In Defense of the Pitchforks

This article, that has been shared a bit in my circles, does a fine enough job of assembling a story around a bunch of people not returning phone calls, but I'm not sure it really goes anywhere into actually interrogating the circumstances of the 'naughts, which to me is still the most unexamined put impactful decade, culturally and politically.  

A minor example would be the mention of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka as a Pitchfork 0.0, without going on to mention how the review was written when the site was in its infancy (1997) and more resembled a 'zine than a major cultural product.  Its reviews at this time still featured hilariously puerile and amateur text, sloppy editing ripe with spelling and grammatical mistakes, and had a pretty paltry following.  By the end of the next decade, Pitchfork's own Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson would go on to write an entire book about

the album.  The review itself had next to no impact and over the course of their next two albums, the Flaming Lips became more popular than they'd ever been.  In fact, their very next album, The Soft Bulletin, recieved a rare 10.0 from Pitchfork, one of its many accolades.

By the turn of the millennium, things had changed significantly and not just in Pitchfork's cultural cache, which had escalated significantly in the post-Strokes indie rock about-face music had taken.  Though the site always covered other music, it gained credibility as the go-to reference guide for the ever-shifting white indie music zeitgeist. Groups like Louis XIV and Jet were toxic to Pitchfork's brand because they had risen to mainstream acceptance on the backs of underground leg work put in by Pitchfork's tastemaking stalwarts like those fluctuating around the DFA. Pitchfork, which barely even covers indie rock anymore, has taken a long time to overcome the stereotype of the "pitchfork album", but it was definitely a thing at the time, the product a seemingly neverending quest for the newest thing, made possible by the insurgence of peer-to-peer sharing networks.

But if any careers were actually killed in the naughts, it's those P2Ps that shoved the knife in.  People didn't really stop buying Travis Morrison's music as much as they just stopped buying music in general. iTunes opened its digital doors in 2003, but it would take years and a series of objectively draconian lawsuits against illegal downloading before it supplanted the P2P networks and their offshoots in music blogs, Pirate Bay, et al.  While one could argue that a 

negative review in Pitchfork could have some bearing, particularly on smaller artists, a horrendous review would at least generate interest.  I personally checked out at least a few albums because of their rancid reviews.  What's probably more true- and likely still is- is the opposite- a glowing review would be enough to generate enough sales to offset the losses from illegal downloads, and moreover produce ticket sales, the engine that really kept the 

industry afloat during this era. While this seems demonstrably true, negative reviews significantly impacting album sales seems harder to prove.*

 

It should also be noted that musical trends are fickle and were never moreso than in the period when Pitchfork supposedly made or broke careers. This was the period of peak hipster, when new cultural products could get lauded and dumped literally within weeks or months of release.  As social media streams began to emerge within the second half of the decade, backlashes would often start before an album even dropped.  So, while it's possible Black Kids would have had a major hit for their debut album, they were also a band ripe for 

the dustbin.  Their debut EP, which was self-released as a free download, contained a massive infectious single that got licensed out prolifically, but nothing else they put out could match it.  It seemed like a classic one hit wonder in the making, and with the deluge of incoming music coming down the RAR pipeline, who had time to follow up with one hit wonders?

This is not to say that Pitchfork's review of the Black Kids album wasn't obnoxious or reckless, because it absolutely was, but many of artists mentioned in the article were on the decline. Liz Phair's LP was intended as a stunt, and to the underground that had nurtured her, seemed to sell out all they treasured about her.   Jet were amediocre band whose 15 minutes had come and gone and were somehow still gobbling up column inches in other publications.  And Travis Morrison had dissolved his more established band (The Dismemberment Plan) to start a solo career, a move that is rarely successful, particularly for someone as niche as him. 

Of all the artforms, music is unequivocally the most personal, because it really is about a kind of mystical connection to certain sounds.  Most critics are sensitive to this, which is one of the reasons that music page on Metacritic is a sea of green (indicating a cumulative score of 61 or above), whereas the film page is a jumble of red (40 and under), yellow (41 to 60), and green ratings.  Whereas one can walk out of a film and judge its narrative a success or failure based on one screening, music requires its audience to really engage with it. Understanding an album requires many consecutive listens and an ear finely tuned to accepting its inputs and recognizing the terms of the artist who produced it.  

Yet, some music is indeed bad, aesthetically and culturally.  It can be bad to us and bad for us. This needs to be communicated clearly and effectively, a task the rating system is not equipped to handle on its own but can contribute to a broader conversation about the things we should value or strive for in our art.  The limits to the kind of relativism in which everyone's opinion, however underdeveloped, is equally valued leads to a world in which the toxic takes of the alt-right (and their Fantano kin) can weasel their way into the mainstream.Obviously the stakes are much lower in the musical realm than in the political sphere.  In fact, if there's anything antiquated in the wild pans Pitchfork and their lot used to dole out, it's the idea that music could be so important that it needed to elicit such extreme responses. As the cultural importance of music itself has shrunk and the floodgates of accessibility opened, music's most aggressive defenders seem like holdovers from a bygone era, indistinguishable from any other troll- be it MCU, Star Wars, or MAGA- festering within their own narrow framework of what music is allowed to be. 

If anything has killed this kind of thinking, it's actually smart, perceptive music writing, which expanded the parameters of the conversations we're allowed to have about music, the way it connected to the world outside of it, or built utopian worlds of possibility within it.  Pitchfork deserves some degree of credit in this too.  

Though their platform upended print media journalism by centralizing the review and thus prioritizing the competitive angle of fandom, their writers throughout the naughts and into this decade grew more thoughtful and in touch with the ideas percolating around music. It 

became less critical in terms of airing grievances and more in line with the type of critical thinking a platform as large as theirs demands.  This is not to say that they don't still goof or that every single article they churn out is gold, but at a time when the clickbait model has created a cottage industry out of instant dunks that make pop culture consumption into a kind of woke olympics more about self-aggrandizing and virtue signalling than recognizing aesthetic accomplishment, a review by Sasha Geffen of Phil Sherburne contains the breathing room and the considerate scrutiny that their chosen subject matter deserves. 

There were plenty of casualties of the music industry from the aughts, but it's important to identify the guilty parties appropriately.  While Pitchfork did play an outsized role in establishing the zeitgeist for the era, its singularity as an influence did not arise from a vacuum.  It took place in the middle of an imploding music market, and a severely disrupted method of consumption that favored novelty over fandom.  

*Now if we're talking the magazine era, here's a place where a critic really could kill a band- since most people couldn't hear the LP before it was written up.  Many an artists entered the dustbins because their one source of exposure was tarnished by a cranky scribe.

No Haven for Toxic Masculinity

wrote this and then didn't publish for various reason---

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On May 2^nd, an explosion rocked North Haven.    A town resident, in the process of a messy divorce, held his wife hostage at gun point in her home for several days.  The house, being located on a major road and with a recently sold but unoccupied property on one side, was somewhat shielded from its neighbors, but luckily a nearby woman who heard what sounded like a domestic disturbance alerted the police.  A standoff transpired that culminated in large barn explosion.   Nine officers were injured and the man at the center of the disturbance perished in the ensuing fire.  Luckily, the woman held captive escaped with her life.

It was a tragic and terrifying event, one which the town I call home will not soon forget.  Though the shock of it caught the entire community off guard, it could arguably be seen as the result of a toxic mixture of elements that had brewing for some time. North Haven is a small town in Connecticut bordering New Haven, Wallingford, and Hamden.  From an outside glance, it appears that this type of incident is a unique event, and thankfully it is, but it’s only a more extreme version of something that is deeply symptomatic of a tendency that is not at all unique to North Haven, but plagues it nevertheless; toxic masculinity.

The mere mention of term may cause many to recoil in disgust or roll their eyes.  After last year’s #MeToo moment, many men’s response was to create their own hashtag in #NotAllMen, as if the mere existence of some decent men absolved their responsibility in tackling the issue, leaving it to women to resolve their own oppression.  But even if toxic masculinity seems like a rather ephemeral concept, it has real, lasting, and deadly material consequences. Nearly three U.S. women are killed every day as a result of intimate partner violence, according to the Bureau of Justice.  According to the CDC, nearly half of all women who are murdered are murdered by their domestic partners.  The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that someone is sexually assaulted every 8 seconds in the U.S. and only 6 out of every 1,000 rapists will ever see prison time.  The vast majority of perpetrators in these instances are men.  90% of female victims and 93% of male victims of sexual violence say that their abuser was a man, according to a 2010 survey by the CDC.

In 2016, the Republican Party, under the auspices of a campaign to nominate a man who has his own 7,000+ word Wikipedia entry just on the 15+ sexual misconduct allegations against him, began actively courting the support of the fringe Men’s Rights movement, a group that has launched targeted harassment campaigns against feminists, spread false statistics meant to diminish the credibility of women who’ve been abused or mistreated, and, in some corners, even advocated against consent and for female subjugation.  The hands of the Democrats are not clean either; a series of scandals last year revealed that a number of national politicians on both sides of the aisle had used secret taxpayer funds to sweep harassment allegations under the rug.  Here in CT, in a perfect illustration of how women can also be complicit in the perpetration of toxic masculinity, Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty protected her Chief of Staff after threatening a female coworker. More recently, a “Time’s Up” bill failed to be called for a final vote in the state house apparently after bipartisan objections about eliminating the statute of limitations for workplace harassment claims failed to pass muster with the corporate wing of each party. 

Toxic masculinity does not just trickle down from the national stage though.  It infiltrates our communities in opaque and unsuspecting ways.  It’s observable in the women who refuse to speak up about injustice or unfairness for fear of reprisal.  It’s present in women who are viewed with suspicion for having platonic male friends or for putting their needs above their husbands.  It’s demonstrated in the ways women are expected to perform custodial or auxiliary labor akin to domestic tasks while at the workplace, and in the “sense of humor” women are seen to lack when jokes cut at their expense. Male supremacy doesn’t even have to assert itself publicly to be felt. Its ideology clogs the air of the spaces it occupies, but to most men it’s their natural habitat so it’s like the fish who ask what water is when you try to describe it to them. 

In North Haven, one sees trickles of these attitudes all around.   In 2015, a debate raged around changing its controversial school sports team name and mascot out of concern that it was offensive to indigenous people.  The conversation reached a stalemate after several in town, including the young college-aged woman who initiated the conversation, indigenous families, and town officials sympathetic to the name change, began to fear for their safety after receiving death threats.  The same type of behavior persisted last year after a prolonged battle over the installation of two turf fields at the middle school made with synthetic crumb rubber infill, a substance currently under investigation by the EPA, CDC, and CPSC for health concerns.  That these two incidents pertain to competitive sports is not an indictment on the activities that many men and women enjoy, but it’s not entirely coincidental either.  Competition and the concept of “winning” are integral to toxic masculine culture. 

For men who bully, taunt, and harass, their actual goal is frequently secondary to the power they wish to assert, the desire to dominate, more often than not over women who challenge their wisdom or authority.  Indeed, central to the push for change in the aforementioned incidents were PTA moms and elected women, who bore the brunt of the merciless mocking, harassment, and gaslighting by sports dads and public officials.  A now infamous May 2017 North Haven Special Board of Selectmen meeting held in response to a request for a special meeting to review the town’s decision to proceed with crumb rubber turf fields descended into a mock trial against the parents and residents (mostly women) who dared voice concerns about the health and safety of their children, led in part by the two majority party men on the board and their male lawyer.  Afterwards, the one minority party woman sympathetic to the idea of holding the meeting, who patiently cited relevant case law supporting the town’s legal obligation to call it as she was jeered and booed, had her house vandalized.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to sense when episodes of mass hysteria like this might bubble over into something truly dangerous like the incident on Quinnipiac Avenue.  Lacking the ability to see what happens behind closed doors in the bedroom or the office, one must rely on what happens in public. And there’s nothing more public, nor vile, than what transpires on social media.  As anyone who has attempted to “chime in” on an issue of even minor controversy can attest, trolls and bullies can materialize quickly and with alarming ferocity. 

Earlier this year when a young woman from North Haven High School posted a notice about the then-upcoming March For Our Lives walkout, she was pestered relentlessly by a group of intimidating men with guns as their profile pictures in a manner not dissimilar to the relentless campaign that hounded the Parkland teens after they spoke out.  Thus, an event launched by children in the wake of a massacre of children, which like so many other massacres of children was triggered by murderous delusions of grandeur and entitlement by an armed man, was met with hostility and intimidation by a group of armed men and their strong opinion about the way children should be responding to threats against their safety and wellbeing. 

Even more recently, a college student set up a GoFundMe to assist the woman who had been held hostage by her husband, lost her home in the May 2nd explosion, and suffered injuries in the process.  The young man who set up the fund was transparent about his process and intentions, posting online in several North Haven groups using his real name and account.  Nevertheless, a paranoid mob soon determined that he was a scammer and the college student too was threatened, with his mother and eventually the victim herself rushing to his defense to assuage the angry hoard. 

This alarming pattern of behavior should surprise no one at this point, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be accepted as normative.  For years, Twitter and Facebook have refused to respond to online harassment claims by women, while aggressively going after seeming lesser offenses like breastfeeding pictures or swearing at verified accounts.   While men are not responsible for all of the harassment or aggressive silencing that takes place online, men become responsible for setting the tone of a conversation by the very nature of the gender imbalance.  When women are afraid to speak up for fear of reprisal or retribution, it falls on men to either fight themselves for open dialogue by all or accept the grossly inequitable norm by encouraging women to either fight back or self-censor.

As I gathered thoughts and sat down to write this column on the way toxic masculinity had affected my community, yet another North Haven woman was silenced, this time forever.  After what was allegedly a domestic quarrel, a woman was struck and then dragged by a car being driven by her husband, who is now being charged with manslaughter after she succumbed to her injuries.   For women who are afraid of their husbands or their male co-workers, the message this act sends is loud and clear- watch your step.  While men loudly protest about what words and actions they take, it’s rare that their lives are literally on the lines over this.  Women live among grave potentialities every day, the kind in which one false move or a word out of line can send spinning the unhinged gears of male supremacy.

For North Haven, and particularly North Haven men, the decision on how to proceed after these two horrifying incidents of domestic violence that both took place in such a small time frame is vital.  It’s on us to decide what kind of community we are and what kind of behavior we will allow.  If we continue down our current path, these latest incidents won’t be the last that bubble up and detonate in ways we can no longer ignore.

Longview

Kucinich 2020

In the far far away time called the naughts, there was an actually existing left but you'd be forgiven for failing to identify it anywhere within sight. Despite organizing massive ongoing protests, they were scrambling for crumbs, praising minor victories by severely compromised neoliberals awash in corporate cash during a time of major bipartisan consensus. The mere idea of "resistance" was shunned by the Adults-In-The-Room whose realpolitik was happy to horseshoe anyone who thought the state shouldn't murder civilians or that people should have healthcare into the same bucket as people who murdered abortion doctors and thought gay adoption would cause the rapture.

In the midst of this was Dennis Kucinich, a man whose platform has largely been adopted by progressive democrats now, but who was mercilessly mocked by an "end-of-history" consortium of a nominally opposition party pants-shittingly afraid of anyone even calling them “liberal”. No one from the Democratic establishment would touch Kucinich with a ten foot pole during his major primary runs, unless it was to further burrow him into the ground. Media outlets, when they weren't mercilessly shitting on him, were denying him entry to things, events which they’d gladly confer airtime to pitiful primary candidates like Dick Gephardt (you see, Ambien Frankensteins like John Kerry and genuine sleaze like John Edwards were the REAL candidates). Even those who basically agreed with everything Kucinich said made staunch arguments against him, citing electability and the pulse of the nation (I literally heard people say no one would ever vote for him because he's vegan).

Even Jon Stewart, in a rancidly dated clip, mocked him for suggesting that he might appoint a transgender supreme court justice ("All rise for the honorable chick with dick"). Another segment by resistance hero Samantha Bee went to a small New Jersey house party to guffaw at a crowd of mostly women who had the audacity to support a campaign based on peace rather than endless warfare. The hitjob showed her visibly repulsed by an apology letter written to the people of Iraq "in Arabic" (ostensibly for war crimes we'd committed in the region), ending the segment by saying that the whole affair made her want to kill herself.

As the pretty ludicrous debate over Joy Reid's homophobic blog posts has recently brought to light, this aversion to difference was once all-too-commonplace, even among people we now think of as allies. Don't think that our sudden trend towards wokeness and populist policies might not be sold down the river immediately in the name of reconciliation with President Pence. As the DACA sellout proved, there’s always a disposable contingent whose urgent needs will be up for negotiation. In fact, most figures from this era, who not long ago argued that gay marriage was a "distraction" and overturning the patriot act was "unviable" still hold broad power and influence.

We're in an era where impossible things happen almost daily so be sure to take a long hard look at whether something that does not seem achievable may be important to support anyway before you defer to those who lack the vision and urgency to see what the future demands.