Pitchfork's Rolling Stone Moment

The Arcade Fire's third record, "The Suburbs," released earlier this month, was ripe for a critical takedown by Pitchfork. Over the past six years, since its debut, the band has shot from precocious indie thriller to accepted mainstream act. It made eight different covers for its new record. The Washington Post's music critic (who, by the way, used to be in Q and not U, remember them?) trashed the new album in an early review, writing, "It's a billowy showpiece that embodies everything wrong with 21st-century rock music: the joyless grandiosity, the air-sucking humorlessness, the soggy sentimentality, all those fussy string arrangements." And just a few weeks earlier, Pitchfork KO'd the new album by M.I.A., who's in a very similar career position.

Instead, Pitchfork blessed "The Suburbs" with a "Best New Music" designation and an 8.6 rating, saying, among other things, it's "powerful art." In the past two weeks, the Arcade Fire has also sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden, which were ravishingly received, and topped the Billboard charts with 156,000 copies sold in the record's first week.

Now, the Arcade Fire (and their label, Merge) deserve all of the accolades and money they make from this: They're better than anyone else who can hit No. 1 or sell out MSG these days. Their debut was easily one of the past decade's best albums, so good that even if things fell off a cliff from there, they'd earned enough good will to last a very long time. Pitchfork hasn't, though. Maybe its willingness to continue leading the Arcade Fire's bandwagon, while helping remove the wheels of M.I.A.'s, proves that it's still all about the music for them.

Interestingly, within Pitchfork's review of "The Suburbs" is the admission that the Arcade Fire's previous record, "Neon Bible," wasn't very good. Ian Cohen writes that record was "sometimes bogged down by overblown arrangements or pedantic political statements" and heavy-handed. But, oh, wait, that record was named "Best New Music" with an 8.4 rating when it was released in 2007. Praising an established band's new record when it's clearly a misstep, only to admit later you knew all along it wasn't up to par after the general consensus turned out to be lukewarm, is a very Rolling Stone thing to do. It does it all the time for bands like U2, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Pearl Jam, etc (who are, not coincidentally, the polar opposite of Pitchfork's aesthetic). Usually the review includes a line such as "best record in a decade," even though the reviews of the previous decade's records didn't suggest anything was that amiss.

Of course, Pitchfork isn't Rolling Stone and the Arcade Fire isn't any of those above bands when it comes to popularity across the whole American cultural spectrum. They're fiercely influential within a specific part of it. (Selling 156,000 copies in a record's first week wasn't very impressive during those bands' peaks.) But Pitchfork is reaching a maturation point, where it's image and reach are well defined, if not static, the former much more so than the latter, as "indie culture" occupies an increasingly central cultural ground in a "long tail" society. Apologizing and protecting titans is probably the last thing it wants to do.

Then again, I also criticize Pitchfork for exacerbating hype cycles, which may be the exact opposite of this criticism. How can it win when I move the goalposts? Maybe I should just buy "The Suburbs." To simplify things, aka focusing on the music, above is part of one of the Arcade Fire's recent shows.