Ridiculous Opinions #232
This week saw the demise of the famous music website, Pitchfork. The site itself isn't dead yet and its archives may or may not live on, but for all intents and purposes, it's as good as gone. It's yet another example of something beloved purchased by a private equity firm, robbed of all semblance of individuality, and then sold off for parts.
I wasn't a reader of Pitchfork, mind you, other than to occasionally seek them out for their scathing reviews of things that I liked that they did not. They were famous for only giving 11 albums 10 out of 10 in their reviews since 1997. Pitchfork was pretty much everything that I hated in cultural critics...smart asses who knew more than me, judging my pitiful tastes through a lens of snobbery and sarcasm. I hated the way they looked at music and how they would look down on anything that didn't fit their obscure and esoteric tastes. But I enjoyed reading it sometimes because of how much I hated it.
There's a pretty good article on the demise of Pitchfork by Casey Newton that I mostly agree with. You can find it here.
Not everyone enjoys websites like Pitchfork, but there is a place for these sites in the world and I think that we're in a pretty precarious place in terms of what comes next. My best friend since middle school, Chris, and I had a little text debate yesterday about what this all means. He said, very rationally:
Eh. I'm not sure this piece actually achieves its goal of pointing out how "platforms" killed this once pillar of music criticism. Lol. It was a fine site for that sort of thing, I guess, but this article vastly overstates the site's influence. It's as if this person has no idea about the thousands of once vital music publications that came and went before the old internet. Hit Parader, Cream, Cashbox, Melody Maker...in the 90s CMJ. All died because they just aren't as influential as their fans thought. No platform or AI killed Pitchfork. It wore out its usefulness to an audience who likely just outgrew it. There are elements of fact here, but there was nothing amounting to a technological shift that killed the site. It just wasn't generating revenue. Plain and simple.
He's not wrong. We went on with our discussion:
Where I disagree with Chris in the understanding of what the replacement is. I don't think there IS a replacement other than an algorithm. That, to me, is frightening.
I have been listening to the "radio station" that Apple Music provides for me, and very often it will mix songs that I like with songs that are similar to what I like. Sometimes, I enjoy listening to that music. Often, I do not. But if I took the time to try to enjoy it a bit more, would that make a difference? If I understood what went into that music, would I like it more? I'll never know, because I get bored after ten seconds and skip to the next song.
It's as if it says, Oh, do you like THIS kind of music? Well, here...let me show you fourteen different versions of the kind of music that is similar to what you like. You will receive no contextual clues about this music. You will not understand what went INTO the music. You will not be given any knowledge about how the music was created and we will not differentiate between whether this music was produced by multimillionaires or someone in their basement.
The algorithm will give you no history or contextual clues in regard to why you maybe shouldn't press "skip" when listening to this song and enjoy this challenging piece of music for the effort and meaning behind it. THAT is the algorithm to me.
So, when Chris says that I won't understand what the replacement is, I think I disagree with him in that regard. I think the replacement is the algorithm and I think that the algorithm is going to make listeners more and more stupid.
And that, I guess, is what cultural gatekeepers like Pitchfork provided...context. And I think that what we're seeing happening before our eyes on the internet is the elimination of context. What were the circumstances around the creation of this work of art? Why were those circumstances important? Those are the things that made me interested in some of my favorite artists today. The more these publications...whether it was Pitchfork, or Rolling Stone, or *Hit Parader...*disappear because of revenue issues, the more we lose as a society.
What becomes of all of this is anyone's guess. I'm not sure that I'm looking forward to finding out.
So, in terms of being a gatekeeper and recommending crap...Here are some current songs that I'm listening to, so that you can hate my music with the knowledge that I know more than you...Some of this is old; some of this is new. This is what this old man is listening to at the moment WITH a bit of cultural context to, perhaps, make you MORE interested in the music...
Here's Terrible News by Middle Kids. Middle Kids is an Australian band that I discovered in 2017, when I was living in Rosseau, Ontario. They had a song called "Edge of Town" that was picked as a favorite on Elton John's radio show. He kind of plucked them out of obscurity and they've been making music ever since. This is their latest single and I love the strange "yell" of the chorus, because it just sounds weird. I'm also a huge fan of a big cacophony of sound and that's what this is.
Here's Wide Eyes by The Big Moon. I discovered The Big Moon through filmmaker Edgar Wright's yearly playlist of the top fifty songs that he listened to for each year. I first found them through the song, "Barcelona", which I think is absolutely brilliant, and I have followed them ever since. This song comes from the album, "Here is Everything", which is, to a certain extent, a concept album about pregnancy written by their lead singer/guitarist, Jules Jackson. And though I'm a DUDE and can barely even fathom what women go through with the birth of their first child, I still found this to be a deeply moving album and it's universal enough to remind me of what kind of thoughts were going through my head during that first year of Harper's life. "Two Lines", the opening track, is a standout for me, but I adore this video:
Here's Seventeen Going Under by Camp Cope. I don't know how I found Camp Cope, but this cover of Sam Fender's "Seventeen Going Under" is a standout for me. It was done for an Australian radio station called Triple J, which has artists come in to do covers of famous songs. Camp Cope broke up last year, and the more I learn about them, the more intriguing they are to me. They had to cancel a U.S. tour during covid because the lead singer also works as a nurse and she was needed during that time in Australia. I suppose we all think that being a rock star is a glamorous thing, but the truth is that the majority of these people barely scrape by. I love this song!
Here's the original Sam Fender song, which has a pretty nifty video.
