Farewell to an idea — the demise of Pitchfork

I was one of the brown gay people who hated Pitchfork in its unaccountable early years.Just hated it. A review of a late ’90s Pet Shop Boys album, one that survived banishment from the reach of the site’s search engine, captured the tone of Triassic-era Pitchfork: a giggling, smirking offhandedness that made readers feel like cretins for wincing at its homophobia.

My attitude hardened as the new millennium began. An advisor to the student-run college newspaper and radio station (where I remain), I heard Pitchfork mentioned often, the news section in particular. Once in a while I’d glance at the site when someone alluded to, say, reviews of Arcade Fire’s Funeral or Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm. No offense meant to their authors — Dave Moore, late of The Singles Jukebox and his own marvelous Substack remains one of the inquisitive of writers — but the larger context in which they were embedded still sucked. The posture of Pitchfork’s content rejected people like me.

Besides, I dwelt in a house of possibility. Edited by the indefatigable Todd Burns, Stylus presented itself as an Earth-3 Pitchfork. Although Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Interpol got their pats on the head, we published reviews of Toby Keith, of Barbra Streisand’s 2005 sequel to Guilty (1980). The On Second Thought feature, in which I specialized, reappraised putative boomer dross like the Rolling Stones’ Dirty Work. Our first Hall of Fame designates were ELO, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Kate Bush. “Poptimism”? Whatevs. We took radio seriously when Clear Channel/iHeartMedia wrapped its tentacles around programming decisions. We were Pitchfork’s superiors by a margin of a 100; when Stylus folded in late 2007 our competition hired several staff writers.

Not me, though! Disappointed and sometimes enraged, I bumbled along during the early Obama years. Thanks to my former Village Voice editor Rob Harvilla I found steady employment at SPIN for the rest of the 2010s even after his departure. Then, rustlings: Jessica Hopper reached out to me about expanding a Pop Conference piece for The Pitchfork Review. She and her staff subjected me to one of the more rigorous line edits I’d experienced to date, thanks to which the essay (on queerness and synths) remains the sort of achievement I hope my obit writers cite. Still, I attended Pitchfork Festival a half dozen times and felt like a squatter.

We like to think, based on the shibboleths recited by the corporate and political leaders whose mistakes were forgiven and their promotions encouraged, that Hard Work will result in success, without accounting for the lucky breaks that can happen in line next to a guy in cargo shorts. Mine happened in 2017 when Puja Patel took over SPIN. The vigorous wooing of POC, queer, and non-conforming talent which became a lodestar of her eventual tenure as Pitchfork editor-in-chief were in evidence already. The other break: Pitchfork finally included me in their pitch email. Jeremy Larson let me write about Arto Lindsay, Liza Minnelli’s weird wonderful Pet Shop Boys collaboration, and several pieces that could’ve been Sunday Reviews (about which I was coy pitching for unaccountable reasons), such as defenses of George Michael’s stardom-sucks album and a re-consideration of Moving Pictures, the first Rush review to appear on the site (yay?), just as my review of Brandi Carlile’s 2018 album is the site’s first (and last to date, sigh). I wrote about K Michelle. Hell, they let me get away with a long-ass Bryan Ferry essay two months ago!

Friends with knowledge on contemporary prestige media will offer better theoretical explanations: advertising versus subscription models, for example. I return to this tweet:

there’s so many awful aspects of this, but the fact that p4k is being taken over by a men’s magazine while women’s media outlets are being shut down left and right is so demoralizing. great way to make sure that this industry remains the boys’ club that it’s always been.

— distopian dream girl (@grace_roso) January 18, 2024

“Niche advertising.” Nine years ago, Condé Nast bought Pitchfork because in the words of their chief digital officer the site “had delivered a very passionate roster of millennial males into [their] roster.” The numbers — the once-important “clicks” — matter less than the perception of success. Think about using logic to a Trump voter. Insist that inflation and gas prices are in decline and you still endure Brandon jokes. Logic is irrelevant. Numbers are less relevant. “Even trying to assess the issue through Condé’s corporate lens strains logic,” Laura Snapes observes. Hence, exiling Pitchfork on the sinking island of irrelevance called GQ reads like a final insult at Patel, Snapes, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Anna Gaca, Hannah Jocelyn, Nina Corcoran, and the other women and non-binary writers and editors whose contributions pissed off the assholes and pedants who think Pitchfork went under because we covered Taylor Swift. It turned into a site where “Caroline Polachek was considered as big of a star as Olivia Rodrigo,” as a friend remarked on the ILX message board.

Music reviewing may face extinction, but don’t blame shifting audience tastes and demands. Audiences read what providers give them. Exploiting the demise of a cultural moment decades ago that left few prepared for the end of Cold War propaganda aimed at a white middle-class readership, our corporate Saurons imagine an ideal demographic to mercilessly target. Demographic shifts haven’t come fast enough: we live in a world where white male millennial Saltburn types remain objects of desire. To devote several days of coverage to experimental hip-hop and free jazz in a doomed attempt at brand resetting might’ve gone even less well than, I dunno, listicles about Taylor Swift’s 2023 boyfriends.

So we beat on. Right?