I intend to keep looking around for entertaining new podcasts to look at as models as we move into our next project, but this week, I took our prompt as an excuse to look into a podcast I’ve been meaning to check out for a while: “The Hater”, produced by AV Club contributor Amelie Gilette and posted on the AV Club website. The Hater also consists of a blog fed through avclub.com, and it’s quite hilarious; in the snarky world of AV Club’s culture reporting, Gilette seems to be the snarkiest of all.

This certainly extended to her podcast, which were almost too snarky for my taste.  Each week, she invites a guest (usually another AV/Onion staffer) and they basically shit on celebrities and silly symptoms of commercialism for 15 minutes.  It’s quite funny, but it doesn’t amount to much…it’s not really so different from conversations I might have with my friends, except these people are very practiced at having these sorts of conversations and are therefore extra good at making fun of silly things that come out of Hollywood.  Nevertheless, it was a pleasant diversion, with a lot of lines that got me LOLING, so to speak (e.g. Amelie on the Comedy Central roast of Joan Rivers: “Basically every joke was a variation on one of three themes: 1. Joan Rivers is old.  2. Her vagina: also old.  3. She has had lots of surgery that makes her crazy in the face.”)  Quite funny, but I think I’ll post about a more substantive podcast in the future.

I think that last post is a bit skimpy, so I wanted to talk a bit about the culture-related websites that I do follow, as well as something about one of those websites that appeared semi-formed in my mind a while ago, and which I think I would do well to write down.

I read Pitchfork Media and The A.V. Club (the not-fake culture branch of The Onion) pretty regularly, and another site called PopMatters with semi-regularity.  They are not blogs.  I guess one would call them “Internet publications”: they combine some blog-ish, feature type writing with lots of reviews and news updates (as well as podcasts for A.V. Club and a variety of video content on Pitchfork).  I enjoy the A.V. Club’s snarky approach to things (their coverage, for instance, of the just-when-you-thought-it-could-get-no-worsening of Heroes has been consistently hilarious).  And PopMatters just generates a ridiculous amount of writing, due to its more open submission policy; this leads to a greater range in the quality of the writing, but it also has sort of a nice democratic feel and it often offers a different perspective on things.

This brings me to Pitchfork.  I am tired of feeling ashamed when I say that I read Pitchfork, or make a reference to one of their pieces in conversation.  So I want to talk about that a little bit, and lay down my theory.  Pitchfork is often criticized on several counts.  One of these is that their reviews often focus too much on the personal experiences of the reviewer (which I view as creative license and not necessarily a bad thing), or are just generally…unobjective, or bitchy or obnoxious or something.  I think this was often true in their earlier days (as with this shameful review of Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides or their choice to embed a video of a monkey peeing in its mouth rather than review Jet’s Shine On).  But I think the publication has matured a great deal, especially with their reformatting of the website and the launching of pitchfork.tv, which I think is just the bee’s knees.  Some very strong features and reviews often come out of the site now, and despite the inherent problems with our criticism industry’s obsession with lists, I find their list of, say, the 500 Best Songs of the Decade about as good as one of those lists can be.  Furthermore, I find their news postings extremely useful for keeping up with tour/release announcements for the majority of the bands I like, and that sort of thing.

Another qualm people have about Pitchfork is that they purport to be the end-all-be-all tastemakers of what music currently being recorded is “good” and “important”.  I don’t think this is true; or, at least, I don’t think it’s any more true for Pitchfork than for ANY OTHER criticism-producing entity, ever.  They post a review and that is the opinion of that one critic, or occasionally a group of critics (as with the lists), take it or leave it.  And here’s what I think happens next.

In my opinion, Pitchfork’s review for a given album more often resonates with me as insightful and on-point than any other publication that I read, and while this has in part to do with my personal tastes, I think it’s also because Pitchfork is just a good publication (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stone, which often feels like many of the reviews are written with some agenda other than pure criticism in mind–probably trying to sell magazines in a dying print market, a problem that does not hinder Pitchfork).  Then, because Pitchfork very often makes a number of good points about an album, people who are susceptible to being molded by criticism (a group that sometimes includes me, though less and less as time goes on) say “Look!  Pitchfork must be right all the time!  They are the definitive account of independent music today.”  This creates a backlash in which a whole other group of people say “Pitchfork is purporting the be the definitive account of independent music today”; but I think their core ideology is hardly different from any other major publication in the history of pop music.  Then you have a lot of people who are just upset because Pitchfork wasn’t very nice to poor widdle Coldplay or Kings of Leon, who apparently need mounds of glowing praise in addition to selling assloads upon assloads of records.  In the end, this whole complicated stigma arises in which Pitchfork is viewed as snobbish or elitist (which I think is one of the worst words EVER and a major problem in politics and news media, as well–that’s certainly fodder for a future post), and I, a loyal reader, become a snob by association.

*(More possible future blog fodder: my status as an alleged “culture snob”.  I thought maybe this would stop being a bad thing in college, but apparently it is still Not Okay.  I like to think I’m just honest about my opinion, and I don’t know why it has to taint someone else’s experience of, say, Lady Gaga, when I point out some of the things about her that I think are really silly.  For the record, I think Gaga has many redeeming or at least interesting qualities, and I just want to continue that discussion of her pros and cons somewhere outside of the internet/my small circle of friends who understand where I’m coming from.)

Anyway, I just wanted to take this chance to lay out my Big Theory of Pitchfork, and it seemed sort of appropriate and class related, so I hope it makes sense.  Please comment!

Since there’s no blog I really consistently keep up with, I’ve been rooting around the nets for one the past few days.  The Tumblr blog of cultural critic Nitsuh Abebe, called “a grammar”, definitely leans towards the “meta” side of things, so Abebe often ends up discussing a lot of the same thematic material as our class, with much writing on the nature of media and on criticism itself.  (I just haven’t been sure whether this is the type of blog I should be looking at–one that falls under the same “meta” umbrella as our class, or one that I can study as an example of a “normal” blog…um.)

In any case, I’ve really enjoyed his writing on Vampire Weekend and the incestuous, backlash-feedback cycle of criticism surrounding that remarkably polarizing band (as far as I’m concerned, they’re just a band that makes some damn good pop songs, and I don’t really give a shit that they wear madras onstage and sing about oxford commas).  Here is the link to all his posts tagged w/ Vampire Weekend.  Mostly, Abebe discusses the rampant bandying-about of racial/ethnic/class signifiers that has occurred in much of the criticism of that band (i.e. they are commonly called out for their “WASPiness”, despite the fact that frontman Ezra Koenig is Jewish and co-songwriter Rostam Batmanglij is Persian).  I quite enjoy his writing, enough so that I hope to continue to read his blog, and maybe then I’ll have a better idea of how to describe it in the context of our class.  At this point, the main thing I notice about its grammar/form is what I mentioned before: as a decidedly “meta” blog, a great many of the posts are based around some pre-existing piece of culture-related writing, building on that web of intertextuality that characterizes the blogosphere.

(*also: doesn’t it speak to the current state of things that, for some reason, I already feel kind of lame and outdated using the word “blogosphere”?  I cringed a little bit, typing it in.  Strange.)

I’m tempted to say that my relationship with technology has always been, to some degree, conflicted.  Perhaps it’s my upbringing–my parent’s are no luddites, but they certainly possess that former-flower-child distrust of attempts by ______ to “control” us, or at least somehow tie us down with new media (though McLuhan would credit television itself as the source of this attitude…curious).  I distinctly remember a period of perhaps a year, maybe more, in my early childhood, when my parents stopped paying for television, informing us that it was simply “broken” (and our set had no rabbit ears, so no freebies either), and I remember yearning for Sesame Street something fierce during this period.  And my father was a big get for the cell phone industry when he finally bought a phone after resisting for years, though he still feigns total ignorance when it comes to ridiculously simple operations like entering contacts or, say, answering a call.

So while I don’t have a hard time adopting, and even embracing, new technologies, I still have some level of skepticism or contrarianism seemingly hardwired into my brain (e.g.: maybe this isn’t the best example, but when I first bought an mp3 player, I made sure not to buy an iPod, and the two mp3 players I have owned have both been the Creative brand).  And from this half-hearted attempt to be discerning springs my total lack of interest in owning a smart phone, or the distaste for Twitter which I expressed in class…but I’m sure I’ll be something of a convert to the potential powers of Twitter by the end of the semester, and I’ll be preaching those wonders to my parents the next time I go home.

Most recently, my inner conflictedness has manifested in my desire for my life not to be shackled to my laptop, which I mentioned in class.  I was especially frustrated during this past break, which I spent at home, and found myself having to turn to my computer to accomplish any of the things I wanted to: doing taxes, earning credit for an internship, searching for future internships, writing a review of a new album, working on an electronic music piece, skyping with friends abroad, etc.  Perhaps it was the signs of age my computer started to exhibit: several keys stick, the battery is nearing the end of its days, there is a loose connection that causes the monitor to flicker occasionally, my audio jack has seen better days, and the fan sometimes wheezes like a lifetime smoker.  Perhaps these kinks implicitly led me to comprehend this machine’s fallibility, its imperfection, its mortality.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to do so much from my laptop, but it’s just a friggin machine, and I felt a little weary of it being the brain center for my life.

But now this class, paperless as it is, is tethering me to my computer for nearly every one of its components.  It’s not that I resent having to use my computer for some aspects of a class, but our syllabus is online, our readings are online, our blogs are (obviously) online, and my notes will probably be on my computer, just to keep things centralized.  There will be little proof of my having taken this class that is non-digital.  When I was filling out my college applications, the option to apply electronically for a reduced fee was being introduced, but I needed to be able to lay out all my application materials in front of me in order to properly think about my applications in a macro way.  Similarly, I am wholly uninterested in the advent of Kindle-type technologies.

Obviously, no physical format is indestructible, and that is a drawback (I rented Three Kings over break but the DVD was hopelessly scratched at some places–and don’t even get me started on those eminently fragile things known as “CDs” and their nefarious plastic jewel cases).  Digital formats certainly have many drawbacks as well, though.  But I suppose, at least when it comes to this class, my laptop and I are hardily stuck together again, so I’d better get used to it.