The reviews used to be shorter and less fact-oriented than currently, but their distinctiveness, creativity and humour made them memorable. It’s not as if we want to discredit the success and professionalism achieved by the world’s most popular independent music website over the last decade. We still admire Pitchfork and give the new staff credit for their efforts. That saying, we also miss the go
od ol’ days when the Pitchfork team comprised other contributors and articles were written in a slightly different style. And even though that early incarnation of Pitchfork seems a bit amateur from today’s perspective, it certainly had an undeniable charm and laid the foundations for contemporary online music criticism. But above all, old PFM reviewers clearly enjoyed writing. The reviews used to be shorter and less fact-oriented than currently, but their distinctiveness, creativity and humour made them memorable, which, with all due respect, can’t be said about present-day Pitchfork. This early stage began in 1995, when the website was launched, and ended approximately in 2004 with a) the publication of the book “Thesaurus Musicarum”; b) release of the list of best albums of the 1970s; c) departure of the single greatest reviewer in Pitchfork’s history, i.e. Are we the only ones who feel that way? Let’s try and rescue from oblivion all those pieces which in the meanwhile have been deleted from the website and are often accessible only via WebArchive. Oh, and this is not a mocking page, mind you. Unlike many other readers we really do prefer the old Pitchfork to the new one and thus want to pay it a sincere tribute, reviving some of the finest samples of music writing from the past.
