When it was announced, a few days ago, that Pitchfork would
be “folded into” GQ, I laughed. But what was so funny? For one, parent company,
Conde Nast’s use of the phrase “folded into” as if paper (or anything else foldable)
was involved. Also, for anyone who’s read Pitchfork’s music journalism with any
degree of attentiveness, we have seen the site mature beyond the rockist
paradigm of straightwhitemale to cover (and be covered by) a much more diverse
range of culture and cultural producers. So, to end up “folded into” – sorry I’m
gonna keep using the scare quotes to confirm that I am not and cannot use the
phrase with a straight face – Gentleman’s Quarterly, a veritable mancave of
grooming products, sockless suits, and other rebarbative, reinforcements of male-ennial
egos and entitlements, well, sometimes the farce is just too obvious. If
capitalism has a sense of humor, it’s knuckleheadedly broad.
I’ve read a number of requiems for the site over the past
few days – none of them, by the way, on Pitchfork, which has not covered its
own demise as music industry news (which it assuredly is). Some have discussed –
and blamed – the changing business models of the music industry. Others have
lamented the lack of interest in and attention span for thoughtful and longer-than-a-Ritalin-label
writing on popular music and its effects in contemporary culture. Still others
have pointed the finger at algorithmic recommendation engines, arguing that as
machines and (let’s face it) pretty rudimentary statistical models [X-is-like-Y]
or [subscribers-who-streamed-X-also-streamed-Y] supplant the model of the
expert/connoisseur/obsessive, we surrender our individual and collective
tastes to a system engineered for expediency and profit.
All the above are surely true and surely symptoms of what Shoshana
Zuboff has called “the age of surveillance capitalism” in which our greatest
value to society is our data as perceived from the single-point perspective of
clicks and likes. The algorithm is watching. But it doesn’t care if we’re
dancing naked or practicing cannibalism, so long as it can convert our online
actions into sellable data packets.
After my laughter subsided, my first thoughts were a little
different (although certainly related to all the above). I found myself wondering
when, as a society, as a culture, we stopped valuing the position that Pitchfork
occupied? Once upon a time, a writer or an editor, maybe even a publisher, would
dedicate time and energy to an endeavor meant to contribute to a debate of the
essential values of a particular field of human endeavor. Whether it be the Journal
of Applied Microbiology, Cat Fancy, Needlepoint Now, or Baseball
Digest, the founding and presiding concern of the publication would be to
engage with a readership who cared deeply, sometimes too deeply, about microbiology,
cats, needlepoint, or baseball. In the case of Pitchfork, the web site covered
the world of popular music, initially focusing on its somewhat less popular
strata. Since it began in 1996, Pitchfork rose in prominence and increased its
influence. To receive a high numerical rating from the site was a boon to an artist’s
profile and sales. (I can personally attest to this. My band, The Fire Show, benefitted
from ratings of 7.9, 8.1, and 8.7 for our three albums. Thanks Joe Tangari!) But
Pitchfork sold to Conde Nast in 2015 and started to shift its priorities, even
outsourcing its recommendations [if-you-like-X-you-might-like-Y] to Spotify.
When did we stop valuing the privilege of making contributions
to the discourse of a field? When did we decide that being the most respected
source of information for a given branch of the cultural tree was not good
enough to merit survival? When did we stop caring about the importance,
privilege, and even the prestige, of having opinions that other people
trusted? And last, but definitely not least, when did we decide that helping listeners,
readers, and viewers, make sense of the cultural productions with which they
engage, and in turn, to make sense of the world and their own place in it, was
not a worthy-enough mission? Note that I’m not asking why we turned our backs
on all these valuable roles. I know the reason, as do you, Conde Nast made it
plain. It’s about money. The bottom line is the final arbiter of value. Every
other form of value, be it protection, guidance, ministration, provision,
commiseration, compassion, generosity, can’t compete with the balance books of
the CFO.
I mourn the death of Pitchfork not so much for the
particular type of music journalism they offered. I read it every day in order
to understand and stay in touch with generalized currents, but I valued other,
nichier music sites more. I mourn the death of Pitchfork as a highly visible symptom
of this moment in technocapitalism. Conde Nast’s profit-driven decision is a
goiter on the gasping neck of a culture that once tried to tell us something
about who we are. The goiter will soon envelop the whole body and eventually
the head. We will all succumb to the accountants’ evaluations of what we do, why
(if) we matter, who we are. Music cannot escape being consigned to this list once
compiled by Karl Marx,
“Since money is the transformed form of the commodity, one cannot see what it was that was transformed into it – conscience, virginity, or potato.”
