http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/business/media/29carr.html August 29, 2005
Garage Rock Meets Garage Critics
A FEW weeks ago on "Entourage," HBO's series about a rising Hollywood star named Vince Chase and the posse of former Queens buddies he runs with, the plot involved a media antagonist conspiring to complicate his career. So who would don the villain's mustache and threaten Vince's starring role in an "Aquaman" movie? Perhaps a reporter or columnist from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter or Entertainment Weekly?
Nah. It was some geek named R. J. whose comics Web site gets a million hits a day.
The writers of "Entourage" are onto something. The nexus of influence has shifted in the last few years. Destroying someone's career or pulling work from obscurity used to be the province of well-financed mass and trade publications, but now anybody with a voice strong enough to stand out on the Web can have a real impact - and maybe make a couple of bucks in the process.
Pitchfork Media is a case in point. Started by Ryan Schreiber in his parents' house in suburban Minneapolis in 1995, Pitchfork (pitchforkmedia.com) has emerged as one of the more important indie music tastemakers in any medium, with 125,000 unique visitors a day and only three full-time employees. Bands like Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse have all received digital love from Pitchfork and soon after have sold hundreds of thousands of records. Web-based record retailers like Insound report big spikes in sales every time Pitchfork fires up a bandwagon. (Last month, the site curated the much-acclaimed Intonation Music Festival in Chicago.)
And perhaps not coincidentally, Pitchfork is home to the kind of full-on rant-think piece-takedown that was once the specialty of long-and-strong journalism legends like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. If someone were going to make "Almost Famous" for the current age, the young journalist on the rise would probably be filing hourly to a Web site his mom never heard of.
THE writing on Pitchfork is much like the alternative weeklies of another era that covered every wiggle and wobble of the music scene - some of it is nonsense and much of it is unwieldy, but it is ambitious and passionately prosecuted. It is a compelling argument against people who suggest that young consumers will not read more than a screen's worth of text, flourishing at a time when mainstream music magazines like Rolling Stone, Blender and Spin have squeezed many of their music reviews down to 18-word blurb.
In that sense, Pitchfork has the same sense of mission as Ain't It Cool News, a site that treats film as hilarious fetish, or Engadget, a place where the pocket-protector set meets to deconstruct every new electronic doohickey the minute it comes out.
"Pitchfork is in touch with a large group of people who put a lot of faith in what they say," said Ken Weinstein, who handles press for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band that few people had heard of months ago but has been riding the Pitchfork up-alator. With no label, it is now selling more than 1,000 records week, Mr. Weinstein said. "Clap Your Hands were together for a year and a half and then suddenly Pitchfork got ahold of their record and it was like a wildfire," he said.
But in a downloaded, mashed-up, genre-crossing musical age, Pitchfork may fall outside the mainstream. Craig Marks is the editor in chief of Blender, which covers a lot of musical real estate, not just indie rock but also rap, industrial and pop.
"With us, it's about the songs," he said. "Pitchfork is like this utopian hippie outpost, where people are pure and bohemian and have great values. Their implicit message is that there is a huge corrupt recording industry and they have decided to band together and fight the good fight."
Mr. Schreiber acknowledges that his writers generally take a dim view of the business. But for the most part, he said, he thinks they have found a model that can scale far beyond his original expectations.
"Actually, I think things have gone from small to big on the Web," he said. "In print, you can only go as high as your distribution, and we would have never been able to pay for circulation, paper and mailing to reach the kind of audience we have. We have gotten very big without being really big."
Xeni Jardin, a writer who is also co-editor of Boing Boing, a Web site that describes itself as a "compendium of wonderful things," says there is a new credibility to the Web as a scout for what is coming over the horizon.
"At this moment in our cultural history, a lot of the better content on the Web is seen as unmediated and more honest," she said. "More and more, people are looking to blogs for the real lowdown."
And a blog does not have to be about the next undiscovered musical gem to earn a link, that clickable word-of-mouth that gives the Web its viral majesty.
In an odd way, Pitchfork shares the virulent politics that drive a lot of the traffic in the blogosphere and on the Web. Much discussion on the site is about who has sold out and who has not, about how the Mainstream Media is clueless about music (guilty as charged, in my case, anyway) and who is actually down for the cause.
While so much user-generated content on the Web is tendentious and full of flabby partisan attacks, Pitchfork steps up to the plate with a rigorous rating system, serious (if idiosyncratic) critical standards and a roster of 40 or so talented young writers.
In a current review of "Love Kraft," by the Super Furry Animals, the writer, Marc Hogan, gives the record an 8.5 - so precise, those rockists - and in his rave goes over the top and stays there to very nice effect.
"Whatever its etymology, Love Kraft is a utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah," he writes. "In that sense, it's vintage S.F.A., with even its departures underscoring the band's long-established strengths. The leftist politics are less overt, but just as potent; the compositions more focused, but still mad as a Lewis Carroll hatter; the pop more rockin', yet probably more accessible to noobs."
Whatever noobs are. Maybe a smaller, cuddlier version of newbies?
But then, that is part of the point. The Web is a place where tribe is built and serviced by likeminded folks who thrive on the insiderness of it all. There is a common language, common values and a belief that whatever obsession is being serviced, it is the right one to have.
