Sweet n' Sour: Stars vs. Pitchfork

Source: By Tabassum Siddiqui

Posted: 09/18/07 10:26AM

Filed Under: Music

Back when Torq, in the flash tie dead center, was nothing but smiles.

When Stars released 'In Our Bedrooms After the War' to online retailers weeks before the CD's actual release date to circumvent the album's inevitable leak, part of their reasoning touched on the increasingly blurry line between critics and listeners. After all, if critics get copies far in advance, why shouldn't indie-rock fans, many of whom also write opinions on their oft-influential blogs?

But the overly analytical nature of the beast paired with the temptation to instantly respond to online postings can be a bad mix—as Stars frontman Torquil Campbell discovered when he used the band's MySpace page to respond to tastemaker music site Pitchforkmedia.com's review of 'War' (which gave the album a 7.4 rating out of 10).

Campbell, never one to mince words, offered up a rant—since deleted but reposted here—that not only tore into Pitchfork and the reviewer but lamented the death of art and criticism, prompting much scoffing from some critics and bloggers (and vehement agreement from others).

"I'm reviewing reviewers now, because I want to see how they like it! Well, I had nothing to do, and was feeling emotional, and probably hadn't slept the night before..." laughs Campbell sheepishly. "But I just feel like things have gotten awfully out of hand. It's odd, because given the fact that the blogosphere and the Internet should sort of open up the discourse and give people free reign to be shocking and challenging and to pick fights and have discussions, it seems remarkably free of that. Consensus just seems to have been endowed on Pitchfork in this way that I think is very puzzling," Campbell declares.

"I think avant-garde music is great and important, but I'm depressed by the sense that's being given by magazines like Pitchfork that any kind of sloppiness or open-heartedness isn't tolerable. Pop music is the venue of the ridiculous. If it isn't ridiculous, it isn't pop music. It should be simultaneously beautiful and profound and ridiculous. If you're not amused by a piano ballad about fascist soccer hooligans ["Barricade," from 'War'], then you're not amused by it. But I think it's a good thing that people like us are around. I wish that journalists would write about what interests them instead of what doesn't interest them—it just doesn't seem to me to be very constructive.

"And I think it's important to point it out when teenage virgins start writing record reviews," he grins slyly. "My opinion is, they should have sex first, and then get into criticism."

Must Read?

0 %

0 %

0 VOTES

SHARE