Conclusion

Pitchfork is a well-designed website that provides rewarding utility for its audience.

Pitchfork has been alternately lampooned for mean-spirited reviews, indie-elisit posturing, and a generally pretentious sentiment while being aggrandized for the same thing.  Nevertheless, Pitchfork provides a powerful platform for otherwise unknown artists who represent the ever-fragmented taste of our cultural environment, to be known on an international scale.  It has also become a useful hub and general disseminator of information including news and rare feature articles.

In Pitchfork newest retrospective, “Top 50 Albums of 2007,” electronic artist Panda Bear and his Beach Boys-esque album Person Pitch, earned album of the year.  To appropriate a line from its heroi-epic 13-minute-long centerpiece “Good Girl/Carrots,” “Get your head out those mags and websites that try to shape your style/think for your self/and wade in the deep end of the ocean.”

This line provides an important ethical consideration about separating the source of information from its inherent medium-bias.  Think for yourself. If you only listen to established and canonized works your worldview becomes provincial and not your own.  Taste is individualized and not collective.