I wonder what happened to that Veronica Mars character who got a Pitchfork internship

AllAboutJazz, Metal Sucks ... there are a half-dozen equivalents for country music and punk and maybe others. I actually think there's more room for these kinds of sites now than there used to be, and that they get better access to artists / artists are more open to talking to them than ever before. Every week, I see what I think is a reasonably "big" artist doing an interview with some website I've never heard of. (Granted, my reasonably big is probably two levels below the artists J0rdan is talking about that wouldn't give access to a fledgling music site.)

Of course, I don't think any of these kinds of places can actually make a living for more than one person, maybe two ... and certainly not 12-15.

thank you for the link jaymc, I enjoyed reading that long post by Mark Richardson

I wonder what happened to that Veronica Mars character who got a Pitchfork internship

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Thursday, January 25, 2024 5:39 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He reviewed a Swedish indie-pop album:
https://pitchfork.com/artists/5248-sakert/

(In his Rolling Stone piece, Marc Hogan wrote, "When a character on the TV show Veronica Mars mentioned getting an internship at Pitchfork, the editors playfully slapped his byline on one of my reviews.")

Playful slapping in the Pitchfork office