In an apparent effort to provoke a large swath of my age group, Pitchfork announced earlier this week that it was revising its numeric ratings for 19 albums that the site had reviewed over the past 20 years. The short intro to the blog post sheepishly explained the reasoning: “The truth is we are always litigating how we feel about a piece of music, revising opinions based on context, culture, who we’ve become, who we once were. We can’t change what we said, but we are almost always changing how we feel about it in ways both small and large…(These adjustments) are hypothetical, which is to say,
I think what bothers me the most about Pitchfork's article is that it does open the door to revising/erasing history. Yeah music's subjective, and tastes change. That's universally understood--it should be by Pitchfork's audience, anyway.
This is like the kid that hates a record, the record goes huge, and suddenly they liked it all along (or vice versa). Putting a record review in print is a commitment. And it's okay for tastes to change, or for a reviewer to miss the mark. What is not okay is the ability to permanently alter that record to reflect the zeitgeist.
I think what bothers me the most about Pitchfork's article is that it does open the door to revising/erasing history. Yeah music's subjective, and tastes change. That's universally understood--it should be by Pitchfork's audience, anyway.
This is like the kid that hates a record, the record goes huge, and suddenly they liked it all along (or vice versa). Putting a record review in print is a commitment. And it's okay for tastes to change, or for a reviewer to miss the mark. What is not okay is the ability to permanently alter that record to reflect the zeitgeist.