Making the jump from the Web to print has lately become a popular way for established Web sites and blogs to make a little extra cash on the side, especially around the holidays. There are loads of examples: Stuff White People Like, LOLcats coffee table books - even The Morning News, a glorified (if excellent) news aggregator, has bound its best original material in hard copy just in time for it to be wrapped up and placed under the tree. The Pitchfork 500, an anthology of the well-known independent music hub Pitchfork Media's favorite songs from 1977 through 2006, neatly historicized and analyzed in discrete boxes and sans-serif fonts, packaged in decadent, gold-toned hardcover, is just another Christmas present for budding teenage Web-savvy hipsters.
But it is also something a little more insidious than that, a Christmas present with an implicit agenda. I call Pitchfork an "independent music hub" rather than simply "Web site" because that appears to be what they strive for - and achieve. The site started in 1995 (under a different name) with sporadic music reviews, but in the more than decade since its inception, Pitchfork has grown to be basically the premiere source for independent music news; they publish four reviews every weekday, they post multiple streaming singles and music videos a day (and have even launched a sister site, pitchfork.tv, to handle the visual side of the scene), they host a wildly popular annual music festival in Chicago, and they publish a variety of features, essays and interviews. And as the site's girth has grown, so has its cultural capital.
There may be a lot of sneering sentiment for Pitchfork - they are accused of being overwrought, snobby and plain misguided - but that hasn't changed the fact that a good review from Pitchfork can turn an unknown band into hot shit. For example, David Moore's review of The Arcade Fire's Funeral (9.7) is often credited with breaking the band, who went from playing clubs in New York to selling out any venue they happened to set foot in and jamming with David Bowie. And even if the review was only a small part of that band's success (because just saying something is good can only get you so far), the Web site's cultural clout is undeniable.
And that, ultimately, is what makes The Pitchfork 500's innocence impossible. By canonizing a select set of songs, and relying on the recognition and authority that comes with the word "Pitchfork" in the title, they have not only defined their taste, they've branded it. And because their taste already happens to coincide with that of a large segment of the population that identify themselves with independent music, they have, in effect, attempted to brand the scene.
In doing so, they have also deceptively historicized their taste in a way that is - if not necessarily misguided - at least entirely subjective. Take, for example, the book's discussion of Daft Punk's "One More Time," written by Tom Ewing, which happens to be excerpted in the Dec. 1 "Forkcast" online. Ewing contextualizes Daft Punk in the French filter-disco scene and in the process does a few subtle but important things: First, he asserts that "the French dance scene was dominated by the filter-disco sound," but he doesn't provide examples or any specifics; we just have to take the author at his word. Then, Ewing sums up and dismisses the scene in two sentences plus a noun: "At its best, it was the sound of almost tangible yearning, the release of disco heartbreakingly deferred. At worst, it was joyless and lazy," followed by a reference to filter-disco as an "impasse." Finally, he calls "One More Time" a "supreme example of the style."
So what a reader unfamiliar with filter-disco (such as myself) gets from this one paragraph is that "One More Time" is really the epitome of an entire genre and I should just download it from the iTunes store because what I'm likely to find after investing in some filter-disco records will be something "joyless and lazy." The genre, cast as an "impasse" (a road block on the musical highway, one that must be driven around rather than stopped at) is delegitimized even as its "supreme example" is canonized.
Despite my own knee-jerk reaction to hate the idea of The Pitchfork 500, it isn't necessarily an evil. I'm sure that it would be an informative, fun book to have around, as controversial lists make for good discussion at the very least. It just needs to not be taken as such a serious authority as it takes itself.
Trevor.borg@gmail.com
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