Contents
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Page 1 — No music at this funeral
Page 2 — Music journalists are not vicarious agents
On the homepage of the music portal Pitchfork Last Thursday morning the world looked as if nothing had happened, and that was exactly the problem. The magazine actually publishes three to four detailed reviews of new albums every weekday, as well as reports, interviews, band portraits and essays. It was like that for more than 20 years Pitchfork was still operated independently and semi-professionally in Chicago and Brooklyn, but also in the years since 2015. At that time, the former founder Ryan Schreiber sold the magazine to Condé Nast and enabled his staff to move to Manhattan to the publisher’s own offices in One World Trade Center. Or collapsed, as some observers found back then.
Anyone who, as a music nerd in Germany, dragged themselves out of bed on the morning of January 18th and reflexively headed Pitchfork controlled, but now found the worst thing there is in pop: the reviews and news from the previous day. It wasn’t until later in the day that at least one new text appeared; previously it said: no fresh content on the site, instead excitement on X. There was one actually an internal email from the publisher passed around by Anna Wintour, who is not only editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine Vogue but also Global Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast. Pitchfork become in the men’s magazine GQ Wintour wrote that part of the workforce had already been separated. Also Pitchforks Previous editor-in-chief Puja Patel was among the laid off employees.
The publisher initially did not provide any further information about the layoffs, but social media quickly said that Condé Nast had cut the magazine’s workforce at least in half. Several senior editors reported on their dismissals on Pitchfork had worked. Former employees of the magazine, other music media and numerous musicians also commented on the developments, mostly with a mixture of shock, anger and incomprehension. Although Condé Nast had announced publisher-wide job cuts at the end of 2023, that seemed to be the de facto end of Pitchfork, to catch both pop and pop journalism completely unprepared.
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The fact that music magazines are being discontinued will actually no longer be newsworthy in 2024. Magazines with previously high circulation have been around for a long time New Musical Express, Q Magazine and Spin only as stripped-down online versions or not at all. The journalistically ambitious music marketplace Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last three years and the workforce has been reduced by 16 percent. In Germany, the printed version was initially published in 2018 Specs and a year and a half later their online branch was also buried. The Rolling Stone and there are still a good dozen international versions, but the US edition in particular no longer sees itself as a classical music magazine. The hype surrounding pop blogs and participatory music journalism has remained a phenomenon of the noughties and 10s anyway.
Pitchfork is now not just another dead competitor in a niche market, but it was at times the most read and certainly the most influential music magazine of the past 20 years. You don’t have to have read a single text on the portal to understand its meaning: since its founding in 1996 Pitchfork was an online magazine, even after it was taken over by Condé Nast there were no attempts to introduce a payment system. Apart from a quarterly coffee table spin-off that appeared between 2013 and 2016 Pitchfork-Content was free and only available on the Internet. The Napster zeitgeist of freely making music available didn’t emerge until three years after the launch of Pitchfork justified, but it never ended for the magazine.
Legendary nasty distortions
Is lucrative Pitchfork was mainly about ties: with his annual sold-out festival in Chicago, for example, which produced offshoots in London, Paris and Berlin, among others, and even after the discontinuation of Pitchfork could be continued. And for Condé Nast, of course, as an image project, which for a long time fit perfectly into the portfolio Vogue, Vanity Fair and New Yorker. Until its impending end, the brand name was understood as a synonym for opinion-forming and opinion-producing music journalism, although no longer with the same authority as in the magazine’s heyday.
This was especially true in the noughties Pitchfork-Reviews and the portal’s own seal of quality “Best New Music” as a career starter for indie rock groups and artists. Bands like Animal Collective and Broken Social Scene or the songwriter Sufjan Stevens made it thanks to music that was actually unsuitable for the mainstream Pitchfork-Support far beyond their genre niches. Even Arcade Fire’s rise to stadium and major festival headlining band began with one euphoric Pitchfork-Meeting their debut album Funeral by author David Moore. The fact that the portal’s then-legendarily nasty criticisms could also destroy careers is a claim that can hardly be substantiated and which still exists in scene circles to this day.
In the early days of the magazine cultivated Pitchfork a writing style that had previously only existed in the smallest fanzines: sprawling texts, unusual perspectives, autofictional approaches. With crude humor and youthful arrogance, the authors (there were hardly any female authors) positioned themselves against the long-established, possibly tired music press. They countered their canon of Beatles, Stones and Led Zeppelin with their own rock music hierarchy. However, this was not about correcting the excessively white, male and heterosexual historiography. The decisive demarcation was for Pitchfork initially in supporting indie artists.
Bands like Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel and, a little later, Arcade Fire shaped it Pitchfork-Canon. This made him less wide-legged, but no less masculine than the heroes of the competition. If the magazine failed to be criticized, a paradox also emerged: Pitchfork reported about music that was never heard at student parties with beer pong and shirtless people frat boys would have run, but sometimes struck a tone that would have generated numerous laughs and high fives at such parties. It was only over the years that this tone became more professional and opened up under editor-in-chief Mark Richardson Pitchfork for pop and hip-hop and grew into an almost unfathomable archive of musical expertise.
On the homepage of the music portal Pitchfork Last Thursday morning the world looked as if nothing had happened, and that was exactly the problem. The magazine actually publishes three to four detailed reviews of new albums every weekday, as well as reports, interviews, band portraits and essays. It was like that for more than 20 years Pitchfork was still operated independently and semi-professionally in Chicago and Brooklyn, but also in the years since 2015. At that time, the former founder Ryan Schreiber sold the magazine to Condé Nast and enabled his staff to move to Manhattan to the publisher’s own offices in One World Trade Center. Or collapsed, as some observers found back then.
2024-01-20 07:58:05
#Music #magazine #Pitchfork #music #funeral
