Pitchfork (1996 - 2024)

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.”