To commemorate the end of the 28-year reign of Pitchfork as an intellectual, snarky tastemaking mega-God, I'm listening to some of the top-rated electronica albums on the site-- today I did In Color by Jamie xx (which is good stuff to listen to at the gym) and I'm writing this sentence to the weird, jazzy beats of Amon Tobin's album Bricolage . . . I suppose the demise of Pitchfork as the ultimate purveyor of musical criticism was inevitable because the musical landscape has become so fragmented, across time, space, genre, demographics, and the globe . . . I can't remember the last time I thought the same music was good at the same time as a bunch of other people (maybe 100 gecs?) and with the advent of the earbud, you don't even know what people are listening to-- it's not like walking around a college campus in 1991 and hearing Nevermind and Ten pouring out of every dorm room-- or back in the 80s when people advertised their musical taste by carrying a boom box and blasting Van Halen or Public Enemy or AC/DC . . . now, taste is a private affair and you can listen to whatever fucking garbage you want, without the intrusion of music snobs-- it would be fun to know though, like the app Snoop, which Ruth Ware invents in her book One by One-- so you can spy on what people are listening to . . . but we'd never stand for that, just as no one wants to know what number (plus decimal point) that some pretentious music snob assigned an album . . . because what the fuck is an album?
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