News
Pavement’s Beef With Pitchfork
Colin Jones :: Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 3:30 pm
Last weekend every main stage set from the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago was streamed live on the music news website. All except one: Pavement.
Now it appears like there was a reason behind the indie luminaries going AWOL. According to the Chicago Tribune, the reason was Pitchfork and its editorial staff.
One member of Pavement was peeved at a bad-mouthing they recieved from the site a few months back. We’re thinking it might have been the Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg received for his solo album The Real Feel last October. Ouch!
Pavement’s agent David Viecelli told the Tribune, “Some of the things he objected to were bitchy, personal attacks that, if someone had said them about me, I wouldn’t have been happy either. Because of that, he had a problem with the video being streamed not just on the festival Web site, but on the editorial side as well. It was a last-minute thing and I wasn’t able to stop it. I apologized to (festival promoter Mike Reed). I don’t think it hurts Pitchfork – if anything it hurts Pavement because fewer people got to see them. But to me the biggest damage was that the fans couldn’t see it. I wasn’t happy with (the decision), but these things happen.”
Sounds a little bitchy of whoever (cough, Kannberg) decided to nix the stream. But who could blame Kannberg? Pitchfork slammed his art with little nuggets like “Even the weakest cuts on The Real Feel are at least passable genre exercises, but at a point it becomes difficult to tell whether they are actually good faux-Neil Young songs, or if these tunes would have any appeal at all to listeners who were not hardcore Pavement fans with an unusually large amount of goodwill for the band’s less famous founding member.”
“Less famous founding member.” Now that has to bruise the ego a bit. And for someone like Kannberg to be called second fiddle to Stephen Malkmus is a dig where it hurts the most.
Pitchfork promoter Mike Reed, responding in the most diplomatic fashion, told the Tribune, “”It’s very common that these things happen and even in some cases get axed at the last minute. Talking to other festival producers it’s common that come the day of the show the manager or a band might say no, for a variety of reasons.”
No matter the reason we’re still pretty bummed that we didn’t get to see Pavement.
