Destroy Pitchfork: Isn't This Fun?

This is to dance what Art Brut is to rock: cheeky, charming, too straightforward to worry about style, ramming through the fundamentals as if pure enthusiasm is the most important part of making music.
- Nitsuh Abebe

After more than a year of feeling a little old and slightly distracted, Pitchfork has finally published a review about why one should listen to pop music. It sounds like a revelation. That Mylo's Destroy Rock & Roll is actually worth a listen certainly helps, but here is a review that for the first time in awhile that made me want to listen. I think that is why I started reading Pitchfork in the first place. No one needs to know about all these random indie-rock bands. What should I listen to?

But was that the reason I started reading Pitchfork? The great contradiction to Pitchfork's popularity in the past three years as the writer's music site, is that it was started by a man who couldn't write a functional essay. Ryan Schiber--harborer of good taste though he may be--has yet to say a single interesting thing. It's fun to point out the obvious, like his early review of Beck's Odelay, but it's continued for years. There's Radiohead's Ok Computer which says nothing much, Wilco's Being There which gives it a ho-hum review, The Rapture's Echoes that tries to talk about dancing, and of course The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds that is just, well, the worst review I've ever read.

It would be quite easy to point fingers at Pitchfork, especially since it is much bigger than it was five years ago when I started reading it, if I hadn't checked their site every single day. Pitchfork is a part of my daily routine. I care about it, worry about it, and criticize it when I feel like it needs it. It has changed over the past three years from an irony-drenched site for college aged music nerds, to a site trying to really understand the cutting edge of music.

Ryerson Review of Journalism has an article that believes that Pitchfork needs to lay off the irony if it's going to survive. It tries to explain how the kitschy rock reviews popularized by Brent DiCrescenzo were fun at the time, but now something a little more enlightened is needed. I'm not really sure. What is interesting is the discussion of DiCrescenzo's review of the Beastie Boy's To the 5 Boroughs. It was published, then promptly removed, edited, and reposted in the nice clean version that appears currently on their site. The original is a mess. It's chaotic and rambling. It's loud and inaccurate. But it's also more illuminating. Here is an excerpt:

Nostalgia, emotional context, the continued story and history behind the artist, the packaging, and everything else matters in my love and fascination with music. This is why writing for Pitchfork, which prides itself on discovering unknown underground artists, means so little to me anymore. Listening to music as some form of continued, insular experiment with recording driven by faceless, MP3-based rock
bands bores me.

I don't believe I'm the only one to feel a little bored by Pitchfork's best albums of 2005, which excluded Bright Eyes, Broken Social Scene, Gorillaz, Danger Doom, and the Deadly Snakes. But it wasn't even that I felt like they didn't accurately cover the year, as I slowly realized that I didn't seem to care that much. While many great albums could be found, none of them seemed to play that big of a role in any of the reviewers lives. Contrast that with the NME's raves about the next random savior of rock, and you could be excused for yawning a bit.

My past year has consisted of trying to keep up with everything. Who was pushing the limits; what did I need to hear. At the end of 2005, a group of us compiled a list of the 50 best albums of the year. The list could have stretched into the 80's. What did I learn from the exhausting and admittedly addictive and pleasing game? No one needs to listen to 80 albums in a year.

The New York Times had a fascinating article on the nature of Year End Lists. "More often, lists are a way for consumers to evaluate whoever made them, a handy way to pass judgment on the people who pass judgment for a living." Pass judgment? I love to do that. And that's something Pitchfork is excellent at doing.

The numbers at the top of each review tend to only validate already known bands. I usually get most of my music from excited recommendations from friends or from, god forbid, the NME, which seems to actually love some of the music it writes about. If a Pitchfork review is below an 8 and I've never heard of them, I don't read it.

Nitsuh Abebe's statement about enthusiasm questions the nature of pop music and whether it can or should ever be genuinely critiqued. The idea that an album can be rationally appraised, much like a toaster in a Consumer Reports, is rather ridiculous. Yet, magazines still churn out new reviews of albums that over-analyze some random guy making folk music in Iowa. Is there anything intelligent about what he is doing? Is there ever anything intelligent to say about rock music? There are gut reactions, fist pumpings, dancing, drunken sing-a-longs, laughing, crying, zoning-outs, tranquil-times, and rave-ups. Great stories have been told; poetry has been related. But is there anything really more to say than: this is really, really good?

In the end, Pitchfork doesn't have any thing to do with the number of great albums that come in. A review of an unknown band that is completely average is never going to be an exciting read. But when a gem comes in and the music is playing on tiny headphones across the country, isn't the best statement these sites could make, like Abebe did at the beginning of the Mylo review, to say: "Isn't this fun?"