WHEN Jan Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco in 1967, its self-serving tag line was: "we're not just about the music, but also the things and attitudes the music embraces". That lasted for all of a year or so before the mag became just another participant at the corporate gang-bang.
You could say that Rolling Stone "jumped the couch" when it moved to New York in the 1980s - to be nearer to the advertising industry - or when it "reimagined" itself in the face of competition from glossy men's mags and started covering more TV and film actors than actual bands. It could even have been when it introduced employee drug testing. Either way it's long since lost any sense of authority or influence, and a recent front cover dedicated to the supremely pointless Olsen Twins merely copperfastened its decline.
It may seem odd to today's movers and groovers to be describing a website as "the new Rolling Stone", but the comparison dates back to that brief period in the late 1960s when Wenner's magazine could nurture and break bands - regardless of how much advertising spend their record company could be persuaded into taking.
The music website, Pitchfork Media (www.pitchforkmedia. com), has now assumed the mantle of the underground and overground music press in the US. A Chicago-based free site, Pitchfork mainly reviews albums, and, in US alterno/college rock circles, it's the one that you want. Pitchfork rates from zero to 10 (and they do employ a zero rating at times); if you hit a nine, you are guaranteed a lorra, lorra interest in your act.
Arcade Fire discovered this to their considerable benefit when the then unknown Canadian band's Funeral album received a staggering 9.7 review. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the next day the band broke.
Basically, a 9 or 9+ review on Pitchfork will get you attention, and plenty of it, from booking agents, distributors, radio etc. Other bands to have benefited from the sites critical largesse include Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade and Sufjan Stevens. It's now quite the done thing in polite underground indie circles to plaster a Pitchfork endorse- ment sticker on your CD shrinkwrap.
Originally called Turntable, the site was set up by music nut Ryan Schreiber in 1995. A big influence has clearly been the Sniffin' Glue fanzine. Pitchfork is something of a powerbroker now, viewed as an alternative gatekeeper to MTV and college radio. Its top three albums of last year were by Art Brut, Kanye West and Sufjan Stevens, so it's probably not as distanced from the mainstream as it would like to think.
The reviews are atypical, as this snippet from Funeral illustrates: "Ours is a generation over- whelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways - we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded 'threat' levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them."
For all the many virtues of Pitchfork, there's a lot of similar "trainee Lester Bangs" type guff on the site. It does get more than a bit overwrought at times and there are more than a few attention seekers among its many contributors. Similarly, there can be a bit of the old "If I hear it on the radio, it can't be any good" syndrome at play.
The biggest danger it faces is being co-opted by any of the vociferous players in the US. music industry. Nobody wants a pay-per-view Pitchfork site, or a Pitchfork weekly magazine or even some Ibiza-style monthly Pitchfork compilation album. But then, no one wanted Napster to close down either.
