I’ve increasingly come to resent Pitchfork over the past couple of years. Whereas I used to enjoy reading countless reviews that tore albums apart with little restraint, I’ve grown quite sick of their pretentious and overblown commentary on the music I love.  Visiting Pitchfork has become kind of like coming home to that roommate who you thought would be great to live with but just ended up complaining about everything all the time. Even their more upbeat/positive album reviews piss me off now.

Well today that all changed for me. I was reading a review of U2’s new reissue of their 1983 live album, Under A Blood Red Sky (they actually gave it 9.0/10!). You should understand that for an organization like Pitchfork (as well as most of its readers), making fun of groups with mass appeal like U2 is almost a hobby.

Anyway, out of nowhere, Pitchfork knocked me flat on my ass with some pearls of wisdom. Lots of us think and say this, but I don’t think that I’ve ever seen this idea conveyed so eloquently as Pitchfork has done here:

“Eventually, the drive and work to be the biggest band in the world became a seriously uncool pursuit in many circles…These days, many distrust guitar bands who don’t reflect their own personal values, who they don’t believe merely walk, talk, think, and act like them. Somehow, a group is more genuine if they’re more, well, regular, or plain, even less accomplished or incurious about a wider world— groups are often unwilling to show flashes of ability, or they’d rather preach to a choir than attempt to unify the masses, or they’re happy being a big fish in a small pond. It’s a weird attitude.”

The moral of the story? It’s PERFECTLY FINE to sell millions and millions of records. If the music is great then the music is great, regardless of whether 10 thousand or 10 million people are digging it. Yes I love my indie rock; but yes, I also love my U2 and my Coldplay.

So to all of you who would never touch a U2 record simply because of some preconceived notion that it isn’t ‘genuine’ or because it’s simply ‘uncool’ - stay in your rooms and keep listening to all of your favorite bands as they strive for mediocrity.

I’m going to go listen to “The Joshua Tree”