THE JET OF URINE REVOLUTION
How Pitchfork’s pissing monkey changed music journalism and ushered in a new world for all of us
Farewell Pitchfork. You might not be dead quite yet, they might not have switched off the stack of beeping and hissing machines, but your vegetative state suggests you’re never coming back as we knew you.
It’s sad, but as we sit around your hospital bed sipping terrible vending machine coffee let us share some stories and recognise all that you were. Because you were a revolution, truly one of the greats alongside Rolling Stone, NME and the rest. And no moment was greater than the monkey. Oh the monkey. The monkey deserves to be remembered.
If you know the monkey already then this is an indulgent deep dive from an NME perspective for the music journalism geeks among us. If you don’t know what on earth I’m on about then strap in, I’ll try and do justice to an album review that changed everything.
BORN TO BE WIRED
Pitchfork and NME.COM both launched in 1996, the very earliest days of the commercial Internet. But the two websites were very different creatures. Along with the UK’s Drowned In Sound, Pitchfork was a child of the digital realm, its music magazine DNA fundamentally altered like a mutant optimised for an emerging world.
The website was fairly random in its early days but as the dotcom boom hit at the turn of the millennium it professionalised and rapidly expanded, riding a wave of both exploding internet use and a alt music culture boom sparked by The Strokes and The White Stripes. Core to Pitchfork’s expansion were its album reviews. Offered daily, they were a heartbeat of confident music opinion, a fresh voice for a new age. By the mid-Noughts Pitchfork had grown to be a respected force in rock criticism.
As Pitchfork was sauntering into the VIP room of music journalism I was Editor of British music title NME. I started running the paper in 2002 (finishing in 2009) and rapidly took responsibility for NME.COM too. Pitchfork was on our radar as a contemporary but it was a different advertising market so it didn’t compete for revenue and anyway there was enough hockey stick website growth around to keep everyone happy.
Pitchfork was a bit cooler than NME, new things often are. Their design was more edgy, not the one-size-fits-all straight-jacket that NME.COM had to suffer at publishing company IPC, and they carried themselves with a distinctly US alt.rock swagger. However, they didn’t have what we had which was 50 years at the coalface of rock’n’roll and one of the most iconic magazine titles ever created. This was protection against anything. Surely?
The magazine of NME was the cash cow and so inevitably drew the focus both inside and outside the business at the expense of NME.COM. NME.COM might have reached more readers globally in a week than the paper version of NME did in a year but conservative media executives in distant boardrooms prioritised sales revenues right now over planning for tomorrow’s future. Likewise, the world focused on physical NME sales figures. Try as we might, myself and the NME Publishing Director couldn’t light a fire for innovation at a board level. This skewed atmosphere generated some weird choices as a result.
KNOW WHEN TO HOLD ’EM
Album reviews had always been seen as one of the most valuable assets created by NME. Our verdict on a release could mean the difference between success or failure for a new album. Music fans would wait to see a mark out of ten before they decided whether to head down to Virgin Megastore and hand over their cash. In a pre-streaming world where a CD was £15 or £20 it really mattered. Because of their value, NME’s album reviews were kept behind the pay-wall of the printed title. If you wanted to know whether an album was any good or not on the week of release you had to hand over £2.00 for a magazine. A week later we would deign to publish our precious reviews on NME.COM for the world to access. You’re welcome.
This had the effect of NME’s albums arriving a week later than most of the rest of the Internet. It was a source of some tension internally but it could never be resolved — hide them and you looked old-fashioned, release them and you took away another reason to buy the mag.
The discussions continued. We thought it was about timing, about waiting for words. But Pitchfork had a monkey.
JET! JET! JET!
Pitchfork’s paradigm shifting album review had an inauspicious foundation. They didn’t change the world with a eulogy to Fiona Apple’s art-rock hip-hop or an intricate analysis of a magnum opus from Radiohead (both 10.0 scores). No, it started with a band called Jet. You might have heard of them.
Jet had pitched up at the NME in the early 2000s, part of a scene that went on to be known as The New Rock Revolution. They were gleefully embraced as part of the gang. Jet were Australian but played a tight retro rock’n’roll that was the sound of the time in our post New York and Detroit Strokes/Stripes world. They looked the part, were endearingly shambolic in interviews, had a pair of brothers in the band “just like Oasis” and, more than anything, they had a stone-cold indie disco smash in ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’. What they weren’t was a band with any depth. They were pub rock thrust into the mainstream through pure happenstance and everyone was happy to switch their brain off for a bit and bounce along.
Off the back of all this, Jet had had a proper hit album with their debut ‘Get Born’ in 2003. It went Top 20 in the UK and even Top 30 in the US. All this put a lot of pressure on their second album, what US titles would call their sophomore release. When it appeared in 2006, ‘Shine On’ was slickly produced rock by numbers and almost devoid of anything interesting. In the NME review Paul McNamee (now Editor of The Big Issue) summed it up perfectly: “So ‘Shine On’ is not an album that tries to reinvent the wheel. In fact, it barely gives it a polish. But if you get a kick out of glorious, ragged old rock’n’roll, then you’ll consider it essential.” Meh, indeed.
The story of how catastrophically uninspiring the album was was actually more interesting than the music on the record. As the NME ‘sell’ for the album review said at the time, “Avant-garde, techno-infused second from Oz’s finest. Just kidding.” It was a sly dig from a sub editor team finally able to stick a knife into a band they saw as not worthy of the intellectual high ground of NME.
Contrary to popular belief, NME doesn’t like to kill its offspring. Generally, we always had far more invested in a band going on to massive success. But the reality is that most bands have one album in them and the rest is a long-tail of disappointment. To spare Jet’s blushes (and our own to a certain extent having backed the band from day one) NME did its usual trick of giving ‘Shine On’ a seven-out-of-ten, a score that’s both a score and not a score, a number where opinion goes to die. It is neither good nor bad. Make your own mind up. Anyway, we were busy, no-one would remember Jet in a couple of years and there were plenty more bands knocking on our door. Have you met The Klaxons?
And that was that, we thought. And then Pitchfork published their review of ‘Shine On’.
It was this: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9464-shine-on/ .
To save you the jump, Pitchfork’s review contains no words at all. Its self-consciously complex scoring system reads only 0.0 as if it hasn’t actually been switched on for the event. Where the words of a review should be there is only a 10 second video pulled through from YouTube. The video features a chimpanzee repeatedly pissing into its own mouth.
All the accepted paraphernalia of a rock review is there — the journalist’s name Ray Suzuki, the minimalist well set typography of the album title and band name, a genre listed as “Rock”, the name of the record label “Elektra” (they must had had fun with this), and a date of review which was October 2nd 2006. But beyond that it’s a video of a monkey drinking its own piss. Nothing else. No explanation, no context.
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Try not clicking on that link. You can’t. You’ve done it already. It’s an essential read. I mean view. Damn.
THE ART OF NOISE
I maintain that what Pitchfork and Ray Suzuki achieved on October 2nd 2006 was one of the greatest acts in the history of music journalism. From a rock review point of view it’s the equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, a moment in art so radical and profane that it forces the recontextualization of everything around it.
Which is a fancy way of saying it was a kick in the bollocks when I saw it. The pissing monkey signalled that the rules of the game had changed. It signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another.
NME had always brandished a sharpened keyboard to do battle. It had challenged the dominance of Melody Maker when it arrived in the early 50’s (eventually swallowing it whole in 2002) and rose to pre-eminence through the power and quality of its words. Along the way it saw off Sounds, Record Mirror and the rest, first through solid quality of prose, then through the development of a contemptuous independent tone and finally, in my era, a crafted voice focused on entertainment. Our words fought rival titles Kerrang! and Q on the paper battlegrounds of the ‘inkies’. Yes, NME’s reviews appeared online too but only as a facsimile of the printed page, the analysis dutifully recreated word for precious word. No edit. The paper of record archiving its own self-importance.
MAJOR LASER
Pitchfork’s ‘Shine On’ review presented an existential challenge. They had turned up to a knife fight with a grenade. It wasn’t that they were playing the game better than anyone else, it’s that they were now playing a totally different game. Or not even playing a game at all, just quietly throwing a 100 yard hoop while everyone else scuffled with each other on the court next to them. The pulling through of an already well-known viral video, reviewing an album with a meme, had never been done before. It was the act of a title born digital, not anchored in paper. It took the album review into a dimension that NME could see but couldn’t reach. I adored it.
What was implied by the absence of the review was, perhaps, more fascinating than what was published. As a mag and website Editor I knew the sequence of barriers that a journalist would have to get past to get a radical review on the page. Every layer of authority from Reviews Editor to Technical Site Manager to overall Editor would have had to have independently signed it off. An online magazine CMS (content management system) will often block the kind of HTML code required to pull a video through for reasons of site data security so it almost certainly involved a specific page edit. How did Suzuki do it?
Well they didn’t, because Ray Suzuki the music journalist almost certainly never existed. That name is credited with only two review on the Pitchfork site, the ‘Shine On’ review in 2006 and a review of re-issues of ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and ‘Efil4zaggin’ by N.W.A three years previously. Just two reviews. The N.W.A. critique dissects the albums for both their musical innovation and their violent misogyny and it’s a fair read but nothing about it suggests what’s to come after.
So Ray Suzuki is undoubtedly an office pen name or ‘house pseudonym’, a fake character used when the title doesn’t want to credit the review to any real person. We had a couple of names that we’d use occasionally at NME, often when a review had been so comprehensively rewritten by the subs desk that it seemed inappropriate to link it to the original writer. (Deuchamp credited the work of ‘Fountain’ to “R. Mutt” for his own reasons.)
This makes the pissing monkey a clear collective act of the title, a decision from Pitchfork as a whole, a collective act. An office joke snowballed and started to become a ‘What if?’ A ‘Could we? Should we?’ These things happen on magazines and they’re a hell of a lot of fun when they do but they need senior sign-of. This time, no-one stopped it, everyone said yes. Regardless of the discussion that took place it looked effortless. A culture defining moment chucked on to the website before heading out for a ramen lunch.
The chutzpah of Pitchfork’s ‘Shine On’ review is, as they say, off the scale. To deliver a full zero to a recorded work was virtually unheard of, the realm of the rampant egotist, but to do that and then offer no reason, just a crass animated verdict, was beyond all music journalist understanding. It made the most radical of NME writers of the past — Burchills and Parsons, Charles Shaar Murray, the great Steven Wells… — look like primped lapdogs. Oh you use words? Alright Boomer…
What was for sure was that NME could never have published that review. Staff members would have laughed but would never have taken the prospect seriously for a moment. We would have felt it demeaned the title and the authority in which we were held. (Perhaps often by ourselves.) We suffered enough criticism that NME was ‘not as good as it used to be’ without dropping words entirely. If the video review were to make it on to NME.COM what would we do in the paper? Print a still image? Accompanied by an explanation? Risk the mag being withdrawn under British obscenity laws?
No, in all ways there was no question that NME could ever have delivered the same radical work. I knew this absolutely because I knew that I would have blocked it. But Pitchfork didn’t block the review. They had their discussions and they said ‘Yes, this is who we are. We are prepared to set fire to 50 years of the etiquette of music journalism.’ Fuck yeah. The monkey might have been drinking the urine but Pitchfork was pissing on all of us.
PSYCHIC TV
That’s not to say that the review is a crass act, far from it. The genius of the ‘Shine On’ pissing monkey is actually its eloquence. Just like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ what isn’t there is more important than what is. The moment of art is not the inert urinal sitting on its back but what it creates in your head. With the ‘Shine On’ review its very abstraction forces you to write the words yourself, the viewer compelled to deliver the critical appraisal that’s absent. In a single moving image it says more about the album than 1,000 words of po-faced analysis ever could. Jet are both recycling the history of rock and recycling their own output. They are the hairy unthinking man-thing stumbling from one bad choice to another. They can’t tell the difference between creation and waste. They literally have no taste… And so it goes on. Reams and reams of words spilling out of your brain, all of them implied. Transmitted like imposed telepathy, you must write the verdict yourself, but with no conclusion to the review it goes on endlessly, your brain, conditioned by 30 years of snide rock journalism, seeking a closing witticism that never comes.
And it’s right. As a review, it’s solid. The album is rank. Most music magazines gave it points for effort and familiarity but as music it’s pretty worthless. Pitchfork called it out. To be fair they’d called out Jet’s first album too through Nick Sylvester’s bitchy pre-cursor review that broke rules and slapped a 3.7 on the album. Sort of like Michelangelo doing some preliminary sketches before bashing out the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling in an afternoon.
Jet’s career never quite recovered. The review dominated all discussion of the band. It still does. (This article is proof of that.) The pissing monkey was bigger than Jet. The review was bigger than the album. It’s every music journalist’s dream and perhaps Pitchfork’s greatest achievement.
To the casual music fan the radical significance of the pissing monkey review might not have been so obvious. However, once the world’s music journalists had stopped laughing and put their eyeballs back in we all felt how the world had shifted on its axis. Nothing could ever be the same. As the person most responsible for the future of NME at the time I felt its significance immediately. The countdown clock of relevance for the paper music press in the form I knew it, the conundrum of print and digital I’d inherited, was ticking down and I didn’t particularly want to see what happened when the alarm went off. No-one wanted to be the last Editor of the paper NME.
WHAT ARE WORDS WORTH?
And there it was, a nothing that was everything. A review so small it almost didn’t exist, towering as an existential threat to everything around it. Genius.
Eighteen years later it’s still hilarious — it’s hilarious to see and hilarious just to think about. It’s regularly shared amongst journalists and fans as a benchmark for up-middle-finger reviewing and a marker of the confidence of the past. Almost two decades after the review first appeared I still occasionally ponder on its significance and find myself bursting out laughing in public. It’s that good.
The people who write the history of music journalism have tended to be music journalists so they mostly see the written words and tell that story. I was never a very good music journalist but I could spot a cultural wave and make the most of it, play it out across the web of media channels to make maximum impact in the real world. I had a feeling immediately for what the ‘Shine On’ review meant. The pissing monkey took music journalism beyond text into a profoundly different place.
In retrospect it was a first step in words taking a backseat to a visual dominated culture. It was a pre-cursor to the streams of endless Instagram pictures and TikTok videos that fill our waking hours today. Undoubtedly some of the eloquence of our old world was lost in that transformation. Language craft, hard earned, began to weather and dull through lack of use. It survives in some places, thrives in a few, but now those places shine out of the darkness rather than being part of a glittering blanket. The new world isn’t necessarily better but it is faster, and oftentimes that seems enough for progress whether we all like it or not.
What we know now was that Pitchfork itself wasn’t immune to the virus. They didn’t create the pathogen they just sneezed first. Scrolling images have robbed websites of eyeballs, and fewer eyeballs mean fewer advertisers, and music journalism isn’t cheap, and so Pitchfork is folded into the body of a men’s lifestyle magazine. And we’re done. Whatever ‘done’ means behind the scenes.
What it does mean with absolute certainty, however, is that the urinating monkey ‘Shine On’ review could never be published today. There are too many suits that need to be kept happy and chutzpah is thin on the ground in music journalism. Pitchfork has finally been well and truly wrung out, its youthful bravado dribbling into a pool on the floor like a puddle of monkey piss.
But hey, maybe on the way Pitchfork delivered the greatest album review of all time. That’s pretty cool.
