Cold Hard Pitch(fork)

“Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read,” is how Frank Zappa once described what I do for a living, which is nice. Judging by Zappa’s shrug-of-the-shoulders tone, this quote probably came at a time when he’d got a shit review, got angry about it, got over it, then reached that formative stage of an artist’s career when, like, they don’t read their press anymore, man. At least Zappa didn’t turn it into a song, though. Not even Chris De Burgh did, he wrote a letter. Or renowned vitriol experts …Trail Of Dead, they used a Myspace picture. Or Bjork, who obviously decided reporter Julie Kaufman was below being the subject of one of her celestial masterpieces and punched her in the face instead. I mean, even The Holloways didn’t resort to penning a song about the low esteem in which they hold The Fly, they just bombarded our comments board for a few days.

Yep, there’s all manner of ways to vent your spleen about a music journo who refuses to pucker up and kiss your arsecheeks, for sure, but the riskiest of them all is to write a song about it, as Jet have done with the Pitchfork-baiting ‘One Hipster One Bullet’ (sample lyric: “You little Pitchfork whore, at your thrift store/You are a fucking bore, you make me sick!”). ‘One Hipster One Bullet’ sees drummer and sometime-vocalist Chris Cester deliver Jet’s long-awaited riposte to Pitchfork’s infamous review of the band’s second album, where, instead of words, they uploaded a video of a monkey pissing into its own mouth, a video that caused many an over-excited penile discharge on DiS’ message boards but did nothing for me, except maybe make me want to upload a review of Pitchfork’s review of Jet’s album of me pissing into own mouth. And that’s not just cos I actually quite, gulp, like Jet, either – Pitchfork’s review was a pointlessly pithy reaction to an album and band they were never gonna like; Jet, last time I looked, had more in common with a garden spade than they do with the average Grizzly Bear b-side. By recording ‘One Hipster One Bullet’, though, Jet have risked opening some sort of infinite cyber-spar vortex – I mean, what’s to stop Pitchfork reviewing Jet’s song about them, then Jet recording another song about it, then Pitchfork writing another review about it, then Jet recording another song about it, then everyone waking up one day with grey hair and realising how fantastically pointless their lives have been.

The song has actually been around in various forms for a while, demoed as ‘Snap Your Fingers’ for ‘Shine On’, Jet’s monkey-mouth-pissing inspiring second album. In that guise, it was an angry ditty aimed at hipsters in general. Now, though, it’s a bit of a non-event – coming three years after Pitchfork’s review, it’s quite possibly the slowest kneejerk reaction in the history of time, sitting somewhere between Guns’n’Roses‘ ‘Get In The Ring’ (namedropping loads of journalists, forgetting about the tune) and Stereophonics’ ‘Mr Writer’ (namedropping none, remembering a tune, but not a very good one). Jet demonstrated with last year’s ‘Shaka Rock’ that they still know their way round indelibly hook-laden retro-rock – especially in the likes of ‘Beat On Repeat’, ‘She’s A Genius’ and ‘Times Like This’ – and you’d hope they would’ve felt the very presence of a third album, even if it was largely ignored, would be enough to piss off Pitchfork. They didn’t, and, instead, ‘One Hipster One Bullet’ (an odd title, suggesting Jet think there’s a Mr Pitchfork at large who’s responsible) opens up a whole new can of band vs. website worms that might see this one drag its way out through 2010…