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TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling

TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.

Cheer2171 3y ago
I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music. If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On"). Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall. You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  To me, a good review clearly explains why. If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully and well! There is no "right" in "like."
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Sure, for example Roger Ebert's review of "Shallow Grave" complains that nobody he knows is anything like these characters. I'd watched and greatly enjoyed the movie by the time I read that review, but he's probably right. However all the people I lived with at the time were way too much like those characters.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    I still think you might be missing the point of Pitchfork. Pitchfork is more about the cultural conversation around media than the content of that media. Take their 1.9 review of Tool's Lateralus [1], which was very positively reviewed at the time by most people who liked metal and prog rock, and has since become one of the most influential metal/prog albums. Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don't like metal and prog rock, then you probably will hate this album, because it is a tour de force of these relatively unpopular genres. If you like metal and prog rock, then you probably will love it." Because that's pretty much all a reader needs to know. Pitchfork's "review" does something completely different. It isn't really about Tool's music, it is about Tool's fans. The "review" is in two parts. The first part is some odd self-referential material that regular Pitchfork readers will recognize as signaling that a parody review is coming. Then the second part is a parody review in the voice of a sixteen year old boy writing a class essay about his summer vacation for his high school English teacher. Except it isn't about his summer vacation, it is about how awesome this album released over the summer is compared to the pop and dance music that stupid girls listen to. It is intentionally parodying the most obnoxious teenage Tool fan you can think of, who thinks he is really smart and is a fan of music only intelligent people can appreciate, when in fact he is just attracted to an aesthetic at a surface level in the exact same way he criticizes of pop and dance music fans. The review is so utterly positive about the album, but for reasons that have so little to do with the actual music. The positive review is positive for all the wrong reasons. It is not a commentary on the music, but on the fans of the music and the "I'm cool because I listen to something underground that most people would hate" attitude. It obsesses about the drummer's specialized technical equipment. It invents some ridiculous cosmic cycle that Really Good Music only comes once every 16 years, and we have been waiting for this album since Metallica released And Justice For All in 1987. The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today. [1] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/
- Ghos3t 3y ago
  As someone who rarely visited pitchfork, this adds a lot of context, thank you
- nradov 3y ago
  When Apple launched iTunes in 2001 it destroyed the value of music reviews. Buying physical albums used to be expensive, and sometimes you would kind of get cheated. You would hear a banging single on the radio and buy the whole album only to realize that the other tracks were just filler. So, a review by a good critic could save you from wasting money on a low-effort album. With iTunes and similar services, users can buy individual tracks instead of a whole album and listen to previews before they buy. Why waste time reading a review if you can listen yourself and decide whether it's worth buying? And now with the broad availability streaming services like Spotify, written reviews are even less valuable; you pay the same regardless of what you listen to so there's no financial risk of trying new music.
- ses1984 3y ago
  In the mid 2000s I remember following a redditor who worked in the music business and he would predict pitchfork scores for anticipated albums with crazy accuracy.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The twist was that Pitchfork staff followed the same redditor.
- secretsatan 3y ago
  > I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music. This was my view of it, I constantly found the reviewers irritating and I rarely paid much attention to the scores, it was just a good source to check out new, interesting music that wouldn't get any exposure anywhere else
babyshake 3y ago
Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.
- dj_gitmo 3y ago
  Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. Is it really so implausible that a notoriously hip indie music blog would have been ahead of the curve on a cultural trend? Certainly some of the people who became big names in 2010s identity politics movements were writing on similar blogs a decade or more before their cultural moment (e.g. I didn't follow Pitchfork, but I remember Laurie Penny writing extensively for Freaky Trigger).
    - dj_gitmo 3y ago
      New York digital media was the epicenter so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a factor, at least for the past few years. The Reply-All meltdown comes to mind.
- WaxProlix 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Brananarchy 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - 3y ago

Cheer2171 3y ago

I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music. If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On"). Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall. You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.

ethbr1 3y ago
To me, a good review clearly explains why. If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully and well! There is no "right" in "like."
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Sure, for example Roger Ebert's review of "Shallow Grave" complains that nobody he knows is anything like these characters. I'd watched and greatly enjoyed the movie by the time I read that review, but he's probably right. However all the people I lived with at the time were way too much like those characters.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  I still think you might be missing the point of Pitchfork. Pitchfork is more about the cultural conversation around media than the content of that media. Take their 1.9 review of Tool's Lateralus [1], which was very positively reviewed at the time by most people who liked metal and prog rock, and has since become one of the most influential metal/prog albums. Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don't like metal and prog rock, then you probably will hate this album, because it is a tour de force of these relatively unpopular genres. If you like metal and prog rock, then you probably will love it." Because that's pretty much all a reader needs to know. Pitchfork's "review" does something completely different. It isn't really about Tool's music, it is about Tool's fans. The "review" is in two parts. The first part is some odd self-referential material that regular Pitchfork readers will recognize as signaling that a parody review is coming. Then the second part is a parody review in the voice of a sixteen year old boy writing a class essay about his summer vacation for his high school English teacher. Except it isn't about his summer vacation, it is about how awesome this album released over the summer is compared to the pop and dance music that stupid girls listen to. It is intentionally parodying the most obnoxious teenage Tool fan you can think of, who thinks he is really smart and is a fan of music only intelligent people can appreciate, when in fact he is just attracted to an aesthetic at a surface level in the exact same way he criticizes of pop and dance music fans. The review is so utterly positive about the album, but for reasons that have so little to do with the actual music. The positive review is positive for all the wrong reasons. It is not a commentary on the music, but on the fans of the music and the "I'm cool because I listen to something underground that most people would hate" attitude. It obsesses about the drummer's specialized technical equipment. It invents some ridiculous cosmic cycle that Really Good Music only comes once every 16 years, and we have been waiting for this album since Metallica released And Justice For All in 1987. The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today. [1] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/
Ghos3t 3y ago
As someone who rarely visited pitchfork, this adds a lot of context, thank you
nradov 3y ago
When Apple launched iTunes in 2001 it destroyed the value of music reviews. Buying physical albums used to be expensive, and sometimes you would kind of get cheated. You would hear a banging single on the radio and buy the whole album only to realize that the other tracks were just filler. So, a review by a good critic could save you from wasting money on a low-effort album. With iTunes and similar services, users can buy individual tracks instead of a whole album and listen to previews before they buy. Why waste time reading a review if you can listen yourself and decide whether it's worth buying? And now with the broad availability streaming services like Spotify, written reviews are even less valuable; you pay the same regardless of what you listen to so there's no financial risk of trying new music.
ses1984 3y ago
In the mid 2000s I remember following a redditor who worked in the music business and he would predict pitchfork scores for anticipated albums with crazy accuracy.
- defrost 3y ago
  The twist was that Pitchfork staff followed the same redditor.
secretsatan 3y ago
> I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music. This was my view of it, I constantly found the reviewers irritating and I rarely paid much attention to the scores, it was just a good source to check out new, interesting music that wouldn't get any exposure anywhere else

babyshake 3y ago

Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.

dj_gitmo 3y ago
Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. Is it really so implausible that a notoriously hip indie music blog would have been ahead of the curve on a cultural trend? Certainly some of the people who became big names in 2010s identity politics movements were writing on similar blogs a decade or more before their cultural moment (e.g. I didn't follow Pitchfork, but I remember Laurie Penny writing extensively for Freaky Trigger).
  - dj_gitmo 3y ago
    New York digital media was the epicenter so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a factor, at least for the past few years. The Reply-All meltdown comes to mind.
WaxProlix 3y ago
[flagged]
- Brananarchy 3y ago
  [flagged]
- 3y ago