should you go to Pitchfork this summer?
I made Spotify and YouTube playlists for the artists performing at Pitchfork's upcoming music festival in July so you can scout out this year's lineup in advance
Hi all,
Shout-out as always to the newcomers who have subscribed since my last edition. No clue where any newbies are coming from at this point, so thanks to those of you who are spreading the word!
In case this totally flopped, I was planning on pulling a Bloomberg, and bidding highly on the Google Ads for "good mailing lists", "millennials using outdated mediums", and "platforms for white guys", but somehow this list continues to grow without me needing to buy anybody's attention.
So that's cool.
If you're like me - the recently released Pitchfork Music Festival lineup caught your attention:
Pitchfork's online album reviews tend to make my blood boil, but their festival lineups are a fairly good barometer of musicians with whom one should have a working familiarity - provided you're the type of person who takes pride in discovering artists before they "become mainstream", whatever that even means anymore.
To build some credibility in the festival's service as a fairly accurate litmus test for, if nothing else, likely candidates to receive the NPR Tiny Desk Concert treatment in the near future, below are some of their past lineups:
2015:
2016:
2017:
Having Chance the Rapper, Jamie XX, Run the Jewels, Freddie Gibbs, and Mac DeMarco on the same bill for a reasonably priced festival seems unthinkable in 2020, but it's important to remember that 2015 was before their major album releases had elevated their collective stardom to the degree it currently resides.
My point is, even though many of those names ring familiar with the benefit of hindsight, they might not have been drawing massive crowds at the time of their Pitchfork appearance.
With this in mind, let's return to this year's upcoming lineup in mid-July:
Regardless of your current pulse of the music zeitgeist, there are three categories of artists on any sort of festival lineup:
The Known
The Known Unknown, and
The Unknown Unknown.
The Known:
The Known are the artists on this list who, upon seeing their name, you vocalized some sort of reaction.
Maybe they're your favorite band, and you know all their deep cuts. Maybe you really wish they didn't make their last album entirely about their wife. But chances are, seeing an artist's name on this year's lineup like, "Run the Jewels" elicited some sort of response out of you.
For me, that's RTJ, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Danny Brown, The National, Tierra Whack, Thundercat, Twin Peaks, Rapsody, and BADBADNOTGOOD.
The Known Unknown:
This segment is for the artists whose names ring a bell, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to think of how one of their songs goes off the top of your head. You're pretty sure they've popped up on your Spotify Discover, but you can't remember if you have any of their songs saved to a playlist or not.
My "Known Unknown"s: Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Polachek, Ezra Collective, Hop Along, Kim Gordon (by proxy, because she was in Sonic Youth), and Dave.
The Unknown Unknown
This last designation is for the artists you didn't even know you were unaware of.
For me, that's basically everyone else...
Now, many people, upon only recognizing about 30% of any festival lineup that costs a few hundred dollars would be well within their right to say, "alright, this lineup is probably not for me, then".
But part of why people bought Early Bird tickets to this year's festival well before the lineup was released is that they trust Pitchfork to curate an experience they'll generally enjoy.
The artists I do know on here are fairly stylistically diverse. So it really comes down to putting faith that this third party somehow knows you're more likely to positively receive these additional, undiscovered artists, then the artists you'd find if you were to just hit "Shuffle All" on the entirety of Spotify's catalogue.
So before you bash this lineup simply because you don't recognize a ton of the names on here, consider the alternative:
a place where everyone in attendance already knows every single word to every song being played.
If that experience is preferable, I highly recommend Benchmark.
And who knows? You might just discover your new favorite band.
For all we know, people looking at this year's lineup in 2025 might be incredulous, saying things like, "Wow. I can't believe that the Capital One Presents: Pitchfork Music Festival once had Dogleg, The Hecks, and Dustin Laurenzi's Snaketime all on the same day!".
More likely, they'll be saying things like, "Jesus, how many more times is Thundercat going to perform at Pitchfork Music Festival, an Amazon Prime Exclusive? What is this, Team Bosh in the Haier Shooting Stars Challenge during NBA All Star Saturday Night?".
But the fact that people could be saying things closer to that first statement is why I want to encourage this largely Chicago-based readership to take these next few weeks to explore the discography of the artists on this lineup, especially your Unknown Unknowns, and give them an earnest listen.
"Dude, do you really think I'm going to go out of my way to manually type in 42 separate artists, sift through their songs, and all just to find maybe 6 keepers?"
Okay, fine. HERE is a Spotify playlist that I made of everyone on this year's lineup. In order. It contains a few songs from each artist. Songs included are a combination of:
their highest played songs on Spotify
what I found when browsing music subreddits and
songs they tend to do live​
For my "Knowns", I threw in some additional songs of theirs that I dig.
For the bi-sensually inclined, HERE is a YouTube playlist I made that serves as a compilation of the artists on the bill that currently have Tiny Desk Concerts and/or 20-ish minute live sets that are publicly available.
If you have a greater familiarity with my Unknowns than I do, I fully welcome suggestions from their discography (or specific live videos to add to the YouTube Playlist) that are emblematic of the artist's general spirit.
We'll check back in on this a few weeks from now to see what we discover.
Happy Listening!