sick sad world
the original inspiration for this newsletter
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Thanks for opening this email / reading this newsletter.
Diversifying my shit talk portfolio:
Despite a perfect economy, there are still record numbers of homeless people in the United States. Luckily, Americans have been screaming their vape-addled lungs out about being a Christian nation, and as followers of Christ, we always care for those less fortunate (unless it’s against building code).
My favorite Mel Brooks movie - White nationalists not knowing how to use a turnstile.
When he’s not busy getting teenage blood transfusions, Peter Thiel is hard at work building a private island for gay men and helping Europe become “more walkable.” Interestingly, this is not Thiel’s first attempt at creating his own colony and a clear sign that not making billionaires pay taxes leads to innovation.
I had begun drafting a pretty incoherent essay about solipsism in your 20s, its inevitability and how it feels even more irritating with the pervasive documentation encouraged by social media. But then one of my favorite writers had a similar thought and wrote about it beautifully, and now I can relax and link to Raquel Alvarado’s lush, intelligent words.
Tunes (and words) to start the week with:
The new Kali Uchis album is so light and fun. She’s had an insane run the past couple of years and I’m loving the whole femme fatale vibe she’s been giving.
And some half-baked thoughts on music criticism and the death of Pitchfork…
Since it was announced that Pitchfork, the once vibrant music criticism website, would be moved under GQ (because music is for boys, apparently), I’ve been thinking a lot about its legacy. For most of my teens and 20s, Pitchfork was critical to my music discovery. Radio was becoming less relevant and everything was moving online. No longer having the staff picks at Newbury Comics or shared Apple Music libraries in a dorm, meant I would have been late to so many of my longtime faves, missing out on those musical sweet spots, when you get there early and your relationship with the artist feels a little more intimate. Sure, most of the reviewers were surly hardcore guys, gleefully ripping apart anything that dared to be too earnest or girly. But in the celebrity-obsessed monoculture of the early aughts, directing your meanness towards art instead of an actress (Perez Hilton, you absolute monster) felt revolutionary.
In 2015, when Condé Nast scooped up the Pitchfork Media property, their relevance was already waning. Culturally, we started to have less tolerance for posturing. “Hipsters,” became the butt of jokes, shorthand for pretension and gentrification. Pop music was once again respectable in the hands of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. And music discovery in the 2020s is a different game. There are less small labels of taste, but more people just self-recording and uploading for the world to enjoy. In the United States, it’s virtually impossible for artists to live in cultural hubs like New York or Los Angeles because of how exorbitantly expensive they’ve become, which thinned out “scenes,” or moved them online. And post-pandemic, you will be hard pressed to find independent music venues, making it difficult for anyone other than Taylor Swift to tour. You can still stumble upon great new artists, but the vibe is very “needle in a haystack.”
It would have been punk as fuck for Pitchfork to shut down at its peak, instead of cashing in. But we’re all trying to survive in America, so I get it. But staying in the game past their prime wasn’t doing us any cultural favors. If you’re on the bleeding edge of culture, you are probably young. And while the old heads at Pitchfork were publishing their 100th think piece on The Wrens, I’d bet anything a handful of pretty good noise bands started up and ended. Then there was the corporatism - critical thought is not thriving in the hallowed halls of Condé Nast. The stink of liberalism tainted each review, in a balancing act of fellating the rich and famous while courting a young, progressive audience. And this is no shade to the ones holding the pen. I understand why these writers were grasping onto the gig for dear life - a paycheck for words is extremely rare! But you need to understand when to pass the baton to someone with a fresher take, amplify a different voice, for the sake of music fans. We all know the saying: “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Maybe this is why there doesn’t seem to be a successor for Pitchfork. I won’t say Gen Z doesn’t have an appetite for criticism, but they don’t seem very into it. A lot of young writers, and for lack of a better term, content creators, appear to view things through a sort of third wave feminist/anti-capitalist/ultra literal lens, which is cool, but is just one of a billion ways to engage with art. It feels like an indictment of older generations, that we didn’t care enough to pass down any reverence for art outside of a narrow, political POV (see Obama’s playlists, Macklemore’s Grammy, the virulent backlash to any hint of criticism about certain female pop stars). That being said, hopefully there is a Pitchfork out there somewhere, so original and underground that it’s invisible to my 37-year old eyes.
xx
ah thank you so much for sharing—would also love to hear your own thoughts about solipsism and myopia 👀
I liked reading you talk about PItchfork more than reading Pitchfork.