I've never particularly been a fan of Pitchfork Media, the indie-music Web site that is sort of a Wine Spectator for the sensitive bearded set. It's not just that Pitchfork's main focus is the kind of indie music I tend not to like (out of tune, self-consciously "artful," bearded), but that the reviews are even more pedantic, self-indulgent and obtuse than the subjects themselves. In short, Pitchfork is the embodiment of everything that annoys me about the iPod/mp3 blog/A-is-the-new-B era (Disclosure: I won a free iPod Mini in a sweepstakes and used to contribute to an mp3 blog).

So I was interested to see a nice piece in Slate breaking down the phenomenon of music lovers who hate Pitchfork. Different haters have different reasons to hate, one reason being that Pitchfork delights in being the East German figure-skating judge, cutting down bands that had enjoyed universal leg-humping from the mp3 bloggers. That, along with expert columns on subgenres like grime and glitch-house, almost makes Pitchfork worth checking out from time to time.