Lifestyle
With Pitchfork in peril, a word on the purpose of music journalism
Unionized staff picket outside the Condé Nast offices in New York on Jan. 23. The company is merging the popular digital music publication Pitchfork with the men’s magazine GQ, which has triggered anger over the resulting layoffs and concern for the outlet’s future.
Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
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Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Unionized staff picket outside the Condé Nast offices in New York on Jan. 23. The company is merging the popular digital music publication Pitchfork with the men’s magazine GQ, which has triggered anger over the resulting layoffs and concern for the outlet’s future.
Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Last week was a tough one for music nerds. I use that phrase with love and kinship — I am (like you are, perhaps) the kind of listener who loves music so much that it hurts. And that kind of passion for new and beloved sounds can make those like us odd, or at least amusing, to “normal” people who maybe only listen to their college favorites and only go to one concert a year, because it happens to be in a park or at the pier.
I offer this declaration of fellowship because that sometimes petty distinction surfaced in a real way last Wednesday, when the editorial director of media behemoth Condé Nast sat in a conference room wearing sunglasses and told the staff at Pitchfork that the renowned music webzine would be absorbed, Star Trek-style, into the men’s magazine GQ, and that most people present would be laid off pretty immediately. Her memo condescendingly thanking Pitchfork’s editor-in-chief, Puja Patel (who was let go) leaked online soon after, announcing that this decimation is what Condé thinks “is the best path forward for the brand.” While its renowned reviews section will live on, Pitchfork’s remaining staff is a skeleton crew. GQ‘s paywall is likely to diminish the reach of what the site publishes, and its identity — the thing that led musicians and fans alike to make it their home page or check the day’s new reviews at midnight — will inevitably be challenged. I’ve been through similar bloodlettings at other publications, and what they do to morale and manageable workloads can’t be overstated.
The days since have seen myriad tributes and jeremiads published in article form and as social media threads, alongside heartfelt goodbyes from staffers and regular contributors celebrating the great work they did at the publication. Pitchfork’s long life and evolution both dominated and embodied 21st century music writing: It began as a blog, basically, powered by the attitude of its mostly white-guy founders, and established itself through creatively nasty pans of popular artists and paeans to arty but cool hipster bands like Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective that were augmented by a numerical scoring system that wasn’t unique (hail Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide, 51 years old and still going) but which reinforced its status as the tastemaker within those circles where Jonny Greenwood is a god.
Even before its owners struck a deal with Condé Nast in 2015, though, Pitchfork had begun transforming, becoming more like a conventional magazine with features and news alongside its reviews. As its authority solidified, mid- and late-period editors like Patel, Mark Richardson, Amy Phillips, Jill Mapes, Jessica Hopper and more dedicated themselves to expanding and diversifying Pitchfork’s coverage, reassessing its legacy as an indie “kingmaker” (LOL sexist) and transforming it into the publication best equipped to cover the vast, atomized waterfront of contemporary music. In the past decade Pitchfork has nurtured many of the best and most influential music writers working today. Now several of them are looking for work.
If you’re not a super, super-nerd, you may wonder why Pitchfork’s half-demise has generated so much anguish. The links I’ve provided above tell the story; I’ll just add a few more thoughts:
Great culture writing reflects the world it covers
The diversity of Pitchfork’s recent masthead, and coverage, matters. It’s only been four months since Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s dismissive comments about women and BIPOC musicians set off its own firestorm as many former Stone employees came forward with stories of structural sexism and racism at the company, spurring a larger conversation about the exclusionary history of the music press. Pitchfork was part of that problematic lineage until its editors chose to actively confront it. Features like the Sunday Review, in which previously ignored albums from beyond its indie-rock core are given the attention they deserve, were the public expression of what was happening behind the scenes as more women, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people assumed positions of power. Pitchfork’s absorption into a men’s-magazine brand feels like a highly conservative move at a time when music has proven to be one of our culture’s most beautifully progressive spaces. Scholar Robin James has written insightfully on how such moves reflect the false assumption that “bros” are more reliable as consumers than women. I find this particularly bizarre coming out of a year in which the biggest entertainment stories have all been dominated by women and BIPOC creators, from Taylor Swift to Barbie to Beef.
Critics are also explorers
This blow affects more than just music journalists; it contributes to the larger downward spiral imperiling everyone in music beyond that Swiftian one percent. I’m not the first to point this out. Publicist Judy Miller Silverman noted that Pitchfork’s coverage of “out” subgenres like experimental jazz, electronic music and even Hawaiian slack key guitar “helped an entire ‘economy’ of musicians succeed.” Writer Marc Masters made the connection between this consolidation and the paradoxical narrowing effect of streaming’s dominance — platforms like Spotify offer galaxies of music, yet their algorithms confine most listeners to tiny areas of taste and offer no context or real community. To those who say music writing is irrelevant in an age of discovery through TikTok and other video-based platforms — ask any artist who doesn’t have the time or money to also be a shiny happy influencer if they’re going to miss the old Pitchfork. Plenty poured one out for it after the news broke.
Usefulness is overrated
While the role of music writing as a form of discovery, promotion and gatekeeping is undeniable within popular music’s history, I also want to push back against the well-intentioned attempts to assert its productive role within the entertainment biz. To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects. And as those Pitchfork scores both assert and satirize, many people enjoy the game of trying to quantify art, to judge it as performance or product.
What I love about music writing, though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen. The best writing at Pitchfork or anywhere reflects that process and is as variegated as the human experience itself. Maybe what a writer finds inside an album or a song is a new way of thinking about a particular musical practice as she gets meticulous about analyzing song structure or studio tools. Maybe she discovers lost histories, whole scenes and subcultures. Sometimes she uncovers something she’d forgotten about her own life story, of the hidden coves of her own feeling. Maybe the sonic innovations she confronts cause her to use language in a different way, and what she ends up with is a kind of poetry. Reading the most powerful writing in Pitchfork – the kind that some surveyors of the media landscape are declaring obsolete, replaced by influencers and algorithms – I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight.
What I am talking about is pleasure. In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun. This is a different kind of pleasure than the quick nervous kind TikTok brings, always moving on to another source of stimulus, always ratcheting up the competition for attention. Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it.
The singer-songwriter Josh Ritter said it well in a tweet the other day: “Loving music is one thing, but to then attempt to translate those ineffable emotions into words for the rest of us, takes talent and bravery and beautiful human optimism.” Optimism is exactly right. To believe that on any given day, a person can make room to absorb something soothing or electrifying or challenging, something that others made with their whole souls, and then find a way to share it with others – that’s a gift worth cultivating. At its best Pitchfork offered many people a chance to live in the optimistic, gloriously pointless space of loving music. I know that the writers it nurtured will always continue to seek out ways to do so; that’s where my hope remains.
This essay was originally published in the NPR Music newsletter. Subscribe here for more.
A model of the statue of Barbara Rose Johns pictured in 2023, two years before the real thing was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol.
Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters
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Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters
In 1951, a Black teenager led a walkout of her segregated Virginia high school. On Tuesday, her statue replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol.
Barbara Rose Johns was 16 when she mobilized hundreds of students to walk out of Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School to protest its overcrowded conditions and inferior facilities compared to those of the town’s white high school.
That fight was taken up by the NAACP and eventually became one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education, whose landmark 1954 ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional.
“Before the sit-ins in Greensboro, before the Montgomery bus boycott, there was the student strike here in 1951, led by Barbara Johns,” Cameron Patterson told NPR in 2020, when he led the Robert Russa Moton Museum, located on the former school grounds.
Johns’ bronze statue is the latest addition to Emancipation Hall, a gathering place in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center that houses many of the 100 statues representing each state.
Every state legislature gets to honor two notable individuals from its history with statues in the Capitol. For over a century, Virginia was represented by George Washington and, until a few years ago, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Lee’s statue was hoisted out of the Capitol — at the request of then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat — in December 2020, the year that a nationwide racial reckoning spurred the removal of over 100 Confederate symbols across the U.S.
The same month, Virginia’s Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol voted unanimously to select a statue of Johns to replace it. Johns, who died in 1991, was chosen from a list of 100 names and five finalists, including Pocahontas and Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to serve as president of a U.S. bank.
Exactly five years and a multi-step approval process later, the 11-foot statue — created by Maryland artist Steven Weitzman — has finally moved in. It shows a teenage Johns standing at a podium, raising a book overhead mid-rallying cry.
Its pedestal is engraved with the words: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?”
Johns is credited with helping end school segregation
Johns was born in New York City in March 1935, and moved to Virginia’s Prince Edward County during World War II to live on her grandmother’s — and later, father’s — farm.
According to the Moton Museum, Johns — the niece of civil rights pioneer the Rev. Vernon Johns — grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of resources at her school. Classrooms were located in free-standing tar-paper shacks that lacked proper plumbing, with no science laboratories, cafeteria or gymnasium at all.
She later wrote in an unpublished memoir that when she finally took her concerns to a teacher, they responded, “Why don’t you do something about it?” She felt dismissed at first, but gave the idea more thought and decided to unite the student council members to coordinate a strike.
“We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand,” Johns wrote, according to the museum.
On April 23, 1951, Johns gathered all 450 students in the auditorium and convinced them to walk out, to protest their school’s conditions and campaign for a new building. The strike lasted roughly two weeks and caught the attention of the NAACP.
NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed a lawsuit (Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia) in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of segregated education in the county’s schools.
The court ultimately sided with the county, but did order that its Black schools be made physically equal to white schools. A new Black Moton High School — known as “Moton 2” — was built in 1953 to avoid integration.
The following year, the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Ed, based on the Farmville case and four others from across the country. But it took years for the ruling to actually be enforced throughout the U.S., especially in Virginia, which enacted a set of anti-integration laws that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”
Prince Edward County schools were officially integrated in 1964, after being closed for five years in an attempt to avoid it. Moton 2 was reopened as the Prince Edward County High School and remained in use until 1993.
As for Johns, she was sent after the walkout to live with relatives and finish her schooling in Alabama due to safety concerns. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Drexel University before working as a librarian for Philadelphia Public Schools. She married the Rev. William Powell, with whom she raised five children before her death at age 56.
Johns has been recognized in Virginia over the years. Her story is now a required part of lessons in the public school curricula. In 2017, the Virginia Attorney General’s Offices were renamed in her honor. And the following year, the Virginia General Assembly designated April 23 — the anniversary of the walkout — as Barbara Johns Day statewide.
Johns’ sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, told member station VPM last year that their family is honored by this newest tribute in the nation’s capital.
“I think Virginia is trying to correct some of its inequities,” Johns Cobbs said. “I think the fact that they chose her was one way they are trying to rectify what happened in the past.”
Bucking a trend in 2025
Plans for Johns’ statue have been in motion since well before President Trump’s second term, which has been marked by a rollback in diversity initiatives and the reinstallment of Confederate monuments.
One of Trump’s executive orders along those lines, aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” calls on the secretary of the Interior to restore public monuments and markers on federal lands that have been changed or removed since 2020.
In October, a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike was reinstalled in a D.C. park, five years after protesters tore it down and set it ablaze.
As is customary, state leaders and members of Congress will be in attendance at Tuesday’s statue unveiling. Among them will be House Speaker Mike Johnson as well as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned in part against critical race theory and has eliminated DEI initiatives in office.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who also plans to attend the ceremony, issued a statement beforehand praising Johns’ “incredible bravery and leadership she displayed when she walked out of Moton High School.”
“I’m thrilled that millions of visitors to the U.S. Capitol, including many young people, will now walk by her statue and learn about her story,” he added. “May she continue to inspire generations to stand up for equality and justice.”
‘Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp
Tears Flowed After Filming Wrapped …
Finale Is Super Sad!!!
Published
TMZ.com
Noah Schnapp says the “Stranger Things” cast and crew had tears in their eyes when they filmed the final episode of the hit Netflix series … and he’s expecting fans to get emotional when the finale drops.
We got Noah in New York City on Tuesday, and our photog asked him if the tears were flowing when the final ‘ST’ season was wrapping up.
Noah confirms our suspicions and says the upcoming finale is going to be super sad … and he’s even nervous for it.
The cast is gonna get together one last time to watch the finale, and Noah’s anticipating more tears there, too.
The “Stranger Things” finale is set to be released on Netflix — and in theaters — on Dec. 31 … so the end of an era is near.
Rob Reiner at the Cannes film festival in 2022.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
When Rob Reiner spoke with Fresh Air in September to promote Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Terry Gross asked him about Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences.
Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.
The father character in Being Charlie feels a lot of tension between his own career aspirations and his son’s addiction — but Reiner said that wasn’t how it was for him and Nick.
“I was never, ever too busy,” Reiner told Fresh Air. “I mean, if anything, I was the other way, you know, I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help. I’m sure I made mistakes and, you know, I’ve talked about that with him since.”
At the time, Reiner said he believed Nick was doing well. “He’s been great … hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years,” Reiner said. “He’s in a really good place.”
Reiner starred in the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family and directed Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to his groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
“After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away,” Reiner recalled. “It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn’t talked to in a long time. It’s like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do.”
Below are some more highlights from that interview.
Interview Highlights
Carl Reiner (left) and Rob Reiner together in 2017.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
On looking up to his dad, director Carl Reiner, and growing up surrounded by comedy legends
When I was a little boy, my parents said that I came up to them and I said, “I want to change my name.” I was about 8 years old … They were all, “My god, this poor kid. He’s worried about being in the shadow of this famous guy and living up to all this.” And they say, “Well, what do you want to change your name to?” And I said, “Carl.” I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much. …
[When] I was 19 … I was sitting with him in the backyard and he said to me, “I’m not worried about you. You’re gonna be great at whatever you do.” He lives in my head all the time. I had two great guides in my life. I had my dad, and then Norman Lear was like a second father. They’re both gone, but they’re with me always. …
There’s a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and [Your] Show of Shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on. And, when you look at that picture, you’re basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century. I mean there’s Mel Brooks, there’s my dad, there is Neil Simon, there is Woody Allen, there is Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Ruben who created The Andy Griffith Show. Anything you ever laughed at is represented by those people. So these are the people I look up to, and these are people that were around me as a kid growing up.
YouTube
On directing the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally
We knew we were gonna do a scene where Meg [Ryan] was gonna fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli, and Billy [Crystal] came up with the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.” … I said, we need to find somebody, an older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous. I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little [movie] things … So I asked her if she wanted to do it and she said sure. I said, “Now listen mom, hopefully that’ll be the topper of the scene. It’ll get the big laugh, and if it doesn’t, I may have to cut it out.” … She said, “That’s fine. I just want to spend the day with you. I’ll go to Katz’s. I’ll get a hot dog.” …
When we did the scene the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it. She didn’t give it her all. … She was nervous. She’s in front of the crew and there’s extras and people. … And at one point, I get in there and I said, “Meg, let me show you what I meant.” And I sat opposite Billy, and I’m acting it out, and I’m pounding the table and I’m going, “Yes, yes, yes!” … I turned to Billy and I say, “This is embarrassing … I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.” But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.
On differentiating himself from his father with Stand By Me (1986)
I never said specifically I want to be a film director. I never said that. And I never really thought that way. I just knew I wanted to act, direct, and do things, be in the world that he was in. And it wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father. Because the first film I did was, This Is Spinal Tap, which is a satire. And my father had trafficked in satire with Sid Caesar for many years. And then the second film I did was a film called The Sure Thing, which was a romantic comedy for young people, and my father had done romantic comedy. The [Dick] Van Dyke Show is a romantic comedy, a series.
But when I did Stand By Me, it was the one that was closest to me because … I felt that my father didn’t love me or understand me, and it was the character of Gordie that expressed those things. And the film was a combination of nostalgia, emotion and a lot of humor. And it was a real reflection of my personality. It was an extension, really, of my sensibility. And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to mirror everything my father’s done up till then.
On starting his own production company (Castle Rock) and how the business has changed
We started it so I could have some kind of autonomy because I knew that the kinds of films I wanted to make people didn’t wanna make. I mean, I very famously went and talked to Dawn Steel, who was the head of Paramount at the time. … And she says to me, “What do you wanna make? What’s your next film?” And I said, “Well, you know, I got a film, but I don’t think you’re going to want to do it.” … I’m going to make a movie out of The Princess Bride. And she said, “Anything but that.” So I knew that I needed to have some way of financing my own films, which I did for the longest time. …
It’s tough now. And it’s beyond corporate. I mean, it used to be there was “show” and “business.” They were equal — the size of the word “show” and “business.” Now, you can barely see the word “show,” and it’s all “business.” And the only things that they look at [are] how many followers, how many likes, what the algorithms are. They’re not thinking about telling a story. … I still wanna tell stories. And I’m sure there’s a lot of young filmmakers — even Scorsese is still doing it, older ones too — that wanna tell a story. And I think people still wanna hear stories and they wanna see stories.
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