But it also developed a reputation as the Tony Montana of music criticism — a kind of cultural assassin, stirring up electronic waves whenever it affixed its dreaded, bottom-of-the-barrel 0. As the site cranked out hundreds of critiques of the artists making indie rock, the mainstream music media was paying less and less attention to them.
MTV became better known as a purveyor of reality-TV programming than a broadcaster of music videos. Rolling Stone chased movie stars and teen-pop performers for its covers and slashed away at the length of the average review — most are now a paragraph, and featured reviews are just four or five times that long.
A path had been cleared for Pitchfork to earn the trust and deference of a rock-starved readership desperate for a more comprehensive and reliable filter.
BY , Schreiber believed the audience for Pitchfork had peaked. But the site's traffic quintupled over the next five years, from a modest 30, visits a day to a slightly less-modest , For the relatively tiny indie-rock audience, however, Pitchfork opinions had an impact far out of proportion to its middling traffic stats. If Pitchfork's ascent has surprised staff members, it has completely baffled some veterans of the Internet gold rush.
David Hyman spent those years trying to build the Web sites Addicted to Noise and, later, SonicNet into one-stop destinations for music news, only to see them sold off to MTV Networks and shut down after the dotcom bubble burst.
Today he's no fan of the Chicago upstart. That complaint would seem to be Pitchfork's strongest selling point: By opening its pages to contributors who were willing to sacrifice competitive wages for a chance to express themselves authentically, the site undercut the authority of its print-based rivals. If he hadn't found Pitchfork after college, his career as a writer might have ended at his school paper.
Dahlen is the author of one of Pitchfork's most memorable — and notorious — reviews. In a September write-up of Travistan, the solo debut of Travis Morrison former frontman of the Pitchfork-approved art-punk group the Dismemberment Plan , Dahlen gave the album a score of 0. According to Josh Rosenfeld, the cofounder of Barsuk Records which released Travistan , the effects of Dahlen's review were immediate and disastrous.
Several college radio stations that had initially been enthusiastic said they wouldn't play it. Dahlen says the review wasn't intended as a display of Pitchfork's might or an attempt to take a once-beloved musician down a peg or two.
Two years after the furor ignited by the Travistan write-up, the site has become more careful about doling out such brutal reviews, says Pitchfork's managing editor, Scott Plagenhoef. When Pitchfork reviewers took on Morrison, he says, they were no longer "little guys on the Internet throwing rocks at big artists" — they were picking on one of their own. Though Plagenhoef says the site has to be more cautious about the power it wields, he still downplays Pitchfork's ability to make or break new bands.
He isn't the only one who's skeptical about the idea of a "Pitchfork effect. Nglish: Translation of pitchfork for Spanish Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of pitchfork. Other Words from pitchfork pitchfork transitive verb.
Examples of pitchfork in a Sentence Recent Examples on the Web The helmets with the pitchfork and number are nothing short of excellent. First Known Use of pitchfork 13th century, in the meaning defined above. Cometh the hour, cometh the man who had never even seen a shooting star before. Brent DiCrescenzo wrote an enthusiastic and florid People passed the review around the internet touting its rare perfect score and its accompanying essay that was as heartfelt as it was bizarre.
For many, it put Pitchfork on the map as a site that was doing something If the album made me emo, I would go heart-on-screen.
Kid A immediately awed and excited me and made me want to gush about it. It remains a shaggy but loving artifact of a first-person essay that tries to put into words the size and scope of a geologic shift in music. Readers loading Pitchfork on April 1, , found a note from the editor in a banner at the top of the page. So the lead review that day was Kylie Minogue's new album Fever , written by Dominique Leone, a prolific contributor to the site in the early s whose primary beat was left-field and experimental music.
The idea, which turned out to be half-baked, was that Fever was a pop album, the kind of thing the indie-steeped Pitchfork wouldn't touch unless it was to pan it. But Dom, who listened to plenty of pop alongside Boredoms side projects and records by the French progressive rock band Magma, thought it was a decent record and wrote a straightforward evaluation.
These days, most who were there remember the post-millennial moment as an unusually powerful one for pop and rap. The meeting between Broken Social Scene and Pitchfork was pure kismet. It only helped. It had been a big year for independent music and for the site—the Broken Social Scene review from February being the most prominent example—and since the search function was limited, it made sense to assemble the most crucial albums on a dedicated page.
The Best New Music section launched in late March , but it would be a few years before the designation showed up on individual pages alongside the score. I had to shift goal posts. In , a number of interesting artists were making scruffy psychedelic music with acoustic instruments. The sound came to be called freak folk, and the album that first defined it was the Golden Apples of the Sun compilation.
Brandon Stosuy, later an editor at Pitchfork, wrote the review, and in a recent phone call he recalls both the quick turnaround of the piece—it was assigned at the last minute, and he downloaded the mp3s one-by-one while writing—and that it reminded him of an earlier, more experimental moment in independent music. How did we get here?
One of the trends in earlys guitar music most acclaimed by print alternative-music magazines was the garage-rock revival, nominally spearheaded by the White Stripes and the Strokes and soon spanning the globe thanks to such bands as the Vines, the Hives, and the Caesars. View Iframe URL. So they got creative. It was worth the wait. In , Sub Pop hosted a fake Pitchfork homepage on its website; in , David Cross wrote his own mock Pitchfork reviews… for Pitchfork. And just to set the record straight: 6.
Vampire Weekend came along when independent music was hitting new commercial heights, and the borders between indie rock and the mainstream were beginning to blur. At the same time, Pitchfork was gaining readers and going through its own evolution—toward a more professional style that went beyond tastemaking while considering ideas around identity and class.
With their preppy style, sly commentary on wealth, and referential lyrics, Vampire Weekend offered plenty of details for a critic to tease out. Team, and the songs focused on fleeting crushes and lasting heartache with knowing humor. The now-mature online hype machine, functioning without the limiting influence of a social media backlash, was good at making a new artist seem like an enormous deal very quickly. By early , Black Kids had signed with Columbia and hired Bernard Butler, formerly of Suede, to produce their debut album.
When their debut album Partie Traumatic finally arrived in July, there was plenty of praise to go around. But editors at Pitchfork heard it differently. Instead of text, the review consisted only of a photo of two pugs owned by Pitchfork President Chris Kaskie. Pitchfork opened its first New York office in and it was only natural that the site started covering the local scene more intently. Luckily, the do-it-yourself spaces around Greenpoint turned out to be fertile ground for indie rock.
One of the most buzzed-about and oddly divisive Brooklyn indie bands of this place and time was Vivian Girls, the trio of singer-guitarist Cassie Ramone, bassist Katy Goodman, and drummer Ali Koehler. Vivian Girls have broken up and reunited, releasing three more albums plus assorted side projects along the way, and their cult influence is now undeniable.
That gave me the push to carve out my own space. I was writing for a hyper-niche audience on a platform nobody understood yet. Nonetheless, early Pitchfork got a few kids into El Producto , and also got a few El Producto fans into Pitchfork , including a college-radio music director named Brent DiCrescenzo.
And the Pitchfork Sirota, likewise rose to the momentousness of the occasion. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us. But by the way, this is a fantastic fucking record. But we were just these nobodies trying to be something on a pretty nascent format. And because of that, it was just a lot snottier. And as it got bigger and bigger and bigger, it became the establishment. And to me, that still felt so cool and exciting and dangerous to whatever extent.
For the record, neither DiCrescenzo nor Sirota regrets their respective But LeMay, now an author and tech-world consultant, has a more complicated relationship with Trail of Dead and his That last part is the truest. This is, of course, debatable; that debate, both in the heat of the moment and in retrospect, is the whole point of assigning albums random numbers in the first place.
Trail of Dead had parlayed the notoriety of their instrument-trashing live show and the underground success of their Merge Records album Madonna into a deal with Interscope, still a fraught leap for a young rock band in the early s.
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