Final summer season, I joined Pitchfork as its new editor from the world of 2020s impartial 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 plenty of horrible, unedited writing is going on, but additionally the place among the most important 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 every of my objectives at Pitchfork has been to convey a few of that bloggy vitality to the location, highlighting the voices of critics, specializing in rising subcultures, and restoring among the website’s rawness. The way in which I see it, we’ve bought such a giant platform right here; why not use it to get bizarre, highlight genuinely unsung expertise, and get actually actual about our style?
This is the reason, when the idea of “cowl tales” got here up just a few 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 another way, what does a Pitchfork cowl story seem like proper now? Some ideas sprang up: It’s a narrative about somebody we care quite a bit about proper now (and suppose you need to, too). It’s a narrative that unfurls a complete 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 fantasy,” infiltrating Charli XCX’s (and perhaps your personal) Spotify Wrapped, and as Pitchfork itself has rotated on him and his collective Drain Gang critically, the timing to do a canopy story on him simply felt proper.
