Clipse v. Pitchfork
Here’s to the Clipse for their public charge against Pitchfork, which is accumulating lots of attention from music sites and blogs and firing up a long-overdue dialogue about the poverty of pop music criticism. Generally, anti-Pitchfork sentiment tends toward the kind of resentment and dismissal that only serves to fortify its authority, and indeed, the Clipse are reacting to a disappointing review of their latest release. It’s certainly true that Pitchfork reviews damn with faint praise. Its numerical rating system is supplemented by the narrowest of critical resources, with reviews ranging from snarky to sycophantic and relying, in large part, on the kind of trivia that derives its power from the appearance of exclusivity. This isn’t exclusive to Pitchfork, though, or even new to meta-pop culture; Gawker Media’s websites are now paradigmatic of what my friend (let’s Call Her Icebox) has aptly described as this “mawkish, rah-rah” spirit. When it comes to pop music, Pitchfork is the high court of hype, and its near-monopoly on Cool in the world of pop music criticism is cheered on by a record industry floundering in its state of economic and cultural bankruptcy. In all this, though, there’s a more troubling problem that the Clipse raise:
It’s very hard to swallow a review wherein the author slams the album for a full paragraph, but then backs off, saying ‘I’m mostly just quibbling here.’ Well, if you’re admitting the criticism is unimportant and misaimed, what then is the intent?
What Pitchfork represents is a cultural consensus that artists and their projects, like any other product of consumerist hype, are essentially dispensable. Its snark and sychophantry are indicative, but ultimately not the source, of the problem. The problem lies in a conflation of pop journalism and art criticism. It’s not that the two don’t or shouldn’t intersect. But there is a culturally vital distinction between them, even in the epoch of high capitalism, that’s discernible in their respective effects. Pop journalism contains within it the priority of relevance and the power to obfuscate; artists are therefore given over to the will to celebritize at the expense of their work, and listeners are made into “fans,” followers who behave accordingly, constituting a necessary realm of consensus. For the pop journalist, there are no consequences, no risks, only power; that’s how it’s possible for someone who calls themselves a critic to “back off,” to actually admit to merely quibbling in the course of a review. When art is so thoroughly and universally devalued, nothing is at stake. The assumption behind art criticism should be that, well, everything is. The stutter in the Clipse piece illustrates the problem with couching pop journalism in a claim to real criticism.
The social reproduction of philistines is a function of consumerism, to be sure, but it’s not exclusive to capitalist culture industries. Go forth and multiply! Let’s go out with Goethe:
“The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.”
3 years ago