Pitchfork. They really haven't got a fucking clue, have they?

Welcome to "Why We Fight", Pitchfork's latest column. The ongoing goal of this column is to look seriously into our conversations about music: how they work, how they locate what's at stake when we make allegiances to different artists or genres, and the different issues-- like social class, race, novelty, and transgression-- we bring to bear when we talk about music. These conversations might be "about" music, but they say even more about how we see ourselves and the world. More importantly, they might even change the music itself-- both how it's made and what it winds up meaning to us.

Of all the ways technology's changed how people relate to music-- how we make it, listen to it, hear about it, pay for it (or don't)-- the one that's always amazed me is the way we talkabout it. For most people, that conversation hasn't changed: we still get word-of-mouth recommendations, share circles of taste with our friends, and don't waste time obsessively tracking what's going on beyond our interests. For many music geeks, though, all that's been joined by an online world where "everyone" hears about "everything" at the same time-- every development tracked like breaking news and hashed out in reviews and comments boxes, on blogs and message boards.

I tried to read more, honestly. But my eyes had completely glazed over. You might want to best me, here - take the Pitchfork challenge! Get to the bottom of this excruciatingly badly-edited exercise in navel-gazing without ripping your own eyeballs out and feeding them to the local possum. Best of luck. Here's the link.

This doesn't mean people should just be "nice." People who dislike things should say so, and any artist who puts out a record should be prepared for the fact that not everyone will love it. This is just life, and there's no good alternative to it: Scenes in which every artist is uncritically considered a special, fragile snowflake tend to get really cruddy really quickly. But when you get to the point where you're wary of any band that seems to think it's actually doing something cool-- even when that act's only gotten as far as selling a couple of hundred singles-- you're halfway to kneecapping any opportunity for bands to actually be cool.

Aaargh! Nurse, quick! The screens!