I'm pro-gatekeeping. Long live gatekeeping.
On being a 2011 hipster, Pitchfork, and those yellow sneakers we can't escape
My 30th birthday is in a few days. With my twenties almost behind me, I felt moved to return to the music from my teenage years. I challenged myself to make a playlist with only one song per artist. I was genuinely surprised to have over 80 tracks – all indie music mostly made between 2007 and 2012. I don’t think I could do the same, even if I included mainstream artists, for the period between 2018 and 2023.
Something changed. It is common for people to hold on to the music from their youth. But I think cultural discovery is different now, too. I grew up in the midst of the hipster wave. It was a point of pride to be the first to discover a band or a book. There was great value placed on developing personal taste.
My friends and I shared music by swapping portable hard drives. We all had Tumblrs and became fervent collectors of quotes and gifs that reflected our individualism. We read niche and hobbyist websites. I remember listening to The Weeknd for the first time because The Birds, Pt. 1 was the free weekly download on a music blog.
I can’t think of any musician who was a monocultural entity the way Taylor Swift is for teenagers today. (We had Taylor Swift then too but without the fan theories.) Fellow millennials are free to correct me but I just don’t think it was cool to like what everybody else liked. That feels different now. “Gatekeeping” is a common accusation online. Just read the comments under any TikTok where an influencer (or civilian) doesn’t disclose the brand of the shirt she’s wearing. All the Instagram girlies are wearing identical yellow and black Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66s. The same statement piece! They’re not even changing the shoelaces!
Here is a sweeping generalisation: When I was a teenager, it was cool to consume what few others did because it meant you were your own person. For many teenagers today, it’s cool to consume what influencers consume, perhaps in hopes that they might eventually become the influencer.
As Ann Friedman puts it in The Cut,
In the age of supposed “de-influencing,” starting a post with “I want to gatekeep this, but …” has become the perfect way to, well, influence. It signals both that you’re in the know and that you are a person of the people who wants to magnanimously share that knowledge.
I picked a weird time to reminisce about indie music. Just this week, news broke that Pitchfork is becoming part of the men’s magazine GQ. Like so many before it, the music publication is being gutted, presumably so its parent company can save a little money.
Pitchfork used to be a part of my teenage cultural diet but I haven’t been a regular reader for a long time. It’s partly because I no longer consider myself to be really into music so I’m not reading about it. I mostly listen to audiobooks and podcasts now. When I do listen to music, it’s rarely new to me. Streaming is a big reason why. When I had an iPod, I was limited to the music I’d already downloaded. I got to know songs intimately, down to the quirks particular to each poorly ripped MP3 file. Now I can pick almost any song in the world and Spotify’s algorithm will generate a playlist to go with it based on what I already listen to.
This shift in listening habits isn’t unique to me. Casey Newton’s analysis in Platformer suggests that machine learning-facilitated streaming has supplanted music publications in the role of taste-making. I recommend reading the whole piece but I really want to highlight his conclusion:
On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.
For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.
If your email inbox looks like mine, it’s full of Substack writers debating whether they should leave this platform. Jonathan M. Katz’s investigation last November, found several Nazi newsletters with tens of thousands of subscribers. Many charge for subscriptions. As Substack takes a cut of all payments, the company directly profits from its failure to remove hate speech.
Newsletters have been trickling away from Substack since the article but Platformer's departure this month seems to have triggered a larger exodus. Other newsletters, like Max Read’s Read Max (I know, so good) are staying put. I’m a free subscriber to both publications and I think they both make good points.
Because I don’t intend to make money from this newsletter, Substack is just another publishing platform to me, like Instagram or Twitter. There’s shit on all of them but it hasn’t really affected me. Many users would leave Instagram if they expected spam and racism every time they opened the app. And as new Twitter has demonstrated, that’s precisely why many advertisers have left. At present, my Substack experience is uneventful. I don’t have plans to leave.
The fossils in charge of Condé Nast decided to adjust their business strategy and now Pitchfork’s workforce, and their institutional knowledge, has been dealt a blow. Substack might decide that it’s better business to host Nazis at the expense of all other writers. The current owners might cash out when the site gets acquired by a tech giant (who will inevitably fire half the staff and try something stupid like AI-generated newsletters or, more likely, training their own AI products on the work of Substack’s writers). If either thing happens, I’ll have to find a new place to publish. It really is bullshit that most of the creative work on the Web now is at the mercy of tech landlords and rich freaks who hate the things that they own.
I wish I could remember where I read this: the real work in the social media business isn’t in having the most innovative product, it’s in content moderation. The risk with any platform for user-generated content is sharing space with stuff you don’t like. Sometimes it’s hate speech, sometimes it’s low quality swill. Platforms generally try to remove hate speech but lousy content is rarely seen as a problem. Market logic will take care of it – good posts will perform well and be rewarded by users and the algorithm, bad ones won’t.
But market logic doesn’t do that! Here’s Israel Daramola reflecting on what a thinning crowd of publications means for music appreciation:
What has filled the vacuum left behind by actual music criticism is a loose collection of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences, and fan communities that engage with music solely through their obsession with a particular pop act. This has all helped produce a mass of music fans who don't understand the value of criticism and outright detest being told the things they like might suck. Even worse, it has helped destroy what scant opportunities remain for obscure or up-and-coming musicians to find an audience.
On Twitter, the writer Maris Kreizman correctly pointed out that this isn’t limited to music. We see it in the book world too. Market logic wants easy wins. It wants outrage bait. It wants I-feel-seen relatability. It wants “shop via the link in my bio”. Algorithms guided by market logic don’t care for criticism that doesn’t drive sales.
I wrote in my last newsletter that our contemporary culture equates consumption with morality. That could be, as Daramola says, why so many of today’s fans don’t care for criticism either.
TikTok has been teasing the return of “indie sleaze” for ages. I’d like to propose that gatekeeping and intellectualism make a comeback too. As a culture, maybe we could relearn the value of a good and thorough dunk. We could cultivate a healthy respect for critics and connoisseurs – even when we disagree with them. And ultimately, we could hold human tastemakers in higher esteem than the machines trained to give us more of what we already like.
Links
Allow me to plug some of my friends’ work.
My friend Karen (who will hate how I’ve characterised her here) is a big shot at NME Asia and NME Australia. Part of her job involves working on The Cover, which is where NME … covers new artists. My phrasing, not Karen’s. Music publications are still in the business of minting new stars! Here’s a feature she wrote on Indonesian indie group Grrrl Gang.
Grrrl Gang were, from the beginning, a statement against machismo in Indonesia’s music scene – specifically the othering and objectification of female musicians. That was one of the reasons the band named themselves Grrrl Gang: to anticipate and defang that misogynistic framing, says Sentana. I know you’re going to see me as a woman in a band – so I’ll own it. That was the logic.
My friend Hannah puts up a new playlist on her Substack Made You A Mix every week. Every single week! She often includes small details about her life as context for each playlist. This is great for me, as she’s a friend I don’t get to see often enough, but I think people new to Hannah would appreciate this too.
It would be remiss of me to not share this mix. I’d say our high school playlists have a lot in common.
This piece from music writer Eleanor Halls on fan culture’s deleterious effects on criticism.
It’s also par for the course for writers to turn down commissions that could land them in hot water with certain fandoms, some won’t even review work from certain artists. One music publication, clearly frightened by the might of K-pop stans, didn’t even commission a journalist to review Blackpink’s new album – they commissioned a fan, who gave it five stars.
Cory Doctorow’s term “Enshittification” is the perfect way to understand what’s happening to all the tech platforms we use. Here’s his piece in Locus Mag and his Wired article about it. I highly recommend them both.
And, just for fun, Sophia Stewart reports on Atria Books’ decision to send an influencer who doesn’t read on an 18-day trip in the name of book promotion.
“Do you like to read?” he says in the video. “I don’t. But maybe I could… On this cruise i’m gonna read a book.” A hashtag appears overhead: #marcreadsabook.
I know my last few newsletters have all been on media and criticism more than actual books. I’ve really enjoyed writing them. Thank you for sticking with me. I’ll return to book reviews soon! Sooner if someone sends me on a cruise!
I always enjoy reading your newsletters and I loved this one too!