The Tragic End of Pitchfork: A Look at its History and the Future of Music Journalism

Pitchfork had built a reputation for its music release reviews and industry coverage.

Pitchfork’s wild 28-year mutation – from mouthy upstart to feisty thuggish tastemaker to critical agenda builder to Condé Nast brand portfolio piece to self-proclaimed “most trusted voice in music” – took a turn bleak this week when none other than Anna Wintour issued a memo announcing that the most influential music publication of this century is merging with GQ. Wintour’s communication was peppered with cheerful words about “new possibilities,” but the layoffs that followed in the hours that followed – including the dismissal of editor-in-chief Puja Patel – made it clear that an era was coming to an end.

You may be interested: The Condé Nast group merges its magazines Pitchfork and GQ

I’ve hated and loved Pitchfork for more than half my life, but my pain is uncomplicated. I’m furious to see him go like this. The fusion of a once provocative and independent music outlet with a legacy men’s magazine is, at worst, inconsiderate and, at best, a bad omen for all of music journalism. If music criticism has become an endangered practice in publications with massive influence, a deep history and a wide readership. Where can you hope to survive?

The historic editor Anna Wintour, responsible for the content of Condé Nast, was the one who communicated the bad news

And I mean music criticism, something that Pitchfork has consistently produced through its many shifts in tone and form over the last decade, continually populating its home page with the work of writers who aren’t afraid to tell us how mediocre it is. 21 Savage’s new album. These types of reviews will not generate much digital traffic in 2024, but they do the essential work of music criticism: listening, bearing witness, telling the truth. How can this practice continue at GQ, a publication that goes to such lengths to avoid insulting its subjects? I don’t believe it. Which means that the world of music journalism will continue to merge into the ambiguous form of advertising, perpetuating the death spiral of adulation that results from big publications needing access to big stars, rather than the other way around. A brutal scene.

Early in Pitchfork’s run, the site seemed drawn to an entirely different kind of brutality. Focusing on indie rock groups, Pitchfork criticized many of them mercilessly, and if you lived through those years, you may be lacing up your dancing shoes on the way to the grave. The site’s critics often seemed capricious, disinterested, and sometimes spiteful, assigning low scores on their signature 10-point scale with punitive zeal. As Pitchfork grew in readership and influence, the site seemed to enjoy the antagonistic relationship it was cultivating with the underground community it covered, and for some the bad blood still flows.

The band 21 Savage. Pitchfork has not moved a hair when it comes to reviewing his new album, as well as others that have received negative reviews.

But by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Pitchfork’s rave reviews made it a powerhouse of good taste, helping turn Arcade Fire and Bon Iver into the kind of bands nominated for Grammys. Pitchfork launched its own annual music festival in Chicago in 2006, and by 2015 the brand had achieved such success that its founder, Ryan Schreiber, and co-owner, Chris Kaskie, sold it to Condé Nast.

The new parent company’s chief digital officer, Fred Santarpia, praised the acquisition for bringing “a very passionate audience of millennial men to our roster.” From there, Pitchfork admirably continued to expand its coverage beyond the white, male-centric indie groups it was founded on and, strangely, ended up showing more grace to the richest pop stars of the 21st century than to unknowns whom he had made a name for by trampling.

Of course, that “they” is always changing. We tend to perceive music publishing as singular, monolithic hive minds, but they are always made up of individual listeners, writers, and thinkers. And while Pitchfork continues to annoy me with its airs of annihilation, it’s impossible to deny the style, intelligence, and critical weight of its most recent star authors: Cat Zhang, Philip Sherburne, Alphonse Pierre, and others.

Pitchfork’s reviews have been key to consolidating the path of many artists, such as Arcade Fire.

Writers are not the companies they work for. And if the current media landscape continues its course, we won’t need to be reminded: there will be no publications for music writers to work on. Capitalism remains stupid and zombie-like, a self-cannibalizing game of acquisitions and abandonment of corpses when profits do not reach a ridiculous level. What happens next on Pitchfork under GQ worries me, for sure. But not as much as what happens with the rest of music criticism in a post-Pitchfork world.

It’s all too easy to be prescriptive and angry, but do we have a choice? It’s time for music writers to come together and create their own zines, their own fanzines, their own websites. Listeners will always want to share their musical experiences, and let’s hope that those who believe in criticism as a craft find ways to monetize their ideas so they can continue the work. They will have to do it. The towers – the one I’m currently writing from seems stable for now – are being torn down. It is difficult to see a future among the rubble. As in any type of cultural criticism, imagination will be necessary.

2024-01-21 17:48:27
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