is pitchfork the oprah's book club of the underground?

so are Guided By Voices!

If I ran an indie record shop I wouldn't run a "Pfork Pick" campaign - too polarizing amongst the indie crowd. If I ran a more mainstream shop (HMV/Tower Records) I'd do it for sure. Start with the Shins & Death Cab and you'll have em hooked.

tho not an oprah fan (i also have no issues) I get annoyed with the knee-jerk reaction to her book club and assumed was the same.

Pitchfork (ok I have not looked at in ages) but used to annoy me for its absolute disinterest in what I cared abt musically - mebbe that was my own problem –and not specifically Pfork related but the whole sense of this is what is important, and you must love it (also a prob. I have on ilx that very few listen to the same stuff I do)

(And, oh yeah – Steinbeck sucks. boring boring writer)

Sadly, most of oprah's reccomendations consist of bestsellers, and pop literature. Nothing really to stand the test of time. Pitchfork is guilty of this too. Not to mention, on occasian, pitchfork can be very close minded to new and exciting forms of music.

The 8.3 I just gave Supersilent isn't gonna put them on The O.C.

Okay, two quick things:

(1) Anyone who'd actually paid a whit of attention to Oprah's book club would probably notice that she switched to a classics-only format a couple years back.

(2) Anyone who describes Pitchfork's best-new-music picks as "bestsellers" is surely living in a more insular indie-centric world than Pitchfork's usually accused of.

Anyway the Oprah comparison is hard to really evaluate in my head, given that (a) Oprah's main influence, even when she was doing contemporary lit, came in terms of getting irregular readers to dive into a novel, whereas Pitchfork's influence seems to be more with people who are already into listening, plus (b) Oprah's influence was always ballooned and skewed by doing one single book per couple-months (I think?), not covering five different things per business day (if I remember correctly the book club would also have running recommendations of other things, though I've never heard any evaluation of the impact of those lower-running picks). Plus (c) is that they just work differently. Oprah's field of operation is/was literature as a whole, and she has/had one of the only major-media outlets actively recommending one single book (in all of literature) per time period -- it was a book CLUB, meaning that the whole POINT of it was that everyone would read the same book and then discuss it. Whereas Pitchfork's field of operation obviously revolves around a particular audience and the genres and subgenres relevant to that audience, and when it comes to music-as-a-whole Pitchfork is very obviously just one small/medium info-source among many, and regardless of how people may respond to the judgments it makes the publication obviously isn't saying "okay this month we listen to Arcade Fire" -- it's a catalog of many things per day that star-marks the major ones like most such publications.

Why did I just bother writing that? Refer back to point (2) above, where the moral might be something like "if you think Pitchfork has a bigger place in the universe than Oprah, you might be living in a bit of a glass house with regards to allegations of indiecentrism."

Having typed all that it occurs that, sure, there are some natural parallels with Pitchfork or really any other taste-oriented thing that starts small and grows successful: they start with just the personal taste of an individual, and then when people respond they bring in more staff and get more of an idea of the audience they're serving, and then as they get bigger they seek to address more and more things outside their original spheres -- that's a pretty natural progression of the issues involved in anything moving from personal-taste to a larger, more significant concern.

Sometimes I really love typing!

i don't even know where to start! except that obv. the discussion wasn't on EVERY pitchforkreviewed album but only the ones with the big ratings and also, since when is james frey "classic"!? and also that the parallels nabisco negates in general weren't the parallels anyone was really making anyway except on the classic tip nabisco forgets all the pfork countdown list things.

and i like typing less so i'll stop there.

I love this line.

but i don't think Pitchfork is for ILM nerds, or people who want to be on the edge of what's happening.

i think it's just more general information, and it's for people who don't blog or go to message boards. in that sense, it serves it's purpose. it lets people who aren't freaks, like us, know what's going on with both Devendra Banhardt (sp?) and The Knife.

somebody's gotta do it.

In terms of just "the ones with the big ratings" note that this is exactly my point -- that there's a vast structural difference between (a) having a book CLUB in which one selects one single book per month or season and (b) having a review/catalog in which one covers five records a day and calls out/recommends the "notable" ones. The dynamic and mode of use don't seem at all comparable to me, which is all I really wanted to ramble about, because I guess the parallels people are drawing upthread seem less than interesting.

not to go all blount on you but next thing you'll pop up on the should ilx go reg only thread and explain at length that it would be a bad idea for ilx to only allow users to post if they were registered at saks 5th avenue.

also most of this thread was TWO YEARS AGO when it was, uh, as you noted, a difft. book club.

so maybe you can revive "it is now may 2004 in iraq" and argue with people on that about how they don't see how close it is to a civil war or something.