Editorial

Pitchfork takes a curatorial, canonical approach to music and taste-making.  They create yearly “Best-of” top-50 lists and have formed canon-building decade retrospectives like “Best 100 albums of 1970.”  Controversially, Pitchfork has re-done their 90’s countdown, prompting protestations of revisionist history and feigned authority.

Pitchfork’s bread is buttered, however, by music reviews.  Pitchfork writes extremely dense reviews averaging 400-600 word counts with heavy esoteric references to obscure music theory, artists, films, and artistic movements.  The focus on references and a band's past work (which are nearly always mentioned) add credibility to the reviews.  Pitchfork uses a 10-point scale that goes to one decimal place.

Placing Pitchfork number 16 on their list of “Top 25 Best Internet Site,” Entertainment Weekly writes, “[Pitchfork is] A webzine people love to dis. Its dense reviews often are overwritten, underedited thickets of pretentious prose. The attitude? Frequently flip,mean, and smarmy. Grudgingly, however, we admit that the Chicago-based site has become a tastemaking institution that's impossible to ignore.”

Here are some examples:

The Review as Creative Writing Project:(1. Tool)(2. Beck)  1.  Tool's review is written as an essay by a teenager obsessed with Tool (point: Tool is for high-schoolers with undeveloped taste.  2.  The review for Beck's Guero is a dialogue between Beck's multiple personalities and an analyst (point:  Beck's new music is too scattershot, unfocused, diverse)

The Non-Review Review:(1. Jet)(2. The Black Kids)  No explanation necessary.

Odd Ratings: (1. Radiohead)(2. British Sea Power) 1.  Radiohead's review reflects how the album In Rainbows was distributed, allowing fans to pay what they want.  This is called the "honesty box" approach.  2.  British Sea Power's new album, according to Pitchfork, sounds like a U2 rip-off.

Here is a satirical Pitchfork review from Neo-satirists The Onion.  Pitchfork's founder gives Music a 6.8

Despite Pitchfork has a large staff of reviewers, the site has managed to formulate a unique voice and a specific attitude to certain artists: Radiohead will always get glowing reviews, while Jet, Kings of Leon, and controversially, The Mars Volta will always receive bad markings.