[Dixielandjazz] When Garage Bands meet Garage Critics

[Steve barbone]

Following is a long article, but if you are young, entrepreneurial and want
to be a change agent, read it as a blue print for success. There is no
reason at all why this type of web site couldn't be geared to OKOM, although
the hits, 125,000 a day, might be smaller. Any creativity out there?

Check out the Pitchfork site to see "what's happening" on the cutting edge
these days. My, how the business changes.

Cheers,
Steve


When Garage Rock Meets Garage Critics

by David Carr Published: August 29, 2005 NY Times

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
(http://www.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.