How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork • Hacker News Board

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#91

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 3:54 AM UTC

dj_gitmo wrote: post #60

babyshake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.

Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.

> Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s.

Is it really so implausible that a notoriously hip indie music blog would have been ahead of the curve on a cultural trend? Certainly some of the people who became big names in 2010s identity politics movements were writing on similar blogs a decade or more before their cultural moment (e.g. I didn't follow Pitchfork, but I remember Laurie Penny writing extensively for Freaky Trigger).

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#92

Post by Solvency » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 3:57 AM UTC

Gimpei wrote: post #73

anthomtb wrote: post #63

I guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40. For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z

I’m not a fan of their embrace of pop music. Music publications are useful to the extent that they introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. You can’t avoid hearing pop music all the damn time. Why anyone would want to read about it as well is beyond me.

Since day one, Pitchfork (all white nerds) used to love to throttle good music but they'd always give a pass to mainstream rap, praising even the most generic mass produced hip hop, like they always secretly wanted to fit in with that crowd.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#93

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:01 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #26

"Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention.” It does? New Music Express still seems to be doing OK. [1] https://www.nme.com/

> "Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention.”

> It does?

It does. Music is, for most regular people during most of their regular lives, a 3- or 4-minute phenomenon that happens in the background while they're doing other things. To write about music (especially regular, popular music) at all is to invite people to slow down and pay attention, like writing about breathing, or about balance and proprioception.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#94

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:03 AM UTC

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #77

Actually sounds like a good thing to me. Any organization that styles itself an industry taste maker is simultaneously repressing the organic creation of culture by the disorganized masses. Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you…

> It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly.

Not my experience at all. Turns out critics are actually decent at judging stuff, and good movies really are better than bad ones.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#95

Post by reb » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:03 AM UTC

hnnnnnnngggggg wrote: post #70

anthomtb wrote: post #63

I guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40. For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z

Pitchfork is not dead ass now but close. 15 years ago we were in lockstep. I find Gorilla vs Bear best of playlist retains that OG Pitchfork vibe the best.

Is that available on spotify? I desperately check gvb every six months or so, but it seems like a husk at this point

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#96

Post by Solvency » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:04 AM UTC

ryanisnan wrote: post #84

Did anyone but Spotify really kill Pitchfork? Pitchfork really served a purpose before streaming services got good at recommending new music. Once they got "good enough", the friction of visiting Pitchfork just became high enough for me to stop visiting.

A very bizarre subset of the population enjoy reading reviews for some reason. Either to: tell them how to feel about something, to validate their own opinion because they lack social company in real life to do so, or because they enjoy it as a weird form of content in and of itself.

But if you're just looking for new music, PF's old curated playlist on their site was obsolete the second Spotify started curating it's own genre playlists.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#97

Post by anonacnt » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:20 AM UTC

Was this not always the plan? Conde Nast is in the business of corporate influence across its portfolio. Indie music and Pitchfork placed all genres and labels on a roughly equal footing. Killing indie music and bringing back label music required that Pitchfork dissolves away.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#98

Post by l33tbro » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

Pitchfork died because it developed a problem with music itself.

Prior to 2014, the site thrived because it took music at face value, and ranked new releases based upon what artists were contributing to the overall canon of progressive independent pop music.

Everything changed in 2015. There was a drastic editorial shift, where the publication became repulsed by its own "unbearable whiteness" [1]. A kind of over-correction began, with the publication championing what they felt was the 'right' kinds of music to promote.

It never caught on. The old audience moved on, and the younger audience were left scratching their heads as to why they should like artists being lauded by the reviewers as being of high cultural significance.

[1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-....

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#99

Post by vonjuice » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:33 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #94

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #77

Actually sounds like a good thing to me. Any organization that styles itself an industry taste maker is simultaneously repressing the organic creation of culture by the disorganized masses. Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you…

> It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly. Not my experience at all. Turns out critics are actually decent at judging stuff, and good movies really are better than bad ones.

but sometimes bad movies are more interesting than good ones (good, not great)

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#100

Post by tptacek » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

wk_end wrote: post #89

Cheer2171 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think you might be missing the point of Pitchfork. Pitchfork is more about the cultural conversation around media than the content of that media. Take their 1.9 review of Tool's Lateralus [1], which was very positively reviewed at the time by most people who liked metal and prog rock, and has since become one of the most influential metal/prog albums. Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don…

It’s maybe worth mentioning that there have been many phases of Pitchfork over the years. That review would never be published today - the Pitchfork that wrote that review is already quite different from the scrappy 1997 Pitchfork (which probably had more in common with that 16 year old), and it’s miles removed from late-aughts/early 2010s Pitchfork (“peak Pitchfork”, perhaps, in terms of cultural clout), which was l…

This exactly; not a week goes by that the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles Worship" (off an Of Montreal review by Matt LeMay) doesn't go through my head. But Pitchfork stopped being that long before Conde acquired them.