why i will no longer read Pitchfork

Is there really anything more satisfying than watching someone who has clearly put a lot of time into something, who has situated their opinion in an historical discourse, who rolls it out on a red carpet, only to be see that they have merely dressed up a piece of shit and tried to present it as Something Important?

This happens fairly often, of course. I feel like aged professors sometimes get so wrapped up in thinking about something like ethics and a democratic society (for example), they inevitably produce this kind of boring platitude, already drenched in its self-important redundance.

This is also how I feel about any new Bruce Springsteen album. Unlike the Rolling Stones, who (at least I hope) know they are turning out garbage, or Neil Young, who is actually crazy, or Paul McCartney, from whom no one expects anything, Bruce Springsteen genuinely thinks he still has it in him. And because his music engages a broader cultural range than most pop music, and does so with a painful earnestness, he certainly can appear to be saying Something Important to a great many people. This is where Rolling Stone magazine comes in. As the completely sold-out bastion of the 1960s completely sold-out legacy (and legacy of selling out), Rolling Stone EXISTS in order to see Bruce Springsteen as a relevant figure. Their relevancy is tied together. There is a whole circuit of bogus cultural affirmation that serves as a mass circle jerk to this mainstream BoBo cultural that (I predict) will completely baffle everyone in thirty years, when the idea of Bruce Springsteen in 2006 will seem as ridiculous as it actually is. That is to say, as the importance of the moment Rolling Stone represents becomes settled into a timeline of our understanding, the unnaturally-prolonged life of post-sell-out masturbation will firstly lose all of the lustre it has assigned itself, and secondly, be forgotten about altoghether.

Today, I announce that Pitchfork has BECOME Rolling Stone, is no longer distinguishable from it, and therefore has obliterated itself. From falling over itself to praise the new Bob Dylan album (long a Rolling Stone trademark), the "greatest songs of the 1960s" list, which I won't even go into here, Pitchfork has issued enough definitive proofs that it IS what it has always wanted to be: Important. In the same way that Rolling Stone is Important. And in fact, by becoming hardly distinguishable.

Now, when I was a sophomore in college, I declared War on indie rock. I stopped listening to Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, whatever, because I do not feel that punk exists on some kind of spectrum with those artists, with the same fans, etc. In this, I think Pitchfork and I are in agreement. Punk has nothing to do with it. Ditto, DIY. If ex-hardcore kids want to sound like the Human League, so be it. But it has nothing to do with me.
(By the way, this spectrum which I refute has earned the MOST EMBARRASSING name in Texas, and perhaps elsewhere: "scene." People actually refer to themselves or their scene AS "scene." Like "all those scene kids with white belts." !!!!! Mortifying!)

Now, I feel bad for people who thought that indie rock "meant" Something, and who have had to see it dragged through the mud and finally abolished in a quagmire of shame. You can't win 'em all. But I imagine these people feel massive resentment towards Pitchfork in its Time Magazine-like dedication to Sleater-Kinney, its obliviousness to hardcore, its embrace of Techno, its willful irrelevance, its reviews which completely ignore the music in favor of a Statement, its celebration of "Hey Ya", and therefore (here's the point of all this) ceasing to be the infuriating, clueless, pretentious, musings of indie-rockers too boring to "get" hipsterism right, and becoming like the Kennedys, like Wynton Marsalis, like Ken Burns: spokespersons for an Americanism so bland and so outside of my universe, it isn't even fun to deride anymore.