People from France who like Die Hard 2 and Jackson Pollock and Badminton

Women who like Flossing and Moon landing conspiracy theories and live in Arkansas 

Men who are interested in men and like Two and a Half Men

My friends who are men and like Twilight and were born before 1975

Friends of my friends who like Adolf Hitler

Friends of friends of friends of my friends who like Michael Bolton and live in Pakistan

Musicians who like HGTV Dream Home 

People who are named “Arnold” and like Hey, Arnold! and are Conservative

People who like Vegetarianism and KFC and Hollister Co. 

My friends who are over 30 years old and like giraffes

Men who live in Tennessee and like The Notebook and Grave Digger (truck) 

Men who like Dildoes and Women and SpongeBob SquarePants 

Laborers who live in Canada and like Tyler Perry and Skype 

(It’s possible that no one will show up for the queries with the word “friends” since it depends on which Facebook account you’re using. If that’s the case, you apparently don’t have as weird of friends as I do.)

“[It] may import its dystopian “21st-century slave” mindset and Kevin Shields-supplied screech from the XTRMNTR playbook, but it forsakes camouflage gear for kaftans and keffiyehs, with a snake-charmer horn refrain and a sand-swept, acoustic-guitar groove that alternately surges and dissolves over the course of its nine mesmerizing minutes.”

 

“It might be a knowing sneer at critics who think Savages are just recycling post-punk’s signature sound, but ostensibly it’s also a salute to an artistic kindred spirit.”

 

But if you ask these Pitchfork haters what score their favorite album got, they’ll answer down to the decimal. While many people rip on Pitchfork, it also seems many of these same people read Pitchfork.

I think the site’s main draw is it provides a way to discover new music. While its hype-skewed scoring and verbose voice make it difficult to decipher a hit from the shit, (“the” with a lower-case “t”) it still functions as way to learn about new musicians you otherwise wouldn’t read about.

However, this only explains why people go to Pitchfork—not why people read it. To find out about the music, one only needs to browse the recent releases. Actually reading the reviews is unnecessary, yet people do read them—enough to let “Best New Music” labels turn unknowns into festival headliners.

So, why is it so many music fans read Pitchfork while simultaneously snubbing its snobbery? I don’t think it’s for the criticism. So many great albums are disgraced with 4s and 5s while awful ones get listed as the “Best New Music.” I know for me—and possibly most Pitchfork readers—whether they know it or not, the act of reading Pitchfork serves to provide a context and perspective on today’s music. From the reviews, to the articles, every piece of text on the site helps readers construct stories around the music and musicians they listen to.

If you look back on the 20th century, you can kind of see music as map or an analogy for what cultural shifts took place. From Jazz to Rock n’ Roll to Punk to Rap, the formation of each new genre reflects major changes in society. I think music is better able to reflect the times we live in than any other art form. So, in a sense, you can use changes in music to understand changes in society.

But now we’re in a time when music changes every day.  Largely because of the Internet, there are now more songs, more albums, and more bands available to us all the time. And they’re all pushing music in different directions. Rather than progressing onward, music is progressing outward.There’s no clear overarching progression or easily defined category. The Internet has done to music what it’s done to every other form of media: sent it into an exponentially expanding and dividing sea of information in which every article, song, or video is hyperlinked with equal prominence. But that’s exactly my point. Music may becoming increasingly expansive and fragmented, but so is society. That’s why I think music still shows us how society is changing. And it’s sites like Pitchfork that show us how music is changing. They may overuse terms like, “dream-pop/shoegaze nebula” and “chillwave engulfed indie pop” (overuse counting as any use), but despite the bullshit, their articles and reviews offer an excellent vantage point on which to understand the changing state of music, and to some extension, the changing state of society. And that’s why read Pitchfork. 

But I still think they’re a bunch of pretentious d-bags.

This one is my favorite. Notice in “Article 6-Purpose” it says, “All three corporate entities are involved in the process of dividing the world population into three separate but interlocking categories: 1.) CROCKERS; 2.) ROCKERS; and 3.) CRACKERS.”

Anyway, my friends and I tried to make sense out of them, but never could. I talked to one of my professor’s whose business card was copied onto one of the pages, and he too said he got some of these letters. He told the campus police, but they never found anyone. I eventually forgot about the letters.

Then a few weeks ago, my girlfriend’s boss got one of the letters. She instantly recognized it as one of the work of Max Turnipseed. But unfortunately, she couldn’t get a hold of it. Renewing my interest in the letters, I took these pictures and posted them on reddit. Here’s one of the responses I got:

“Hey,

I’m the guy in Austin who received letters from the Crocker Rocker guy at my bar. Instead of carrying on a personal conversation via a public thread, I figured I’d shoot a PM your way.

Agreed, this guy is just a bit off. Thought you might enjoy this account of my personal interactions with him.

The first time I met this guy he stopped in randomly for a beer one day while I was working. At the time, I thought he was a little off. I wasn’t sure if he was drunk or just a weird guy. As a man in my late 20s, I gave him the benefit of the doubt (having been brought up to respect my elders) and served him a beer. He talked a little crazy, but I let it slide for a drink before he went on his way of his own volition.

A few weeks later, I arrived at work around 11 am only to find him having a conversation with my main cleaning crew guy (who worked for a third party we had hired). The problem was that he was speaking through a massive hole in my front door to my contract custodian. Come to find out, he had knocked a door panel loose with his shoulder whilst leaning against it trying to pry the double doors apart to slip one of these letters in between them. They were having quite the exchange (since my custodian spoke broken English). The author seemed a little taken aback that I was upset with him about breaking my door. I asked him why he didn’t just drop the letter in the mailbox, and he replied that he had had several letters returned when he mailed them to us. This likely had to do with the fact that his letters were addressed to a non-existent street address, but obviously no mailman is going to take his letter out of my mailbox, even if it has no postage attached. I ended up taking his letter and asking him to move along, after which I helped my custodian repair the door.

Apparently he had sent some letters to the bar before I was the GM and several of my regulars, as well as one bartender in particular, were already familiar with him. None of us had any real idea about how to interpret his correspondence for…well…reasons you can relate to, I’m sure.

Since then, we’ve received (I believe) 3 letters from him containing some ridiculous content. One was particularly eyebrow raising when it included a seeming threat to some official (DA, I believe — I don’t have the letter in front of me as I type this) in Colorado after and in regards to the Aurura, Colorado shooting last summer. I had a lawyer friend in Austin (to whom most of these letters were partially addressed — he is one of my regulars) put out some feelers to some connections in Colorado regarding this correspondence. He never heard much back, so we figured they didn’t consider it a serious threat (the man is in his 80s, after all).

We haven’t heard from him in some time. The last letter we received (which I think I featured in one of the pictures I posted) was postmarked from Las Vegas. I don’t know if this information is of use to you or not, but I thought I’d throw it out there. Feel free to write back if you like.

Cheers, Ders”

Anyway, it sounds like Max Turnipseed—or whatever his real name is—is a schizophrenic octogenarian with a lot of time, business cards, and paper living in Las Vegas.

Yesterday, (and today and pretty much everyday for the last year) I ate at Chipotle. As I finished shoving the unwieldy remains of a burrito into my mouth, I noticed an employee cleaning tables while wearing a lanyard patterned with neon YOLOs. I thought to myself, what was her thought process when she looked at it? You only live once, so I’m going to carpe the diem by scrubbing burrito residue off tables? Forget societal pressures and responsibility, I’m going to do what I want to do! And that’s…working the late shift at Chipotle. I don’t think she’s stupid or blame her for working at Chipotle. But I don’t believe she’s really seizing the day. I’m not crazy about my job either. But then again, I don’t have a YOLO lanyard.