Pitchfork's Chris Ott takes No Prisoners

To ‘clear that up,’ in August, PFM had more unique hits than Spin has monthly subscribers. (But this, of course, does not mean that PFM has more readers because that stat doesn’t take into account Spin’s newsstand sales, comp list recipients, and that multiple ppl read each circulated copy of a magazine.)

The website I work for gets around 20 million unique hits a month. And it has around 6 million users a month. Big difference.

No, of course not. I'm not trying to manipulate these numbers to 'prove' PFM is bigger than Spin, just explaining in the face of this confusion and derision the root of that claim (and why, yes, it is flawed). (And I'm probably being defensive in the process, but I personally don't find anything healthy about these sorts of pissing contests. I'm more than happy to defend the site when I think it's being unfairly characterized, but floating misinformation as proof of PFM's size and 'superiority,' I don't find to be helpful to altering the site's image. That's not meant to be a slight toward Chris. We just approach things differently.)

For the record, I want it to be known he singlehandedly makes me ashamed to write for the site. Sure, Ryan's opinions can make me shudder, but Ryan is a great, funny guy. Ott's incapable of holding a civil conversation. He loves to insult you, then come back for a big hug of "aww, I'm just kidding. I just like to rile." He loves that word "rile."

His writing has such a boner to be British.

(and hitchens)

("who i want to meet: fewer people. interests: hating people, making enemies"), so i guess thats all quite sweet really, if a little try hard

hes a friend of maura too, is everyone in the world a friend of maura?

I gotta say, I think Ott's stuff withstands these criticisms for the most part. My sense has always been that he's insightful and I think the notion that he's contemptuous of his audience is a red herring. I think he's just deeply invested, and I don't mean in persona or cred or any of that, I mean in music. There's room for disagreement, but the premise of most of these criticisms seems to be that disagreement vitiates the exercise.

Hey, but that's just me. I realize the furor has died down but I'm surprised to see that it once was so ... furious.

I'm fairly objective, because ignorant of the rivalries on show here. And I have this to say: Chris Ott comes out on the high ground. The detractors, and there are so many, mainly come over as petty and secretly rather admiring. I think the Pitchfork piece is entertaining. And of course it's idiosyncratic!! Ott deserves his props and can take heart that such a long droopy arsed thread was pushed out in response to his piece. If it was that awful would anyone have bothered?

Chris Ott comes out on the high ground.

Chris Ott:

Cut the wolfing pal, I know plenty of people who know and revile your fat, frustrated ass. Let's stop pretending what gets said on the Internet is reality, we both box in the same class. The pseudo-intellectual coddling that goes on around this place is just homoerotic. When will you accept yourselves?

hmmm....

what crap.

One time I attempted to point out some factual errors and influences he apparently missed in one of his reviews, and he told me that i displayed "a complete lack of knowledge of popular music of the last 40 years". It was pricelessly funny. (Incidentally, in that same review, he went off on a fact-impaired rant about an entire genre and didn't actually say a damn thing about the music on the album in question.)

As for the feature in question: I'm solidly in the camp of "Why Bother?" La, la, la, let's make a list of things I don't like and share it with the whole world! I don't like things, la la la!

This whole "we have more readers than Spin" thing strikes me as pretty funny. As if that was the point. As if that was a measure of quality or success! Jessica Simpson sells more albums than Mecca Normal, does that reflect on the quality of the product?

Pitchfork is increasingly irrelevant, at least in the world of college radio that I inhabit. I read it only for the news. Every colleague I've talked to feels the same way.