Well, I’m gutted. Surely everyone who stumbles on this has heard, but in case you haven’t – Pitchfork is being “folded into GQ.” It’s a nice way of saying that one of the internet’s most premiere and long-running music blogs is being liquified and dumped down the sink. The staff is gone. And the timing really couldn’t be worse.

Pitchfork was a necessary evil in the music world. You can, and should, lambast the earliest days of Pitchfork, but once they were established, they became a proper thorn in the side of the industry. Pitchfork was a rare outlet that had both a wide reach and an ability to say no to arena artists. How often have you been perusing Wikipedia for some shit U2 album and seen that Pitchfork were the only ones that gave it a middling review? In the earliest days, it was done out of spite and ego, sure. But with those rough few years removed, Pitchfork will be remembered as a site that told it like it was.

The site offered constructive criticism in a way no other outlet really does. Pitchfork were forward-thinkers, offering advice to artists on how to build on the album actively being reviewed. They also thought in the past, helping listeners to understand why they may or may not like an album, and what the context is, always done with a deep knowledge of the backstory. Pitchfork offered the rare service of teaching you something about an artist you didn’t already know, even if you disagreed with the review. And that’s what proper music criticism is.

Even after the purchase by Conde Nast, when claims of “poptimism” became ubiquitous with P4k, the site still offered a ton of value. They covered metal, they gave insight into muddied artist histories, they still weren’t afraid to bash the walls out of another crapped-out Ed Sheeran release. The biggest thing they ever taught me was not to give credence to an artist just because they’re a name. This blog and this writer loves to celebrate music – I don’t really like to write negative reviews! I find I enjoy most music. But let’s look at my least favorite albums from 2023 – Mac Demarco, Metallica, Maneskin, Miley Cyrus. These albums from big-name artists all got mostly positive coverage, but not from P4k. I believe strongly in speaking positively about music, but I am vehemently against poptimism – which is effectively giving positive coverage to big-name artists because negative coverage might hurt their feelings. Poptimism is also, naturally, a concept that disregards artists that aren’t headlining festivals because why would anyone ever listen to them? It’s as algorithmic as a human can develop.

Vulture – excuse me, venture capitalists are a plague amongst American society. Just recently, they knifed and bled out Jezebel. Sports Illustrated, one of the most important magazines in American history, is gutted in favor of libel-inducing AI. I have already had so many friends laid off because a VC bought a popular blog just to fold it. David Zaslav will have animators work tirelessly on a movie that everyone is hyped for only to toss it in the bin as a tax writeoff. Jim Spanfeller, the G/O owner, is making it his personal mission to lay off every employee until his company has 0 writers, 0 clicks, and $0. These men deserve an ending more cruel and more unceremonious than Saddam Hussein. These people are actively destroying the internet and all that we love about it, so they can save a few hundred on taxes. It’s despicable. And they’ve now come to Pitchfork with, well,

There may be feuds in music, but there’s none in music criticism. I am far from the first person unaffiliated with Pitchfork to woe its likely demise. One of their main competitors, Consequence of Sound, published a touching piece on how necessary the site was. The best I can do is to mimic others, but it’s something that needs to be mimicked regardless.

It was always my dream to write to Pitchfork. When the site was peaking (in my opinion!) in the mid-2010’s, I used to read every review. There was nothing more exciting to me than listening to an earth-shattering new album, going to Pitchfork, and seeing the bright red circle with “8.7 – BNM” in it. I found so much new music there, and taught myself a lot of about music writing. Since “Hollywood screenwriter” will probably never play out, I thought Pitchfork would be a more modest dream goal. I even had an introductory post thought up, I just never knew how to get my foot in the door. Now screenwriter is looking more likely after all.

So what’s next for P4k? I have no idea. That’s GQ’s problem to figure out. Maybe they’ll keep it running as is – horribly unlikely though. Most likely, each edition of GQ will have one paragraph on page 45 giving a perfect 10.0 to the new Selena Gomez album with no $10 adjectives. Maybe it’ll be AI-generated.

Pitchfork was at times a villain. But if it has to go, it deserved a much more honorable death than this.