Pitchfork and the Death of Things as Themselves

Pitchfork, of course, went from being a notoriously self-regarding hipster review site that gave glowing reviews to indie rock bands to perhaps the most aggressive enforcer of the consensus “poptimist” worldview in music criticism, seemingly overnight; the jangly NYC indie bands that they once championed became in very short order the preference of The Wrong Kind of Person, at Pitchfork. I find it’s nearly impossible to write about poptimism because the communal discussion of it is so divorced from reality. Poptimism has been the utterly dominant ideology in music criticism for, what, 15 years? At least 10.