The Official Pitchfork Obituary

I met the man I am dating now 12 years ago, at our college newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, where we sometimes found ourselves at adjacent desktops, editing the next day’s copy. “Fun and games,” we called ourselves self-deprecatingly, because we oversaw music and sports, respectively. Because in the hierarchy of newsworthiness, we ranked below the more serious work coming out of features and the city desk. He was at baseball games, recording batting averages and surprise home runs. I was drinking PBRs with members of local bands. Our colleagues were covering council meetings and murders, drug scandals and Greek life. We were not the same.

I wrote my first Pitchfork review in 2019, seven years after college graduation, three and half years before this week’s announcement that the site would be folded into GQ and half the staff were laid off. Long before, I’d been disabused of the notion of “making it,” because media jobs never paid enough to afford my insulin, much less my thrifting habit, but I knew writing for the site was as close as I would get. In a notebook, right around the time I met Aaron, I’d written a list of life goals — ”short story in the New Yorker,” one read. “Review for Pitchfork,” read another.

The Rory Gilmore fantasy had fizzled before graduation, when I watched friends suffer through temp jobs at regional papers a few years away from shuttering. But I could bank on mutual esteem. It was as exciting to go long on art in a national publication as it was to imagine that past self at the turquoise iMac, whose dream I was fulfilling. I could feel accomplished at landing a byline alongside people whose writing mattered to me, whose critiques and curiosities had expanded my own palate. You could take the money out of journalism, I thought, but there were some things capitalism couldn’t kill — solidarity, maybe. Taste.

I saw the best minds of my generation get destroyed by madness, Allen Ginsberg opens “Howl,” but for anyone starry-eyed about art or journalism from 2000-2015, the same could be said about content. I don’t think any of us were ready, spiritually at least, for the way capital would feast on writing’s carcass.

I can measure my adulthood in the fads that destroyed my friends’ jobs: corporate consolidation, SEO, pivot to video, the Buzzfeed listicle, the birth of the gig economy, paywalls, streaming services. But there’s a difference between a career and a vocation. One pays your rent. The other is an outward projection of your humanity. There is plenty of work that we do as a labor of love, dispelling the myth that we’re all only in it for a paycheck. Mothering; mending clothes; teaching; watering a friend’s plants. We need daycare workers to enable the existence of CEOs, and yet one barely makes a living wage. The injustice is obvious, a truth we live with everyday and only rarely acknowledge.

If writing about art has persisted through the twilight of media, it’s because there are some of us who will do it to the bitter end. Unpaid or underpaid, viral or barely read, influential or gathering dust in the depths of a Discord. Ultimately, it’s a question of values — are we on this earth to live inside teetering stacks of money, or are we here to write novels and play the guitar? To relate to one another the only ways we can, through lyrics from Silver Jews songs or ambient drone that sounds like a freshly-broken heart? You can’t measure the ROI on meaning-making the way you can with ads or clicks. We’ll never know the number of people at a symphony discovering new reasons to be alive, the same way, ironically, an album’s impact can’t really be measured with a score.

Nonetheless, trying to articulate that is worthwhile. Talking about art is worthwhile, especially as the world collapses.

Pitchfork’s future remains hazy. On Thursday, when I thought everyone I’d ever worked with had been fired, I got an email from the reviews editor, saying that he and the remaining skeleton crew would continue assigning new work until they couldn’t anymore. Maybe, as one person joked on Twitter, Pitchfork Music Festival will rebrand into a pants expo. I am no gentleman, nor were a lot of the people working hard to change Pitchfork's, only for it to be absorbed into a publication where the maleness is baked in.

Two years after I graduated, my college paper collapsed the music section (called “Diversions”) into the arts desk, and it was a harbinger of the landscape I’d watch from the sidelines for the rest of my adult life. One less paid position. One less vertical. Fewer pages to print. I’m 34 and more pragmatic, but no less ferocious. You can kill the funding, but you can’t kill the fight. I’ve never met a more resourceful group of people than the ones who’ve endured layoff after layoff, starting excellent Substacks and independent publications of their own (like this one).

We’ll survive however we have to. We’ll continue writing about art. What I know now, that I didn’t then, is that fun and games are the entire point — the way we weather a world that’s largely indifferent to our joy.