Has a restaurant critic ever actually sunk a restaurant?
It's such a common sitcom trope, but it's so weird.
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But if it's like, a normal moderately-fancy restaurant, it does seem a bit far-fetched. I'd imagine bad yelp reviews would be more of an issue than professional critics these days, for most places.
has a music critic ever actually sunk an artist/album?
has a game critic ever actually sunk a game?
has a ship critic ever actually sunk a ship?
[Ronald McDonald drives a car speedily, while the camera is affixed to the car and focuses on Ronald McDonald, who looks at the camera, and says "lol, #gamergate". Max Coveri's "Running in the 90s" plays.]
Dahlen is the author of one of Pitchfork's most memorable – and notorious – reviews. In a September 2004 write-up of Travistan, the solo debut of Travis Morrison (former frontman of the Pitchfork-approved art-punk group the Dismemberment Plan), Dahlen gave the album a score of 0.0, declaring that it "fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place."
According to Josh Rosenfeld, the cofounder of Barsuk Records (which released Travistan), the effects of Dahlen's review were immediate and disastrous. Several college radio stations that had initially been enthusiastic said they wouldn't play it. "One indie record store even said that they wouldn't carry it because of the Pitchfork review," Rosenfeld says. "Not because they heard it – because of the review."
Dahlen says the review wasn't intended as a display of Pitchfork's might or an attempt to take a once-beloved musician down a peg or two. "It really was me driving home from Pennsylvania for eight hours," he says, "listening to this again and again, just sitting there like, 'This is relentlessly bad.'"
Two years after the furor ignited by the Travistan write-up, the site has become more careful about doling out such brutal reviews, says Pitchfork's managing editor, Scott Plagenhoef. When Pitchfork reviewers took on Morrison, he says, they were no longer "little guys on the Internet throwing rocks at big artists" – they were picking on one of their own. Though Plagenhoef says the site has to be more cautious about the power it wields, he still downplays Pitchfork's ability to make or break new bands. "We probably accelerate the process," he concedes. "But people will like what they're going to like regardless of how they found out about it."
He isn't the only one who's skeptical about the idea of a "Pitchfork effect." So are some of the bands that have received raves from the site. "Putting too much weight in somebody else's opinion of a piece of art, that is a dangerous thing," says Richard Reed Parry, a musician for Arcade Fire, whose album Funeral received a rapturous 9.7 rating from the site. "It's just a reaction. It's the last piece of the cultural puzzle, not the most important part."
Still, it isn't hard to find evidence of the impact that Pitchfork has on music journalism. In the record-review formula used by the aggregator site Metacritic.com, which calculates a weighted score drawn from nearly 50 different publications, a review from Pitchfork is given as much weight as a review from Rolling Stone.
http://www.wired.com/2006/09/pitchfork/
In fact, I was about to mention Travistan, but I forgot the title and the musician in question somehow.
^ This is also true.
But I do know that they're near-pointless when it comes to videogames. The whole score aggregation thing turns out to be really stupid, and at best only serves as a way to encourage people to read the text of the reviews. At worst it passes judgement on games using a bunch of arbitrary and artifact-introducing calculations that themselves use a biased selection of reviews.