Culture, Art, and Identity: The Death of the Death of the Death

I never thought I’d miss the long form articles on music that Pitchfork used to publish, but here we are. I had stopped reading them long before indie darling P4K was acquired and assimilated into the Condé Nast mass grave empire.

Nast publishes a lot of different things, but I think of them foremost as the publisher behind the kind of pseudointellectual political pandering you’ll find in the New Yorker and former fashion magazine Teen Vogue.

I can’t help but think of them that way even though they also own Ars Technica, Wired, and the now defunct Modern Bride, which Nast killed off in 2009.

In 2024, Nast announced that it would roll Pitchfork into men’s magazine GQ. Someone came to their senses following the all too predictable backlash.

Nast walked the decision back, announcing that Brooklynite Mano Sundaresan, formerly of NPR and founder of indie music blog No Bells, would take over as Pitchfork's new Head of Editorial Content.

Sundaresan was something of a return to form. In their heyday, Pitchfork’s long form articles were the kind of wordy art school kid literati manifestos typically written by a particular brand of hipster that only a very specific kind of aesthete would enjoy.

I was one of them; they helped me pass the time when I was working boring yet stressful desk jobs in logistics. That liminal space in between taking calls from customers and delivery contractors.

Secret Music by Jenn Pelly or This is Not a Mixtape by Marc Hogan (both of whom are still affiliated with Pitchfork) featured absolute gems like:

“…"perfect sound forever" was a lie.” Cassettes have their own problems, from unruly tape that you may need to tape together to inevitable disintegration, but...” - Marc Hogan

“Does a day of consumption "legitimize" the cassette medium?” - Jenn Pelly

I stopped reading these sometime around 2014; this was about the same time that I decided that my talents could be put to be better use than managing trucks.

Pitchfork seems to have stopped publishing long form articles altogether in October of 2024, just a short 3 months after Sundaresan’s appointment.

I have not even thought about those articles in years, but I thought of them yesterday as I read what I can only describe as a cultural hit piece in the Atlantic by Spencer Kornhaber, “Is This The Worst Ever Era of American Pop Culture?”

The Atlantic is not published by Nast; it is published by Emerson Collective, a company founded in 2004 by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.

Emerson Collective says that it’s “a company that invests in entrepreneurs and innovators driven by purpose and a sense of possibility, working to create a world of abundance for future generations.”

The company, which describes their mission with a charming Orwellian cant “to do the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people,” bought a majority interest in the Atlantic in 2017 for an undisclosed sum.

Kornhaber went to the same college as Hogan, but unlike anything Hogan has ever written about music, Kornhaber’s article reminded me of something Elvis Costello once said in an interview.

Responding to a question about how he was treated in the music press, Costello said that,

“Framing all the great music out there only drags down its immediacy. The songs are lyrics, not speeches, and they're tunes, not paintings. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it's a really stupid thing to want to do.”

I don’t necessarily agree with Costello - Lester Bangs was an amazing writer, even as a rock critic. He made some of his own music as well - his band included Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine (who is the uncle of Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.)

I don’t know how to put this more tactfully, so as for the Atlantic article, I’m just going to say it straight up, Lester Bangs style:

It takes a special kind of degenerate swill merchant to reference The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , The Decline of the West, a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, along with the 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization in the same article.

And now he’s made me do it, too. Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink; pass the whiskey, please. Korhnhaber’s article begins as a profile of

Ted Gioia

’s substack “The Honest Broker,” which bills itself as “a trustworthy guide to music, books, arts, media & culture.”

I guess Gioia never saw the cult classic Way of the Gun:

Gioia is Substack’s top music writer, a true crime if ever there was one. Gioia is the worst kind of musician; an unsuccessful one who gave it up, got an MBA, and then became a cultural critic. As described by the Atlantic article:

Gioia, 67, knows something about greatness thwarted. He started his career as a consultant, working for Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey. But he moonlighted as a jazz pianist, releasing two albums and gigging around the world. At one point in our conversation, he pulled up a recording of himself playing piano in 1986—before he suffered a debilitating case of arthritis in his 30s.

“These arpeggios, I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I always felt that if you give me another nine, 12, 18 months, I can be as good as anybody in the world.”

Where someone like Hogan or Penn writes lovingly as fans of music, fans who understand that all music is ephemeral and of its time, bitter insiders like Gioia pen bitter missives, frustrated that they didn’t get what they know deep down they deserve.

Leave it to a jazz musician - his novel The Birth (and Death) of the Cool is summed up well by this wonderful amazon review:

When you get 20 pages into a book published in 2019 and the author is using Myspace, Paris Hilton, and American Idol as examples of "cool" or even "culture", you know that you're dealing with the drunk, out-of-touch, impotent uncle at Thanksgiving who's complaining that kids today don't appreciate how uncool he is.

The meat of the profile on Gioia is a viral 2022 Substack post he wrote about how so-called catalog music is strangling the life out of new releases:

Is Old Music Killing New Music?

Quoth the Atlantic, which republished Gioia’s article in January of 2022,

Gioia described omens of stagnation in everyday life, such as when he encountered a “youngster” singing along to the Police…

…might Gioia be overinterpreting data showing listening habits that have long existed? He didn’t think so. “In my generation,” he said, “nobody I know listened to their parents’ music.”

Gioia is as wrong as someone who is wrong can be. Gioia himself is a testament to that; his book about “coolness” is fixated on Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis.

Miles Davis was born in 1926; Gioia was born in 1957. Miles Davis was his parents music. Bix Beiderbeck was born in 1903! Gioia is only a few years younger than my father…

Not only were my grandparents not born yet in 1903, but my fathers grandfather hadn’t even passed through Ellis Island yet when Beiderbeck was born.

How do people write this tripe? And how do people read it? Who reads it? It’s just such empty dreck. I found it difficult to stomach and I used to read dictionaries for fun; I’ll read almost anything.

But this?

“The music today doesn’t sound that much different from 20 years ago,” Gioia said. Is that true? There are certainly aspects of truth within the vaguery.

There’s not much interrogation happening here. Is he asking for a return to 16th century chamber music? The 20th century saw an explosion in new instruments and in modern recording technology itself, which was initially developed by Les Paul, seen here holding a Gibson Les Paul.

Let’s set that aside for a second, and ignore the fact that electric guitars, amplifiers, guitar effects, multitrack recording, and digital synthesizers were all relatively new tech when Gioia was still with it.

What do Pitchfork darlings Animal Collective think? Are we living in the death of history? Art has long been tied to moments in philosophy.

There is an idea from post modern philosophy about an "end of history" which, if you can make sense of this quote from historian Keith Jenkins, is about how:

"the peculiar ways in which the past was historicized (was conceptualized in modernist, linear and essentially metanarrative forms) has now come to an end of its productive life; the all-encompassing 'experiment of modernity' is passing away into our postmodern condition…"

Two years ago, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom of Animal Collective released this banger “Edge of the Edge,” which features a sample of a 56k modem that took me right back to the early 2000’s.

I don’t remember hearing anything quite like this then, aside from the actual modem sounds when I was dialing into the internet hoping that the screeching wouldn’t wake my father up.

“Edge of the Edge” is a brilliant nihlistic dream pop song about a modern world that Gioia is keen to sully with accounts of a war between Sparta and Athens from the fifth century BC:

You took it out, but you can put it back
You took it out, but you can put it back in
You took the swig and then you take a crack
You're on a quick, but you're runnin' up the track

One taste to break the fall
One wave to take us all to the shore
Can't say it's what you bargained for
It's forever at the push of a button [modem sounds]

Strange fruit has a hidden rot
Took a taste, and then you spit it back out
Consequences of the inside track
Bad time and you're runnin' in the back

One taste to break the fall
One wave to take us all to the shore
Can't say it's what you bargained for
It's forever at the push of a button

Up to the edge of the edge
Of the edge, of the edge
Of the edge, of the edge,
Of the…

The track is built on a sample of "Denise," a saccharine doo wop number by Randy & the Rainbows that spent 17 weeks at #10 on the billboard chart after it was released in 1963.

Sampling itself isn’t new; Gioia was 6 when “Denise” hit the charts and 12 when the first digital sampler was developed. Guess he missed it, since it would’ve been his parents music.

Recorded music was still a spring chicken in 63. Even besides the technology angle, Gioia and Kornhaber also both miss the most obvious elephant of their deep dive into the market share of old music; there’s a lot more of it now than there was in 1963.

Tchaikovsky and the Glen Miller Band didn’t leave a big catalog of recorded music relevant to the experience of people living in the 20th century; as great as “(I've Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo” may have been, it’s no “American Woman” or what I’m sure is a Gioia favorite, “Old Time Rock and Roll.”

And then Kornhaber goes on to profile Jaime Brooks. Brooks is a musician that Kornhaber notes, not unlike Gioia, “has put her music career on hold,” in Brooks case, allegedly because “…The process of moving notes around on a computer screen, alone, started to feel “masturbatory,”

My eyes are still rolling. Brooks also says,

“A successful new album would “generate a bunch of value for Apple, for Spotify, for whatever other companies are taking pieces,” she said. “And I don’t feel good about that.”

Kornhaber laments this, writing that Brooks “recorded three excellent albums” before hanging up the mics and digital audio workstation.

Strangely, Brooks feelings about generating value for whatever companies doesn’t seem to stop Brooks from posting writing on Substack, or using Instagram, or releasing an album in 2022…

Under a project name that Kornhaber chose not to profile. Kornhaber also chose not to profile his previous project, Dead Girlfriends, which led him to rebrand as Default Genders when the first name which was widely criticized.

I guess it all makes sense somehow; the ~1400 people who signed up to Brooks newsletter about music must not be interested in hearing any of Brooks music.

Or not posting music somehow prevents Substack from using Brooks to “generate a bunch of value.” Who are these people and why is our culture giving them attention?

I guess I share some blame in that now, too… thanks a lot, Kornhaber. But I’m only a tourist here; a stranger in a strange land.

It’s interesting that Kornhaber profiles Brooks in this way because of the apparent tap dancing and lack of insight that I’ll highlight in the paragraphs below.

It’s also hard to tell if it’s intentional. Is Kornhaber pandering or does he not see the juxtaposition he created? And why did he even include Gioia?

Brooks, who somehow gets consistent press despite apparently not wanting to make media companies money, is trans. And after leaving Gioia’s doom scroll, prior to the identity lauding profile on Brooks, Kornhaber profiles art critic Dean Kissick.

Kissick argued in a Harper’s cover story that “politics destroyed contemporary art.” That’s actually the sub title of his article. And, as an artist with an intellectual bent, it’s hard not to agree with Kissick that…

The project of centering the previously excluded has… been hollowed out into a trope… differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief.

We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.

Kissick is the only proper intellectual in this story; reading his Harper’s article is the only silver lining in the Atlantic article. Kissick writes that:

…every major biennial I have visited over the past eight years—from Germany to Greece, Italy to the United States, Brazil to the United Arab Emirates—has taken as its themes the deep richness of identity and the rejection of the West.

He also says that,

Half a century ago… Tom Wolfe complained that, as modern art became more abstract and de-objectified, and its interpretation more tightly prescribed by the era’s leading critics, the work’s appearance grew subordinate to the theory that purported to explain it, to words on a page.

In the decades that followed, critics, artists, and curators alike began to frame contemporary artworks in relation to more or less every subgenre of contemporary philosophy—deconstruction, poststructuralism, speculative realism, accelerationism, pataphysics, psychogeography.

Now, as the scope of art has narrowed dramatically, so too have the theoretical frameworks used to interpret it, and descriptions of work are dominated by the language of decolonial or queer theory.

Kissick’s Harper’s piece is about the identity crisis that art itself is having. According to his profile on The Drift, Kissick is writing a book about all of this, about the way that our shared culture has turned and how that turning all revolves around the collective identities attached to the idea of the self.

He told Kornhaber that he’s not ideologically motivated, saying, “I just don’t care that much if people are very woke or very anti-woke. The conversation itself just takes up way too much space.”

Kornhaber calls this position “conservative” while also claiming that he sympathizes with what he calls Kissick’s “complaints”. Cue the tapdancing and lack of insight.

In Harpers, Kissick wrote that,

Critical claims have ceased to be about the art itself—as they were in Wolfe’s day—and now concern art’s capacity to drive political change.

Not only has the art world embraced the magical spiritualities of the elders, but it has also returned to an old view that artworks can possess a mysterious, world-changing power; according to the texts issued by art institutions around the world, society’s ills might be healed through inclusivity, symbolic representations, and arcane, coded gestures.

Brooks, who is trans, dated Grimes in the early 2010s, transitioned after coming out as trans in 2015, and left Los Angeles in 2018 around the same time that Grimes started dating Elon Musk.

Kornhaber glosses over this aspect of Brooks entirely, ignoring the question of identity that speaks directly to both Brooks art and the critique that Kissick puts forth.

To me, Brooks most popular track, “Pharmacoma,” sounds a little bit like if a commercial for a particularly boring brand of soap was spun on the turntable at a rave held in a strip mall anchored by an Ocean State Job Lot on one side and a Kohl’s on the other.

Maybe that’s why “Edge of the Edge” has so many more listeners. At any rate, this brings us full circle to Gioia’s whingeing about how music hasn’t changed much in 20 years.

This could support Gioia’s claim but it doesn't. More now than ever, in fact. What’s actually happened is more along the lines of what Kissick has identified or what the idea of the death of history describes.

Once upon a time, personal identity was organized around musical subcultures. Now personal identity has gotten revenge and killed music scenes in service of the self.

Rick Beato has an interesting take on this that lines up with that; I’ll link it below, but it’s pretty long, so I’ll also summarize it for you.

Essentially, Beato thinks the internet is responsible, because in what he dubs the “algorithmic era” of music…

“…there’s really no unifying broadcast platform like we had with radio and MTV that forced this collective experience for listeners…” and now, “discovery is personalized rather than collective…”

…the effect of which is that every individual listener and artist…

“…can curate their own mini era where there’s no particular dominant sound.”

The rest of the modern art scene has developed this way too, as Kissick noted above. Art movements are dead, replaced by the movement of the Self and the significance of the meme.

This cultural shitpost of Kornhaber’s that it’s music fans who are wrong reminds me of another great song that speaks pretty directly to all of this identity crisis.

“As Seen on TV” by Pitchshifter was released on the album Deviant in the year 2000. It features artwork from Gee Vaucher, an anarcho-feminist considered a seminal artist of 1980s protest art, best known for her work with the anarcho punk band Crass.

Deviant also features punk rock luminary Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys (and the Green Party) delivering a social critique in spoken word over the music, bracketed by the chorus “I can't deny it's killing me, no one loses on TV.”

A social critique of what? Glad you asked.

The connections between the punk scene, the current wave of cultural, quasi political handwringing, and the performative identities that Kissick critiques as a kind of out of control, gauche bohemianism (which Brooks represents in projects like “Default Genders”) are irrefutable.

The third stanza of the song covers generational conflicts. Do you think when he wrote this, Jello had any idea his words would become so prophetic? Maybe he did.

Each new hot generation has a statement they want to call their own. Tattoos? Piercings? That's for Moms and Dads. What you want to do is spend your allowance on Devil horn implants, elephant man head, designer tails. Third leg, fourth leg - everyone a hermaphrodite!

Jello Biafra is 66; Ted Gioia is 67; Rick Beato is 63. Gee Vaucher is 80. Dean Kissick, Jamie Brooks, and Spencer Kornhaber are orbiting 40. All of this me feel a little bit like Adam Sandler’s character from the Wedding Singer:

In Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, written just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama took the idea of the end of history and applied it to ideology.

Liberal democracy and market economy were triumphant; the ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for would be replaced by:

"…economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."

Fukuyama, Brooks, and Kornhaber all must not have seen The Decline of Western Civilization - which Gioia cites it in the viral article that led to his profile by Kornhaber - and which showcases the ever widening conflict between self and other in the second wave punk scene of the 1980s: