emily yacina reviews her pitchfork review
‘it’s unfortunate that publications like that can rest on their laurels without continuing to be thoughtful’
I have a vivid memory of a trip I took to the beach with some family friends when I was five or six years old, where myself, a friend my age, and a couple of our older siblings were working together on a sandcastle. while the older kids took it upon themselves to sculpt elaborate turrets and dig an intricate system of tunnels, my friend and I were tasked with running pails back and forth between lake erie and the construction site to ensure there was always a moat surrounding the structure—a comically useless job considering how fast the sand absorbed the water. after a reasonable amount of time, the older kids got bored and found something else to do, while my friend and I continued to stress out over the water level for the foreseeable future.
this memory started to resurface a lot more when I began working in media and, consequently, engaging more with music journalism, and most recently crossed my mind while reading yet another thoroughly aggressive pitchfork review whose subject was an unassuming independent artist. ringing in the new year with a belated middling review of emily yacina’s LP remember the silver, the website published what felt like a needlessly personal and misguidedly objective write-up of emily’s breezy pop record, using the songwriter’s poetic lyrics and uncomplicated arrangements against her. ‘why are we still doing this?,’ I asked myself, remembering the scene at the beach where our useless work continued long after the younger tier of laborers was left in charge. when there’s still so much work to be done to support artists and improve journalism in these two simultaneously crumbling industries, why is anyone still putting forth the money and effort on a piece of writing with no value outside of the writer’s unresearched catharsis and the artist’s entirely justified feelings of dehumanization?
‘I’ve had stuff on pitchfork before—they’ve reviewed songs of mine, and it’s always been pretty positive,’ emily informs me when I reach out to her regarding the review, after revealing that she wasn’t all that familiar with the site before a couple of her singles garnered their interest in 2015. ‘but when I opened the new review, just seeing the number itself, I was like, ‘what?’’ after the initial surprise of the circled and emboldened ‘6.0’ at the top of the page—a point or so below what the site would generally award an album they have no constructive criticism of—she read on to find a particularly demeaning interpretation of her work. ‘once I read the thing I was like, ‘hoooly shit, this is so intense.’ it just felt really personal, I guess.’
‘when I opened the new review, just seeing the number itself, I was like, ‘what?’ once I read the thing I was like, ‘hoooly shit, this is so intense.’ it just felt really personal, I guess.’
the ‘personal’ emily notes here was so far removed from the ‘personal’ she injected into her album that she felt like her review was somewhat unique among the site’s other D-grade write-ups. ‘right off the top of my head, one of the last lines in the review was like, ‘the lyric ‘desexualize my soul, I wanna be a piece of paper’ translates to ‘fuck my life,’’ she recalls. ‘and when I read that I was like, it could not be more the opposite. it’s just wild that it’s so stated as fact. I want everyone to have their subjective interpretation, and I hope people can take the things they want from the songs, but those lines can get blurry sometimes when it’s just so off.’ much of this misreading, emily notes, could’ve been avoided had the writer spent some time researching the project, as plenty of the record’s themes were addressed in interviews published leading up to silver’s release. ‘I just took that as she wasn’t thinking enough about it.’
two days after the review went live, emily took to twitter to voice her frustration with it, drawing attention to the writer’s internalized misogyny in translating vulnerable lyrics about personal struggles into sexist, generalized clichés about being a helpless woman in love. ‘you chose to reduce my voice into something weak and lovesick, completely misunderstanding the meaning behind the songs you mentioned,’ she wrote, clarifying that her song ‘only’ is about struggling with asexuality, while ‘96th street’ addresses her best friend’s suicide. ‘for your own sake, I strongly urge you to examine your own internalized misogyny, because I can’t imagine ever getting to love myself with the sexism you invoke.’
in confronting the writer who belittled her music and personal experiences, emily’s statement overlooked the massive publication whose editors greenlit an entire paragraph arguing that her backing vocal contributions on a single (sandy) alex g track overshadow everything she created herself on silver, fortifying an all-too-common narrative of female artists existing in relation to their male peers. I guess this kind of thing becomes more common once a creative passion project like pitchfork gets passed on from its original dictatorial architects to a marketing-minded overseer, continuing the site’s penchant for controversy while bleeding out its humanity. frankly, with every major music site taking cues from pitchfork, I don’t think this industry is doing much to progress toward a model of meaningful criticism.
getting familiar with pitchfork in 2015 is considerably different from what it was like getting to know them back in 2005, when the site was famously ending the careers of indie artists and solo projects in their infancy with needlessly malicious write-ups of records that either felt like an easy target or just generally didn’t jibe with the individual reviewer. amos barshad looked into this a few years ago for slate, digging up a few of the site’s most notorious reviews, including a pair of write-ups that were devoid of any text—just .jpegs of pissing monkeys and apologetic puppies. online music journalism was still the wild west then, and we were just throwing ideas against the wall to see what stuck. while the now-condé-nast-run pitchfork has mostly shed their past of dunking on unsuspecting artists, an occasional ill-conceived, career-shaking pan still slips through the editorial line.
‘my friend, sean henry, we’ve been joking about it because his last album got, like, a 5.5 or something—really brutal,’ emily tells me. the review—which scored a 5.9—was published on january 15, eleven days after emily’s and two-and-a-half months after the record’s release date. like emily’s review, sean’s is an infantilizing character study, this time honing in on his ‘cloying,’ ‘boyish’ vocals. even the irreverence of early pitchfork reviews, barshad admits, had their charm—they were often well-constructed pieces of creative writing, sometimes even taking the form of bizarre dialogues, and in many cases the subjects of the reviews merely came off as incidental to the pieces’ impetus. on the other hand, emily’s and sean’s write-ups aren’t only irresponsible, they’re completely disposable outside of the writers’ portfolios.
‘writing about art that you think is bad is totally ok, and should be a part of music journalism,’ emily clarifies, ‘but I think particularly with the one written about my album, I couldn’t accept it as an objectively bad review because of how gendered it was.’ sean’s review, it’s worth noting, feels pretty gendered, too—almost as if pitchfork recognized their own misogyny and imposed a demeaning gender role upon a male-identifying artist to balance the scales (his trailing emily’s score by 0.1 almost feels like a revisionist attempt at feminism). ‘we joke about it, though,’ she assures me. ‘I don’t think either of us are devastated. I’m not writing music to support myself, or make a job out of it or anything, so it’s not hurting me.’
in my own experience as an editor for a blue-checkmarked music publication, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the irrelevance of graded album reviews. working with a basic one-through-ten number scale, our unpaid freelance reviewers rarely seem to feel comfortable using our stamp of approval to condemn a release with any rating lower than a seven, or speak for us when they personally revere a record enough to offer it anything above a seven. but even on the occasion that a writer gets fired up enough to pen something as harsh as the review emily’s record received, we, like any other music outlet, are trailing in the SEO game so badly to pitchfork that it hardly matters. when you google a record’s title, our reviews rarely appear on the first page—yet pitchfork’s tend to populate above everything, including the artist’s website, socials, or even their wikipedia page in many cases, very conceivably swaying the opinions of listeners and directly affecting the livelihoods of fledgeling artists trying to make a living off their music.
‘it’s frustrating for anyone who makes art and deals with the complexity of putting something out there that’s so personal to have it be misunderstood by someone who doesn’t do that thing.’
‘I don’t know a lot about the music journalism world, but it’s unfortunate that publications like that can rest on their laurels without continuing to be thoughtful,’ emily observes of pitchfork, as we discuss how the current state of the industry appears to be devoid of empathy between artists and writers. as some jaded critics have recently pointed out, our obsession with ratings and rankings has ventured into macabre territory with so many recent high-profile artists passing away or intimately writing about personal experiences with death, from pitchfork giving the posthumous mac miller album a C on their needlessly slanted grading scale to their annual pitting of albums like purple mountains and ghosteen against pop records on their year-end lists, unable—or unwilling—to contextualize the music for readers the way it was intended to be heard. ‘it’s frustrating, I think, for anyone who makes art and deals with the complexity of putting something out there that’s so personal to have it be misunderstood by someone who doesn’t do that thing.’
meanwhile, emily points out, there are plenty of smaller publications doling out criticism constructively, noting that this isn’t her first piece of negative press. ‘I’ve gotten bad reviews before on smaller blogs, but any time that’s happened it’s always been really thoughtful. I feel like the writer has listened very carefully and knows what they’re saying—not that I agree with them, but I accept that not everyone is going to like the art that I make.’ these are the voices that should’ve occupied the space left by the first generation of pitchfork staffers when they moved on to more sustainable careers outside of music journalism, leaving the site’s innovation in the hands of business-minded individuals, and the content to freelancers struggling to pay rent in brooklyn by churning out stories as quickly as possible.
‘there’s still a lot of really cool publications that I do love that talk about these things openly and are very thoughtful with all of their writing,’ emily continues, citing gold flake paint and the soon-to-be-launched le sigh successor slumber mag as two examples. the lexicon of this type of site eschews the objectivism of columns like ‘best new music’ in favor of subjective ‘favourite songs’ lists, while a significantly smaller audience permits them to tailor their recommendations to a more niche readership. these sites may be considerably more community-oriented than corporate, and largely exist to promote marginalized and otherwise under-the-radar artists, but they should still serve as a model for how responsible pitchfork should strive to be as the self-proclaimed most trusted voice in music.
with this highly objective and obediently trusted global source of criticism tearing apart a piece of art and its artist, it’s reasonable to speculate that countless listeners were exposed to and instantly turned off to emily’s music for the first time when the review went live in january. the flip side of this, though, was that many of those readers who did spend time with the record and formed their own opinion on it evidently wound up being sold. ‘I got a lot of messages after the review came out that were like, ‘I was wondering why this review was so intense, and so I listened to the album and I love it!,’’ she recalls. ‘I wouldn’t have all these new listeners if it wasn’t for that review—a bunch of people bought records after it came out, which I was not expecting either.’
there’s obviously a point to be made that a nasty write-up from one of the world’s most-viewed reviews sites would be better for the artist than the few conciliatory press-release-worthy snippets any of the middling 7.0 recipients get to take home. but emily seems to be wary of the stockholm syndrome and exploitation inherent in this system: ‘I think I have my inner voice saying ‘be grateful, be thankful that people care enough that there’s a review on this website’—but I also think that’s bullshit,’ she says before positing pitchfork’s subscription to reality TV’s method of creating stars out of people presented to us as deplorable. ‘a lot of people were telling me that it was supposed to be controversial so people would visit the site, kind of clickbait-y, but it’s wild, if that’s true, that they’d choose this independent, really tiny musician, you know?’
‘I think I have my inner voice saying ‘be grateful, be thankful that people care enough that there’s a review on this website’—but I also think that’s bullshit.’
the most disheartening aspect of this situation is pitchfork’s continued insistence that every album is worth critiquing, whether they can find someone inspired enough to do the job or not. I tried writing about emily’s single ‘gleaming’ myself when the track was released last year, but I was unable to convey the elation it made me feel without resorting to ecstatic platitudes, causing me to over-contextualize it in a subjective recommendations column rather than offer any critical insight. I think it’s important for a writer to realize the difference between interest and inspiration when it comes to their subject, and to cover them accordingly. effective music journalism is typically the result of an agreeable or disagreeable marriage between an artist’s subjective idea and the listener’s subjective interpretation, while an objective misreading of the work of a ‘really tiny musician’ feels like back-peddling—like filling that useless bucket of water only halfway.
the punchline to my story about my day at the beach is that after transporting water back and forth for a while, my friend emptied a full bucket over my head and ran off to join the others. the feeling that stuck with me was shame in realizing just how dumb what we’d been doing really was. I felt like emily publicizing her feelings was her way of dumping her bucket of water on pitchfork’s head, and while the website obviously didn’t undergo the character development I experienced, it at least wound up being a personal victory for her and for anyone who’s exhausted with uninformed journalism dictating young artists’ careers. ‘I got more support than I thought I would get, which is really cool and affirming. afterwards, having said my piece, feeling all of the love and support from people in my life and people I don’t know who read the review and understood what I was saying, that was really positive. I’m proud of not feeling so shitty about it.’
all of this isn’t to say pitchfork doesn’t do great work—in many ways they continue to improve upon the thoughtful review- and feature-writing that convinced us all to trust them in the first place. rather, with the audience they’re commanding, it’s incredibly irresponsible for them to continue publishing anything that not only rejects any opportunity for creative dialogue, but also regresses the role of music journalism to thinly veiled cyberbullying. plenty of sites continue the arduous process of publishing thoughtless, moat-filling content they probably hope will go unnoticed by their subjects, and a site like pitchfork shouldn’t be resting on their laurels as long as this trend continues.