TUBA CITY

i'm taking over the comments box, tim! but, you do raise an interesting point about pitchfork. everybody talks shit about their terrible writing (well, i know i do), but everybody still reads it. it's crazy that blurbs from their reviews appear on promotional stickers on cd's now! i think they might be almost single-handedly responsible for the success of the arcade fire, but i may be wrong. i find that i really love half of the stuff they love and find the other half really trendy and boring. but, i think the position of records like devendra, madvillain, and dungen is just a reflection of very strong albums.

I think there is some definite truth to yr Arcade Fire assessment, that album jumped into the Billboard Top 200 after Pitchfork made it their #1 pick! Not to discount the actual music on the album or Merge's efforts in getting the CD to the right people/radio/press/stores, but you have to wonder how it would've done if Pitchfork had panned it instead of giving it a 9.7.

In general, I'm not really questioning Pitchfork's tastes, they cover a lot of great music...but I fear that they're starting to dominate opinion and music-information-seeking in such a Google-like way that if something isn't on Pitchfork, it will start to seem like it doesn't really exist.

i don't know... i think pitchfork functions more as a mirror than as a tv. they don't broadcast taste nearly as much as they'd like to think they do- they reflect it. maybe i just know too many music nerds, but usually i hear about something, then see it reviewed on pitchfork (usually in a way i don't agree with), and not vice versa.

that's not to say that they don't hold a lot of sway, but with something like the arcade fire, i think that's a band that would've exploded with or without pitchfork. i mean, they were a "hot new band" in a little magazine called spin...

arguing against myself- that fucking god-awful Fiery Furnaces record. without pitchfork, would anyone be listening to that record? seriously!

I think that in some ways pitchfork has totally changed the dynamic of independent music, not really through any virtue or sin of their own but by being at the right place at the right time.

The writers at pitchfork are probably somewhat similar to people who read tuba frenzy (for example i'm a terrible writer) and like things because they listened to the same records that we have over the last decade. That means that a large portion of their good reviews are going to be for records that their readers will like. Everyone's tastes change based on the things they have heard. The few good records that get unfairly ignored by pitchfork don't have as much impact on our tastes.

It's kind of like the independant music industry and the internet have created some kind of emergent phenomenon in the area of hipster taste. There is no way that any independent release could have sold as rapidly as the arcade fire record did, even a couple of years ago. I don't think that it is even the best record of 2004.

You can see this reflected in the position of pitchfork reviews at or near the top of google searches for album titles. It's becoming harder and harder to ignore pitchfork because everyone else is reading it.

Or something along those lines...I liked the fiery furnace record even though it is hard to listen to more than a couple of songs in a row.