“Every step Pitchfork takes is the right step.” That’s my pal Anshuman Iddamsetty, a national tech columnist at the CBC, on the super-new (debuted at noon) Pitchfork Weekly — a digest-style web series detailing the cultural behemoth’s choicest news stories, interviews and reviews.
I’d have to agree. Pitchfork’s gone through many stages since its launch in 1995, with sentiments toward it traversing awe, revulsion, apathy, and culminating in general, widespread acceptance. Almost 20 years later, after relocating from Chicago to NYC and with a successful festival series in its name, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Pitchfork usurps MTV with a certain kind of clout that’s very valuable if you’re a new media devotee.
The inaugural episode of Pitchfork Weekly is pretty innocuous: Das Racist does its usual weird-evasive shtick before performing at Carnegie Hall, A$AP Rocky yells some things while picking his nose on camera, Montreal’s Grimes lisps adorably on location at New York Fashion Week. Punctuating the interviews are short text/image, almost GIF-like, clips highlighting the site’s biggest news stories that week: Nile Rodgers’ collaborating with Daft Punk, the new Diplo and Usher song “Climax,” pullquotes from a wonky review of the new Maccabees record.
Given Pitchfork’s ability to synthesize internet culture in a way no one else can manage, embedding their text-based practice as video (while still managing to prioritize and shout out written content) is such a DUH move. In a week where CBC and NPR have both announced new music discovery initiatives, Pitchfork’s taking the acknowledgement of our very real online life a step further and giving us the kind of customized, taste-making content we once got from The New Music. It’s never been a better time to be (virtually) alive.
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Anupa Mistry writes about music for Toronto Standard. You can follow her on Twitter at @_anupa.
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