Last autumn, I sat down to listen to the new Rolling Stones album, Hackney Diamonds. It had launched around the corner from my house, at the Hackney Empire. Pensioners could be heard on Mare Street that day, grumbling about the camera crews interrupting pavement access to the local Iceland. The world’s media descended. I skipped through a clean slate of excitable, positive, dumbfounded reviews of it online, doubling my excitement.
Three tracks in, I politely bowed out. Not for me, I thought. That listeners, including those paid to do so, seemed to love it felt fabulous for the Stones themselves. What a heroic achievement. But where was the lone voice of dissent here? Then the Pitchfork review dropped, a derisory, agitated take-down which promptly and effectively kicked off that day’s online scrap by suggesting the record had been mostly made for money.
Like the new Stones album, the US music website Pitchfork is not meant for me. For young readers, though, it is part of a patchwork media that helps cultivate thought and guiding values. Since 1996, it has established itself, with the help of a ludicrously precise scoring system, as the universal young barometer of good music taste. It is incendiary, passionate, scholarly, nerdishly detailed, steeped in its moment. Pitchfork is probably the most persuasive live argument that reading and writing about music is still a worthwhile road for young people to travel while working out where, why and how they fit in. To reject what went before and try on something new for size.
In this exchange, a publication turns into more than a magazine. It becomes an odd proxy friend. Avid readers learn the names of the writers, editors and podcasters at the website as assiduously as they do the noisy, opinionated singers, rappers and musicians they document. When a culture is created around a music community portal like Pitchfork, it becomes a kindred firepit.
Where was the lone voice of dissent about the brand new Rolling Stones album? Then the Pitchfork review dropped
That niche thinking sometimes ripples out with mainstream consequences. Often it doesn’t. So be it. The connecting valve between the staff of a publication such as Pitchfork and the readers who devour it is a passion, built on the business of what is worthwhile and what is not. If nobody else gets it, who cares?
Last week, it was announced that Pitchfork’s parent publishers Condé Nast are to absorb the site under the GQ umbrella. Look, times are hard in online publishing. The niche will disappear fastest. The cost-of-living crisis is real for everyone, including corporations. While advertising continues to prioritise the monolithic engines which direct online traffic, not their multiple destinations, scalps will be taken. Before that cycle is broken, heritage publishers will struggle for share of the consumer dollar needed to fund themselves.
But that doesn’t mean that Pitchfork’s shift into a well-oiled house of high-end menswear consumerism doesn’t come with some sadness attached. Its independent thought shrinks the moment the announcement is made. The brilliant editor-in-chief of the site, Puja Patel, has left with the move, taking with her a radical shift in where Pitchfork pointed its gaze under her five-year tenure.
Patel initiated valuable work moving the site from a predominantly white male focus to the sound of female and non-gender-conforming voices; black, brown, Asian musicians; queer artists.
This shift was reflected in the staff. The music championed on the site was often baffling to anyone over 25, but the purity of its intention was always resolute and crystal clear. Of course Pitchfork hated Hackney Diamonds, a record made by octogenarians replicating an ancient rock ’n’ roll model without so much as a nod to how the pop graph has jumped around so wildly from its starting position.
Dismissing the old leaves space for the new to fill. When niche interests cross over, the kids who congregated around Pitchfork to first declare this is ours, will one day get to look back with the conviction they helped shape a cultural world they perhaps once felt disconnected from. Once that invaluable rite of passage disappears, it rarely returns.
