the title above is borrowed from eric harvey's article "the social history of the mp3." it's a mostly thoughtful piece, telling a somewhat different story, and to very different ends, from steve knopper's engaging and extremely well-received appetite for self-destruction. the article ends:
If the networked public sphere shaped by mp3s could collaboratively re-imagine itself not as an audience or a market but as members of a civil society, who feel that they deserve a stake in its own culture, then the rules going forward, and our appreciation of music's social and affective values, might emerge like mp3s themselves: from the bottom up. We've long since figured out how to grab and recirculate music. Now, let's make something with it.
the buzzwords ("public sphere," "civil society" — elsewhere, "imaginary communities") betray the social science-bent of his critical theory-laden cultural analysis, and the utopianism and call to arms calls nothing so much as the trojan horse (flogging does not deter) of reconstructed ethnography to mind. and, indeed, harvey is a Ph.D. student in media studies and ethnomusicology at indiana university at bloomington.
i bring all this up to highlight a respite to the usual complaint of pitchfork: that it's a bunch of hipsters making authoritative but arbitrary judgments of taste. which is not to say that pitchfork was not one of this decade's most influential tastemakers, at least with regard to a certain niche of underground music that blew up beyond anyone's expectations (except for mine and ben gibbard's — ha ha). i have railed against pitchfork too many times in this blog to provide you with a representative link, but it was never on this count. it was always because the publication was quick to ignore (or, in the case of many of its writers, was ignorant of) the social realities of the worlds they write about. that is, it wasn't about arguing that the blow was better than hot chip and how the year-end best-of list was wrong, it's that the blow has a social context and, so, the blow and the hot chip are not the same thing (of course, the hot chip has its own context too, but i don't know anything about it). but it was pitchfork's m.o. (and they eventually got rich from it) to create a fictional world to write about, to flatten the cultures it considers and make them equally accessible with a mouse-click, equally numerically quantifiable by a critic.
matt wobensmith once said:
All the people who are in charge of your punk media, who are giving out all these ideologies, have too much invested in not letting you see the outside world. They don't want you to. These people who edit the magazines, who run big labels, who may or may not know or like each other — they're all invested in keeping you isolated in this punk culture. It's just like a monoculture; just like society at large. They want to cut you off. They want to take away your roots. They want to give you a false identity and a false reality. They don't want you to see the outside world.
this was long before there was a pitchfork (at least, in the guise we came to know it after their watershed 100 greatest albums of the 90s list that came near the end of 1999). wobensmith was talking about maximumrockandroll and the other big fanzines of the mid 90s, but the point is the same (if significantly amplified here). there is a story here, about the rise of the mp3 and the mainstreaming of indie rock, and i think this imaginary indie rock world (which is to say, cottage industry turned actual, industrial economy) is unimaginable without pitchfork's yeoman work in creating the illusion that this music is about buying things, instead of relating to people.
time was i would say my favourite pitchfork writers were the former mark richard-san and dominique leone. they were, and remain, the most lucid writers on music the periodical has published, and their tastes more often than not turned out to be "correct" (which is to say, i generally liked what they liked). then came people like eric harvey, tom ewing, julianne shepherd (briefly), and especially nitsuh abebe. in their various ways, each of these writers pushed against the model of pitchfork critic as detached tastemaker, and each tried to reflect on the social practice of belonging to these worlds (either the social worlds in which the bands and subcultures exist, or the fake pitchfork/indie rock-at-a-mouseclick world). more often than not, these writers failed (though nitsuh abebe in particular made a valiant effort in his article "twee as fuck," which attempted to draw out the social context of something dear to my heart and almost got the reader there). but then, reading these same authors' posts at the music board ILX, you start to realise that these writers can do the job, that they sound completely different on ILX than they do in print. perhaps it's something about the editorial process at pitchfork, perhaps it's knowing that they're writing to the publication's indoctrinated audience, who knows? but, in reading through all of their work recently, while finishing the syllabus to my punk rock aesthetics and culture course, i must admit a newfound respect for these writers (and nitsuh abebe and eric harvey have made the final cut). these writers took on the paradoxical task of trying to preserve the forms of social practice that prop up independent and d.i.y. subcultures (harvey, the ethnomusicologist, calls these "social rituals"), in a publication that pays them using money earned from making sure its readers forget that these forms of social practice ever existed.
the lieb just wrote me:
you, acting in your capacity as superego (as always), left repeatedly to smoke during the actual set put a bit of a damper on my enjoyment.
he is remembering a particularly bad (as i remember it) kristin hersh show in portland six or seven years ago. those days are now long gone, along with the days when i'd call brent decrescendorzzz my favourite writer at pitchfork. i am given pause to reflect about this because it seems a lifetime ago, when i was a "music critic" and cared about the correctness of my taste (and proving it bombastically to my readers). obnoxiously walking out of a kristin hersh show repeatedly to smoke in showy protest against the violation of aesthetic norms, that could only come out of a critical tradition i'd inherited at college, from t.s. eliot to clement greenberg to benjamin buchloh. the bluster of criticism, the rhetorical bullying of "superior" taste, that was brent decrescendorzzz. i didn't even agree with 90% of his opinions, i was just drawn to the way he arrogantly expressed them. and, even though he hasn't written regularly in pitchfork in almost ten years, it is his attitude that built the publication and, in many ways, the indie rock bubble that it helped close off from the outside world. all the kids who fell in line to buy arcade fire records even though they're basically just U2 records, everyone who loved the dismemberment plan and then turned on travis morrison, people who like deerhunter, it was brent d.'s rhetoric that did that, even though he only wrote one of those four reviews.
so this is me apologising to the lieb for acting as critical superego, time and again (and, looking over my earliest critical writings, this is me horrified). how presumptuous of me. not to say that reconstructed ethnography is necessarily the way out of the detached critic paradigm, but good on eric harvey for trying.
