And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [22]
As promised, half past ten on the morning of July 18 saw Ryan Schreiber, the founder and editor in chief of Pitchfork, place his imprimatur upon the new band, which he likened to “some fantasy hybrid of Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.” His readers would know these names—bands that ranked among the most successful indie-rock acts of the previous four years, all of which (not coincidentally) owed a debt to Pitchfork in getting there. Schreiber had essentially launched Broken Social Scene’s career when he described their American debut album—which he said in his review that he had found just by “dig[ging] through the boxes upon boxes of promos that arrive at the Pitchfork mailbox each month”—as “endlessly replayable, perfect pop.” More recently, a Schreiber review had conferred indie-rock superstardom on Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which did not even have a record deal (the band had self-produced its album). What makes Pitchfork so powerful is not the size of its readership, which by web-magazine standards is small: one and a half million visitors each month, only a fraction of whom read the site regularly. Rather, it is its stature in the firmament of indie-rock blogs as a kind of North Star, a point of reference to be measured against. A glowing Pitchfork review need not be agreed with, but it must at the very least be reckoned with. In his post about the new band, Schreiber concluded with a wink to his site’s clout. “Get familiar now,” he wrote, “we could be writing about these dudes all year long.” Predictably, by the end of August, more than thirty blogs had posted about the new band, and the album’s leaked tracks became fixtures on the Hot Tracks list at Elbo.ws, a site that monitors plays of downloaded music.
Once Pitchfork blesses an act, any mention of that act on other blogs needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgment that one has lagged terribly behind the times. On September 7, Stereogum.com not only quoted Pitchfork’s review but wrote, “The hype machine”—by which they presumably meant blogs like themselves, because not a single dollar had yet gone into promoting the new band—“has been in motion for this band, so we feel sorta silly calling them a Band to Watch (we know, we know . . . you blogged about them first).” Even so, the first comment, just fifteen minutes after the post, began with one word in all caps: “DUH.” By September 18, Idolator, the music blog of Gawker Media’s online empire, could pull back for a world-weary dissection of the new band as phenomenon, complete with “Odds of Backlash,” which it placed at 5:1. On October 5, when Rolling Stone magazine’s “Rock and Roll Daily” blog finally weighed in, with an unctuous pronouncement of phony hipness—“Trust us on this one: you guys are gonna seriously sweat us for introducing you” to this band—commenter “nick” unloaded with justifiably righteous scorn:
yeah . . . everyone is really gonna “sweat you” for being (LITERALLY) the last blog on the Internet to write baout these guys.
The band was called Annuals, and they hailed from Raleigh, North Carolina. I first heard the tracks on October 14, three days before their official release but three months too late. Their sound is difficult to describe, especially to those who have not heard Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, or Broken Social Scene, bands that plumbed the sonic expansiveness afforded by our high-tech,