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We Owe Pitchfork
For all its chaotic choices, the site reshaped how we think about music.
The old writeups could be a touch deranged, more interested in communicating their excitement than afraid of embarrassing themselves: “It’s cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes ”; “ Source Tags and Codes will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope”; “It’s taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase ‘emotional’ to its true origin.” It can be done again, right?But Pitchfork writers were also boxing against an obstinate and desiccated music industry that couldn’t appreciate weird rap and took multiple album cycles to clock that acts like Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, and Death Cab for Cutie would move units with the right record and push. But since it has come up as an excuse for people to scoff at Pitchfork being absorbed into GQ, it bears spelling out that it is a dusty way to think about music being released during a decade where the pop girlies serve slacker rock teas, and the folk-pop and hard-rock guys have a taste for trap beats.
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