Famed antagonist of the elderly and those who didn't "realacize that there dun was a camera in the barn," it's been warping the very fabric of our existence since it's inception. I can order shoes without leaving my house; I can order pizza without out picking up my telephone. I can spend hours vanquishing electronic dragons or view massive stockpiles of explicit pornography during the time I've allotted for writing this very paper! We live in the goddamn future; a land of iPod touch screen phones with innumerable Usher (Ft. Lil' Jon) ring tones. Flying cars and cancer-curing sex-robots are not far behind.
Some will claim that it's advent has stifled a once flowering English language; that the written word is nearing it's death rattle. While their, no doubt, ineptly composed papers would appear to back, at least superficially, their equally moronic claim, I am not in possession of this fear. For you see, I have read pitchforkmedia.com. Ornately constructed and entirely heavy-handed with their reviews, Pitchfork is one of the more popular websites-- both to read and to bash-- at the moment. Take comedian David Cross. You might know him from his television appearances (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), his voice acting (Those tremendously popular Halo video games), or his stand up. The latter falls into the field of pitchforks reviews, and both his CDs have seen appraisals by the site. When he was invited by their editors to submit his top ten album, Cross responded with:
Hi, I was a somewhat surprised that Pitchforkmedia.com would ask me to participate in this. Here's why:"The devastating paradox of David Cross' pre-recorded comedy: Is it funny that everything Cross says is nauseatingly smug, yelped out in smarmy, supercilious prose? Or is David Cross just a giant fucking asshole? That Cross is such an immensely unlikable live performer-- condescending, defensive, arrogant, patronizing-- is both his greatest asset and his most crippling flaw."
And while the above review of my second cd It's Not Funny is certainly more thoughtful than, "David Cross? Yeah, he's funny" or "He sucks", it's still a bit shitty. "...immensely unlikable"? The paradox is "devastating"? How is it devastating?
And that's just one reviewer, Amanda Petrusich.* There's another one, William Bowers, who claims to: "...having developed a strange, extra-textual concern for David Cross. Likeminded futon-psychoanalysts fret over his fluctuating weight, his fitfulness, and despondence..."
Fretting over my weight? Oh well. But regardless of their opinion of me and/or my act, they've asked me for my Top Ten List®, So here is my contribution to the Top Ten List® For Pitchforkmedia.com.
Cross then went on to review ten fictional albums at the expense of Pitchfork.
You can see, from the text quoted in Mr. Cross's list, that the written word is alive and well; perhaps a little too alive. This is not some obscure little backwater URL that features blog posts about what the webmasters cat did, this site is a giant; a behemoth of taste-making. Bands like The Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or Tapes N Tapes have all exploded into the limelight with a mere positive word from it's staff. It receives (according to the semi-reliable Wikipedia) 200,000 hits per day and 1.5 million unique visitors per month. People would jump off a bridge if it received anything higher than an 8.5.
Plenty of non-digital publications are striving for a dumbing down of the populace-- pick up a USA Today-- and It's well known that newspaper circulation in America has been graph-plummeting with study determination since the Carter administration. Printed media is at a, to borrow a the title of a Britney Spears vehicle, crossroads. Newspapers increasingly consolidate and congeal into more compact larger firms under bigger and more faceless corporations. Conversely, the quantity of magazines has increased dramatically, driving competition among frantic publishing magnates to be the next Maxim or FHM and grab a slice of the ever thinning market share. Both those magazines are vapid nudie-mags for men too chicken shit to view actual pornography, but their success in a dying industry has spurred numerous imitators. Rolling Stone even hired a former editor from the latter magazine to spruce up their sales-- I'm guessing that cover with Jessica Simpson vacuuming in her underwear was his idea. While that might appeal to John Q Stupid, a snob like me would avoid that image like AIDS. The most sex appeal you'll see on popular Internet music sites is from the American Apparel ads and Jenny Lewis interviews. For a prude such as myself, that's almost too much.
Rolling Stone Magazine is the analogue counterpoint to Pitchfork. Founded in 1967 (Pitchfork's birthday was in 1995) it has somehow managed to stay culturally irrelevant for the entirety of it's shameful 40 year run. This is a magazine that despised Led Zeppelin during their prime creative years and gave Nirvana's landmark album Nevermind a nondescript three stars. This is a magazine that would rate Kid Rock or Creed as favorably as Radiohead. This is a magazine for your self-aware uncool father; It's VH1 in print. With a circulation of around 1.3 million, they also lay claim to the burliest market share.
While they have published some commendable journalism (I am a card carrying progressive), RS is a music based publication, so I will judge them by that. Their business model seems grounded around selling CDs. Look at a list of recent album reviews in any issue you'll see a mean around three and a half stars. It's a brilliantly ambiguous rating really. You could apply it to a Lenny Kravitz album or an Elliott Smith CD and no one will be the wiser. To be fair, unlike Pee-Fork, their reviews are mercifully short and entirely readable. Here's paragraph one of a criminally enthusiastic Creed review:
You can see, from the text quoted in Mr. Cross's list, that the written word is alive and well; perhaps a little too alive. This is not some obscure little backwater URL that features blog posts about what the webmasters cat did, this site is a giant; a behemoth of taste-making. Bands like The Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or Tapes N Tapes have all exploded into the limelight with a mere positive word from it's staff. It receives (according to the semi-reliable Wikipedia) 200,000 hits per day and 1.5 million unique visitors per month. People would jump off a bridge if it received anything higher than an 8.5.
Plenty of non-digital publications are striving for a dumbing down of the populace-- pick up a USA Today-- and It's well known that newspaper circulation in America has been graph-plummeting with study determination since the Carter administration. Printed media is at a, to borrow a the title of a Britney Spears vehicle, crossroads. Newspapers increasingly consolidate and congeal into more compact larger firms under bigger and more faceless corporations. Conversely, the quantity of magazines has increased dramatically, driving competition among frantic publishing magnates to be the next Maxim or FHM and grab a slice of the ever thinning market share. Both those magazines are vapid nudie-mags for men too chicken shit to view actual pornography, but their success in a dying industry has spurred numerous imitators. Rolling Stone even hired a former editor from the latter magazine to spruce up their sales-- I'm guessing that cover with Jessica Simpson vacuuming in her underwear was his idea. While that might appeal to John Q Stupid, a snob like me would avoid that image like AIDS. The most sex appeal you'll see on popular Internet music sites is from the American Apparel ads and Jenny Lewis interviews. For a prude such as myself, that's almost too much.
Rolling Stone Magazine is the analogue counterpoint to Pitchfork. Founded in 1967 (Pitchfork's birthday was in 1995) it has somehow managed to stay culturally irrelevant for the entirety of it's shameful 40 year run. This is a magazine that despised Led Zeppelin during their prime creative years and gave Nirvana's landmark album Nevermind a nondescript three stars. This is a magazine that would rate Kid Rock or Creed as favorably as Radiohead. This is a magazine for your self-aware uncool father; It's VH1 in print. With a circulation of around 1.3 million, they also lay claim to the burliest market share.
While they have published some commendable journalism (I am a card carrying progressive), RS is a music based publication, so I will judge them by that. Their business model seems grounded around selling CDs. Look at a list of recent album reviews in any issue you'll see a mean around three and a half stars. It's a brilliantly ambiguous rating really. You could apply it to a Lenny Kravitz album or an Elliott Smith CD and no one will be the wiser. To be fair, unlike Pee-Fork, their reviews are mercifully short and entirely readable. Here's paragraph one of a criminally enthusiastic Creed review:
On Weathered, Creed's lucid powerhouse of a third album, the Orlando, Florida, trio emerge as masters of hard-rock atmosphere. As Soundgarden proved with Superunknown, there are a million little intricacies to pulling off what sounds like big enormous rock. And Creed are all over them: Weathered is rock of unusual focus and arrest, a beautifully distressed dance of sustained style and unapologetic emotion.
If there's a video of what Scott Stapp (Creed's grotesquely untalented frontman) did to the editors of RS to get that printed, I hope it was thrown into a volcano. For it surely involved the most base of carnality and the most unwilling of livestock.
But you can see, comparatively, the text is dumbed down-- refreshingly so. And yet this is a printed medium; a relic from the days of Gutenberg and the enlightenment. Shouldn't it at least be stuffier? Harder to read? No, our linguistic mass grave does not lie in the shadowy crevasses of the Internet, but our humility, our unpretentiousness, just might.
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