From Pitchfork to Q, music criticism is under attack. We must fight for the magic it can inspire
Last week, it was announced that the influential and widely read music website Pitchfork was being folded into men’s magazine GQ, with the loss of many jobs. The title, which started as a blog in 1996, rapidly rose to become the dominant voice in music criticism for millennials. To many of the site’s millions of monthly readers this news means a great deal more than simply the decline of a large website: they see this, with some justification, as an existential threat to worthwhile music criticism itself.
The pill has been even harder to swallow coming as it does so soon after the massive downsizing of the essential voice of the international underground Bandcamp Daily. Elsewhere the recent loss of small titles, such as the brilliant Gal Dem website produced by women of colour, and long-running print titles such as Q, suggests that the threat to music criticism as an industry is tangible and pressing.
But not all voices lament the coming changes to Pitchfork. For every two people decrying what they see as corporate vandalism on the part of the parent company Condé Nast, there seems to be one eager to deploy the laugh/cry emoji at the website’s fate. After all, the argument goes, why do we even need music criticism when the whole world’s music is instantly available at the touch of a button?
After finishing this feature I’m going to prepare for a DJ job – I’m playing music between bands at a club. I want to make sure I have some really earboggling new sounds and in order to achieve this, I will refer to the expert advice available at magazines I have a subscription to such as The Wire and Crack and excellent wide-ranging websites such as Bandcamp Daily and, while I still can, Pitchfork. If I were going to listen to the 3.6m new songs uploaded on to streaming services every month, assuming I took an eight-hour break to sleep every day, my listening session would have started in January 1997. The truth is: everyone
needs help sorting through the insanity-inducing avalanche of new music.
You may not agree with a lot of contemporary criticism – and if you don’t you’re not alone, a lot of it drives me up the wall, and I’m not even exempting my own website from this observation – but it is, essentially, a friend who is always there for you; albeit a friend who can occasionally be infuriating and difficult to get on with. Often, people haven’t even considered what a future without music criticism will look like, but when pressed some will argue the curatorial heavy lifting can be done by streaming service algorithms. But these recommendations are a much less friendly proposition than music criticism.
Spotify’s opaque algorithm rewards conformity to rigid metrics, including song length, and the prominence of chorus and hooks, and actively punishes any kind of experimentation. Even if you aren’t partial to avant-garde music, this method of recommendation is harmful because of the drag it will have on pop. So-called experimental music exists in the same ecology as pop music, feeding it nourishing ideas and information. The renaissance in pop over the past decade owes a great deal of its vivacity to the very groundbreaking music Spotify threatens to crush and marginalise further. This narrowshouldered, bottom-line-obsessed attitude towards music is the mirror of what is unfolding at Condé Nast: saving a few bucks today, regardless of the financial catastrophe it will undoubtedly cause further down the line.
Editing an independent music magazine dedicated to the music I love – which doesn’t always have great commercial prospects, that can sometimes feel a bit weird, or raw, or unsettling on first contact – has always felt scarily like trying to pull a steamship up a hill. The Quietus – which I’ve run with my pal Luke Turner for the last 15 years – faced closure during the first lockdown of 2020 with the rapid collapse of digital advertising. We had to introduce a subscription model and this unequivocally saved us. We still had a giant ship to somehow get up a hellish incline but now we were being joined by some of our readers, picking up ropes, digging their feet in.
I hope my site survives, but I have to be honest and say I’m more concerned about the general landscape that all music magazines occupy. Yes, we do need a music press independent of streaming platforms to help us sift through the mountains of crap, but we need people to see that we are far more than just than a glorified Argos catalogue. When we lose the independent spirit of sites such as Pitchfork we lose something crucial of music itself, because to assume that record reviews only exist to help you buy music is a fundamental category error. Criticism is never, ever, just about the music. When we talk about music we’re often talking about everything else in life that is important besides.
I think a good analogy for writing about music is like composing poetry about the weather. You could spend an entire lifetime writing verse about thunderheads and tornadoes and not come within a mile of creating something that was as literally sublime, but once in a while the writer will connect with the rhythms, the flash of lightning, the spatter of rain, and if they are really focused they will discover entirely new rhythms and be inspired to write something unique.
To write down a series of words that have never been combined before, expressing a complex series of emotions, thoughts and experiences that joins you and the reader at a level that feels telepathic and changes your joint experience of reality: that is the definition of magic. A lot of the time, music writing is a client, shackled to the vast glorious beast it serves, but occasionally, at its best, it stands independently to one side as a thing of singular elegance. We mustn’t let such a beautiful thing be broken and cast aside.
John Doran is the co-founder and editor of the Quietus website, and a writer and occasional broadcaster