When Pitchfork tanked my friends' career

Notes on meanness

I attended a Christian college in West Michigan in the early 2000s, a sentence clause that might lead you to think this missive will concern the prophetic imagination impinging upon the public sphere. But longtime VDL readers will know I always keep you guessing! No, today’s post is not about politics. It’s about indie rock.

A Christian college in West Michigan in the early 2000s, you see, played a far larger role in the indie rock story of the time than one would imagine. For West Michigan played a vital role in the development of Sufjan Stevens, one of the biggest names in the genre. Stevens studied in the area, back in the 90s, and gigged at local venues and coffeehouses. When he became an indie rock star in the 2000s, on the building strength of the albums Seven Swans, Greetings from Michigan and of course Illinois, he perfected a kind of earnest, open, emotional music that resonated widely. And even when he did blow up, he still maintained that West Michigan connection. He played in the area frequently; I saw him in concert three times.

Stevens inspired a number of musicians in the West Michigan scene, looking to him as a template for possibly breaking out to national success themselves. The most prominent band at the time, the band that the scene as a whole expected great things from, was a group called Anathallo. I saw them in concert too, at local shows in art spaces and storefronts and the like. 200 cap rooms filled with hipster kids wearing neckties over polo shirts.

They got their shot, too. They released a full-length album, Floating World, on a reputable indie label. The sort of release that could land exposure in Pitchfork, then ascending as the most influential publication covering indie rock. Get a good review there, and Anathallo might have a bright future ahead of them.

Well, they got their Pitchfork review. Only, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t even average. It was an outright negative review, actively and hostilely so. A 1.7, for crying out loud. The sort of brutal pan that Pitchfork specialized in at the time. “Like Sufjan Stevens himself, Anathallo hail from Michigan, their turn-ons include Jesus and marching band practice, and they never saw an overly elaborate song title they couldn't preface with a word from a foreign language,” wrote reviewer Marc Hogan. Brutal, yes, but also, one must admit, funny in that cutting, take-no-prisoners way.

The review sent shockwaves through the local scene. Some thought Pitchfork was being horribly unfair. Others, though, secretly cheered it on, as they had never liked Anathallo from the beginning. The band carried on for a few more years, but the wind was out of their sails. Anathallo went on hiatus in 2009, effectively ending their career.

An indie rock rise and fall story, then. Twee artists kneecapped by mean-spirited critics. Which makes it that much stranger that this whole saga makes me feel incredibly nostalgic. Happy, even.

We were young once, and we hated with our whole hearts.

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I thought of the plight of Anathallo while reading this long, in-depth piece on the state of music criticism, which appeared in The New Yorker. It is written by Kelefa Sanneh, pop music critic and author of the book Major Labels. I love Sanneh’s work, and have been reading him for more than twenty years. All the way back to my Pitchfork-reading days in the early 2000s, actually. I loved music journalism, features and criticism, and followed it more closely than I did literary coverage, to be honest. Like, sure, I read the latest joints from James Wood and Zadie Smith, but when William Bowers came through with a heater of a review of the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record? That was appointment reading right there.

Sanneh’s contention is that music criticism has gotten far nicer, and perhaps tamer, than it was during the Pitchfork heyday. One can also look back further and grow ever weepier, at the bombs tossed by Lester Bangs in Creem or Robert Christgau in The Village Voice. Yet one look at the landscape today suggests that critics lack the mettle their forebears. Even when Paste magazine ran a negative review of The Tortured Poets Department, the most recent Taylor Swift album, it ran without a byline. Anonymized. Which is too bad, since the opening line would have made Aughts era Pitchfork proud. “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” Eat your heart out, Brent DiCrescenzo.

That lack of a byline demonstrates what Sanneh believes is a major factor in the unbearable niceness of music criticism. Fans, or really, stans of music artists are quick to defend the honor of their beloveds, and will rain down hellfire upon critics who don't show the proper respect.

Which, definitely! That’s a factor right there. Though hardly the only one.

Here on our own little platform, critic Steven Hyden of Uproxx and the Indiecast podcast ventured a thesis of his own. While there are huge stars like Swift who command legions of stans, smaller artists still exists, and increasingly, they do so in their own habitats. Metal fans review metal music for fellow metal fans, jazz vibraphone fans review jazz vibraphone music for fellow jazz vibraphone fans, and so on. When circles get smaller, one is less likely to take shots at each other.

So maybe that was the secret to Pitchfork’s meanness back in the 2000s. It wasn’t too big, but it wasn’t too small, either. That was the growth period, after all, and dropping sick burns like that attracted attention. I checked Pitchfork every day in part just to see what they would say, along with news about the latest Matt & Kim EP.

And fine, I’ll admit it. I loved Pitchfork for its meanness. I kept my smile to myself when I read the Anathallo review. But—I still smiled. Because it was a good joke. And because, as I can see now, twenty years later, I was part of a scene that was just big enough and just lively enough to merit beef and meanness and viciousness. The lifeblood of any scene. Lack that quality, and your scene won’t be long for this world.