Pitchfork and the soundtrack to an ending
How a Wilco album changed my life and beating the odds of a bad (blood) review
In the summer of 2004, Wilco released their fifth studio album A Ghost Is Born. I was in the middle of high school and had just earned my learner’s permit so I drove myself to our local Best Buy and bought my first album ever (RIP to the ability to do that).
As a child of the Chicago suburbs struggling to find my own shade of cool, I had increasingly dabbled in indie music, a genuine interest and a slice of a social marker. Wilco, a Chicago indie band that had made it, were local lore. Their drummer even used to teach private lessons in our high school band room before he didn’t need to anymore.
I popped in the CD on the ride home and frowned as I looked at the track listing, beginning with “At Least That’s What You Said”. I was still a fledgling fan, but gone were the band’s guitar jangle and buoyant Americana (or post-Americana) melodies, replaced with quiet, plaintive piano and a voice that was somewhere between a whisper and an amble, pleading and full of pain (this was familiar).
But eventually an electric guitar flicks and then drops like a guillotine, the band coming in like a marching band until settling into a guitar solo groove that explodes into chaos minutes later. I stumbled through the valley of confusion and was brought out into the promised land of something incredible and new.
It was the thrill of discovery, a lightning bolt realization that I had tastes and interests and opinions that I could and would have to formulate on my own as I tried to make sense of what I was listening to (and in life beyond). It was a smash cut to the inside of my brain, pulsating through the discomfort of learning as it grew three sizes that day—a Grinchian lesson for my adolescent mind.
I had been led to this moment by Pitchfork.com, an online indie music outlet that my older brother had pointed me to, having done his due diligence as elderly tastemaker. After Wilco’s previous album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, had set the scene on fire, their next album had been hyped and primed, myself devouring so many words about this great big thing that I should get excited about.
It felt like a secret held between me and the computer screen as I clicked around a corner of the Internet full of people eagerly anticipating the next text by a man named Jeff Tweedy. I was a young sponge looking to absorb and the recommendation machine that was Pitchfork and its many wonderful writers would become the soundtrack to my next twenty years.
Pitchfork died last week. Or at least Pitchfork the website as we know it is being eulogized for its imminent death since its parent company Conde Nast decided to “fold” the music publication into GQ, a publication ostensibly about men’s fashion.
It was accompanied by mass layoffs, creating a diaspora of talented writers and editors, and is yet another death knell for culture writing and the media ecosystem. And while I have no ill will to GQ, the bundled deal of music and fashion feels like some kind of focus-grouped Coachella brand integration that does little to respect readers’ devotion to the two separate and interesting topics and only further dissolves our cultural fabric into monoculture. We are one step closer to all liking the same things.
Pitchfork’s ending will mean one less place for me to click over to on the “Internet”. I put the word in quotes because it feels like the Internet is shrinking. Those little corners we used to go hang out in are disappearing, replaced by the assembly line conveyor belts of three or four social media platforms. Content is king and all we are deigned to deserve is the trough they (we) let ourselves sidle up to.
But in 2004, the thrill of discovery and the Internet were like peanut butter and jelly. No one knew how far down the rabbit hole went, but you could certainly keep clicking and try to find out (reader beware). Clicking and reading and striking up funny friendships in the comments have been replaced with an endless scroll and tap-for-likes (though Reddit remains a somewhat holdout).
In the face of this, the defining feature of Pitchfork was its commitment to publishing daily album reviews, all of which were written and edited by real human beings. They were journalists and music fans of (increasingly) diverse taste, curating thoughts not just on indie rock, but rap, jazz, experimental, re-releases and retrospectives, and even foreign/international iterations of all of the above.
To that end, each day Pitchfork would review four albums, assigning each a numeric album score. It was one integer and one decimal point—6.5, 7.3, 8.4, 3.0—followed by a handful of words. The number would always cause debate, but more importantly, the words added context.
They were words that framed the album against discography or history or the culture of the moment. They weren’t just qualitative evaluations, they were, to the best of a human’s ability, consideration of time and place and intent.
Every day in the hospital my blood work would return a number, a quantitative evaluation of my return from cancer. The many component parts would be represented by one integer and one decimal. Unlike Pitchfork’s album reviews, I was looking for consistency. Each morning I would refresh the website of my life and see what the review was for that day. The data mattered, and unlike a review, was immutable.
But then would come the words. The words that filled a day. They were usually spoken, by doctors and nurses or sometimes written in letter or text or email from friends or family. They contextualized the numbers of my life, different from a review in that they did not explain the reason for the numbers, but they did give consideration to that strange moment in my existence.
Low hemoglobin may have meant sluggishness, but a message from an old friend could alter that state. Or a funny story Emily might tell about her experience in the world beyond the hospital walls could erase an annoying dip in platelets (which meant transfusion, which meant Benadryl, which meant fog).
The words mattered even if some days there were little, just the low-volume drone of a basketball game on in the background to soundtrack the day. Strung together, they implied humanity and feeling in a way that numbers could not. And numbers could never take into account the intangibles.
Intangibles are all that matter when it comes to the most important number in cancer—survival rates. I became x out of so many people and those were my odds of living x more days or years, to refresh the Pitchfork page x more times to see what integers and decimals they had handed out to gauge someone else’s blood, sweat, and tears in the pursuit of their own art.
That percentage is a number backed by science but primarily used as a guide post. As any doctor will tell you, outlooks vary from patient to patient. And as any music fan will tell you, a band’s “worst” album might become one of their favorites. The numbers might not necessarily be wrong, but the odds can be beat.
By the time you’re roughly halfway through A Ghost Is Born you get to “Hummingbird”. It is a mournful pop song about memory, enshrined by the chorus: Remember to remember me/standing still in your past/floating fast like a hummingbird. A violin eventually kicks in as it repeats, fiddling away like a hummingbird taking flight.
It feels like the first hint of the Wilco of previous albums, its lyrics even taking on a self-referential bent—did Tweedy know this album would sound like a departure from the sounds of their past, or was it just a poignant sketch of a character, riding around town after town/toll after toll.
The back half of the album warms even more, the sun coming out a bit, at least sonically. Previous life returns, though by this point, after sitting with it long enough, I began to wonder if I preferred the newer stuff.
It felt like fresh ground, myself beginning to enjoy the discomfort of having to process something I didn’t quite understand. It was the dawning realization that change wasn’t just inevitable, perhaps it was healthy, and perhaps it might even be necessary.
I wanted to write about Pitchfork’s demise because reading it was a daily ritual for me and so much of life is ritual, whether acknowledged or not. Those repetitions that we take for granted until they disappear—reading the newspaper or a friendship at your favorite lunch spot or having your parents a phone call away—their absence makes us regret our casual appreciation for a thing that was always there.
And while we have an unbeatable ability to adapt and re-build, sometimes it’s worth it to acknowledge all the effort that went into something now made into memory.
The art of recommendation is not taken lightly, as anyone who has recommended a favorite thing and sat in anguish as their beloved viewer or listener did not fall similarly in love. But that’s how stuff exists—someone makes something and then someone tells someone else about it.
And while people seem to increasingly disagree with why you need any sort of critic or criticism, relying instead on integer and decimal aggregate data, it feels obvious that an informed opinion can be a surface in a vacuum, a wall to make sure that all that worthwhile sound and image is reflected back and actually seen or heard.
Everyone always remembers that one incredible recommendation that turned them on to their next favorite thing. If you’re interested in trees but live far from them—you might want someone who knows a lot about trees telling you if a really cool one just fell in the forest.
Pitchfork leaves behind a bunch of people sitting around at its wake. A ghost has been born and we’re all divining with the unknown, wondering how or where or who will reincarnate it or if anyone even cares to dabble (invest capital) in that magic in 2024.
In the meantime, as always, writers will write and I will seek them out. I’m new to substack but a part of my landing here was an algorithmic Twitter blessing leading me to Chicago music journalist
. His newsletter has already yielded a number of great new year recs, including Ducks Ltd. and Friko, a band that puts me firmly back into some long lost Coheed & Cambria days.I mourn the loss and celebrate what remains. And what I do still have is stereogum.com, my first music blog love.
The critical consensus of cancer is almost uniformly aligned. From a consumer experience, it is universally panned. Two thumbs down across the board.
It’s easy to say that cancer should get a 0.0, but in the spirit of eulogizing Pitchfork, I could see them giving it a 1.2, the review destined for heated online debate that if the people read through they might think, yeah, it makes some good points. Maybe something about the beautiful humanity that can be found in hardship, something that ultimately might track. Or maybe someone’s holding a grudge because they gave heart attacks a 0.8, and everyone knows that cancer is worse…
Who knows, they can fight it out on the annual year-end list of Best Worst Illnesses. The point is that you’re thinking about it and maybe even talking about it (though I would not recommend it).
A Ghost Is Born tests you with its penultimate track, “Less Than You Think”, a swerve back into hopeful sparseness.
It is a three-minute song followed by twelve minutes of production hum, squealing feedback, and growing, ominous sonic growling. From the back of the cd you know there is another song, but if you are a purist who wants to try and understand the “why” of anything—you wait. You endure the uneasiness, asking yourself for twelve-minutes, “why did they choose this?”
I have no answer except “because they wanted to”. The descent into the unknown feels purposely disorienting, as if you have been trapped into drinking an after-dinner coffee until the end of time… It exists to exist.
It is a statement, a middle finger perhaps to people with an itchy skip finger, a quick slap of the wrist for patience, to force the listener to sit with their thoughts and discomfort and the unknown and find their own meaning in the growling black hole of time.
And then the floor tom shuffle of “The Late Greats” comes in and you’re back, pulled back to the familiar here and now as Tweedy gives a fitting salute to life and the pursuit of some impossible “best”, singing: The best songs will never get sung/the best life never leaves your lungs/So good, you won’t ever know/You can’t hear it on the radio.
**If you have any good music newsletters/substacks, or if you write one, drop it in the comments or let me know. I’m looking for new recs!
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
This week I listened to A Ghost Is Born a bunch of times to write this piece, so give a listen to what I would say is a Top 2 Wilco album. Debate me!
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