A Week Late and a Weak Lay: Quincy duz the Fork

The original pitchfork festival, circa 1909

Much like noted jazz-hater Tom "Samhain" Breihan, I went to this year's Pitchfork Festival. This may initially seem at odds with my general game plan, based on what I post here, but let me offer the following reasoning: though perhaps one might think I'd generally go to like the X-Million Tongues Festival or Terrastock or Mutek or whatevs, I was generally broke then. This was cheap, I wasn't technically broke, and I had a ride. Plus, why do I have to explain myself to you? I'm a goddam web presence, no matter how minor. Going to P-Fork was practically my duty, as such.

I didn't even make it to the big Friday hullabaloo, which was I guess okay by me because "living" music and blah blah plus I've never bothered to listen to Spiderland. No reason. Anyhow, what I did actually make of the dustbowl tourney on Saturday and Sunday I rather enjoyed. For the most part, music was secondary, which is I think maybe the average P-Fork obsessives unofficial motto. Auditurus esse inconsideratus, according to one translation site.

And that wasn't a bad thing at this event. I knew a bunch of people in attendance, and they were friends and often had cigarettes to bum. I reunited with a kid my high school cohorts and I used to give an extremely hard time to 10 years ago and won some kind of moral victory over him when Clipse did not, in fact, suck. I got to catch a bit of Craig Taborn, whose Junk Magic I picked up based on (yup) a Pitchfork review several years ago and who were more psyched out than any of the "psych" bands that I glimpsed at the fest. And De La Soul somehow made me feel like I was in 11th grade again and just discovering Stakes is High (my fave for whatever reason I care to choose), a grade for which any association would usually be horrid but was pretty much alright by me at this time.

But back to my cynical/cliche'd view that P-fork attendees don't give a fuck about music. Is it a testament to the never-winding-down digital music turnover that, one week after the fact, you totally think that the fact that I'm writing a post on this festival is far too little, far too late? Yes you did. And if you didn't, well, then fuck me. 'Cause that's the basis that the next few paragraphs hinge upon.

Tom "Jinja my Ninja" Breihan (note: I actually think he has a fairly strong batting average of posts for someone who has to write something every day; I'm just making these names 'cause I'm smallfry and poking fun is rad) this week brought up how fractured the music industry is. Long tail ish, a bunch more bands are selling a lot fewer records. P4k's rise as a cultural entity along the same time that filesharing blew the fuck up lead to it being a major player within a certain fragment of the shattered coke mirror of the music industry. Sure, major player is now a relative term, but I'm fairly confident stating without having done any research that there are at least a few bands that don't have day jobs any more based on the strength of Pitchfork reviews.

I know that this is all shit you've probably heard before, and you're starting to panic that my recently mentioned new found stability is leading me into the deep well of "refried beans" style blogging. Truth is, I've been peeking at Pitchfork on a daily basis since 2000 or so. Sure, I actually read a lot fewer of the reviews these days and don't really check the news and kinda wish they still had a little special daily section of track reviews instead of the incorporation of streaming tracks with little commentary (though I guess their commentary has in general become less meaningful to me as well...), but they maintain enough connections with critics of generally good taste that there are still reviews of some very worthy releases that slip into the mix, not to mention their "Month in..." columns.

As a whole, I suppose Pitchfork has become some kind of morning comfort-zone habit, along with half a pot of coffee and a back slicked with sweat from overlayering on my walk to work. I think it's like this for an awful lot of people. Sure, their canon doesn't always push my "give-a-fuck" button, but it's nice to check on something that so many people go to to feed on for their dose of aural culture. And this year's festival rolled with that aesthetic completely, with reasonable prices, lines that (at least for me) moved a lot more quickly than I thought that they would, and scores of midwesterners standing and swaying amicably at assembled talent from around the globe. Truly the potroast of the festival circuit.

Even with the shortcycle trendwatchery so pervasive and so maligned (unless we're over that by now), the Pitchfork brand and namesake festival are both somehow consistent, dependable entities that can still cause large numbers of people to assemble and smoke grass together in a dingy baseball field. And that's something that I can at least partially get behind, even if I've only heard Glostick Koran once, and against my own will. Now excuse me; I must run and have my Xanax scrip refilled before my next post.