Pitchforkmedia: Mass Opinion Generator or Invaluable Indie Resource?

Abe: Pitchforkmedia.com and I have an intimate relationship.

Each morning, I open my eyes and rouse my laptop from her slumber. I have just one topic for my sweetheartk: “Heard any good music lately?” I run my finger along her and click the link for Pitchforkmedia.com. Call me a tool. I just call it love.

For those of you out there who aren’t regularly accused of music snobbery, congratulations for making it this far. Allow me to explain. For the past few years, Pitchforkmedia.com has been the reigning champ of online music criticism for that amorphous pseudo-genre we indulgently call “indie music”. Every weekday, their crack team of critics (including our very own indierati prince, Nick A. Sylvester ’04) post up news, reviews, interviews, and features, offering guidance to thousands of kids looking for their daily fix of interesting sounds.

And yet, for some reason, people are always going around talking a line of poo about how the ’Fork is a malignant influence on today’s youth. Poo-talkers like you, Henry. I have a laundry list of reasons why such arguments are shallow and, indeed, hypocritical. But I want to give you the benefit of the doubt: do your worst.



Henry: Hammie, I use Pitchfork often, I love music, and I’m a sucker for a kickin’ melody, but isn’t it awful when people regurgitate opinions from the Internet, shunning certain music for fear of banishment or, worse yet, pretending to love everything for the sake of undermining said stereotype?

You know those people who claim eclectic musical taste? These claims are mostly empty. Anyone who writes “eclectic” on thefacebook.com listens to and loves anything Pitchfork feeds them. Eclecticism’s most common manifestation in college is a playlist full of Pitchfork favorites with some token polka/showtunes/Bulgarian songs intended to impress or throw off any curious onlisteners.

I came upon Pitchfork around the tenth grade, and was, for a while, the sole user of said opinion-generator amongst my peers in Duluth, Minnesota. All I needed to do was grab three bands off the home page and download some of their songs in order for my “eclectic” musical taste to reach renown .

This monopoly on such mind-numbingly obscure bands as “the Shins” molded me into a veritable musical übermensch, a power I abused to court “the ladies” and plug into the local college community. For that profound expansion of social capital, I am eternally indebted to Pitchfork.

It wasn’t until arriving here that Pitchfork’s hidden flaws reared their ugly heads. My sense of camaraderie in musical savvy quickly gave way to a startling realization: every one of these indie-philes I was meeting read Pitchfork daily, adapted it to their needs, and in doing so crafted a musical “personality” though a process as efficient as a Model T assembly line. Some read further than others, wading through the blandly melodic and arriving in the safe realm of the avant-garde (read: unlistenable).

Thus, I quickly realized that listening to a man heaving frozen yams at himself over an engineered beat was just Harvard’s equivalent of burning “This is the Dream of Evan and Chan” for every girl I had a crush on in junior year. Those goddamn Record Hospital DJs will deny it, but don’t listen to them: they love yams.



Abe: Okay, the way I see it, you’re making the typical hater criticism of Pitchfork, and really, the criticism that our dads probably made towards Golden-Age Rolling Stone and that their dads made of Prehistoric Big Band Monthly or whatever.

You’re saying that media advice on music leads to lots of people cultivating similar tastes in music, moving from this to arguing that “cultivating similar tastes” equals conformity, and concluding that this “conformity” creates a class system, where those who don’t conform are made to feel like idiots.

Here’s my argument: That class system is always gonna be there. Jerks are jerks, now and forever. Even in a Fork-free environment, people are going to find out about obscure yam-based concertos, and lord that information over those who don’t. What Pitchfork does is actually widen the playing field, and harness the power of the jerks to empower the non-jerks.

When some snobby P-Forker who likes digging through record bins finds an album like Broken Social Scene’s “You Forgot It In People”, and then gives it a 9.2 rating, all of a sudden, anyone with a dialup connection can hear about it and seek it out. The good, non-commercial music is no longer the sole domain of the chumps.

You can lead a horse to electroclashtastofreakadancefolkyfunk, but you can’t make him drink it. If someone doesn’t like what the rock critic community likes, they don’t usually listen to it. If their friends make them feel like fools for that, it’s the friends that are the problem.

I won’t deny that Pitchfork sometimes sways my opinion one way or the other—it took me a bit longer to come around to the new Beck album than it may have, had the Fork reviewer described it as great—but ultimately, people tend to go on listening to music that they like and making their own judgments on it. They merely have a way to find additional music that might interest them.

Plus, all of this is kind of a dated argument, in a way. The real snobs that I know sound suspiciously like you, my friend. They tend to be the ones who, in a dazzling feat of meta-snobbery, decide that Pitchfork’s opinions are anathema, and doubt themselves if they agree with this merry band of traveling hipsters.



Henry: Is there something inherently wrong with Pitchfork, a phenomenon that sparked a convergence in the evolution of musical tastes and the boring conversations about who discovered Modest Mouse first? Maybe not. But there IS something wrong with taking any musical advice at its word, and, what’s more, with ignoring certain music because other people choose to do so.

Is it true that people look down on Pitchfork users? Sure, and I would agree with you that those are the real snobs you and I know and love to hate. I would contend, however, that their argument differs from my own, and it is their brand of snobbery that makes me wonder about “indie” music in general. What the hell is it, and why do we care? Give me the damn Goo Goo Dolls again, they don’t pretend to be anything but cheesy.

Perhaps my instinct to hop on the anti-Fork bandwagon (a smaller, more dilapidated wagon then the Fork model itself) stems from my attachment to word-of-mouth, an age-old method of discovery that necessitates… gasp…real human interaction on some level. If you sit alone and bulldoze through the recent reviews on Pitchfork, it seems to perpetuate the isolationist, ever-headphoned culture that I most concretely associate with those “discovering themselves” on Pitchfork. Spend that time talking and listening to music with other people, branch out and meet new folks to learn from, all that communitarian idealism…anybody?

Sure, there needs to be something like Pitchfork, and I don’t advocate its demise. But when that something is as powerful as it has proven to be, it zaps our desire for interaction, spurring us to refer each other to this or that review instead. Abe, remember our nostalgia for the mix tape/CD, as both a method of wooing a crush and of expressing oneself?

Playlists on iTunes are a poor comparison, and if we perpetuate our dependence on stereotypes, the musical love-exchange of our high school glory days may go the way of our GPAs and physical fitness, and other such relics. That, at least, is something many of our readers can relate to. Pass the yams, I’ve got a concert this weekend.

—Staff writer Abe J. Riesman can be reached at riesman@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Henry M. Cowles can be reached at hmcowles@fas.harvard.edu.