The ‘Diamond Jubilee’ metaphors sure got out of hand

The Cindy Lee phenomenon showed how music criticism still matters, but also very much how it doesn't.

Like many people who follow the kind of music still notionally known as “indie,” I spent much of 2024 fascinated by Diamond Jubilee, the 32-track double album by Cindy Lee, which is the drag persona of a musician named Patrick Flegel, ex-member of the well-regarded post-punk band Women.

I placed the album fairly high on my eventual year-end list, which appears here. Diamond Jubilee felt like an immediate classic, a special kind of record that achieves improbable and seemingly contradictory things. Somehow it feels like every great pop album, but also like nothing I’ve ever encountered. It feels beamed into the world from both the distant past and a not-quite-graspable future. It is Dorothy’s black-and-white Kansas and her technicolor Oz conjoined in some shared liminal space. It is immediately ingratiating but also inaccessible in ways that suggest an ever-shifting but impermeable barrier between artist and listener. It demands attentive engagement but also rewards passive listening. It is beautiful but also ugly, joyous but heartbreaking, indulgent but austere, too long and yet somehow not nearly long enough.

Yes, but what does it sound like? The description I arrived at was that Diamond Jubilee resembles “an Americana record assembled by a hallucinating A.I. program that was trained only on ’60s girl-group pop, AM-radio yacht rock and soundtracks to David Lynch movies.” Not bad, huh? Good stuff, Troy.

I did a quick online sweep to check whether I had unconsciously lifted that language from somewhere. That’s because every review of the album reaches a point where the writer finds themselves at pains to describe what they’re hearing, and invariably that meant firing up the strained-metaphor/simile machine to produce descriptions of the listening experience that all basically say a version of “It’s cool but weird!” Here are some examples from the first few pages of search results.

The Needle Drop: “This album feels like a warped memory of a warped memory. If you handed this to me out of the blue on a burned CD and said, ‘Hey, here’s a bunch of weirdo experimental demos from some lost '60s label from back in the day,’ I’d have to believe you.”

Belwood Music: “(A) warped memory of every 60s pop song I’ve ever heard all at once. A lengthy jam between The Beach Boys, The Supremes and The Velvet Underground that got lost to time. A record collection of the biggest singles of the late 50s to early 70s, where all the songs are somehow bleeding into each other like colours running on a tie dye shirt.”

Album Of The Year: “The feel of Diamond Jubilee is of a sprawling lost artifact from a different time, where the creaking lo-fi textures, thick cushion of reverb, and especially the eerie synths on the back half surround something reminiscent of obscure vinyl you’d find digging in the crates, or a transmission from a public access station decades past where the haunted mystique has you wondering what might have been.”

The Arts Fuse: “The soundtrack for a ’60s cocktail party tossed on Mars.”

The Guardian: “(A) parallel dimension of 20th-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/garage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, classic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all feature, emerging through lo-fi production as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm.”

Paste: “Sounds like it’s coming from the other room, if not another gauzy galaxy.”

Stereogum: “Hitting play on Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee feels like drinking a cold beer in a wood-paneled bar at the end of the world.”

Defector: “Akin to floating through the very antecedents of rock n’ roll. A radio station is one useful evocation, though more often the record has the feeling of a rigorous and lovingly conceived mixtape made up of crate diggers’ gems.”

And then, of course, there was daddy. The glowing review from Pitchfork opened with this doozy of a paragraph:

“This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more?...Each song is like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits.”

So you get the idea. I haven’t read online review sites regularly in about a decade, but I’m guessing the reception to Diamond Jubilee was as unusual as the album itself. Because it offered so little in the way of built-in context, obvious influences or excerpt-able press materials, people who engaged with it were forced to use their actual imaginations, producing, at best, kind of a modern iteration of the “blind men describing an elephant” parable.

That’s partly thanks to the mystique Diamond Jubilee was able to maintain despite all the attention it generated. More records should do that, but if it was easy, more of them would do that — or rather, if there were market incentives to produce something like Diamond Jubilee, both as a work of art and an artifact, more artists might try. Lee/Flegel has done zero interviews, and the album still is unavailable on Spotify and other streamers or in physical form, existing only as a continuous YouTube upload, originally posted without song breaks, and as a file download from a willfully suspicious-looking Geocities webpage.

For all the ways the album is an anachronism both sonically and for how it circulated like a hidden treasure of the ‘90s internet, the Diamond Jubilee phenomenon more so evokes a specific era of music criticism: the peak years of the Pitchfork experience, which lasted roughly from the early aughts until sometime in the early ‘10s. During that period, the site’s authoritative (and often famously insufferable) editorial voice, and its sacrosanct 0-to-10 album rating scale, wielded enough power to elevate unknown bands to national attention and knock established artists off comfortable pedestals. (Diamond Jubilee got a 9.1, the highest numerical rating the site had given a new album in almost four years.)

No, but I’ve heard OF them

I belonged to the Pitchfork demographic and had a love-hate relationship with the site, as did surely a lot of bearded white 20-something guys who in the 2000s nursed pretensions toward music expertise. We of course checked it daily, disagreed angrily with the reviews and mastered the art of pretending to have known about an artist before Pitchfork plucked them out of obscurity with a coveted “Best New Music” endorsement.

There is a whole quasi-historical genre of acts that either flourished or withered under the sudden gaze of indie-rock’s Eye of Sauron. The standard-bearer for this cohort is Arcade Fire, whose 2004 debut album Funeral received a near-perfect rating and sparked a subcultural feeding frenzy. The owner of the record store I frequented at the time had ordered two copies simply because the band was on the reliable indie label Merge Records and had interesting cover art, then was overwhelmed by inquiries the week the review came out and couldn’t get Funeral back in stock for months. I happened to see their show that fall at the Magic Stick in Detroit, a small-ish room on a tour that had been booked and launched before the Pitchfork review appeared. By the time they played in Detroit, the hype had become overwhelming, and the place was packed way beyond capacity. They opened with “Rebellion (Lies)” and closed with “Wake Up,” both now recognized as classics of the era, and the crowd convulsed with a communal understanding that something special was happening. (Which is to say, some of us even uncrossed our arms.)

I have a whole box somewhere full of moth-eaten t-shirts purchased long ago from merch tables at shows I’d gladly drive across the state for, on like a Wednesday, based on a Pitchfork BNM endorsement: Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, the Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Decemberists, Band of Horses — artists that probably would have found audiences anyway, but whose blessing from Pitchfork was gasoline. By the time the site gave a 9.0 to the self-titled debut album by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in 2005, the BNM pipeline from obscurity to the spotlight (and often back to obscurity) was firmly established. I’d trekked two and a half hours to Ann Arbor on a school night to see the band’s sold-out show at the Blind Pig and stood in a crowd content to vicariously draft on CYHSY’s next-big-thing momentum, while the band itself looked utterly petrified.

This happened countless times between Pitchfork’s ascent and a decline of influence that began with the streaming age and hastened with its acquisition by the Conde Nast media empire in 2015. The site continued to publish work that was interesting, if decreasingly legible to us olds. By then it had evolved to cover a diverse spectrum of pop music forms, and worked as hard to discredit music-snob stereotypes as it once did to establish and reinforce them (and perhaps overcorrected toward poptimism in the process).

Conde Nast announced in January of 2024 that it was folding Pitchfork into another of its properties, the men’s magazine GQ, and laying off much of the site’s editorial staff. The site kept publishing, staged what was apparently the final edition of its annual music festival in Chicago and posted its year-end rankings per usual. Yet, within the world that follows these things, Pitchfork’s “transformation” was greeted as the symbolic if not literal sunset of an era in media.

Maybe they all should have pivoted to video

This news arrived at the beginning of an especially ugly year in a business that’s already experienced plenty. That same month, the Messenger abruptly shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists. Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, NBC News and Time Magazine all shed staff in 2024.

Pitchfork’s undoing is to some extent just a variation on the same story happening everywhere. But the difference between Pitchfork and your average struggling metro newspaper is that it was native to the online world, unencumbered with the costs of printing and distribution. Founded in the mid-1990s by a Minnesota music geek who was barely out of high school, it was a class-A product of the early “weird internet,” where there were few rules or economic incentives, and anything seemed possible. It existed because something like it needed to exist.

Now, Pitchfork has now suffered the fate of so many successful countercultural endeavors — which is to get absorbed, then discarded, by the establishment it existed to critique, just another line on a spreadsheet for a media conglomerate desperate to trim costs and maximize profits. This is the story, in microcosm, of the entire digital experience in the 21st Century.

This is doubly sad for those of us whose lives were shaped not only by music but by smart people discussing and arguing about music. The site had elevated music criticism to a prominence unseen since the heyday of Rolling Stone decades earlier, and became the gold standard for anybody who attempted — successfully or otherwise — to write about music for a living. When I made my own feeble attempt at this, the logic behind music criticism was simple. Albums were primarily sold in physical formats, and a good record cost the same as a bad one, so knowledgeable people who could explain which ones are worth a listener’s money wielded a modicum of power (although probably not as much as we thought).

The digital economy might have destroyed the business model that made criticism a viable career choice, but the principle is the same. Right now, a functionally infinite supply of music is accessible to anyone, basically for free. Instead of their money, listeners need to determine what deserves attention in the irretrievable hours of their lives, and thoughtful music writing can be the difference between seeking out something new and exciting to occupy that time and letting Spotify-generated playlists provide the soundtrack to your day. A world without Pitchfork and its peers (whomever they are these days) is a world that has ceded jurisdiction to the algorithms that are automating more and more of these decisions. Why read a review when the digital content stream will serve an endless buffet of music, free of context, that you’ll probably passively enjoy and then never think about again?

It would be a mistake to mythologize the 2000s music-criticism experience just because the system today feels worse. The dominion of Pitchfork meant the exclusion of voices that didn’t align with the site’s narrow definition of “indie” music. There is no use pretending Pitchfork and the blog-rock world over which it lorded was some kind of meritocratic utopia, free of payola, corporate influence, nepotism and whatever else. And for every act that was equipped to capitalize on their Pitchfork moment, just as many were as forgettable as anything else on an auto-populated list. Buried below even my t-shirt collection, there’s a box of CDs containing albums by Tapes ‘N Tapes, Love Is All, Wilderness, I’m From Barcelona, The Boy Least Likely To, Evangelicals, Annuals, Crystal Antlers, Art Brut, Battles, Comets on Fire, Castanets, Unicorns…all discs I apparently once purchased or kept as promos based on Pitchfork raves and may have convinced myself I enjoyed, but could not name a single song from today. (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah seems to occupy a middle space, subsisting on the nostalgia circuit and touring endlessly to perform its lauded debut album in full after subsequent releases failed to connect.)

Which category will claim Cindy Lee? They were on tour when Diamond Jubilee appeared, then canceled all remaining dates soon after its release, owing apparently to all the stress that the sudden attention created. Either way, it is telling that Pitchfork eventually named Diamond Jubilee its No. 1 album of 2024, over several more obvious choices. Pitchfork itself made Diamond Jubilee the indie-rock story of the year, so naturally it’s going to claim it. This is Pitchfork saying, “Remember all those records you only heard about because of us? We’re still here, bitches.”

Except only sort of. I’ve never been sure how to correctly use the term “exception that proves the rule.” Is it appropriate here? Seems to be. Back in Pitchfork’s heyday, there would be about 15-20 Diamond Jubilees per year. Today it exists as a singular curiosity that feels special mainly because of everything around it that has changed. The album’s absence from typical distribution channels created a space for an institutional tastemaker to step in and shepherd listeners toward their exciting new find, then bask in the credit for having done so. In order for this to occur in today’s creative economy, more artists would need to leave already-scarce income opportunities on the table. And that seems as unlikely as stumbling into one of these nether-dimensions we’ve imagined where the refractory brilliance of Diamond Jubilee serves as the world’s pop-music soundtrack.