Final summer season, I joined Pitchfork as its new editor from the world of 2020s unbiased music running a blog. It’s an unglamorous world, however one I’m deeply keen on, all janky web sites and Substack newsletters. It’s the place loads of horrible, unedited writing is going on, but in addition the place a number of the most significant and pressing writing is going on. Within the even smaller music-focused realm of this world, there are not any site visitors calls for, no “home type,” simply interviews, takes, and lists pushed by ardour and curiosity.
One in all my targets at Pitchfork has been to convey a few of that bloggy vitality to the positioning, highlighting the voices of critics, specializing in rising subcultures, and restoring a number of the website’s rawness. The best way I see it, we’ve obtained such a giant platform right here; why not use it to get bizarre, highlight genuinely unsung expertise, and get actually actual about our style?
For this reason, when the idea of “cowl tales” got here up a number of days into my tenure, I used to be initially slightly nervous. How would we match such shiny editorial packages right into a Pitchfork ecosystem that we’re attempting to make extra down-to-earth, extra human?
Phrased in a different way, what does a Pitchfork cowl story appear like proper now? Some ideas sprang up: It’s a narrative about somebody we care rather a lot about proper now (and suppose you must, too). It’s a narrative that unfurls a whole scene or subculture like a tapestry. It’s a narrative in regards to the future.
The identify “Bladee” stored popping up in my mind. Over the past decade, “web music” has been made within the Swedish rapper’s picture, however Bladee, now 30, stays near-impossible to pin down. As he’s gone “from meme to delusion,” infiltrating Charli XCX’s (and possibly your individual) Spotify Wrapped, and as Pitchfork itself has circled on him and his collective Drain Gang critically, the timing to do a canopy story on him simply felt proper.
