Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008

Pitchfork 500: No rankings, just an education in the best

By Jeremy Dutton

Creating a best-of list of anything is an exercise in vanity. Who are they to tell me what's best, you ask? So goes with the age-old repudiation of critics. Just look at the Billboard charts. How can you argue that the Beatles, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley aren’t hands-down the best ever? Well if you look at our post-election letters to the editor, you can see what's popular always has its detractors.

Pitchfork, the online spot for indie music news and reviews, has taken a generational step forward, dismissing every list that has come before and taking on 1977-2006 with "The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to Present."

The book is a bold step and allows the writers to focus more on ground breaking shifts in the past 30 years that doesn’t involve the obvious. Yeah, the Beatles and Rolling Stones have influenced every band that has come since — we get it. Here, they use the "art-rock godfathers" David Bowie Iggy Pop and Lou Reed as the purveyors of indie music as we know it, but they also give deserved credit to the influence of rap, hip-hop and electronic to what we hear now.

But the most interesting thing about the book is how it's structured. Pitchfork has been oft-criticized for being too critical, the liberal elite media of the indie world, if you will. In "Pitchfork 500," they step away from the conventional 500 to 1 ranking that most best-of lists rely on, instead breaking each chapter into three-year chunks. This disavows the holier-than-thou and allows them to provide thoughtful discourse on each song they selected. They not only list the best songs, but they also tell you what the song did to further music's evolution.

Hall and Oates certainly wouldn’t be included in the collection of time-honored critical faves, but Pitchfork backs its choice of "I Can’t Go For That" with this: " 'I Can't Go for That' was as uniquely crossbred as the other electronic hits from its era — 'Tainted Love' and 'Don't You Want Me' — but its biggest compliment came from its most obvious musical legacy: Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean.' " Brilliant, right?

There's more. They take on "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and debunk its stature as a sometimes feminist anthem with the fact that the song "was penned by the Hooters' Robert Hazard who allowed (Cyndi) Lauper to change a few pronouns here and there." And they prop up the Pixies' "Wave of Mutilation" from "Doolittle" as the album that symbolized the "transitional moment between 'college rock' and the focus-group tested, post-Nevermind commercial designation 'alternative rock.' "

It's a reference guide that reads like a book, taking into account what was going on at the time each song peaked and its relationship to everything that came after. There are points when Pitchfork's nose turns up a bit, such as when it blasts the entire post-grunge era, throwing Bush, Soul Asylum and Candlebox in the trash. I'd agree with them for the most part, but if I had a choice between hearing those songs on the radio like I did then over what I'm hearing now, it wouldn’t be a contest.

There's also a turning point in the '00s when Pitchfork's selections veer increasingly far from the mainstream. There's no mention of Green Day's revival of the rock opera, no cred given to Coldplay for bridging the gap between Radiohead and Britpop.

But this is all minor when you look at the wealth of musical education the book provides.

Diamond in the rough

My Brightest Diamond is playing the Red Room on Nov. 17. A Monday is a slow day, but it’d be worth the trip. This noir chanteuse played with Sufjan Stevens, but her moody music now stands on its own. Get more information at redroomcoffeeandconcerthouse.com.