10/29/08
Text: Nik Mercer
Love it or hate it, Pitchfork Media is the gold standard for music journalism on the Web. Sure, P4K may have one of the most bizarre rating systems ever, it may offend on occasion, and it may come off with an air of pretention, but in the end, you know you can't live without it. As the New York Times put it, Pitchfork Media is "one of the more important indie music tastemakers in any medium." This is most definitely true.
When The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present showed up on our desk, we were expecting something incredibly snobby. Instead, we discovered something truly enthralling and worthwhile. Instead of ranking the five-hundred tunes included in the volume, editors Scott Plagenhoef and Ryan Schreiber just attempt to give justification for why the tracks they selected are the best ones from the past three decades, breaking songs down by year rather than score. The lack of P4K's notorious compartmentalization and meticulous grading is refreshing; the book serves simply as a reference to music. My Bloody Valentine is followed by Spaceman 3; Guided by Voices comes before Nine Inch Nails; Iron Maiden is somehow back-to-back with Orange Juice. On top of providing witty commentary on each of the songs, The Pitchfork 500 also includes a slew of sub-lists and explanations: "Bootybass" is all about ghettotech; "Career Killers" is specifically on, uh, career killing cuts (i.e. Beastie Boys' "Ch-Check It Out"); "Threat Level: This Was Our 9/11" is a breakdown of the musical response to September 11. You get the picture.
We can deny it as much as we like, but Pitchfork Media is this generation's musical lexicon: The Pitchfork 500 is all at once our musical necessity (how does music make sense otherwise?) and our guilty pleasure (how else can we talk down to our friends about Usher and Justin Timberlake?)
