People criticize Pitchfork Media for being overly pretentious, to the point where I've heard their rating system parodied as 'a scale of one to ten based on similarity to Radiohead.' People believe that the site searches for a certain ideal rather than judging for quality in the many different genres of music. Others rely on the site for their source of music news, cool videos from old favorites, new releases and bands to watch. And it really does have the whole music world on surveillance, from main stream hip hop to practically inactive art rock groups. Even though they only post 5 album reviews a day when more than 5 have been released, it seems like its gears never stop churning out content.Like the public I have a love hate relationship with Pitchfork. I love that they organize the new releases for me so I can see what's coming out, but like I said it's never a complete list, and I usually find something unnerving within the first 2 sentences of a review which stops me from even considering the rest. So overall I view them with expected irritation. Take this for example:
"You wouldn't need to pay attention to the lyrics on Lacrosse's sophomore album to understand that every track is about love. Not just any love, mind you-- a big, big love; the sort of gigantic feeling that..."GIGANTIC? A BIG, BIG LOVE? Are you going to follow through with the Pixies reference, or not? Control/Command+F "Pixies" on that page and you will find that NO, he does not. Shouldn't I be happy or excited to have caught a pixies reference somewhere? Shouldn't my soul feel touched by this shared interest between myself and some other pixel of humanity? Probably, but instead, I am upset and confused because I've never heard this band before and now all I want to know is, do they play or sound like the Pixies?
(Besides, a shared love of the Pixies is not that special. It's more of a social prerequisite.)
However, the rest of the review does provide a good sonic image of the band's new songs, and that lead was setting up one big, figurative leap to describe the music:
"The music is enormous and often overwhelming, with every hook and gesture blown out to absurd extremes of joy, desire, and anxiety, emulating the heightened emotional reality of romantic comedies and teen soaps. Every moment of the album sounds incredibly exaggerated, but at their best, Lacrosse replicate the intense drama of ordinary love with uncanny accuracy."Writing about music is one of my favorite things. A creative writing teacher once told my class that playing with the senses is one of the most fundamental components of good writing. When people take acid they hallucinate because their perceptive signals all cross. The signals from their eyes are going where signals from their ears should go, and signals from their taste buds go where sight should go and so on. (Check out Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way on the History Channel or youtube for a more comprehensive explanation). And that is exactly what you are supposed to do in figurative language; don't compare something visual to something else that's visual. Switch everything around. Compare a guitar riff to the sight of a tree falling, compare the taste of pie to the touch of a mountain breeze or the sound of a train crash. (These are not the best specific suggestions, but you get the point; match up sound and sight and taste and touch and so on). Music is made of sounds that are not necessarily words, so when you write about it, unless you spell out the lyrics or come up with onomatopoeia for the instruments, you have to turn to the other senses in your description. Since we are land-creatures in a world under the sun and rely heavily on sight rather than echolocation, people fall into an excess of visual descriptions in efforts to make their writing cinematic. But it's okay to do this when you write about music, because you're not necessarily writing about anything you can see (unless it's a live review). So you can say that something is huge rather than just loud, and a music review automatically becomes one of the most delicious and refreshing pieces of aesthetic criticism you could possibly read.
Pitchfork writers often do this well, but sometimes they are too hasty to really commit to some beautiful verbal reproduction of the album and say stupid things. It really depends on who is writing the review; sometimes you can tell that the particular individual is simply not predisposed to liking the artist's work, which calls the objectivity of the reviews into question. In the Céline Dion 33 1/3 book, Carl Wilson insists that taste relies on familiarity. Since reviews are inescapably subjective, you would want a metal head reviewing metal albums and a seasoned pop diva writing about the pop releases. Though it would be refreshing or interesting to see that one indie pop band changed a diehard punk and hardcore listener's opinion on the aforementioned sugary genre, you want to hear about a new band or album from someone who understands it and is best equipped to describe it to you. While it would seem that everyone at Pitchfork is well-informed of each piece of music's relevance in the music world, and are able to draw immediate, inspiring comparisons between artists, they commit this foul in featuring artists that it would seem no one on staff could possibly be qualified to assess.
Nothing causes me to question who they think they are better than when Pitchfork reviews mainstream pop and hip hop acts, as when they reviewed Beyoncé's latest album.
'Reviewing Beyoncé?? Oh, no, Pitchfork. This is not your place,' I thought, upon seeing the thumbnail and rating. 'Seriously, Pitchfork, who do you think you are???' But when I read the review... I realized, they were right. Beyoncé's mediocre score was more than fair and they gave her all due props to justify their evaluation in terms of the singer's own high standards. Still, can't Beyoncé figure it out for herself if she's not on top of her game?In 2008, Gossip singer Beth Ditto toasted music journalism at Webster Hall in New York, with a plastic cup of amber liquid and a giant 'fuck you.' She basically convinced me that music journalism is sick and wrong. To paraphrase, she said that people spend their whole lives being beaten up by bullies in school and when you get out of school you think you're escaping the popular kids who ostracize you. Musicians pour their hearts and souls into their art to express themselves, and the people at major music publications like Spin, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork spend all of their time finding new and mean ways to make fun of them and tear them down. She then called them 'the New Jocks of High School,' (and later led the crowd in protest chants, which was honestly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen or been a part of). I think Brooklyn Vegan were the only ones, though copious photographers were there to represent other outputs, to cover this and include the rant.
This reminds me of the Strokes song where Julian Casablancas pokes fun at the pop culture pundits trying to keep up with and make sense of new music:
"Oh dear, is it really all true?(These lyrics might be inaccurate, as I copied and pasted them off the Internet since I don't have the CD insert lying around from 2003).
Did they offend us and they want it to sound new?
Top ten ideas for count down shows--
Whose culture is this and does anybody know?
I wait and tell myself, "life ain't chess"
But no one comes here and yes, you're all alone"The Strokes, "What Ever Happened?" Room On Fire [RCA, 10/28/2003].
Music journalists judge other people's self-expression while simultaneously flexing their artistic muscles in their own trade, writing. It seems unfair to use someone else's art, possibly containing large percentages of his or her soul, to further your own. Even within visual arts, music and literature people constantly borrow from and inspire one another, but this is different. This is less like cheating on a test or copying techniques from someone else's painting and more like talking shit about people to make yourself feel better or getting people to like you over mutual hatred.
In this view, though, music is something that is to be experienced and enjoyed, but not graded or evaluated. Is it wrong to have an opinion about what constitutes as good or bad music? I DJ and write for a culture blog, and in both métiers, if there is something I don't like, I don't feature it. Maybe Pitchfork operates under the same principle, owing to the fact that the number of reviews they post is more disproportionate to the number of actual new releases than the rising cost of education is to the rate of aggregate inflation. (Fact-check that one). But then how do you explain their rating system? Sometimes an album will receive a low number (a 5 or lower is bad), without a particularly scathing or negative review. I think people get most upset with this site when the critics tear apart an artist they've loved for years.
The right to critique is under attack in all fields of journalism in the face of the rights to privacy and expression, particularly in recent years where the indulgence of the populace has turned celebrities into an industry. We attack the media for disrespecting individuals' privacy, whether a field of cameras sprouts up outside the scene of a car accident or Paris Hilton's doorstep, and furthermore for confounding stupid shit with actual news. (RE: Hilton versus car crash). Yet music and music journalism have been each other's lifelong accessories and neither would survive without the other. (Or is it 'neither can live while the other survives, eh?)
My frustrations with Pitchfork boil down to one suggested course of action. Someone should critique their critiques. It would be equally ridiculous as journalists and music fans critiquing music, and equally necessary. There needs to be someone to check the validity and fairness of these reviews, and grade them for style and content. A sister site, the accessory to the everlasting accessory to music. Any other amateur writer or music listener or I would be just as qualified to criticize them as they are to criticize music. I do not have time to run such a site, but this is my humble suggestion.
