On January 23, employee unions picket in front of Condé Nast's offices in New York. The company is merging popular digital music publication Pitchfork with men's magazine GQ, sparking anger over the resulting job cuts and concerns about the store's future.Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images Hide caption
Toggle caption Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
On January 23, employee unions picket in front of Condé Nast's offices in New York. The company is merging popular digital music publication Pitchfork with men's magazine GQ, sparking anger over the resulting job cuts and concerns about the store's future.
Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Last week was a tough week for music geeks. I use this phrase with love and closeness. I'm (probably like you) the type of listener who loves music to the point of pain. And such a passion for new and beloved sounds makes people like us strange, perhaps for “normal” people who only listen to their favorite songs from their school days and go to only one concert a year. Or at least likely to find it interesting. A park or a pier.
I make this declaration of friendship because last Wednesday, as the editorial directors of the media giant Condé Nast sat in a conference room, sometimes petty distinctions came to the fore in real life. be. sunglasses He told the Pitchfork staff that the famous music web magazine would be absorbed into the men's magazine GQ, Star Trek-style, and that most of the people there would be immediately fired. Her note condescendingly thanking Pitchfork editor-in-chief Puja Patel (who was fired) was soon leaked online, calling the fallout “the best path forward for the brand.” Mr. Condé announced what he was thinking. The famous reviews section will survive, but only a small staff remains at Pitchfork. GQ's paywall is likely to limit the reach of the content the site publishes, prompting musicians and fans alike to make the site their home page and check out the day's new reviews in the middle of the night. It is inevitable that their identity will be questioned. I've experienced similar bloodshed at other publications, and I can't overstate the impact it has on morale and manageable workloads.
Since then, countless tributes and jeremiads have been published in articles and social media threads, with heartfelt farewells written. staff and regular Contributor Congratulations on the great job they did in publishing. Pitchfork's long life and evolution has dominated and defined 21st century music production. Fundamentally, it started as a blog fueled by the attitude of its mostly white male founders, and established itself through original, mean-spirited breads and odes to arty-yet-cool work by popular artists. Hipster bands like Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective were powered by a numerical scoring system. Although this system was not unique (Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide, still going at 51 years old), it strengthened his position as a tastemaker within circles such as Jonny Greenwood. God.
But even before its owners signed a deal with Condé Nast in 2015, Pitchfork began to transform, becoming more like a traditional magazine, publishing features and news alongside reviews. As its authority solidified, mid- and late-career editors such as Patel, Mark Richardson, Amy Phillips, Jill Mapes, and Jessica Hopper devoted themselves to expanding and diversifying Pitchfork's coverage. , reevaluated its heritage as an indie “kingmaker” (lol) and turned it into the publication perfect for covering the vast and fragmented waterfront of contemporary music. Over the past decade, Pitchfork has cultivated some of the best and most influential music writers working today. Now some of them are looking for work.
If you're not a super super nerd, you might wonder why Pitchfork's semi-annihilation caused so much anguish. The links above tell the story. I'll add a few more thoughts.
Good culture writing reflects the world it covers
Pitchfork's recent masthead and diversity of coverage is significant. It's been just four months since Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner's disparaging comments about women and BIPOC musicians caused a huge uproar. A number of former Stone employees have come forward with stories of systemic sexism and racism at the company, spurring a larger conversation about Rolling Stone's xenophobic history. music press. Pitchfork was part of that troubled lineage until its editors chose to actively confront it. Features like Sunday Review, which give well-deserved attention to hitherto ignored albums outside of the core of indie rock, highlight the behind-the-scenes stories as more women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ people rise to positions of power. It was a public expression of what was happening. At a time when music is proving to be one of the most beautiful and progressive spaces in our culture, Pitchfork's absorption into a men's magazine brand is a departure from a deeply conservative movement. It feels like. Scholar Robin James has written an insightful piece on how such movements reflect the mistaken assumption that “brothers” are more trustworthy consumers than women. I find this especially strange in a year where the biggest entertainment stories, from Taylor Swift to Barbie to Beef, have all been dominated by women and BIPOC creators.
Critics are also explorers
This blow doesn't just affect music journalists. It contributes to a larger downward spiral that endangers everyone involved in the music, beyond Swift's one percent. I'm not the first to point this out.Public Relations Officer Judy Miller Silverman I got it. Pitchfork covers experimental jazz, electronic music, and even the “out” subgenre. hawaiian slack key guitar “The whole 'economy' of musicians contributed to their success.” Author Mark Masters has linked this integration to a paradoxical narrowing effect. Advantages of streaming — Platforms like Spotify offer a galaxy of music, but their algorithms limit most listeners to narrow tastes and offer no context or real community. To those who say making music is pointless in the age of TikTok and other video-based platforms, ask artists who don't have the time or money to reminisce about the old days and become shiny, happy influencers. Please rake.many poured out one After the news broke.
usefulness is overrated
While the role of music production as discovery, promotion, and gatekeeping in the history of popular music is undeniable, I also wish to push back against well-intentioned attempts to assert its productive role within the entertainment industry. Masu. For me, the best thing about music production is that it is relatively useless compared to other elements of the cultural economy. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machine more than other forms. Celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out personas that turn artists into fetish objects. And because these Pitchfork scores make both a statement and a satire, many people enjoy the game of quantifying art and judging it as a performance or a product.
But what I love about music production is that it allows us to sidestep the productive, competitive side of culture: the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. In fact, writing great music creates space for you to slow down and immerse yourself in the creative work of others, sabotaging your productivity. Really listen. The best writing at Pitchfork and elsewhere reflects that process, and it's as colorful as human experience itself. Perhaps what a writer discovers within an album or song will become a new way of thinking about a particular musical practice, as they carefully analyze song structures and studio tools. Perhaps she will discover lost history, entire scenes, subcultures. Sometimes she reveals something she had forgotten about her own life story, the hidden coves of her own emotions. Perhaps the sonic innovations she encountered led her to use language in a different way, and what she ended up with is a kind of poetry. Reading the most powerful writing on Pitchfork, the kind of writing that some observers of the media landscape have declared obsolete and supplanted by influencers and algorithms, reminds me of my peers. I feel nourished by the boldness of the scribes. Art and emotion as a work of art, pausing to carve out a critical zone, taking time to think, laughing at a good line, feeling your brain crackle as you absorb an insight.
I'm talking about joy. At the end of the day, what's important in writing music is exactly the same as what's important about music, and that doesn't lead to anything productive. Instead, it offers a break from the busyness, a free zone for thinking, and some glorious rejuvenating fun. This is a different kind of joy than the instantly nerve-wracking kind that TikTok brings, where you're always moving on to another source of stimulation and constantly increasing the competition for your attention. Composing music says: Slow down. be careful. It witnesses and recalls meaning as it unfolds within measured time.
Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter once said it so well: Tweet I said the other day, “Loving music is one thing, but it takes talent, courage, and a beautiful human optimism to try to translate that indescribable feeling into words for us.'' Optimism is That's exactly right. People always make room for what is calming, what is stimulating, what is challenging, what others have created with their souls, and find ways to share it with others. Believing you can do it is a talent worth cultivating. At its best, Pitchfork offered many people the opportunity to live in the optimistic and gloriously meaningless space of loving music. I know that the writers this school has developed will continue to find ways to do so. That's where my hope remains.
This essay originally appeared in the NPR Music Newsletter. Learn more and subscribe here.