On The Dissolution of Indie

A reaction to an article by Carles.

You probably know that music's stingiest critic gave a perfect score to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For people who don't read Pitchfork, or even those that didn't know what Pitchfork was, in the days following the review its reverberations were unavoidable. On one album score, the magazine spent all 14 years of its accumulated snob capital. Whether it was internet-payola or pageview prostitution or honest truth, the review sadly mattered. Ironically it did little to explain why this was only the second perfect release of the past decade.

In its history Pitchfork has served to clean the rarefied air that indie music inhabits, and dissociate it from the pop music of MTV and Rolling Stone. But just because it didn't review The E.N.D. doesn't mean it does not care about major-label top 40 music. Notice its 2006 song of the year, Justin Timberlake's "My Love," or its recent and happy acquiescence of Lady Gaga.

At its best Pitchfork is a well-written articulation of the musical elements, technology and performance that make a record a success or failure. At its worst it is verbose, unfocused and pretentious writing that makes unfamiliar references to feign intelligence and belittle the reader. The elitist tastemaker has always had its detractors, but unlike say Rolling Stone's haters, these people still read it. That is because, through agreement or disagreement, they need Pitchfork to validate their tastes.

Perhaps nothing the magazine has done has been easier to agree on than the fact that Twisted Fantasy is not the most perfect album since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The adulation did little more than imply that Kanye West might be the living incarnation of MJ, and advertise its URL to the readership of Rolling Stone. If it can be so wrong or bought so cheaply, does what Pitchfork says matter anymore?

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And so deflates the indie bubble blown bigger by the limitless lungs of Pitchfork. We may have succeeded in saying that their scores don't matter, but try as we might it is impossible to ignore what the magazine deems relevant. Would anyone disagree that some of the best albums of the last decade were those by: Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, Outkast, LCD Soundsystem or Animal Collective?

In 2006, The Onion wrote an article about a fictitious review of music by founder Ryan Schrieber. A made-up staff writer responded with the following:

Maher termed Schreiber's assessment of music "overwrought, masturbatory posturing intended to make insecure hipsters feel as if they're part of some imagined elite beau monde."

Then this review is either ostentatious bombast or the end to the indie fan's false utopia; or worse still, the words to tell them perhaps it didn't ever exist.