What The Hell, Pitchfork?

I am, as I'll be the first to admit, a pretentious, elitist ass. Mostly it's that I think my taste or choice is superior to someone else's: music, movies, books, comics...I'm under the impression that my choices have more weight or validity than another person's.

But even I balk at Pitchfork.

Their recent review of the new Wilco album (out tomorrow!) is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. They basically take the band to task for making mellow, content, straight-forward music. The reviewer is savage and seems to take glee in hammering at Jeff Tweedy and Co. for creating an album that isn't as self-consciously arty or experimental as either Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or A Ghost is Born.

Since when did experimentalism for the sake of experimentalism become something to value in and of itself? It's really part of my whole complaint against indie music as a genre and an aesthetic. Sure, a lot of mainstream music is crap. But the whole "anything that anyone else might possibly like is automatically crap" hipster shtick is tired and ridiculous. It's apparently cool to hate things, or so you'd think from reading Pitchfork.

What's ironic, though, is that Pitchfork tends to perpetrate the same sort of sins of conformity that their non-indie rock-crit kin commit. There's this notion of hating things that everyone else likes, yes, but there's also an element of "this band is the Next Big Thing," said in such a way that you can hear the capital letters. They're just as guilty of being bandwagoners as anyone else, it's just that they pride themselves on loving the obscure and the weird. And they love it not because they actually genuinely like the music, but because it's obscure and weird and experimental and no one else not in the little indie club has ever heard it. There's this aesthetic that prizes non-listenability over music that's actually enjoyable.

I think that's where my main gripe is: the indie aesthetic is focused on out-pretensing the next guy rather than on music that they actually like. You get the sense that the indie kids listen to stuff not because they like the way it sounds, but because they feel they're supposed to. It's really just as bad as liking flavor of the week mainstream band, and it drives me freakin' nuts.

I guess it's stuff like this that's the reason I can never really stand most of the other people who listen to the music I ever listen to.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "One Dime Blues"