OVERHEARD MUSIC

Anatomy of a Pitchfork Record Review, or, Diagnosing Culture’s Borderline Personality Disorder

All right, look. Let’s just take this line-by-line, if we have to. Okay? Let’s just take it apart and then spell it out. Because the point of criticism is to name explicitly what insidiously pervades social experience, and thereby liberate consciousness from its subjugation to the givenness of that aspect of social experience. To obviate the obvious, to disabuse opinion of the burden of consensus, and incite the kind of conflict that only comes from actual independent thought. That is the basic work of criticism, and any criticism that cannot itself hold up to that same evaluative standard fundamentally and absolutely fails.

Pitchfork understands this. Or, at least, recent Pitchfork reviews—now shriller and more transparently defensive than ever—display the kind of bratty and bullish insecurity that comes with the growing pains of self-awareness. (Yes, we might simply say: Pitchfork is a teenager. It’s tantrumtastic!) The internal contradiction in Pitchfork, as in any “hype machine,” is the need to both lead opinion by creating consensus and the constant struggle to escape the consensus it creates in order to retain leadership status. That conflict is a real one, and the source of a great and very profound anxiety.

A reading of a recent Pitchfork review exposes the angsty attitude of the publication toward itself, its readers and its responsibility for the culture they have in common—a conformist culture. We don’t have to read between the lines of Ian Cohen’s Feb. 6th review of the self-titled debut release by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, since he manages to express this internal conflict explicitly by insulting and baiting the reader while defensively exaggerating a sense of disregard for his readers’ opinions. Still, a line-by-line breakdown seems like something that, at this point, might actually be necessary (and, okay, kinda fun) if anyone is ever going to successfully throw a wrench in the hype machine. Let’s have a look.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

[Slumberland; 2009]
Pitchfork Rating: 8.4

[[Excerpted Pitchfork text in Ital.]]

[[My comments follow or refer to the bolded ital. portions]]

Like plenty of other bands in the internet era, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem poised to attract an audience that will far outstrip that of their easily identifiable precedents— in their case, groups like Rocketship or Shop Assistants, each obscure these days even by Approved Indie Influence standards. A few other twee/noise-pop revivalists arguably pulled off that same trick last year, but Pains of Being Pure at Heart are likely to appeal to listeners beyond online name-droppers and Brooklyn scenesters.

[[Two motivations of the review are introduced right off the bat, and these coalesce in the last sentence of the first paragraph. Those motivations are: (1) Introduce a band in an explicitly obscure or referential historical context in order to circumscribe in advance a small and therefore elite audience already in the know, and (2) Make the (*self-fulfilling*) prediction that this audience will expand. The passive-aggressive jab at “online name-droppers” (awkward, given that the very first sentence of the review reveals Mr. Cohen to be precisely that!) and “Brooklyn scenesters” seems unnecessary and, at this early stage in the review, surprising, but it foreshadows a much frothier one-man spitting contest to come. Let’s read on!]]

That these second-wavers[1] are getting first-rate attention shouldn’t be a worry[2] unless you’re into dick-measuring contests about the late-1980s (but I was there) or still holding a grudge against Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts[3].

[[ (1): Calling the band second-wavers reinforces the caveat against the reader thinking this debut album represents anything authentically original, lest the reader not catch the—ahem!—references to their “easily identifiable”-yet-“obscure” influences.

(2): The suggestion that a broader audience for the band would be something to describe as a “worry” at all would seem utterly bizarre and misguided in the context of a review that was actually focused on dealing with the band and its music on their own terms. In the context of a Pitchfork review, though, the idea that the tension between ‘underground’ and ‘mainstream’ knowledge is a source of anxiety at all gets placed right up in the foreground, revealing a self-consciousness that eclipses the actual musical content.

(3): Yikes!! Okay, okay already!! I’m not “into” that, all right, guy? Sheesh! Except, um, now I’m confused. Didn’t you pull your dick out first, in the first sentence of this review, when you name-dropped the band’s “easily identifiable precedents,” only to charge the reader with ignorance of those precedents, “obscure these days even by [the] Approved Indie Influence standards” that you yourself set as a Pitchfork writer? On a related note, is it guaranteed that a reader would even know why one would “hold a grudge” against bands like the Vivian Girls and the Crystal Slits? If it is guaranteed, if you’re so confident you know your audience, what is the motivation for levelling such an aggressive charge against them? Do you want them to stop reading Pitchfork because they feel alienated? That’s, like, the textbook example of Borderline Personality Disorder: I hate you—don’t leave me! ]]

Despite being such a streamlined listen, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart acts as something of an indie Rorschach: Once our staff got a hold of the fuzzy, major-chord fizz of “Come Saturday” or “Stay Alive”, it raised comparisons to everything from Sleepyhead to Black Tambourine to even Peter Bjorn and John (at their most shoegazy) and Ride (at their most heavy-lidded). In other words, you’ll dig this record as long as you’re a fan of trebly, melancholy pop music. Which is quite a lot of people reading this review.

[[ Lest we question Mr. Cohen’s audience awareness again!]]

What distinguishes POBPAH from the rest of their modern peers is a sense of craft located in the sweet spot between wilfull [sic] amateurism masking incompetence and not gumming things up with bells and whistles. It’s immediate and substantial, but initially, it can seem distracting that the band is built more for speed than muscle. Yet these aren’t songs that need anchors— as much as Alex Naidus’ bass plays an integral role in pushing everything forward, he’s more likely to contribute melodic counterpoint than low end. Kip Berman’s voice is appropriately unaffected, working in melodies that almost feel like 45-degree angles— exact, acute, and just right. Keyboardist Peggy Wang-East doesn’t harmonize in a traditional sense with Berman very often, but particularly on “Young Adult Friction”, her vocals are a hook in themselves, taking an already strong chorus to a higher plateau.

[[ All right, finally! A few words on the actual sound, the musical and lyrical content, of the record itself! Now we’re talking. You keep going like this, Mr. Cohen, and I’ll stick with you to the end. I want to know what this record is like! I want to know how it feels to listen to it! I want to know what’s relatable, catchy, original, cliché, surprising or inventive about the songwriting, and what place this record would take in a record collection if, say, it sounds like something I might enjoy. So: let’s hear it! Go on.]]

So yeah, they’ve got the sound figured out, but what ensures that this will be something that’ll make it past the point where the indie cycle of life goes on and bands are inevitably starting to cop the sounds of, say, Archers of Loaf? Regardless of the b&w cover art, there’s more gray matter than initially appears. The title alone of “This Love Is Fucking Right!” is enough to set off the sugar shock factor (it’s a nod to the Field Mice), and that’s before the chorus which renders the f-bomb “feckin!,” but the invocation of “you’re my sister” before the title is as dark as you want it to be.

[[That’s it? 4.5 sentences on the sound of the record, and you’re already moving on (or back) to the question of its chances of survival in the Pitchfork-patented Darwinian “life cycle” of hype? C’mon! We were just getting started! If that’s how you’re going to insist on playing it, then, Cohen, I’m game. Let’s see, what were you saying? Oh, right. You wanted to know how fit the band is for survival as something singular in a culture of conformity. Got it! Well, it’s hard to say, since there were only five sentences about their sound. What do you think? What would set them apart, what is the salvation from sameness in their sound? It’s darkness, “a darker tone,” according to the next paragraph, that marks a distinction. Fascinating: dark lyrics against an upbeat pop music arrangement. That is the kind of descriptive and original thought that makes Pitchfork the exemplary music publication of our time. No, I’m being sarcastic.]]

“Stay Alive” is the record’s centerpiece, boasting the most anthemic chorus; initially, it could pass for cloyingly optimistic, with bell-like keyboard pinches accenting thumbs-up signifiers like “shoot at the sky” and “you’ll stay alive.” But once again, after closer listens it takes a darker tone, possibly talking down a suicidal friend. Most tellingly, “Come Saturday” sets the stage for the rest of the record with a promise of ignoring parties for a summer wasting and spent indoors. It’s every bit as heartfelt as the later lyrical nod to Another Sunny Day.

But then again, sincerity never made me turn up the volume. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery, and you’re just being a dick if you think the past has some kind of patent on that. That’s just the way good pop music works.

[[For crying out loud, guy. I already told ya I don’t think that! You’re the one who’s dropping name-bombs of obscurity all over the place and clouding over any hint of music writing that actually makes it into this review! I really don’t think it’s necessary to get your pointer finger out and start jabbing at me, telling me that my (presumed!) opinion makes me “a dick,” you know? Look, did I do something to piss you off? You know, like, earlier on in the review? Because that’s just mean, man! You realize, don’t you, that you’re projecting. Projecting! Calling your own references “obscure” to the Indie-approved mainstream is something you do when YOU think that “the past has some kind of patent” on Ye Olde Dark-Lyrics-Bright-Tones pop schematic. You made a dick of yourself, therefore, within the *first sentence* of this review, even acknowledging, two sentences later, that this approach counts as something like a “dick-waving contest,” although somehow it would seem that the name-dropping reviewer himself is exempt from that indictment.]]

So.

At two levels—the immanent level of the reviewer/reader relationship and the larger, transcendent level of contemporary culture’s relation to its own history—there is an anxious struggle with the unarticulated fact that the hype cycle describes a cultural competition for influence and authenticity. In Cohen’s words, it’s the but-I-was-there factor. His review wraps up with a finger-wagging command that we drop our concern with that factor all together, because it makes us superficial “dicks,” but obviously “we” have no say in the review, so that leaves only one person who has to drop it.

It’s wrong to refer to the dynamics of hype in culture industries as cyclical (as in, “hype cycle”), because that merely describes something two-dimensional, like a pendulum swing—up and down, back and forth, endlessly repeating—that is somehow organic to the eternal and unchanging nature of Public Opinion. “Hype” describes more than just a symmetrical oscillation between approval and backlash; it is the competition for influence that swings (or magnetically attracts) a very fickle pendulum unevenly and inconsistently to-and-fro. In that sense, hype is not cyclical but dialectical. A dialectic is not two-dimensional; it has none of the reciprocality or symmetry of a cycle. The dialectical negation that comes from an internal contradiction yields something new and wholly antithetical to the previous conditions. In other words, it changes things irreversibly.

And just as criticism has a dialectical motive (the impulse to reinvent social/cultural conditions by articulating the inherent contradictions in the status quo), so does hype reflect a dialectical dynamic. It’s just that hype is a negative dialectic: not only does it not irreversibly change social/cultural conditions, it actually reproduces those conditions and is the source, the stasis, of the status quo. The pendulum-swing movement of hype is not predictable, repetitive or uniform enough to call it a cycle, but it’s still a back-and-forth movement that hinges on the structural bearings of the way things are and have been.

Pitchfork is a “hype machine” precisely in the sense of being a negative dialectic: it succeeds in “staying ahead of the pack” by perpetually redefining “ahead”—i.e., the new/next/now—in order to always produce a space for the pack to fill, a content for conformity. What it produces is new, but not actually antithetical to existing conditions, since the “new” is explicitly produced in order to *reproduce* consensus. Ian Cohen’s frat initiation-style aggression toward the Pitchfork reader and overt concern with the question of the life cycle of pop music “shouldn’t worry us,” though. It’s just a pathetic and transparently reactive attempt to deal with the essential contradictions at work in a hype machine. Pitchfork, above all, is concerned with patenting the past and perpetuating the present.

Not to be a “dick” or anything.