My 24 Years of Pitchfork

The grinch you hoped would never get gooped on. Alas. An ode to the early days.

Pitchfork was how I knew the internet was working.

Every morning for almost 24 years, my day has started with command-T in the left hand, a quick "pi" in the right. My fingers defaulted to the combination at some point, I don’t know when. It isn’t uncommon for half my browser tabs to be the front page of Pitchfork.

My degrees say otherwise, but in college what I studied was the history of recorded music. Pitchfork was my first curriculum. I knew nothing outside of jazz back then – hadn't even listened to a Beatles album straight through. Popular music, as good as it was in the late 90s, didn't speak to me. I wanted what I liked to say something about me. Wallflowers signified nada.

There were better music publications. But what Pitchfork offered me in the year 2000 was an attitude. Relentlessly skeptical, hopelessly romantic. Makes sense: the site was started by a Gen-Xer in his childhood bedroom. It happened to become more than that. But at first Pitchfork was just Ryan's way of hearing the world, and an attempt at creating meaning around the things he loved. It reminded me of two other Gen-Xers who created meaning around the things they loved, Beavis and Butt-head. Uh-huh: Some music needs to suck, otherwise how will you know when something’s good?

That felt like another unspoken rule at the time: If a lot of people like something, there must be something wrong with it. Taste was zero sum, take no prisoners. There was only so much oxygen in the air. In the early days of Pitchfork, some genres simply weren't worth investigating at all: dance, pop, rap, r&b, most acts on major labels, anything that lacked guitars. This was a reflection of Ryan's early myopia. 20 years later, he’s still the most open and excitable listener I know. But at the time his hard lines made the site feel trustworthy, like a wise older sibling. To like everything, in a way, was to like nothing at all.

Early Pitchfork writing was what I’d call smartdumb. Some version of “wait. what? wow!” was the common reaction. The best early reviews were raw, diaristic, diarrheic, knowingly pretentious, effortlessly funny. I didn’t get the sense that anyone there cared what I thought about their writing, or whether I even understood it. My favorite pieces, like Chris Ott’s handwritten Slanted & Enchanted review, Brent Di's Kid A review ("I had never even seen a shooting star") or Ryan's since-deleted John Coltrane review ("shit, cat"), were not reviews per se but performance art that responded to performances of art.

I wrote comedy for the Lampoon at the time, and the site's highbrow-lowbrow spirit spoke to me. To the extent that music criticism is a moral concern, this oblique style of review felt less suspect to me than what most music reviews were and still are: people who don’t know how to make music opining about the work of people who do. The precursor, though I didn’t know who he was at the time, was Lester Bangs, who felt similarly about his own work.

What many people never quite got about Pitchfork was that the ratings were also a performance. No individual score was particularly meaningful. The point was simply that new music was worth taking seriously — so much so that you needed the finer granularity of an extra decimal point.

Ratings, and soon the Best New Music designation, made Pitchfork a meaningful cultural context. The numbers were hot takes, conversation starters, an easy in for outsiders: Who are the Wrens? Are they actually that good? Is Jet actually that bad? Why is it OK for James Murphy to rip off Iggy Pop, but not for Jet?

For a growing community of early music bloggers and message boarders at the time, the arguments were heated and urgent and somehow almost always constructive. In the wake of 9/11, perhaps it was a relief to care so deeply about something so insular as UK grime or the latest JR Writer mixtape.

These conversations grew in number and volume and celebrity — Jay-Z actually showed up for that Grizzly Bear concert. This loose but active network of enthusiasm, with Pitchfork as the center of gravity, helped create a middle context (in the Trow sense — bittersweet to see more people talking about him again!) that made it possible for all kinds of independent music to flourish from 2003 till about 2012.

Unlikely years, given the general state of the music industry at that time. So I don't think it’s a reach to say Pitchfork was an ad hoc life raft for a new middle class of artists. For a moment, it seemed possible to make a living making the music you wanted to hear in the world. Resentments piled up of course — why Clap Your Hands and not us? — but the fundamental promise of Pitchfork’s backing was a beautiful thing we all could believe in.

My first Pitchfork piece was an interview with experimental composer Keith Fullerton Whitman, who later taught me at Harvard. From 2002 to 2006 I wrote hundreds of album and track reviews, and eventually ran the site’s tracks section. I was encouraged to expand the site’s coverage and follow my own interests, and we suddenly had broader license to cover rap, and dance, and pop, and experimental music. The section was a free-for-all, often inscrutable, and committed to embodying the spirit of Early Pitchfork at a moment we knew our cool was being co-opted. I liked the idea that my pocket of the site was still a little scary to the looky-loos. At the time we were all inspired by the wordplay and heavy referentiality of the mixtape rap we were covering. With (very) mixed results, we created our own similarly dense poetic language to discuss the music, which The Guardian not unfairly dubbed "bloglish."

Zach Baron got his start in the tracks section. So did Sean Fennessey. So did Ryan Dombal, and so did Amy Phillips, with a 5-star review of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek.” Tom Breihan, Jamin Warren, Pete L’Official, Adam Moerder, Jess Harvell and so many other talented people contributed. The staff message board was the most exciting place on the internet to me, and the staff ftp was our Silk Road. I learned so much from my daily exchanges with the other writers, especially Andy Beta, Brandon Stosuy, Amanda Petrusich, Julianne Shepherd, Scott Plagenhoef, Chris Ott, Dominique Leone, Mark Richardson, and others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

It was unpaid work in the beginning – we all had other jobs. Many of us were not writers per se. But our work at Pitchfork had purpose. The world would be an infinitesimally better place, we believed, if more people heard the music we loved.

In order to do that, the fanzine would need to evolve a bit. The coverage expanded, the writing professionalized. Ryan took on a business partner who made the company profitable, and by 2005 the site had its own festival, originally called Intonation. My editors Chris and Scott patiently taught me how to write criticism, and guided me past my usual stunt work into a new kind of play. We all saw what the site could become and worked tirelessly to turn it into a Real Editorial Operation, soon with benefits, an office, and a payroll.

Still I remained caught between two impulses – wanting to help grow a business, but also wanting to embody the site's Bangs-y Total Energy Thing that attracted me in the first place. If you know my story, you know which side won out. I was court jester at Pitchfork, then a pain in the ass, then a real liability. I was fired and rehired twice before being fired for a third and final time at the end of 2006.

For a while I was the second-youngest writer on Pitchfork's staff. The youngest writer was Matt Lemay, and we quickly became close friends. We were both musicians, and Matt's band was signed to Absolutely Kosher, an important label to us at the time. I was inspired by the double-life he lived: a critic who also had skin in the game as an artist. We started a label together in 2004 called Beekeeper Records. Boxes of Kyoshu-Nostalgia by Marxy (aka cultural critic W. David Marx), the one album we were able to release, still sit in my mother's garage. It wasn’t a financial success, but it felt good to have clarity. I knew for sure how much I cared about music. I would go into the red for it.

This tiny little website changed my entire life trajectory. It rewired my brain, opened my ears, and expanded my heart. I had thought I’d write TV for a living, or be a Classics professor. But even when I had the career I thought I wanted, few things felt more important to me than being in the thick of it with music. My impish tendencies were my undoing as a journalist. It was my friend James Murphy who thought making music might be the better fit for me, as producing records was sort of like criticism inverted: creating the mold that engendered the reaction.

I might be the only person on earth who has both given and received Best New Music. I toured with bands I panned. I produced albums for artists I first helped break. As a music producer, I try my best to make the music I would have liked as a young critic: songs that are referential but not exactly reverent, artists who don’t look like “artists”, records that are a bit off, or a bit unfinished sounding, or just plain wrong. Music that undermines my definition of “good.”

Even as the Pitchfork Effect waned, and even as so many of us poked fun at the scourge of Condé Nast, I still cared deeply about this site. There was very little that reminded me of my Pitchfork days, when the site felt like a fanzine. But I read it everyday. It was obvious the writers and editors still cared deeply about independent music, and the sheer diversity of new writers was itself impressive. They lived for new music and fought for it and over it, day in day out, just like I did and still do. What they chose to illuminate was immaterial. It was a light I just hoped would never go out. A grinch you hoped would never get gooped on. Alas.

The ground has been crumbling beneath us for a while now, for all the reasons everybody already knows. Still I mourn the layoffs. I feel deeply for Ryan Dombal and Amy Phillips, two talented editors who were the site's curates and served at Pitchfork almost as long as its founder. I empathize with my friend Ryan Schreiber, whose handle across all platforms remains Ryan Pitchfork. Just because you’ve exited the company doesn’t mean the company’s exited you. It's hard to watch anything you were proud to be a part of become a shell of itself spiritually.

As for the site’s future with GQ, I have a lot of faith in and admiration for Will Welch, a good friend for almost 20 years now. Will got his start at Fader and loves music deeply. He is not a critic. That was never his game. But few people are as passionate as Will at championing the unlikely hero, telling their story, creating community around their work. If you haven’t picked up GQ in a while, I think you should. Will is and always has been an inspired and inspiring leader. I am choosing to be optimistic.

Optimism is why I ended up writing this, my first newsletter, in between feeding my four-month-old son and trying to teach him how to roll over.

I'm not so naive to believe that Substack is the answer. It was a historical anomaly that any of us were paid to run fanzines in the first place. But right now, Substack more and more closely resembles the constellation of DIY blogs and websites that made new music so exciting to me 20 years ago. The goal was not to land media jobs. We wrote because finding our people and creating meaning around the things we love is a basic human impulse. I find that Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr, the platforms that killed off blogs, reward different impulses, and don’t encourage thoughtful discourse about music in the same way.

It seems like a lot of other people agree. And if what you love is independent music, it’s obvious we can no longer count on supposedly Real Editorial Operations to do the work for us. For now, we’re back to diaristic, diarrheic fanzines, maybe not written in our childhood bedrooms but certainly a few from basements without heat or the back of the B62. Sign me up.

As for what this newsletter will be: I have no idea. Right now I’m interested in what I call smartdumb music: Music that, at first listen, seems a bit tossed off, a bit overly simplistic, or maybe even not music at all. A cacophony that breeds its own zen.

Genre feels less and less meaningful a way of interacting with music. Lifestyle playlists have turned all music into an ambient mistress. Criticism — the “is this good?” kind — also feels hopelessly out of touch with the increasingly fungible nature of recorded music, and the blurred line between artist and audience. Would we have liked that Miguel song if Miguel had sped it up first?

We need new games to play. Smartdumb is not about the intention of music, or its cultural context, but the personal experience of listening. Like decimal point ratings, it’s a place to start the conversation and talk about those experiences. The other categories are dumbdumb, dumbsmart, and smartsmart. There is no hierarchy — all have their place. We’ll get into it. I’ll try my best to write once a week.

Stay tuned. Thanks for caring. - nbs

cartoons by farley katz + nick sylvester. jan 28, 2004.