Friday, March 7, 2008

Reatard TV?

I was reading the latest Jim DeRogatis interview with sort of Chicago-based Pitchfork Media mogul Ryan Schreiber.
Here's an excerpt:
Q. Back to Pitchfork.tv: I’ve heard that you’ve had teams of people out shooting concerts across the country for the last six months.
A. We’ve had a New York crew, and we go out and shoot various things around the city. Our executive producer is R.J. Bentler, who has actually worked with us on shooting the music festival and who has done a lot of editing work professionally for like NBC and stuff like that, and then there’s Juan, who used to work at Plum TV and did a show over there called “Juan’s Basement” -- he’s doing a lot of shooting as well. Then, in Chicago, we have a crew out there, too, and they’re shooting basically live concerts for us as well.

The funny thing to me, is that the minute Schreiber mentioned the "New York" video team was at work all I could think was:
"Great. New York. We'll have nothing but videos on Jay Reatard."
Then, lo and behold, I read this in the very next answer...

Q. So are you going to offer entire concerts online or just songs from a performance?
A. We’re actually going to offer entire concerts. The first thing that we’re launching, or one of the first things we’re launching, is Jay Reatard at Cake Shop, N.Y.C., that we shot in October.

I guess that's all I have to say on Pitchfork.tv for now... but I have to add, although it was cool DeRogotis laid into Schreiber pretty hard, I kinda have Schreiber's back on this. I mean there really is no come back for the cynicism that says Pitchfork.tv is purely a money grab. The same could be said for Pitchfork in general, or even music critics in general. It's either going to work or not work.
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1 comment:

eric boogiepop said...

That was a great interview.

I like where Jim was going with the whole question of championing bands. Although, I think that championing bands is an inherent part of music criticism. If you say that a band's record is good, that's basically championing them. Of course, Pitchfork is unique in that you can actually see a "Pitchfork effect" happen after they talk about a band (i.e. an increased amount of CD sales, concert attendance, etc.). And the fact that they have news coverage of bands, festivals, the video game soundtrack, and the new Pitchfork.tv... well, it makes the whole "championing" thing really blatant. Maybe that's just too much.

Or is it just that the bands that Pitchfork champions are mostly worthless, trendy crap that you won't care about in a couple of years? Maybe that's my objection...

Oh, and I thought it was really telling where Ryan said that he only does one review a year. Wow... if I had a review site and it got to the point where I was too busy to do one review a year, I'd say that things have gotten out of hand.

March 8, 2008 at 5:46 AM

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