“The world's collide, but all that we want is a shady lane:” has Pitchfork really become establishment?
By Nicole on July 20, 2010 in main
In an attempt to recuperate from three days in 90+ degrees temperatures at this year’s p4k, I have decided that my reflections will take a more synoptic, non-linear approach. Last week, the NY Times ran a feature on my friend ‘David’s’ (not jeopardizing your anonymity) blog, Pitchfork Reviews Reviews which among several things, suggested that PRR’s existence means that Pitchfork has evolved into a veritable cultural arbiter/benchmark of all things ‘alternative.’
Does this very notion of becoming ‘establishment’ run counter to the core essence of what it means to be alternative? I think David touches upon this issue a lot in his writing, particularly when he assesses how the heretofore edgy discordances of punk music has become so ingrained in our culture, that they are in effect now safe, or what we are to make of ventures like the Creator's Project. I guess what I’m trying to say is, can I consider a festival in which I spent time sitting on an Air Conditioned Greyhound Bus in order to receive a free tee-shirt, dropped an embarrassingly high amount of money on European microbrews and vegan ice cream cones, and browsed a Whole Foods tent remotely counter-cultural? Should I feel badly about buying into the alt-establishment or view it as a natural progression of this century and a testament to the very power of youth culture?
Looking at this Festival from a very macro perspective, I am tremendously impressed by what I participated in. Despite sweltering heat, the festival was completely sold out and about 18,000 individuals attended each day. The three headlining acts of the festival provide a very neat encapsulation of indie music as it has stood in my life: Modest Mouse, Friday’s headliner are an infinitely fascinating crossover story who were sort of beautiful losers/underground favorites the first half of the 2000s and then were accidentally catapulted into the mainstream by 2004’s “Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and have made a very different kind of music ever since; Saturday’s headliner LCD Soundsystem have probably shaped alternative music/culture more than any other act in the aughts as evidenced by the eternal freshness of 2002’s “Losing My Edge,” the uplifting anthem “All My Friends,” and the recent Billboard Success of “This Is Happening” – the likely final album by the band, James Murphy is the scenester par excellence and is seemingly unassailable right now; lastly the entire festival was closed out by Pavement the defiantly slipshod icons of the nineties whose reunion was probably the biggest selling point of this year’s event, Stephen Malkmus is a demigod in a very different way from Murphy and he lets us know that it’s okay to be empty and not feel okay and be fully aware that you may dress for success while simultaneously knowing that success will never come.
Moreover, the fact that Pavement came back to headline this Festival after being booed off the stage at Lollapolooza in this very city in 1994, shows that Pitchfork is sort of reclaiming the reigns of indie culture and setting it right, and maybe I shouldn’t feel somewhat resentful that Pitchfork was tinged with a distinctly corporate vibe at times. I also think it's inspirational that a band like Smith Westerns (who are all younger than me for crissakes) are given by Pitchfork the opportunity to perform for A&R guys from labels like Matador in front of an appreciative audience and will continue to rise through the echelons of the indie rock industrial complex. To be honest, I feel really great that there’s sort of ‘established’ festival that I can attend annually and have my tastes affirmed and cavort with people like me who “deserve a phd in pop music” (Chicago Sun Times), and at the end of the day it shouldn’t really matter whether I possess these opinions because Pitchfork granted their album an 8.0+ or not.
The fact remains that when I returned from Chicago and attempted to find national press coverage of the Festival – what I discovered was pretty underwhelming, and in that respect it’s fairly remarkable that I was so consumed and felt downright encompassed by this event for three days, when in reality it isn’t really resonating on a decidedly broad cultural level. In this sense, Pitchfork is kind of like rock fantasy camp or something in that in deluded me, Stephen Malkmus, James Murphy, Issac Brock, and 54,000 others into toying with the idea that our preferred form of cultural recreation was a neatly packaged commodity which you could find anywhere in America for those beautifully ephemeral 72 hours and it tasted as delicious as one of those non-dairy chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream cones (too bad the Festival melted so quickly) and it sounded as refreshingly modest as those vocal loops on the intro of ‘Cut Yr Hair.”
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