Pitchfork: Lessons in Taste Revisionism

I started reading Pitchfork in 2001 or 2002.  Back then its website was www.pitchforkmedia.com, since www.pitchfork.com was the home of a horribly designed website called "Livestock World."  Searching for a snarky review of the newest indie record – an act whose value in social capital was just beginning to dawn on me – I frequently found myself looking at animated GIFs of farm equipment.  I tell this story not to establish my credibility as an early, unsung supporter of Pitchfork.  Actually, the only reason the site popped up in my AltaVista search in the first place is probably because, by the early 2000s, Pitchfork had already begun its ascent as an indie music tastemaker.

But the fact that Pitchfork's namesake URL once hosted a shoddily-designed site hawking farm equipment is kind of funny: it conjures up visions of a silly, latter-day Nietzschean genealogy.  In other words, the site wasn't always a "hegemon of taste".  Indeed, as the Livestock World story illustrates, Pitchfork’s origins were humble and pedestrian (something the site’s founder Ryan Schreiber has always explicitly noted).  What he and others have noted with less frequency, however, is the extent to which the site's finely tuned tastes have themselves shifted since its popularity rise in the early 2000s.  Today, Pitchfork may indeed be a hegemon of taste.  Yet the logic underpinning its influential evaluations has not been particularly stable.

From this...
[1999 site header]

Consider Pitchfork’s estimation of the “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s.”  I’m not talking about the list that’s on their website now.  I’m talking about this one – the one created at the end of 1999 that was updated and ultimately removed from the site in 2003.  Today, this list is only accessible via the internet archive site, the Wayback Machine.

Admittedly, a quick glance at this first list doesn't seem to yield much.  Yes, the contributors did put a Phish record (!) at number ninety-four, but otherwise the catalog looks pretty respectable.  The top three albums are what you might expect: My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (#1), Radiohead’s OK Computer (#2), and Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted (#3).

But look at the revised list from 2003, and the selections of the first stand out in relief.  Yes, some of the changes are more or less cosmetic: OK Computer replaces Loveless as the best album of the ‘90s (it is “reiterated…just how much better” the former album is than the latter), while The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin elbows Pavement aside for the number three spot.  Slightly more noticeable is the demotion of certain albums on the new list.  Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love drops from eleven to twenty-four, Beck’s Odelay falls from nine to nineteen, and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville tumbles all the way from five to thirty.  Most striking, however, is the complete and utter absence of rap on the original list, and its relative conspicuousness on the second. 

...to this.  What's the diff?
[current site logo]

There are zero rap albums on Pitchfork’s first list.  A few of the artists included on the initial tabulation (e.g. Underworld [#93], Soul Coughing [#66], and DJ Shadow [#7]) were utilizing parts of these genres in their music, but they could not be catalogued as rap groups.  The updated 2003 catalog, however, is comparatively awash with them.  There are no fewer than fifteen rap albums on this list, ranging from Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (#99) to Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (#17).  Sandwiched in between, we find GZA and Genius, Pharcyde, Dr. Dre, two Tribe Called Quest albums, Nas, and the Notorius B.I.G.

The question here is definitely not one of merit.  The albums picked for the revised list are excellent, and, indeed, we might want to just explain away Pitchfork’s first list by concluding that the site didn’t have anyone interested in rap on staff in its infancy.  That conclusion may very well be right.  But the simplicity of it is not particularly satisfying, for a few reasons.

First, it seems unlikely that the few individuals who contributed to both lists (Ryan Schreiber and Brent DiCrescenzo, for example) were still unaware, by 2003, that they had ignored the best rap albums of the 1990s.  Indeed, as early 2002, Pitchfork began to actively cover and review the genre on a semi-regular basis.  But this was a sharp change from previous years.  Pitchfork did not include any rap albums in their “Top 20 Albums of 2000” list, and only one in the 2001 list.  At the end of 2002, however, the site named nine rap records in their year-end review.  The next year, they tabbed seven, complementing the revised ‘90s list.  Some of this shift in emphasis was undoubtedly the result of new contributors coming into the fold.  But given the swift and significant rise of rap on Pitchfork, it seems unlikely that it was merely due to the influx of a few new staff writers.  It appears rather as a dramatic shift in the taste profile of the site as a whole.  Why else completely delete the original “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s” list?

I am not suggesting Pitchfork’s taste revisionism concerning rap was calculated (though at the time its editors and writers could have hardly failed to notice it).  Actually, all the better if it were organic, since it raises some fascinating questions.  The most important of which is: If Pitchfork is a tastemaker, then who or what is shaping its tastes?  If the site’s turn to rap was an honest recognition that great rap albums had indeed been produced in the 1990s, and that the landscape of contemporary music had been slowly shifting toward this genre since the ‘90s, then to what extent did Pitchfork’s musical tastes modify given broader structural changes within popular music itself?  Perhaps the site has some power to anoint bands as "the new hot thing."  But how and why does it choose to pursue different musical styles?  What are the (perhaps unacknowledged or unnoticed) forces influencing its listening habits?

My sense is that in trying to tackle these questions, we would find ourselves in a discussion whose parameters go beyond the whims of a single music review site.  What we would be talking about, in fact, would be the various issues - technological, demographic, economic, and political – that have effected the production and consumption of popular music in US over the past quarter-century.  Issues that ultimately condition what tastemakers find tasteful in the first place, and why.