Pitchfork, Race, Collaboration, and the Making of “Indie Rap”

Abstract

This essay historicizes the moment in popular music when rap music and indie rock began conversing with one another. It shows how Pitchfork received, what is referred to as, “indie rap” by drawing a particular line of influence: from indie rock to rap music. Pitchfork is thereby shown to have contributed to the historical whitening of Black music. Drawing on the work of Fred Moten, this essay argues that Pitchfork established the “white avant-gardism” of indie rock through the construction of a series of binary oppositions that associated Black rap music with pastness and the commercial and “white” indie rock with futurity and the experimental. Such a critical bifurcation is revealed through a close reading of Pitchfork’s reception of the artist most representative of “indie rap:” Kanye West. This essay shows how Pitchfork understood West as needing to appropriate “European” music to move from the past into the future and become experimental. It counters this antagonistic racialization by situating West’s use of Auto-Tune within a lineage of Black radical aesthetics that includes the experimental vocal manipulations of artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Drake. This essay seeks to recover the collaborative spirit that defined “indie rap.” It focuses on West’s collaborations with Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver), showing how they labored together to produce an “indie rap” that crossed the musical and racial lines established by Pitchfork. This essay concludes that, if West epitomized an ethos of collaboration before his reactionary turn, it is Vernon who now carries forward this collaborative spirit.

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