As a child and up until I gave any thought beyond cartoons and juice pouches, I attended a Presbyterian church with my parents, who sat and listened to sermons while grinding their teeth with Trident gum while my sister and I elbowed each other in the pews, staring distractedly at a stained-glass depiction of the book of Acts. To this day, I can't chew Trident without thinking about the Old Testament.
The church had, below the sanctuary (what do Presbyterians call the place where everybody feels ashamed of themselves for an hour a week, to rousing organ music?), what was called the 'fellowship room,' designed for adults to catch up on shared knowledge of prescription medications, and over much hand-wringing about their children who still shit their pants, and seemed disturbingly obsessed with large explosions.
I don't know how much true fellowship happened between those wood-paneled walls and pleated khakis, but the adults seemed united in one thing: The hideousness of the coffee, so weak it could star in a video for some goth band, whose mascara was darker than the tepid drip dolled out to my parents, who were just trying to find anything to digest the graham crackers they'd just eaten.
A decade later, and a curio appeared to change everything for the better, to elevate our collective idea of what coffee could, and should be, as Starbucks began to grow like scalding rumors in cities first, and then to the suburbs, where they would eventually offer lattes to those who had just gotten tattoos and eaten salty chicken tacos in the adjacent shops.
The bigger they are, you know. There's a finer line than you'd think between success and bloated overreach, the first is roundly rewarded, and the second reprimanded and scorned. Starbucks wasn't the first, nor the last good idea to fly too close to the commercialized sun, and its impact is, thankfully, permanent.
In 2001, Pitchfork, the web zine devoted to exposing, and rating with staunch accuracy, reviewed Radiohead's much anticipated album, Kid A. The review was long, somewhat florid and prosaic, and brilliant, the words that could only have come from someone who not only heard, but felt every nuance, embracing not only the band's musical aptitude, but buying reams of tickets to the surrounding hype. Pitchfork hailed the album with a perfect rating because they just GOT it, right place, you know. Theirs was a new medium for celebrating music that still seems futuristic. They were right, and everybody knew it.
Within the independent music online zine offerings, Pitchfork looms largest, because they've never abandoned their defining principles. There are no Pitchfork coffee mugs, shirts, or gratuitous staff biographies. The writing still displays its heady mixture of endearing naivete, the hallmark of the cultural insularity gifted on youth, and the unhesitating obligation to wear the mantle of aesthetes, to their own identically impassioned readers.
A few years in, they tried to sell a book about the year in music, which failed to move many pages. Aside from putting some stellar videos, and upgrading the layout and search function of the site, it has remained blessedly free of going to the Starbucks route of focusing instead on too many periphery products and services, while ignoring what made it great in the first place. Everyday, four new reviews, along with thoughtful reconsideration of reissues, from genres as far flung as African music, to experimental jazz, and their overview of the Beatles reissues were very well written.
I've written music reviews, and it's as easy as commercial electricity. The ability to communicate objectively the intently communal, yet increasingly insular experience of experiencing music is a remarkable achievement that requires study and scholarship on par with any graduate-level work. Think about your top-five favorite albums, and then try to explain, much less write seven-hundred words about why someone else should or shouldn't bother, finished with a precise numerical rating.
Naturally, they've been targeted for ridicule for their supposed influence on record stores, and a monopolization of taste for generations of music enthusiasts. Which is totally true. But, so what? Don't record stores want to market product that will move? Rolling Stone used to have such influence, and Starbucks made millions of people look beyond canned-coffee, while Pitchfork once sent me on a late-night record-buying crusade to buy an album by a Canadian band called Arcade Fire.
I've been led down some unsatisfying avenues, like the time I bought, through special order, an album by the noise band, Supersilent Six. Great name, but inaccurate on so many levels. Forty-five minutes of trumpet squeals and distortion sent me packing, but why else would I ever have bothered to give something like that a try? Pitchfork has expanded my tastes. The writer clearly liked, and sold its value, and effectively made its case, even if it's not mine.
Industries, like anything involving any more than one person, need direction, the guiding beacon that furthers all followers and imitators. Just as 80s independent music had to cobble together underground tours and sleeping arrangements, paving the way to the established network today's new bands enjoy, the internet, some poetic music fans, and increased bandwidth brought exposure to bands who otherwise would have been far too unappreciated without their mouthpiece.
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