In late summer 2011, I was in Norway covering a music festival for NME. One night at a party in another writer’s hotel room, I got talking to an American guy called Zach Kelly. Zach, it turned out, wrote for Pitchfork. As a 22-year-old music journalism freak, I could only imagine this was how it must feel to meet a member of your favourite football team. He kindly let me pin him into a corner to probe him about life there – he had started as an intern at their Chicago office – and the kind of work he did. That would have been thrill enough, meeting someone from a publication I perceived as so untouchable it was hardly worth aspiring to. Shortly after I got back to the UK, I got an email from an editor there, Mark Richardson: Zach had recommended me, and would I like to review albums for them? NME said no. But Mark persisted, and a year later, Pitchfork asked me to become their first UK member of staff, an associate editor. I said yes.
I tell this story as it is one of hundreds like it: Pitchfork’s editors were extraordinarily committed to investing in new critical talent, the writers and editors who were the driving force in unearthing and chronicling the defining alternative acts of the 21st century, as the website that midwestern record-store employee Ryan Schreiber founded in 1996 evolved into an authoritative, professional outlet. Arguably not since the inky heyday of NME itself had a music publication developed such a distinct reputation, thanks in part to its famous decimal-point scoring system and early take-no-prisoners reviews. “Pitchfork” even became a byword for a certain kind of music and music fan: artisan before artisan culture took over everything; a little forbidding, cloistered; maybe you loved to hate it, but still clicked through half a dozen times a day.
