Stick a fork in it

The news that Pitchfork is being swallowed by GQ dealt a body blow to many of us for multiple reasons. My heart goes out to those able journalists now looking for work in a market increasingly flooded with workers from other recent layoffs, such as those at Bandcamp. The shrinking of platforms for professional critical discourse and news about music is alarming for artists and labels as well as those who work for websites. For me, the most sickening aspect is the fact a music publication has been consumed by a men’s journal. This has been a huge part of the problem of music journalism for decades; it’s one of the reasons Rolling Stone has always covered women so little and poorly – in the ‘90s when I freelanced for Stone, we were always told that it was a men’s magazine; Wenner Media sibling publication Us was for women. P4k started off being a rather typical nerdy indie boy blog, but it rose above those snarky beginnings to become a platform for diverse types of music and writers. I loved the way it reckoned with its own past by reevaluating its reviews. The fact that a female POC, Puja Patel, has lost her admirable run as editor in chief is a stab in the guts – that the knife was wielded by another woman, Anna Wintour, sickening. (For the record, I never wrote for Pitchfork and never felt a part of its community, but still I grieve.)

That said, I discussed the news with the 14 undergraduate students in my music journalism class on Wednesday. Only two of them said they ever pay attention to Pitchfork, and all they really know about the site is its rating system – and they aren’t crazy about that. They see it as arrogant, judgmental. Instead this group of dedicated music lovers prefers to find out about new releases through Spotify, social media, and friends and family. (One student reads The New York Times, bless her heart.)

This is a small survey sampling, but it confirms what many of us know: Forget the death of newspapers and magazines (that’s old news about old news), we are now in the end of the era of websites and blogs. Young people crowd source their news, information, entertainment, and opinions. As one student said, she would rather figure out whether she is going to like an artist by reading a bunch of different people’s comments about them, rather than one person’s opinion. And of course, consumers don’t need critics to tell them what records to buy any more: they can hear them themselves on apps and YouTube.

This is all very disturbing for critics, journalists, and media companies, and it’s also bad news for artists – criminally underpaid by Spotify – and the music industry. The only comfort this offers to the talented people at Pitchfork is that they should realize it’s not that they weren’t doing good and important work. It’s just, well, the times, they are a changing. Again.

Bruce Springsteen, Confessional

“Trouble in the Heartland,” in which I come clean about my love affair with Bruce Springsteen.

Riffing on Lita Ford’s Memoir

The England-born, Long Beach-raised only child had deflected the ravages of puberty by teaching herself to play the leads of Jimi Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page. As she tells it in her straight-talking, dirt-dishing memoir, “Living Like a Runaway,” neighbors used to visit her 1970s teen-girl version of a suburban man cave just to watch her shred.

My review of Lita Ford’s memoir Living Like a Runaway is in the Los Angeles Times today.

Chrissie Hynde’s American Dream

Chrissie Hynde’s memoir Reckless has been surrounded by controversy because of some boneheaded comments the rock icon made in an interview. Apparently, having the appropriate response to one’s experience of abuse is another one of those boxes women artists now have to check off correctly, while men can carry on doing the raping and pillaging — no questions asked. I found her book to be a story not about sexual violence as much as about the American dream turned sour, as I wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

Pedro Punk Book Review

Oral histories and punk r0ck go hand in hand. No scene lends itself better to this anti-hierarchical literary form than my little town of San Pedro, whose music scene has had a steadfastly populist vibe since before the Minutemen. Local artist Craig Ibarra documents Pedro punk of the ’70s and ’80s masterfully in A Wailing of a Town, a — you guessed it — oral history I reviewed for the Los Angeles Times.

Lorde Almighty

Of course I love Lorde: She’s a feminist, she’s from New Zealand, and she makes great music. I reviewed her show at the Greek last night for LAMag.com

Curled Up With Queens

The website Curled Up With a Good Book says of Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways: “you need to read this.”