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Hipster Runoff, Gorilla vs. Bear, Diplo
Turntable.fm
Monday, June 27

Better than: Listening to your friends DJ on turntable.fm.

Turntable.fm is a newish "social DJing" site that basically brings the chat-room concept to the world of online radio stations. DJs can congregate in rooms and add their favorite tracks to a queue, and listeners can chat and rate the songs that spin into their orbit as either "lame" or "awesome"; if a song gets too much negative feedback, the DJ responsible for playing it will be skipped.

The site is still in beta mode; only people whose Facebook friends are already using it are allowed inside. This exclusivity (or "exclusivity") prompted Gorilla vs. Bear and Hipster Runoff to throw a virtual festival on the service—called, naturally, #VIPFest, and starring Diplo, Pitchfork head Ryan Schreiber, Hipster Runoff's "Carles," and a bunch of online rubberneckers.

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@bwsullivan

​The revelation that a movie about a disgruntled mother wreaking havoc on a blogger who snarked her indie-rocker son—tentatively called Pitchfork—is on the way has (perhaps inevitably) sparked the wonderful hashtag #PitchforkThrillers. What better way to spend a summer Thursday than coming up with witty names for the flick? After the jump, the best of the best.

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NB: This is not how bloggers generally dress.

​Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Duplass brothers—the siblings behind last year's cutesy indie Cyrus—were shopping a script for a thriller in which the mother of a recently deceased indie rocker seeks vengeance on a blogger who had snarked in her kid's general direction. The brothers are hoping to get Susan Sarandon for the mom role and Cyrus Jonah Hill to play the blogger, but the really important name is the one of the site where the mean mau-mauing appeared: Pitchfork. Since the brothers have already stolen my idea, I might as well show you some of the "indie thriller" treatments I'd been working on:

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Ian Cone

​The 100 Biggest Assholes in Rock Issue, The Shit List Issue, The Overrated, The Rock Bible--Chunklet mastermind Henry Owings redefined the 'zine aesthetic with his deliciously wisecracking, ass-chewing tongue, dumping on everyone and their mother while taking a little bit of time to engage in some of his patented self-deprecation. (He is the same guy who emblazoned a Chunklet tee with the oh-so-perfect ethos "I Collect Records Because Pussy Hates Me," after all.)

Lately Owings has been occupied with his three-week-old daughter Charlotte--changing diapers, building a crib, having an extension built to his house. And then there's his latest publishing venture, which may indeed be Chunklet's zenith: the textbook-styled behemoth he calls The Indie Cred Test. Published with the assist of a Kickstarter campaign and compiled by Owings and a bevy of writers (including Voice scribe Christopher Weingarten), its sadistically thorough pop-culture aptitude tests include an "Online Music Journalist Application Form" and other multiple-choice quizzes and questionnaires. Once the "tests" are completed, you'll find out just how hip (or more likely, not hip) your pathetic ass really is.

I chatted with Owings while he was at his homestead in Atlanta; he answered questions lifted right from from The Indie Cred Test, addressed the misconceptions about his rep, and reflected on the book's dedicatee, the late drummer Jerry Fuchs.

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So the big whoop today is that Pitchfork bestowed its first 10.0 review in nearly a decade on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ; penned by a dear friend of ours, rest assured this opinion has generated, in turn, a wide variety of online opinions -- outraged, bemused, intrigued, confused. Here, now, a sample of the public response to Pitchfork's response to Kanye's response to the public's response to his response to Taylor Swift winning that one MTV award.

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Screaming Females at CMJ, last year. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

​In case there was any doubt, it's now official: next week's Pitchfork-sponsored #Offline Festival will have no CMJ affiliation whatsoever. "This is purely a Pitchfork event," a representative for the website told us yesterday: "just putting together a lineup we'd like to see in one spot, convenient, affordable. Kinda like the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago and our showcases at SXSW." That means no badges, no cross-promotion, no cooperation on scheduling, sharing bands, or distributing showcases around the city. It also, if it weren't already obvious, means war--a not-so-small insurgency in the heart of Williamsburg. The rhetoric may be friendly, but the underlying actions are anything but. CMJ is surely dismayed this morning (so far, they've declined to respond to our requests for comment). But this was a long time coming.

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​Well, that's one way to let CMJ know what you think of it, if you are the vast music recommendation website Pitchfork--by having a multi-day, 30-plus band festival in the middle of Williamsburg during the marathon's prime three nights. They're calling it #Offline, paradoxical hashtag and all; dates are set for October 21-23 at Brooklyn Bowl. The line-up skews a little Altered Zones (Sun Airway, Diamond Rings, Lower Dens), a little Jersey (Beach Fossils, Andrew Cedermark), and a lot, uh, Pitchfork (Freddie Gibbs! Marnie Stern! Avey Tare!), right down to the swagger that led the site to hold off on the announcement of their own gigantic shindig until it was only a week away. SOTC favorites A-Trak and How To Dress Well will be there, too; here's the full, three-day line-up:

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​It has triggered a high-profile lawsuit, of course, but even before then, Vampire Weekend's blonde-in-a-Polo-shirt found-Polaroid-ish image for Contra was, like it or not, the most compelling and iconic album cover of the year, if now also the most expensive. Why, exactly, does a random photograph of a random person/thing now carry the weight among a certain strain of indie-rocker once held by high-end auteurs like 4AD's Vaughn Oliver? What makes the bizarre cover of Fang Island's latest so similarly engrossing?

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​ Remember that Pitchfork office party last month we told you about so dutifully. No? The one with a girl nicknamed Meatball? The one Beach Fossils played a few weeks before John Pena tossed his bass in the East River? The one Pitchfork Reviews Reviews documented so precisely ("a hush fell over the room when ryan schreiber made his grand entrance, he stood eight feet tall and was trailed by three interns hoisting boomboxes over their heads that were playing Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio, and also two interns carrying smoke machines") before getting New York Times shine? Oh, now you remember.

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Love u Chris...

Pitchfork is having a good week. Yesterday, our pal Jon Caramanica wrote a piece in the New York Times suggesting the website had pretty much fully arrived as a "hegemon of taste," in the words of one super-fan. This weekend, the publication will host its annual music festival out in Chicago. And in between, Twitter has come alive with the #p4kfestpickuplines hashtag, a perhaps too-real look into the grimy psyches of music critics the country over. Let's follow along, shall we? (By the way, anything with the word "fuck" in it was disqualified, because come the fuck on.)

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