My morning interweb routine brought me across this pretty good article on Slate by Matthew Shaer that looks into "The indie music site that everyone loves to hate." Check it.
UPDATE: In the comments, TMoore and some others mentioned the need to check a lot of reviews and not rely on just Pitchfork. I agree 100% with that and wanted to draw some attention to a cool site that pulls lots of reviews for an album onto one page. It's called metacritic and covers music, movies, games, books and TV. It certainly makes for a good read since you can see the full range of opinions of an album on one page. Just enter the album in the search box on top of the page and start reading. That's it.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Die, Pitchfork, Die! | UPDATE
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6 comments:
haha. nice look jds.
as is pointed out pitchfork does at times border on the ubsurd but it does have its good writers the guy that does the hip hop reviews is great in my opinion. some of the indie reviews just lose me.
Yes. The writing on Pitchfork can be tedious and overly wordy for the sake of looking cool.
However, the only reason it weilds any power is because people read it. And people only read it because they like it.
I don't read their reviews very often but the news and interviews are some of the best around for indie music fans. However, that line is becoming the tired equivalent of "I only read Playboy for the interviews".
I pretty much think that Slate piece is dead-on.
There are interviews in playboy?
I don't get the impression Pitchfork is some evil beast, i don't often agree totally w/ the reviews but even when i don't i often enjoy the writing. And if i don't enjoy a particular review, i still get to chuckle at how pretentious its author is making himself look... it's a win win situation for me.
I think it's important to also do a bit of Meta skimming or whatever you want to call it - any web savvy person knows there are more than just one review site, and I'm sure like myself, people take into account multiple sources when they are reading about an artist or album, me, i read dusted, then i check pitchfork, then i read all music, then i check the blogs, then i see what cokemachineglows got, then i... and on and on...
Pitchfork is just another site, with their own reviewers, w/ their own spin on reviewing... i can't really give two shits either way. Yeah they can be annoying, but everyone is a taste maker, there's no such thing as an objective musical review, and i think they acknowledge that, sometimes, though a little too self consciously.
Yeah I don't think that Pitchfork is inherently evil. But it's too bad it's become no different from the old guard of music journalism it helped over throw.
There are so many lesser known but really good blogs and music sites out there but it's a lot of work doing the rounds.
I'm hoping that We Eat Music (user posted music news blurbs and videos that you can vote on) or something similar takes off. It would make 'Meta skimming' a lot easier and would reduce the influence of the bigger sites like Pitchfork.
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