Kiera Butler
Recently, the legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau told me one of his favorite facts about the music industry today: there are more hours of music recorded in a single year than there are hours in a year; it is literally impossible for one person to listen to everything. Even the most obsessive music zealots couldn’t come close, but it’s funny to picture them trying — a nation of rock-nerd zombies joylessly trolling the MP3 blogs, night after waking night. Nick Hornby meets The Twilight Zone.
For those who don’t have forty hours a week to devote to panning for gold in the vast muddy river of new releases, there’s Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com), the eleven-year-old Web magazine that does the sifting for you. The main thing that distinguishes Pitchfork from the Rolling Stones and Spins of the world is its focus: album reviews — five new ones every day — that are aimed at helping the overwhelmed listener. “In some other magazines, what this band or that band did on the road gets more words than ‘Is the record good?’ and ‘Should you buy it?’” says Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork’s thirty-year-old founder and editor in chief. Not so at Pitchfork, where the other features on the site — breaking news about the independent music scene, interviews with musicians, and features — are merely extras.
The Pitchfork staff does have forty hours a week to spend filtering through new music, which is good because in their Chicago offices the first thing I noticed were the mail bins, stacked high against several walls and stuffed full of CDs. New releases come in at the rate of 500 to 700 every month from record labels, promoters, and musicians who hope to catch the staff’s attention. It’s not every day that the Pitchfork staff finds real gems in those bins, but when it does, the critical world listens.
Last year, Pitchfork was among the first to discover Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, an unknown, unsigned band from Brooklyn. After a Pitchfork reviewer in New York recommended it, Schreiber and the rest of the staff were floored by what they heard. In June, Pitchfork posted an enthusiastic review, praising the band for its “dizzily wowing vocal harmonies” and “richly buzzing” phrases. They rated the album a rare 9.0 on their ten-point scale, and in the months that followed, critics at major papers (The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, to name a few) weighed in. “Pitchfork is taken seriously,” says the freelance rock critic Jason Gross. “To print critics, it’s like, ‘We’re going to look like a bunch of old stupid sourpusses if we don’t get in on this ASAP.’”
It’s true. David Carr, the forty-nine-year-old New York Times media columnist and pop-culture reporter, considers Pitchfork his best defense against becoming the dreaded Old Stupid Sourpuss. “I get records at work, and every once in a while I’ll put them in, but I’m, like, a dad,” says Carr. “I can’t be walking around my house with headphones on all the time.”
As it has influenced everything else, the Internet is influencing rock music criticism, and in the rock criticism community, Pitchfork has become the first major Web-based tastemaker. Carr sometimes invokes Pitchfork’s opinions in his reviews. “In journalistic terms, Pitchfork allows you to express in short form that at least one tribe on the Web holds this band or that band in good regard,” says Carr. “It turns everything into apples, if you know what I mean.”
It’s fair to describe Pitchfork’s founder, the baby-faced Schreiber, as the antisourpuss. He’s infectiously friendly, and he can’t sit still when he talks about music he loves. In fact, during the hours I spent at Pitchfork, he barely sat still at all. As a kid in Minneapolis, Schreiber was lonely. His parents, both real estate agents, were out a lot, and even in elementary school he immersed himself in music culture. “I was so into music I was kind of weird,” he says. “Music was all I ever really wanted to talk about.” As I talked with Schreiber and the conversation cycled again and again back to bands and albums, I realized that music is still all he really wants to talk about. I asked him what he liked to read. “All I ever read actually is music reference and music publications,” he says.
In 1995, Schreiber was nineteen and fresh out of a lackluster high school career, with no real desire to go to college. So from his childhood bedroom he launched Pitchfork, posting a few reviews every month and interviewing every band he could badger into talking. After a few months, he began updating the site daily, and for the next few years he worked part-time as a telemarketer in the evenings so he could build Pitchfork during the day.
Over the next ten years, Schreiber expanded the site, soliciting freelance reviews and selling ads. After stints in a series of midwestern basements and bedrooms, Pitchfork made its above-ground debut in its new Chicago offices in the summer of 2005, when it became clear that the site — with a full-time staff of five, more than forty contributing writers, and 160,000 daily visitors — had finally outgrown the basement. Schreiber likes the new offices because “they remind me of an old detective agency.” Next door to a law office in a small building in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Pitchfork’s five-room suite is packed with thrift-store desks and squeaky chairs, and a handful of no-frills laptops. No private offices; no conference rooms. Close quarters ensure lively discussion. (On the day I visited, someone said, “Let’s hope the Red Hot Chili Peppers never put out another record”; someone else wondered aloud how such an “aesthetically unappealing band” could have gotten as big as it did, while others offered theories and explanations.)
Because Pitchfork has become a notorious arbiter of trends in rock, some readers have begun to wonder what the site’s review-writing formula is — and whether there is a secret recipe an artist must follow to produce a Pitchfork-approved record. In 2004, Loren Jan Wilson, a University of Chicago undergraduate, went so far as to devote his thesis to the subject. Using a computer program he wrote, Wilson analyzed Pitchfork’s writing to detect patterns in reviews. He found that artists that sounded “sad” or “plaintive” often elicited good ratings, while those that reviewers described primarily as “confident” or “assured” were less likely to score high. Using what he learned, he wrote two songs designed to fill all the criteria for a favorable review, but that part of his research was inconclusive, as Schreiber and company never reviewed the songs.
On the day I visited the Pitchfork offices, I came ready to witness the reviewing formula in action. I watched as Schreiber and Scott Plagenhoef, the site’s thirty-two-year-old managing editor, hunched over their laptops discussing the posting schedule for the next week.
“How big do we think the new Coup album is?” said Schreiber.
“It could B-List,” said Plagenhoef. (“B-List” reviews appear second on the site’s homepage, under the featured review of the day.)
“Ughhh,” groaned Amy Phillips, the twenty-four-year-old news editor from the next room. “That record is terrible.”
And the Pitchfork staff swears that this is how it goes. There is no formula except what seems too obvious: they pluck discs from the bins that they recognize from labels’ release schedules and friends’ recommendations, and sometimes they try a disc out just because its name or cover art appeals. The staff in the office discusses new releases, and Pitchfork’s writers weigh in from all over the country on a staff message board. After a bit of talking, writing, and listening, everyone has figured out how he or she feels about a record, and someone is in good shape to write a review.
As haphazard as the process seems, there’s a lot of history behind the particular tastes of Pitchfork, a history that is inextricably tied to Schreiber’s musical coming of age. In Schreiber’s case, a lot of the changing a person goes through between the ages of nineteen and thirty — the widening of perspective and the solidifying of identity — happened through music. “When you’re younger, there’s a lot of resistance to listening to music the kids you don’t like listen to,” says Plagenhoef. “I think once you get a little older, that clique-ish approach to listening to music changes.” In the late 1990s, Schreiber began to pull away from the insular world of indie rock he once inhabited, where musicians produced records cheaply on independent labels. In that world, loudly despising the way corporate record labels commodified music was de rigueur. Sick of the strict indie code of ethics, Schreiber began to pay attention to the mainstream, and he was surprised at how much he liked Top 40 sensations like Destiny’s Child and Gwen Stefani. From the echoes of electronic music he heard in pop songs to the Indian bhangra beats in the hip-hop that was popular at that time, he realized that mainstream music drew its influences from interesting and diverse sources.
But even as Schreiber’s tastes were changing, Pitchfork’s readers remained deeply loyal to indie rock, and when Pitchfork began to cover the mainstream, readers resisted. Indie rockers are famously suspicious of anything that is commercially successful, and some readers assumed that Pitchfork was being paid by promoters to review popular music. Others, who couldn’t quite believe that Pitchfork reviewers genuinely liked, say, the new Missy Elliot single, assumed the new coverage was, as Schreiber put it, “some sort of ironic flourish.”
Schreiber knows that if readers suspected that he’d crossed the line from covering the commercial music industry to participating in it, he would lose credibility fast. Thus he is slow to discuss Pitchfork’s commercial success. In December 2004, because of a computer error, a Web page revealing the site’s ad revenue became publicly available, and many readers were surprised at how much money the site was pulling in — and outraged that reviewers still earned only a measly $20 a review. When I asked Schreiber questions about finances, he squirmed and told me he didn’t want to talk about the site’s revenue because “that’s not how we really define ourselves.” But a current rate card reveals that the site is becoming increasingly financially competitive. Ad rates range from $3.50 to $8 per thousand impressions, with minimum buys of 100,000 to 300,000 impressions, depending on the size of the ad. In order for a medium-sized ad to appear 250,000 times on Pitchfork, for example, an advertiser would spend $1,250. (Web advertising rates vary widely — and they’re often negotiable — but Pitchfork’s published rates are on the low side of average among sites that attract a young, hip demographic. They are similar, for example, to the rates of the media gossip site Gawker.)
Among older music critics, there’s a kind of nostalgia for a time when albums didn’t arrive in the mail every day, when finding out about new bands meant becoming friends with the record store clerks in the know. Before 1966, when a seventeen-year-old Swarthmore freshman named Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy!, the world’s first rock magazine, hardly anyone had even considered writing about rock; music journalists stuck to classical and jazz. One year after Crawdaddy! appeared, a young Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone, and in the years that followed, critics like Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, and Greil Marcus proved to the world that rock was worthy of analysis; they wrote popular music into the cultural consciousness.
Crawdaddy! folded in 1979, but Rolling Stone, like the Rolling Stones, is still at it. And according to Schreiber and Plagenhoef, the magazine, like the band, also looks old and tired. Around the Pitchfork office, a mention of Rolling Stone elicits a collective wince. “It’s definitely an establishment magazine,” Plagenhoef says. “It’s the opposite of youth culture, which is what it’s trying to cover.”
In covering youth culture, the Pitchfork staff has the advantage of being overwhelmingly youthful. The senior citizens of Pitchfork’s stable of writers are in their mid-thirties, and the youngest are teenagers. Besides the practical benefits of their age (late nights at rock shows are no problem; family responsibilities are minimal; bands often speak more candidly with a peer than with some old dude), Schreiber likes the passion that young writers pour into their reviews. If you browse the archive, that passion is hard to miss. Phrases like “on all levels, a total fucking triumph,” and “fucking supersonic” are not uncommon ways to end a review.
But youthful passion has its limits. Although he enjoys Pitchfork critics’ enthusiasm, Robert Christgau thinks their reviews tend toward “opinion-wielding for its own sake.” Pitchfork’s writers, he says, simply aren’t old enough to be able to put an album in its context, so they opine freely, blissfully ignorant of the past sixty years of rock history. “If these guys would like to leave their world, and especially go back in history, that’s much harder. They just haven’t heard enough music.”
He has a point. Some of the reviews do seem to scream I-just-took-this-great-creative-writing-workshop-at-Bard, especially the ones that read more like prose poems than rock criticism. But free-form music reviews are nothing new. In his 1974 essay, “How to be a Rock Critic,” Lester Bangs wrote about the willingness of magazines to publish pretentious screeds. “Most of them will print the worst off-the-wall shit in the world if they think it’ll make ’em avant garde!” he wrote. “You could send ’em the instruction booklet on how to repair your lawn mower, just write the name of a current popular album by a famous artist at the top of the cover . . . and they’ll print it! They’ll think you’re a genius!”
While Pitchfork’s most opaque and pretentious reviews are a few notches of formal innovation short of a lawn-mower manual, Plagenhoef admits the writing can be “impenetrable and masturbatory.” He’s right. “Let’s talk about reductionism, shall we?” begins the recent review of a Stereolab record. But the blather is far less common these days, especially because a few years ago, one particularly off-the-wall review contained so many factual errors that Schreiber had to retract it. You learn from your mistakes.
And from each other. Fundamental questions — like what makes a record a perfect 10 — come up again and again in continuous staff discussions. Schreiber thinks a 10 is a “timeless classic,” but Plagenhoef isn’t sure “timeless” matters. “I don’t think what someone might think about a record in five or ten years should affect how we think about it today,” he says. (On the perfect-zero front, the staff is more unified. They think about perfect zero the same way that Dante thinks about damnation: to deserve it, you have to do something deliberately foul. When The Flaming Lips produced an album that required four stereos and four copies of the album for a complete listening, the Pitchfork staff agreed to take the release as an act of hostility. It was a zero.)
Joe Levy, the executive editor of Rolling Stone, said of Pitchfork, “Those guys are working in the great, uncleared forest, free to grow without editing.” That isn’t exactly true. In the past several years, Schreiber and Plagenhoef have refined the editorial process, and writers sometimes go through several drafts before they post their reviews. But when unexpected problems arise, the staff makes decisions on a case-by-case basis, and sometimes those decisions draw criticism. Last year, Schreiber and Plagenhoef decided that the reissue of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” album deserved more than the 8.7 rating they had given the original release. So they pulled the old review and replaced it with a new one — and a new rating of a perfect 10.0. Schreiber was surprised when readers complained. “I didn’t think anyone would miss the old review,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Turns out people will whine about anything.”
Figuring things out as you go along isn’t always comfortable or easy, but working in that great, uncleared forest also has its advantages. Schreiber has discovered that running Pitchfork, like finding great records, is a matter of listening widely and making up your mind; talking about your strong opinions with people who have strong opinions of their own; and then diving once again into your pile of unopened CDs and getting back to the real work of running the site. There’s a lot going on at Pitchfork these days: the staff is planning the site’s second annual music festival for July, and they’re in the midst of expanding the site so it can support more MP3s so readers can do more listening. Throughout the day I spent at Pitchfork, Schreiber darted around the office, fielding phone calls and making plans. But every once in a while, he would look up at those towering crates of CDs and tell me guiltily, “I really need to go through those bins.”
 Zijin (www.zijin.net) studies journalism ,communication, Internet communication. As a privately run website,it was founded on March 18th,2000. Originally named “Zijin Journalism Review", it changed to Zijin on October 18th, 2000. Started by Mr. Zizoo, Zijin is one of China's earlist academic websites on journalism and communication, well-known among its counterparts in China. |
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