Hmmm, humm, haw. So for 90-plus percent of us, in North America anyway where there's no NME, Pitchfork has been our main source of music news for a decade or more now. Has the effect been positive or negative? Where are we at?


This book demonstrates a lot of what's right with the 'fork and a lot of what's wrong. It's their only book, and it supports the assumption that I'd always made that their bread is buttered on the list side (so to speak) and that most of the reviews and the feeble stabs at news and cultural crit they make are viewed internally as more service journalism, or maybe a chance for writers to spread their wings out of the 150-word blurb genre. (Brent DiCrescenzo's anarchic and misunderstood concept reviews will stay with me as a high point of the site's output.) They've done album and song and video lists for every year and decade that makes any sense, and while they didn't shed much light on much of anything--my friend says that if you just ignore the top pick and pretend #2 is #1 and so on, they're always exactly right--but they certainly provided fodder for discussion and prognostication and the occasional bets. (I'm proud of losing ten bucks when the number TWO song of the '90s turned out to be "Common People"--duplicating its British chart performance upon release, incidentally--and the number one was some bullshit from Pavement--and so okay, what's wrong with that is in some ways what's wrong with the site--upper middle-class indie bubble, right? Who except three fortysomethings with cardigans thinks Pavement was a top-flight group?


And the fact is that we've had a skewed version of contemporary music history pushed on us by these guys--started out more middle-American indie-when-that-meant-emo-when-that-meant-exes-on your hands, studded belts, etc. I think it's funny that n+1's recent history of hipsterdom sees the "Pitchfork era" as an agglomeration of, you know, beards, animal bands, dance-pop, mainstream rap, and beginning around 2003 and supplanting an earlier culture based more around vice and art shows and electroclash and Terry Richardson and so on. Maybe in Williamsburg, but in the rest of the continent Pitchfork preceded or was contemporaneous with Vice, and they were just two different strains of the culture--and imbricated, of course, overlapping again and again in surprising and shifting ways. But anyway, the point of this paragraph is that it got tiring having Pitchfork imposing its sameness on us, and especially a sameness that was like enough to ours but also different enough to seem like an irritating mockery at worst and a shallow, blinkered misunderstanding at best.


So I assume they avoided the sixties in this book because they didn't want to say a bunch of shit about obvious songs like "Pet Sounds", and there is definitely some good curatorship--the art form of the '00s--here. Lots of shit I haven't heard of, good historical breadth dating back to '77, no Department of Eagles. Certainly it seems insincere, and for a list of obscure new traxx you could do better on the internet and for a coffeetable book you could do better with [The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex] (do those brackets do links in reviews the same way as they do in the forums? I guess we'll find out). But it still has much tunes to give. Anyway, I shot it an extra half-star in recognition of the site's, not the book's, influence on all of our everyday lives and youth culture this last decade, without necessary trying to sum that influence up or decide whether it was good or bad. It was large. ( )

Even if you think that Pitchfork was good 5 (or more) years ago and now it's crap - this really is a must-read. I haven't agreed much with PF lately myself, I don't think every Animal Collective album is genius and I think Vampire Weekend are boring. But the fact is all best-songs-ever lists I've seen always have three things in common: They include about a thousand songs from the usual suspects (Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Radiohead etc.). They generally stick to the philosophy that Older Is Better, suggesting that musically not much happened since Nirvana. (The 2000s are practically absent from most tops - and we are, after all, only one year away from entering a new decade) And, of course, a last great problem is that there really isn't that much variety. Where's twee in all these anthologies? The most you'll get is a mention of The Vaselines or Belle & Sebastian. Where's fabricated mainstream pop in the last two decades? Or has there really been nothing good after Madonna or Prince? Also, doesn't at least one Of Montreal song deserve to be on EVERY LIST there is? Now say what you will about PF, but this book has all these things. There's twee and there's pop and there's Of Montreal. There's Eminem, there's My Bloody Valentine, and there's Minor Threat and there's Bright Eyes. And yes, there's Radiohead, Bowie and The Rolling Stones, but there's also Kylie and Justin. And there's also Modest Mouse. And there's also The Decemberists. And for that you should read this.

review originally posted here:
http://letterarms.blogspot.com/2009/01/ciao-and-welcome-back-dear-reader-buon.ht... ( )