Stars Vs Pitchfork

Tue 6th Jul, 2010 in Local News

Back in August 2007 Pitchfork reviewed Stars album In Our Bedroom After the War and received a lashing from Stars’ leadman Torquil Campbel.

The record was favourably reviewed – with a rating of 7.4 – but it led Campbel to pen an incensed rant in response claiming that as “every undergraduate geek living in a state of imposed virginity is allowed to effect the critical discourse in this hellish age we call “now”, I too would get in on the moronic inferno and have a bit of a go at blogging myself. I’ll try to be trite, smarmy and reductive, dismissive, self congratulatory and smug, ill informed, ignorant and overly simplistic.’

Though it’s almost three years since that review and Campbel’s response, the Stars’ leader still had plenty to say about the issue when FasterLouder asked him about it this morning.

“I generally don’t talk about this because it’s so inside baseball and so solipsistic and so bloody boring,” Campbel explained, “but the one thing I will say is that is was actually quite a favorable review and that’s not what I was taking issue with. What I was taking issue with was a kind of ethos that I continue to see creeping in to the way people talk about music on the internet, which is uncivil and it’s unthoughtful.”

“That’s part of my job, to pick fights with journalists and to say outrageous things,” Campbel declared. “I’ll always fight from the ropes because that’s where I want to place myself. I don’t want to win. I don’t want to get along, I want to provoke and I want to be ridiculous because that’s my job. Writing that screed against Pitchfork was part of that for me I guess.”

Campbel told FasterLouder that “music journalism is a part of pop music and it should take on the same responsibility as everyone else in pop music does, which is to reflect the dreams of young people, and be ridiculous, and be profound and be stupid and the same time, and not just sort of take a bunch of half-assed press kit factoids and write a review about how you kind of like the record but you’re too cool to admit it. That didn’t seem to me to be very exciting.”

The full interview with Stars leadman Torquil Campbel, including his thoughts on Pitchfork’s infamous ten point scoring system, will be published on FasterLouder soon.