My first music review covered “I’m In Love With You” by The 1975 (“Being Funny In A Foreign Language”). I eagerly wrote it in one sitting on the evening of the day it was released. That was a Wednesday. I approached the then-editor of Laker Review about writing music reviews for the Oswegonian. My pitch was not just an idea but a fully-written article. I thought the song was terrible. I still do. In my words, “[Matty] Healy’s ultra-English voice has the cultural pride of a Britpop star but with the realness of whatever the posh equivalent of a ‘bro’ is.”
The review was my attempt to emulate the sharp wit of Pitchfork, the Internet’s hub for written music criticism. Pitchfork appealed to my “music nerd” identity. It treated albums released by mega pop stars like Ariana Grande (“yes, and?”) and experimentalists like Arca (“Яitual”) as equally worthy of coverage. As controversial as some of their reviews are, Pitchfork reviews are essential reading for aspiring music critics and journalists.
So the news disheartened me.
A staff memo circulated online through a tweet by journalist Max Tani. Condé Nast, Pitchfork’s parent company, had announced plans to absorb the online music magazine into the men’s magazine GQ. Anna Wintour—yes, as in “The Devil Wears Prada”—chief content officer of Condé Nast, signed the letter. The merger plan coincided with layoffs of Pitchfork employees, including its editor Puja Patel.
Wintour wrote that “both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism.” While GQ’s music journalism is not terrible—Cassidy George’s feature on the resurgence of nu-metal fashion is fascinating—most of it is in no way “unique and valuable.” GQ, which originally stood for “Gentlemen’s Quarterly,” concerns itself more with metrosexual fashion and celebrity access than it does with music. Imagine the uproar among Pitchfork’s indie rock disciples if they referred to Acetone (“I’m still waiting.”) as “the rock band you’ve probably never heard of,” as GQ did.
Pitchfork’s founder Ryan Schreiber derived the website’s name from Tony Montana’s tattoo in “Scarface.” However, I read it as a double entendre. A pitchfork is a tool that reverberates a tone, as well as a weapon for an angry mob. Likewise, Pitchfork got its reputation from amplifying independent musicians while also inciting fury from readers who took their hot takes a tad too far.
Under GQ branding, Pitchfork will lose that critical honesty it built itself a name for and adopt the soulless copywriting that permeates online journalism. This change is not entirely new: Pitchfork gradually incorporated mundane top 10 lists and filler content alongside its trademark album reviews and insightful longform essays. Its early reviews experimented with form, such as the opening lines of their famous review of “Funeral” by Arcade Fire (“WE”) that read like a generational manifesto or an infamous Jet (“Shaka Rock”) review consisting of a gif of a monkey too crude to even write out. But even as it grew more traditional, its reviews still exhibited creative prose, like you knew humans wrote them.
But GQ, a magazine for grocery store stands, does not mesh well with what made Pitchfork worthy of reading. Like most publications navigating the Internet’s flow of constant content, GQ does not have time for creative risk-taking when there is a bottom line. It seems that Pitchfork has received the final brunt from a culture of money-minded media professionals who conflate being mature with being boring.
Some reveled in the news of Pitchfork’s folding. Several tweets repeated the conservative slogan “go woke, go broke” in an apparent interpretation that Pitchfork fell due to its expansion to music outside indie rock and employing female, transgender and non-white writers. Many of Pitchfork’s original devotees, stereotypically young white cisgender male hipsters praising indie rock, saw the controversial 2015 article “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie” as a threat to their readership.
In reality, this has nothing to do with diversity, and Pitchfork is one of Condé Nast’s most lucrative brands. The decision is more likely an attempt at union-busting. The NewsGuild of New York, with whom the Pitchfork union affiliates, met in December with Condé Nast representatives. The company promised the guild that the previous announcement that the company would lay off 5% of its employees would not apply to Pitchfork staff.
Condé Nast seemingly lied. Susan DeCarava, the guild’s president, released a statement four hours after Tani tweeted the memo calling the company’s management “untrustworthy” and that the Pitchfork staff “deserve better than to be treated like disposable parts.”
Music critics mourned. Schreiber expressed “sadness” at the layoffs of the writers, who he called “integral to its operations for years/decades.” The fact that Pitchfork, which distanced itself from its reputation as a website for men, now belonged to a men’s magazine felt like a massive step backwards. NPR critic Ann Powers wrote that Pitchfork’s diversified staff was “crucial” to its success: “No disrespect to ‘gentlemen’ but we need the diversity it gave us.”
Broadcasting professor David Crider teaches a course here at Oswego every spring on how the development of the media affects popular music. When I took the course last year, he raised an open discussion on whether music critics were relevant today. Why care what a critic thinks when we can immediately stream the song for ourselves? Why look to Pitchfork for new music when an algorithm curates a playlist for you?
Crider took a live poll, and many students, including myself, credited YouTuber Anthony Fantano and his channel TheNeedleDrop with influencing their music taste. Fantano has indeed usurped Pitchfork’s audience, or at least given them a close competitor. They both carved an identity as musical encyclopedias chastising music snobs while dodging that same label for platforming indie artists. They even share the same notorious system of rating music out of 10, a system that incites fierce online debates. Fantano’s virality proves that a market for music critics persists in the streaming age.
To discredit music critics as useless commits the same misunderstanding as Condé Nast. This mindset treats music reviews as unsolicited PR for products rather than a literary art form as valid as the music itself. I avoid defining music critics as commentators on the music industry, not because the industry does not exist, but because treating music as inherently a product misrepresents the craft behind it. I do not read Pitchfork or listen to TheNeedleDrop as authoritative consumer guides. I go to them to find opinions from people as passionate about music as I am. Music critics are not the bosses. They are the talkative coworkers at the water cooler.
In fact, the vast ocean of music available on streaming makes a music critic a utility for music explorers. Fantano’s dedication to listening to every artist worth commenting on justifies his self-label as “the Internet’s busiest music nerd.” But what Fantano offers through a hip and memeable personality, Pitchfork provides through a whole team of writers.
That is, the team whom Condé Nast fired much of their talent, and whom the rest now work for GQ.
Wintour claimed that the merger was “the best path forward for the brand.” It probably was not. The merger will not only eliminate the passionate criticism that propelled Pitchfork from its start. It will also hurt the reputation of music criticism as a legitimate art. It will force the community of avid music nerds it cultivated to rely on a music sphere getting increasingly fractionalized. It will disappoint a generation of young Pitchfork-influenced music critics who aspire to share their writing with a wide audience.
But importantly, the real victims are the Pitchfork employees witnessing the instant disposal of their careers at the hands of “industry leaders.” Pitchfork will not die—I hope—but under the GQ brand it will certainly be incarcerated.
Image by Mick Haupt via Pexels
