Bullying and Budweiser: Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson, Greta Van Fleet, and Corporate Hipster Hops Hypocrisy

“Since I quit acting almost 10 years ago I’ve had no real professional use for expressing my true outward emotions.“

That may have been true when Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson wrote it in May 2018, but things have clearly changed. Larson’s true outward emotions may be disguised to his office “superiors and subordinates,” but his emotions were very clearly expressed in his recently-published “review” of Grammy-Nominated Greta Van Fleet’s critically acclaimed album, Anthem of a Peaceful Army.

But it’s actually not  a review at all.  

It’s Bullying. 

It’s Clickbait. 

And it’s a hit piece —  an astonishingly hypocritical and eerily personal attack littered with trashy insults and uppity, elitist mockery — as Larson strangely fixates on allusions to major label money, corporate rock, commercialism, algorithms, and (hipster-lingo) “retro-fetishism,” — describing Greta Van Fleet as “[t]he poor kids from Frankenmuth” who are “all costume” and “exist to be swallowed into the algorithm’s churn and rack up plays.” Later, Larson derisively slams Greta Van Fleet in a smirking line calling the band “proficient, at best” musicians — without further contextual elaboration. 

Placed alongside the other unnecessarily pointless insults, the “review” and its substantive content collectively highlight a perplexing, score settling-stylized hit piece that — upon examination of  Larson’s own failed acting career, “art,” and occupational redundancy — is clearly #triggered by introspective anger, resentment, and survival-mode self-loathing from an individual lamenting his own impending algorithmic professional obsolescence and artistic irrelevance. 

Indeed, “all costume” and its underlying corporate music commercialism implications are an odd target for a guy whose own once notoriously independent Brooklyn-based employer << sold out >> to one of the world’s largest mass media companies. 

In doing so, Pitchfork joined a portfolio of similarly cutting edge counter-culture publications such as Golf Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, Vanity Fair, to name a few — and relocated from BK to Manhattan’s tony financial district — as part of Condé Nast’s plan to reach Pitchfork’s reported 88% of male millennial readers. Added Pitchfork’s Executive Editor Mark Richardson on the Conde Nast acquisition: “Hey, they publish a lot of my favorite magazines of all time.”

Even more sinisterly, Pitchfork also strategically partnered with the villainous — and world’s largest — corporate brewer, Anheuser-Busch-InBev (“AB-InBev”), snugly positioning itself as a clandestine AB-InBev shill peddling their corporate faux craft beer at Pitchfork and Pitchfork-sponsored music festivals and in cooperative publications.  

The Pitchfork – Conde Nast – AB-InBev partnership even spawned an online beer magazine called  October, — “[a] project supported by ZX Ventures (Ab-Inbev’s new venture capital team), and led by Pitchfork’s Slow Focus Studio (Condé Nast), Good Beer Hunting, and BeerGraphs, we’re bringing together a group of people with expertise in publishing, culture, and of course, beer.”

October publishes articles pimping AB-InBev’s corporate faux craft beer, such as July 2018’s How to Drink Your Way Through Pitchfork Music Festival, in which AB-InBev beer is paired with Pitchfork Festival performers. AB-InBev’s Goose Island is featured prominently throughout the article. Other artists are paired with “craft beers” owned by AB-InBev: Julie Byrne – Virtue Cider’s Rose; Saba – 312 Urban Wheat; Tierra Whack – Goose Island’s Old Man Grumpy; Kelela – Goose Island’s Next Coast IPA; Alex Cameron – Virtue Cider’s Michigan Honey, to name a few. 

Goose Island’s relationship with Pitchfork stretches back to their pre-corporate acquisition days, when independently owned Goose Island was featured at Pitchfork’s Chicago Musical Festival. Goose Island was sold to AB-InBev for $38.8 million in 2011. Virtue Cider’s owner, Greg Hall, Goose Island’s former brewmaster and son of former Goose Island owner John Hall, sold Virtue Cider to AB-InBev in 2017. 

Pitchfork Music Festival headliners, Tame Impala and Lauryn Hill, however, were conspicuously not paired with an AB-InBev product. Why? Because they refused  — Instead, they were lamely paired with…. water.  

Gulp.

October’s explanation is tragic: 

 

What. The. Fuck.

Pretentious hipster beer magazine discourages raging during Tame Impala’s set in an article about how to drink through the festival… and instead directing festival attendees to get high and drink water?  

Pitchfork circa 2004 would’ve skewered October. 

October subsequently published A Weekend of Drinking Aimlessly at Pitchfork Music Festival in which writer Dan Gentile (also the author of How to Drink Your Way Through Pitchfork Music Festival) hilariously recaps drinking AB-InBev beer throughout the festival weekend. The accompanying photographs: 

All costume? Pot, meet kettle. 

As for Larson —  Is there a better place for an enviously #triggered malcontent to angrily denounce Greta Van Fleet, major label funding, corporate music, algorithms, and especially “all costume” than his warm corporate office on the 40th floor of One World Trade Center? Really, how much anti-corporate rage can Larson legitimately muster with an AB-InBev-supported Condé Nast signing his paychecks? 

None.

More importantly, and back to the Greta Van Fleet “review” — what necessitates the bullying? What motivates a music critic to write such a mean-spirited and demeaning “review”, mocking the band’s physical appearance, attire, representation, music, and instrumental proficiency? Larson’s sole intent was to humiliate Greta Van Fleet and deride their fans. 

Isn’t there enough of this bullshit in the news and on Twitter everyday? 

(He’s really so proud of himself)

For me, the music “review” (or Spotify or Apple Music profile/summary) is supplemental to the (often introductory) listening experience. Listeners want to read something — and I personally think that Apple music and Spotify’s writers do an excellent job providing an informed, unbiased, contextual artist or album background that I read contemporaneously with the listening experience. 

Music is a very personal escape — an escape from the pervasive negativity, trolling, and bullying in the news media, social media, and online. How does Larson think his trolling and bullying are palatable to escapees like me?   

Trolling and bullying doesn’t make you cool.

It makes you a dick. 

And yeah, it’s really cool to mock a band that supports children’s hospitals, hospitalized children and food banks:

From Larson’s perspective, it must be frustrating to inch closer and closer to professional obsolesce, literally seeing your influence evaporate on social media, displaced by algorithms, and being involuntarily forced into the role of music compiler and “best of” catalogue manager. The once-influential music critics and self-styled gatekeepers are now antiquated relics, struggling to redefine their industry role. It helps us understand why he’s lashing out. 

Noted Slate’s Amos Barshad: “[l]ook at Pitchfork: It’s been years since the site had the kind of cultural cachet on which it built its empire” in When Critics Could Kill. Poynter’s May 30, 2017 article, Pitchfork sold, but hasn’t sold out: “Traffic to the digital magazine’s big features has increased in the double or triple digits year over year every month since August thanks to the creation of new “best of” lists designed to be read years after they’re published.” 

He’s a librarian. 

Bitter pill. 

The bullying is also in response to Greta Van Fleet’s success. 

The band is currently on a sold out world tour and was recently nominated for four Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist, Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance, and Best Rock Album. Their album, Anthem of a Peaceful Army debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 Chart and three of its singles spent a combined 27 weeks at #1 in Canada. Anthem was included in NME’s 2018 100 Albums of the Year list. Greta Van Fleet are billed in the most prestigious festivals around the globe. 

Larson, on the other hand, is a failed actor and professionally unfulfilled. He has a mere 13.5k Twitter followers, compared to Greta Van Fleet’s 93k (377k on Instagram) and spends his time tweeting about algorithms. His personal blog is an interactive graveyard and his latest blog post, Bad First Drafts, accumulated a whopping five likes. I get more likes and comments posting a picture of a half-eaten hot dog smushed into the sidewalk on Instagram. 

His writing? Boring, uninteresting, and lethargic —- The sulking 11th grade school loner’s diary after a semester reading Camus and Sartre and discovering Pump Up the Volume. 

For context: 

“Leaving work today I was overcome with emotion. I couldn’t name it—anxiety, joy, anger—it just tore through me like a wraith whistling in and out of my body. My skin was tingling, my face was warm, and I quickened my pace to the train. With I guess a kind of morbid curiosity, I turned the music in my headphones all the way up just to see what would happen. Hundreds of people walking by me in the vaulted concourse of the luxury mall next to the World Trade Center turned silent and, of course, this emotion vibrated stronger. Tears pressed from behind my eyes just a nameless emotion, type “emotion” into your browser, hit enter, and I would be there somewhere as one part of its definition.” 

Reading Larson’s blog, I was overcome with emotion: Boredom.

Larson’s September 2018 blog entry  “The Cars – Drive”, a glimpse into the 80’s hit:  

It took five albums for the Cars to write a song about a car. I’m in awe that Ric Ocasek dodged writing about cars for that long. Six years. Was it on purpose, was it conscious? “Drive” calls all this into question. You assume, well yeah, that’d be a bit spot-on if the Cars wrote about a car; Robert Smith never wrote about a cure and Morrissey never wrote about smelting. But cars, what a valuable songwriting card to give up.

Riveting. 

Oh, and by the way — Morrissey may have never written about smelting, but Robert Smith certainly wrote about “a cure.” The Cure’s 1984 album “Pornography” touches on mortality, illness and finding “a cure”, among other themes, which are present throughout the album. The album’s final song, Pornography, concludes: 

And real blood 

I’ll watch you drown in the shower 

Pushing my life through your open eyes 

I must fight this sickness 

Find a cure 

I must fight this sickness

That’s obviously a minor point, but worth noting nonetheless.  I may not get paid to begrudgingly listen to new music all day but that doesn’t disqualify me from calling out the misinformed “experts.” 

Larson’s photography? Not much better, but take a look…

The bottom pic is an image we’ve seen a thousand times in vintage 90s’s Spin Magazines. It’s not original. It’s not art. The photographer is a documentarian, not an artist. Random front row drunk with an iPhone in portrait mode captures the same exact image.

Yawn.

When you criticize others then you justifiably open yourself up to same. Criticism is one thing, trolling and bullying are another. It’s petty clickbait bullshit. Obviously, trolling and bullying was a way for Larson to exact some kind of weird, imaginary revenge on the band, which didn’t go unnoticed.

Greta Van Fleet’s worst efforts, according to Larson, have resulted in multiple Grammy nominations, sold out shows around the world, and invitations to the most prestigious upcoming festivals. Larson’s best efforts, his personal blog and Anthem “review” has yielded a mere 5 likes in its most recent post, and there was a small spike in Twitter traffic following his tone deaf vitriolic “review” of Anthem.

My final note to Jeremy: After all these years publishing articles for New York Times Magazine, Spin, NME, Pitchfork, etc., you ended up peddling Budweiser from your cozy office in the World Trade Center. Congrats, man. You’ve made it.