Recently I was triggered (as the kids say) by a musician that I had a fight with playing a show here. With blind rage dictating my actions as it does way too often, I quickly wrote a piece mocking her recent positive review in Pitchfork and announced that I would start a new series where I write counter-reviews of the ones done by Pitchfork.
But the next day, the hurriedly written hatchet piece seemed an embarrassment. There were surely better things to do with my limited platform, so I quickly deleted it. But thinking about this series, which may never materialize, I became curious what were other obviously wrong pitchfork reviews. This inspired me to find this article in Slate magazine where the author attempted to interview various artists who had received 0’s when the magazine was at its most influential.
Amos Barshad had a difficult time getting comments from most of the artists who received the dreaded 0, he concludes that many of the bands given such reviews still feel lingering shame especially if they can’t point to their success.
But Travis Morrison whose record “Travistan” received a 0, seemed to be really impacted by the bad review and commented indirectly on it in the piece. My sympathy for him lead me to listen to “Travistan”. I really wanted to like it because I really hate pitchfork. And like most people, I’m always going to be on the side of the artist rather than the critic. Which is ironic given my own writing has become criticism.
But why do I hate Pitchfork? Well, besides having disliked the genre of indie music since high school, I have a personal grudge against the website. One of the first record reviews my old band Coughs ever received was on Pitchfork and it was an insufferable review. The review by Nick Sylvester was a 6.5 and was not a pan but managed to anger all of us.
While Nick Sylvester was not the worst writer Pitchfork had (that honor would go to Brent Dicrenzio), he certainly wasn’t a good writer by any stretch of the imagination. The writing style is not as awful as I remembered but it is seemingly deliberately muddled and unclear in its verboseness.
The plus side was it was very easy to mock. The first line “down the mons and up the vag, am I right?” was a real clunker. The review also made reference to our singer Anya sounding like Kim deal which we were all aghast at and seemed misogynistic. Whether Sylvester was some kind of misogynist, he seemed to believe Coughs was some sort of primitivist project animated by a desire to return to childhood. And he claimed that by us doing a song where Seth demonstrated his prowess at the banjo caused Sylvester to see through our façade.
Of course, a site like Pitchfork is always equating the hard rocking, dissonant and angry with a lack of maturity and the tuneful and melodic with adulthood. It’s pretty much a cliché as old as rock criticism. The German noise-rock band Die Toddliche Doris recorded a noise album and a pop album at the same time. Then by releasing the pop album a year later, they tricked the music critics into praising the “pop” album as the more mature.
The review had an unmistakable tone that reduced me to rage. Joe Orton in his diaries talks about reviews of his new play “Loot” describing some of the mediocre reviews as “sniffy”.
Now looking at the review much later, it certainly wasn’t an entirely bad review. But it was weirdly sniffy, suspicious of our record that we had put our heart and soul into. Sylvester seemed to believe that we were somehow insincere or were pulling the wool over his eyes in our strident confrontationalism.
He wasn’t entirely unique in his attitude. Many of the tastemakers of that time deemed to think that Coughs was the herald of bad things, we were the midwestern rubes who were ruining noise or something…. A lost review in tiny mix tapes said something to the effect that noise was over now because people like us were making it. (the review was deleted)
Sylvester’s review wasn’t exactly negative, it seemed to regard us with a certain amused but condescending affection which annoyed us but was not intended to be harmful. And now seeing Sylvester’s reputation for writing some of the meaner reviews in early 2000’s Pitchfork, I can say we got off comparatively light.
The lost review in Tiny Mix Tapes and other reviews of my music project have had spleen that Sylvester’s reviews lacked. I unsuccessfully tried to have Forced into Femininity removed from the website Rate Your Music because I was sick of seeing the same 1.0 reviews with crudely written put downs. And I’ve only gone to the Rate Your Music page on Coughs once and came back emotionally scarred.
But at that time, this was the only major review of our first record and it seemed the first and last word on our music career. I remember for months going to friend’s houses to use the internet and search for other reviews and still seeing this same review in a vacuum.
I’m not sure if I ever encounter Sylvester, this was before pitchfork moved its headquarters to NYC so he must have had some connection to Chicago. But Sylvester’s biography was very much that of an east coast elite, a Harvard graduate who even worked on the Harvard Lampoon. No doubt Sylvester could have worked on the Simpsons but I’m guessing writing for Pitchfork seemed cooler.
Now I can google Nick Sylvester and follow his career because he’s made something himself as a music producer and has also married an ESPN broadcaster.
In those dark days before our first tour I couldn’t find anything about Sylvester, he was a complete enigma. This younger self searching for dirt on Sylvester would be delighted with the dirt on his Wikipedia page, being let go of the Village Voice for making up part of a story or his production career beginning with LCD Sound System who seems the apotheosis of millennial cringe.
But honestly if someone were to write a Wikipedia of my life they could probably find as many failings. It’s pretty hard to make it to the advanced age of myself and Sylvester without having some sort of semi-private shame.
Eventually other more positive reviews came out and we did the first of several U.S. tours so it no longer seemed like a sniffy review would be the end of us. And most of the noise scene was equally contemptuous of the culture of Pitchfork so it was unlikely it would have ever hurt us that much.
But I’ve always kept my grudge against Pitchfork as well as being philosophically opposed to their whole ethos. So the fact that they might have ruined Travis Morrison’s solo career makes me want to praise “Travistan” by Morrison.
One thing that’s obvious from reading the review is that the 0 was given for effect. Pitchfork has admitted in recent years that many of their negative reviews were given to get people talking about the website. Giving Travistan a 0 instead of a 4.0 is more dramatic and got people talking. But the review while negative is not as negative as a 0.0 would make one think. Chris Dahlen finds things to like in the record which alone would make it seem like it deserved a point or two
Plus there is a weird cruelty to the review that seemed embarrassing when I first read it, Dahlen discusses one of the songs which apparently is about Morrison being beaten up in front of the Gap. I was shocked that he would reference this beating which seems awful and traumatic with such glee but after doing more research this beating was only a metaphorical one and the song is actually about 9/11.
But “Travistan” is so help me not a great record or I can’t really tell how good it is. It would be like if there was a popular ska band and then they put out a less popular follow up. Similarly listening to Dismemberment Plan and then Morrison’s solo follow-up, my initial response is “yes this is indie rock.”
I listened to some of the Dismemberment Plan and didn’t really like it that much, I think I prefer “Travistan” to this because it’s a biut sloppier and more human but not by much. In truth, “Trravistan” is like 6 as a record. Pitchfork never corrected the score as they did to much mockery to several records they panned. The truth is no one cares to correct the historical record to admit that something that was supposedly terrible was just ok.
It turns out as well, my sympathy for Morrison might have been misplaced. The article in Slate I read didn’t discuss how Travis Morrison outspokenly supported the Iraq war and wrote an embarrassing blog post about it with hawkish positions that people on Bush’s cabinet might have held.
This blog even discusses a back and forth with some writers from Pitchfork, so was this why the writer turned so violently against Morrison? It’s probably smart of Morrison to not mention this but it doesn’t throw him in a very good light.
The blog is also depressing in light of the current US support of Israel’s genocide and march to war in the Middle East. Morrisons rational-sounding talking points remind me of current talking points being used in support of Israel. Then as now, the media was full of these nonsensical takes which unfortunately sounded reasonable enough to drag us into a horrific war. Of course, anyone today would be laughed at for even uttering the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” and if there is a future, there will be a similar response to the phrase “two-state solution”.
Our sorrow for Morrison’s wasted potential might not be worth it. While his kind of earnest manly contrarianism was more acceptable in the edgy early 2000’s than it would be today, it definitely erases my sympathy.
I personally think the Coughs first record is an 8 but maybe it’s a 6. Who knows and who remembers? One thing I will say is that Anya never sounded like Kim deal….