I liked this essay before it was cool
Note: I haven’t been contributing to the blog much of late, and this is the reason. It’s an essay I recently did on hipster subculture and its relationship to indie music and Pitchfork. It’s not really relevant to anything that usually gets posted here on Explorations, but it took me so bloody long to write I figure I may as well share. Please excuse my awful description of hipster fashion and various assumptions I make about what you may or may not have heard of.. Bare in mind it was intended for my lecturer, not the blogosphere. Oh, and it’s really long. So I wont be offended if you don’t read it.
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You pass a guy in the street. He is has thick framed, vintage-looking glasses, skinny jeans that are folded upwards at his leather shoes, a worn out but modern sweater, and white headphones visible underneath a distinctive hairstyle. You ask yourself what he is listening to. Perhaps it is the “finger picked maze-work” of Kurt Vile (Bevan 2011), or the “cascading looped-up falsetto harmonies” on Big K.R.I.T.’s latest release (Breihan 2011), or maybe even the “personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music” of tUnE-yArDs (Perpetua 2011). Chances are you’ve never heard of them. Chances are he heard of them through Pitchfork.
The aforementioned names are just a few artists that have earned the coveted “Best New Music” award from music news and review site Pitchfork Media (www.pitchfork.com) in recent weeks. If none of these artists look familiar to you though, don’t despair: that’s how they want you to feel. Meet the hipster, the faux-counterculture that values taste as its primary currency and prior knowledge as a form of social dominance (Greif 2010a). The hipster wears more fashionable clothes than you, eats healthier food, goes to bohemian bars, appreciates finer art and listens to better music than you. If you want to keep up, you better read Pitchfork.
This essay will be focussed on the ways in which Pitchfork Media reinforces the idea of taste as an indicator of class and as a tool for social dominance, with particular reference to the hipster subculture. It is, however, a concept that can be applied to broader social values and is not a characteristic exclusive to hipsters. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu studied the relationship between class and taste in his 1979 book Distinction. Bourdieu found that a person’s taste in art, music and food is not ingrained or inborn, but is simply something that is acquired by them in an attempt to conform to the customs of their class and as a means of legitimating and expressing a sense of superiority over the lower classes (1979, p. 7). While these tendencies are apparent in wider society, there are few groups of people in which taste is applied so consciously and deliberately as the hipster.
The original ideals of the hipster can be traced back to Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’ in which he described a culture of upper-class white males who wished to distance themselves from the hallmarks of corporate white society, instead adopting the ideals of the cooler black Americans (Mailer 1957, cited in Greif 2010b). This resulted in a subculture within the dominant class that was insistent on rejecting the authority of their class.
One way in which the hipster rejects the social values of the dominant class is by demonstrating the traits of the “rebel consumer” (Thomas Frank 1997, cited in Greif 2010b). The rebel consumer is someone that uses specific aspects of mass consumerism against itself in a kind of twisted irony, so that by adopting particular mass products as their own, they identify themselves as defiant against authority. This can be observed in the hipster’s adoption of trucker hats and browline glasses, both of which have come to symbolise corporate or blue-collar America at various points during the twentieth century. This could be described as homology, which according to Paul Willis (1978, cited in Hebdige 1979, p. 113) is the symbolic representation of values, ideologies or experiences shared within a subculture. However, by adopting these symbols as their own hipsters are not endorsing the history or ideals that are associated with them, but are using it as a way of controlling the meanings of these objects, and therefore as a way of cultural dominance.
The most prominent characteristic of the hipster is its reliance on prior knowledge; being ahead of the rest of the population, especially in relation to fashion and arts. Anatole Broyard (1948) described the sense of superiority that prior knowledge gave hipsters in his essay ‘A Portrait of the Hipster’:
The indefinable authority it provided was like a powerful primordial or instinctual orientation, in a threatening chaos of complex interrelations.
Hipsters believe the lives of minority groups (of which they consider themselves) and the decisions that control them are dictated by a higher authority, so by possessing forms of cultural capital before anybody else, hipsters take back a degree of power over their lives (Broyard 1948). According to Greif (2010a) “all hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world.” So by way of rebel consumerism and prior knowledge, taste has become the “primary currency” within the hipster subculture (Greif 2010a), used as a both a form of hierarchy within the subculture and a form of social dominance outside of it.
The original wave of hipsters occurred in the 1940s and consisted of “middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed,” (Fletcher 2009). However, in its recent revivalism since 1999 the term hipster has had more to do with the underground music scene, namely indie rock. The term was first used to describe artists signed to independent record labels, but its meaning became broader in the late 90s to the point where it now suggests more about the listener than the characteristics of the actual music (Suddath 2010). In the internet age, almost every band in the world has access to a mass audience through social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bandcamp. This has brought about a shift in artist-audience relations where suddenly there is no middle man. The potential for prior knowledge is enormous.
Enter Pitchfork.
Pitchfork Media, the so called “mecca of music snobbery” (Radwanski 2005), is an online music publication featuring reviews, news, columns and interviews. Since its establishment in 1995, Pitchfork has become music’s primary online tastemaker (Butler 2006), influencing an entire generation of independent music fans and, yes, hipsters. According to Chicago record store owner Steve Sowley (quoted in Kot 2005), the website has an “unshakable control over the indie-music scene” and an unrivalled impact on album sales. Some online retailers have even reported albums selling upwards of 600% thanks to positive Pitchfork reviews (Harding 2008).
According to founder Ryan Schreiber, the name “Pitchfork” is actually intended to reflect an “angry mob mentality” against the mainstream music industry and press (Joseph 2008), which strongly reflects its hipster ideals. Pitchfork’s attitude towards mainstream tastes can be observed in a 2010 column written by Tom Ewing, who is a regular record reviewer and contributor. In one of his ‘Poptimist’ columns he wrote about when he worked in a bookstore where he and his fellow employees had total control over the music played. Instead of playing agreeable, easy-listening music that would please the customer, come closing time they would play songs by artists such as Merzbow, Swans and Nurse With Wound. These are bands that Ewing classifies as drone, noise and experimental with sonically extreme tendencies. Ewing admits that the music they would play brought on “sensations of hypnosis, endurance, submission, loss of self” and that enjoying the music takes some getting used to (Ewing 2010).
This was music used as a declaration of territorial control […] We particularly enjoyed it when customers would come over and ask how we could possibly like this noise, or whether we really thought it was music.
Ewing and his co-workers were using their tastes in music to apply their dominance and gain control over their surroundings. Not only that, but they were hoping for customers to react with confusion and shock. Ewing claims that this is because they added the element of taste. “Yes, actually, we do like this stuff, and we know you don’t.”
Because Ewing has (what he would consider to be superior) taste, he is able to withstand and actually enjoy music that others find unpleasant. Part of this enjoyment comes from knowing others do not share his same sense of musical refinement. This principle is shared by many hipsters and Pitchfork reinforces this notion that taste can be used to exert social dominance.
A majority of Pitchfork’s content, however, is not its anecdotal or contemplative columns; it is their trademark “long, rambling personal opinion of an album” (Suddath 2010). There are many elements of Pitchfork’s review style which reflect hipster ideals and attitudes towards taste. The first and perhaps most notable aspect of a Pitchfork review is its use of complex, pretentious language. Brent DiCrescenzo’s review of Radiohead’s album Kid A basically went viral in 2000, which garnered Pitchfork much negative criticism but also a huge increase in readers. According to founder Ryan Schreiber, people felt compelled to pass the review on because of its “purple” and “outrageous” writing which had the unintentional effect of being hilarious (Suddath 2010). The review was full of pretentious metaphors, artsy prose and proud intellectualism:
The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard’s cap… Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper… Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction… The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax… It’s cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes… The human part of me wept in awe.
While this gushing 1200 word review (accompanied by a full 10.0 score) is perhaps one of the more flamboyant in the website’s history, it does represent the long-winded, highly personal way in which Pitchfork writes about music. This is particularly unusual considering most other music print magazines such as Rolling Stone and Spin have condensed their reviews into just a few sentences (Carr 2005). While most music journalists cater for a broad audience with the expectation of short attention spans, Pitchfork demands concentration, good literacy skills and an in depth knowledge of musical history and occasionally musical theory.
Through its use of language and writing Pitchfork limits its audience to the well educated and the middle-to-upper classes. Without the ability to decipher Pitchfork’s “impenetrable and masturbatory” writing (Plagenhoef, quoted in Butler 2006), one cannot fully understand what constitutes an excellent album from a good album or an average album from a bad one. This links back to the fundamental ideals of the hipster: taste as currency. Without understanding Pitchfork, one cannot gain access to the cultural capital that the hipster possesses and therefore cannot become a member of the subculture or share the sense of superiority that comes with it.
For those who lack the ability to interpret and draw meaningful conclusions from their reviews, Pitchfork provides a numerical score that represents the overall merits of an album. This is, of course, not a new concept; Rolling Stone operates on a 0 to 5 star system with half denominations and NME uses a simple 0 to 10 ranking without denominations. Both systems have 11 possible rankings. Pitchfork writers however, as supreme arbiters of taste, are able to differentiate the merits of an album down to the first decimal, ranking albums on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0. This means that a Pitchfork review can have 101 different numerical outcomes, which reinforces the website’s image of intellectualism and refinement.
According to Ewing (2010), being a fan of a specific genre of music or a member of a subculture requires an ‘other’ figure, which results in music listeners being hostile towards music listeners of another genre or subculture. This sense of ‘us and them’ is obviously rife within the hipster subculture and is also evident in the opinions of Pitchfork. When the website was founded, Pitchfork was clearly aimed squarely against the mainstream music machine; a hostility apparent in its name. Nowadays however, Pitchfork’s ‘other’ figure is not so easily definable, especially since mainstream hip-hop and R&B artists such as Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Lil Wayne, Rihanna and Kanye West have all recently been awarded the “Best New Music” tag for their singles.
Pitchfork still remains fiercely loyal to the indie genre though, with Pitchfork reviews often panning many successful mainstream rock acts in favour of more obscure, unheard of bands. A particularly notable example of this can be seen in Ray Suzuki’s 2006 review of Jet’s second album Shine On, an album that received positive reviews from music press heavy-weights NME, Q and Rolling Stone, as well as receiving platinum levels of sales. Suzuki, however, was less impressed; his review consisted simply of a YouTube video of a chimpanzee urinating in its own mouth. This can be seen as not only an insult to the band, but also to the tens of thousands of people who bought the album. And this is exactly how it was intended to be taken. Reviews such as this reinforce the ‘other’ figure in indie rock and maintain exclusivity in the hipster subculture, so that only those with sufficient taste can scale the hierarchy of cool.
However, blogger Henry Farrell believes that Pitchfork’s reviews are not always centred on taste and that sometimes the website has ulterior motives to pursue. In a 2006 post titled ‘The Art Mafia’, Farrell argues that Pitchfork critics must:
…preserve their own role as critical intermediaries and arbiters of taste – in other words, they don’t want consumers to feel sufficiently secure in their own tastes… Therefore, one could make a plausible case that critics have an incentive to inject certain amounts of aesthetic uncertainty into the marketplace, by deliberately writing reviews which suggest that bad artists are good, or that good artists are bad.
Like Ewing’s (2010) use of drone and experimental music as “territorial control” in the bookstore, Pitchfork uses its influence to shape the market place and maintain its dominance in the world of music criticism. Although this is of course nothing Pitchfork would ever admit to, an example of this could perhaps be seen in Stephen M. Deusner’s 2010 review of Mumford and Son’s debut album Sigh No More. This album, propelled by the single “Little Lion Man”, received almost all-round positive reviews. NME and Rolling Stone both gave the album 7 out of 10, while Australia’s leading alternative radio station Triple J awarded it ‘Album of the Week’. In Pitchfork’s review, Deusner states that the band “are in the costume business[…] playing dress-up in threadbare clothes,” and that the album is a “shallow cry of authenticity”, giving it a score of 2.1.
While the merits of Sigh No More are certainly debatable, Pitchfork’s review should certainly not have come as a surprise to anyone. In the case of Mumford and Sons, the public fell in love with the band before the music press had time to pass judgement. Most magazines saw this as a mark of quality and responded with good reviews, but Pitchfork viewed the band with bitterness and has hence published nothing but negativity about the band. This is because Pitchfork has a history of latching on to bands in their early stages (usually after the release of just one single or EP), reporting obsessively on them in the following months, then heaping praise on their debut album. This is because prior knowledge is of high importance in the hipster community.
Hipsters rely on their ability to formulate opinions and tastes before the rest of the public to maintain relevance and legitimate their place as a superior class. Because of this, it is rare to see Pitchfork back down on artists that it has previously given much hype to. If Pitchfork gives a band a high level of attention in its early days, it will almost always result in a good score for that artist.
This can be seen in the rise of Californian hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (often shortened to Odd Future), and in particular the group’s leader Tyler, the Creator. After discovering the group’s free mix-tapes on their self-run blog, Pitchfork threw their entire weight behind the group, publishing 27 news pieces on their activities in the months preceding Tyler’s debut physical release, Goblin.
Upon release, Goblin inevitably received a good score of 8.0, but the review tells a slightly different story if one looks deeper into the writing. Reviewer Scott Plagenhoef (2011) states that it is “bleak, long, monolithic, and can be a slog to get through” and that it should have been a whole 20 minutes shorter. Of the lyrics, he states that some lines are “particularly cringe-worthy; stock phrases shouted with no larger purpose” and that “his more reprehensible lines come across like a pathetic attempt for an underdeveloped, disconnected mind to locate some emotionality, control, or simply attention”. In conclusion, he writes that overall the album “is more promise than delivery” and that to like it you need to want to be part of the club that comes with Odd Future fandom. The writing does not seem to resemble the score, but if Pitchfork had given Tyler a bad review after all their hyping, it would have been akin to admitting their sense of prior knowledge was misguided, which would be viewed as a huge failure by their hipster audience.
Pitchfork Media is a website obsessed by the concept of taste. As shown in this essay, Pitchfork uses language to restrict its audience to the well educated, alienates listeners with conservative music values, derides fans of mainstream rock, uses a complex scoring system to reinforce its own intellectualism, injects uncertainty into music criticism to uphold its stature as a tastemaker and prides itself on its prior knowledge. All of these elements reinforce the value of taste in our society and its role as a tool for social dominance over those considered beneath us. Without understanding Pitchfork, one cannot gain access to the cultural capital that the hipster possesses and therefore cannot share the sense of superiority that comes with it.
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Reference List
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