What an awful day this past Wednesday was, when I was texting with friends about what we were seeing on twitter and we learned one-by-one which of our friends at Pitchfork no longer had a job. Thanks for reading Beauty Blew a Fuse! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Still, given who was let go, clearly things will never be the same. Scrolling to see who was losing their jobs was for me a bit like rewinding a tape—I started thinking about when I first met these people and how I became aware of their immense talents.
But it feels necessary to me somehow, to document just what these folks, once my co-workers and now my friends, brought to a publication that has meant so much to me.
Maybe think of it as notes toward a speech I wish I could have read aloud at the proper going-away party all these people deserved. The site was really taking off at that point—founder Ryan Schreiber had hired Scott Plagenhoef as editor and Chris Kaskie to run the business side, and they were moving aggressively to make everything about the organization better. That included creating the Intonation Music Festival—the first iteration of the Pitchfork fest—and I was there for that event, as I would be every summer through Amy started writing for music pubs of considerable note when she was 19, which was incomprehensible to a late bloomer like me, and I knew her work.
Over the following year, I began to edit part-time for Pitchfork and became more involved in the reviews section. My primary duties initially were doing a sizable chunk of the review edits and running the Forkcast section more on that later. I have a clear memory of walking into the office on my first day.
Many of the desks were hulking steel monstrosities from the 70s. Amy had a creaky old Windows machine on her with an ethernet cable that led to the modem, and that cable, which you had to be careful not to trip over if you were walking along that wall, was stretched to the breaking point. It was fun discussing music with her, in part because our tastes were pretty different.
