Like someone else said, who has the time to sift through the enormous amount of music that appears online now and any blog’s opinion is just that, an opinion.

Living in England I used to use Dround In Sound more and you see a lot of Pitchfork hate on there but it is increasingly plagued by amateurish, badly written so-called reviews which are more about the ego of the wanna-be reviewer.

And as for the Starbucks comparison that is just nonsense. Starbucks coffee is crap and certainly not hip over here and I shouldn’t think most Starbucks drinkers have even heard of Pitchfork or the music that it covers.

It is easy to make generalizations about various media ( x sucks, y is good), but these probably don’t always hold true.

I think it boils down to a good writer getting out her point. If Pitchfork occasionally covers a band I like, and does it in whatever convoluted way they think is appropriate for them… well, I still like the band, and maybe other folks will find them due to their indentured servitude.

Just cuz a band blows up (become tasteful), doesn’t necessarily make them suck. If they react poorly to the attention (make a sucky album), then we pass and move on to the next shiny thing.

It is not like these bands are sacred to us, right…