The process of media consolidation has been such a grim march since before I was born that I normally hardly pay attention. Oh, Publication X is ceasing. Well I guess that’s rough.
But today’s announcement that Pitchfork was being folded
into GQ was a stab to the heart.
Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Pitchfork regularly – as I’ve discussed previously, it’s been circling the drain for a while. The site has over the past few years veered in an obnoxiously poptimist direction, favoring rhapsodic nonsense about a perfectly forgettable Ice Spice song rather than anything even remotely countercultural or in-depth, with even most of the indie they championed being remarkably inoffensive – I like Big Thief as much as the next guy, but they’re hardly leading a musical revolution. And yet it was still a devoted music website (i.e. not an app), a place where actual journalists were paid to actually write about music, without a video autoplay coming up every five seconds, without much-touted Spotify exclusives, without the morass of branded content.
This is where I should also point that it’s a bit suss,
to say the least, that this happened a month after Pitchfork’s union
successfully negotiated zero layoffs.
But once upon a time Pitchfork was vital. OK, sure, it was easy to make fun of. The painfully earnest reviews of indie music were often silly and overwrought, but it was, for those of us who grew up far from urban centers, a way to learn about the wider, weirder world of music beyond the top 40 at a time when radio airplay was still functioning as a cultural arbiter in piggly-eyed Middle America (hard to imagine in the era of Spotify I know) Along with the much-missed Tiny Mix Tapes, the website that single-handedly turned me onto so much incredible noise rock, it was an open invitation, with its year-end lists and decade retrospectives and its annual music festival that I attended every year for their first few years. Their long-form journalism was often brilliant, frequently heartbreaking, and always thought-provoking, and these articles introduced me to ‘90s Chicago post-rock, afrobeat from Fela Kuti forwards, and countless other veins of music I would have never known. Shoegaze seemed less a genre than an ideology. And in the same way I read and read so as to know the world, I listened and listened so as to know the world.
I’ll just leave this forgotten beauty here: https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6411-resonant-frequency-39
And in my dorm room I would restlessly search for Mediafire
and Megadownload .zip copies of these albums. I would pore through the mildewy
reek of the music library of our little college radio station where I was paid
a pitiful stipend as station librarian. I would find Youtube clips consisting
of scratchy transfers of old 7” Cherry Red singles paired with highly pixelated
album art. I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#A# (infinity) on my
Discman in winter fields. I would see shows in dank and grimy venues with only a
handful of other weirdos present. The Robot Ate Me tackled me to the ground and
may have dry-humped me as he sang on top of my pinned-down body.
Right now, I’m sitting at home, marinating pork shoulder in papaya and spices, to sear and then deglaze with Viognier. I long ago traded in my band t-shirts bought at sweaty shows and beat-up Chuck Taylors and Chrome seatbelt bag for linen shirts and Clark’s suede and a nice leather satchel bought at a Budapest haberdasher, and I’ve gone from couch stays in scrofulous shared houses to bitching about the Keurig selection in boutique hotels.
But I’m listening to those albums that meant so much to
me at one time. The self-titled Beach House album, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Asobi
Seksu’s Citrus, Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Albums that
once seemed to hold the key to something, in the lingering waft of Nag Champa
and shitty Iowa schwag at 17 years old, when some part of me fully believed
that the only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, and then they
buried her alive one evening in 1945.
And so the final burial of Pitchfork is another reminder of the general enshittification processes. All those feisty independent journalistic outlets and blogs that shaped my perspective have been outmoded by the algorithm, the treasure hunt has been replaced by the hopeless scroll.
This sucks. I hate it here.
At best, the better of those articles will remain floating in the floating world, ghosts to be found by people much younger than myself – a bit like the odd old issues of magazines from other eras you’d find lying around. Because ghosts are often so much more reassuring than the present.
