I Will Literally Go Down on Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke & Pitchfork Media engage in some role reversal.

Like most people in the real world but almost no one in the blogosphere, I don’t give a shit about Pitchfork Media.  They have solid news coverage but what else do you expect from a website that has pushed itself as the number one authority on the indie music scene over the last ten years?  Every band goes to them first, they get to choose what and what not to run, and every other website gets the runoff.  Of course they’re going to have interesting stories.  Like any website or publication, sometimes they have good reviews and sometimes they have bad reviews, blah blah blah, snoooooooore as music nerds bitch and moan about whether or not some record deserved to be in their Top 50.

Unforgivable, however, is their bias for some bands, like Radiohead and Animal Collective.  They’re a privately-owned company; of course they have the right to be as un-biased or biased as they want, but the Pitchfork guys seem to fall over themselves trying to clean Thom Yorke or Panda Bear’s testicles with their mouths.  This is not a new thing, or an occasional one; it happens all the fucking time.  For example, from their coverage of some new book coming out about Yorke:

Thom Yorke is one of the most important musicians in modern culture. His influence is vast. He deserves a legitimate, engrossing, authorized biography. Thom Yorke: Radiohead & Trading Solo is not that biography.

Way to be objective, you chump.  I get that Pitchfork’s edge as a website is that they inject humor into their news bits, but the article reads like a press release from the official Radiohead fan club (which is named Pitchforkmedia.com, har har har).

The nut guzzling continues when it comes to Animal Collective, a band so amazing that Pitchfork reviewers were already comparing other 2009 releases to Merriweather Post Pavillion a mere day after it was released (“while it’ll be surprising if we get a better record than Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009″ – amazing).  Check this interview with the band, in which amazingly hard-hitting questions were lobbed, one after another:

Is the new record “Merriweather”?

Whoops.  Oh, wait, here’s some hard-hitting journalism!

Having “Brother Sport” at the end really does snap you back into something. It’s not very typical to have a track of that quality closing it out, which, to me, is interesting.

Gulp gulp gulp.  If you read the interview, all of the questions are either horrible generic or not questions at all.  The interviews, as a result, are pretty much just glorified press releases: Questions designed to make the band talk about something obvious that they wanted to talk about anyways.  They’re meeting in the middle of the road with this boring Q&A bullshit, and the only way I can fathom anyone giving a crap is if they have Animal Collective’s name tattooed on their chest.

None of this compares to that infamous review of Radiohead’s Kid A, in which the writer compared the act of listening to the songs to getting blown by a magical unicorn.  However, making fun of that is like shooting retarded fish in a barrel, and I think the writer was fucking with us.  Still, I’d rather read Pitchfork’s attempt to troll music dorks then their attempt to be so smugly objective about such subjective things, like whether or not Thom Yorke is the messiah (for my money, he is not).  I wish they would try harder.