Is Pitchfork racist?

Nobody tell Lupe or the black Muslim heroin ring he works for, but I'm broadcasting today live from the Chi. I came up here this weekend to check out the Pitchfork Music Festival, and I'm not leaving until later on this evening. I only make enough money to travel on the back of a flatbed truck with a buncha Mexicans, and it doesn't get here until sundown. So, for the sake of not having to think too hard here on the lobby of the Y, where teh ghey-looking foreign dudes keep coming up to me asking me which wireless network I'm using (hopefully that's not some sort of signal for copping a blowski in a public restroom), I figured I'd regale you fruits with a few of my observations from the festival.

First of all, I'd like to address something that just occurred to me while I was working on a post about how Gucci Mane might be able to score with some smoking hot white chicks, if he hasn't already been locked up again. Why is it that Pitchfork stays reviewing albums by LCD rappers, but then when you got to the festival, it's MF Doom and Pharoahe Monch, who were this weekends token hip-hop acts - Doom on Saturday and Monch on Sunday?

I'd have to check, but I think this year's fest might have had less hip-hop than ever. A couple of years ago, I saw the Clipse there, and granted all of their songs about selling cocaine (which, it turns out, they weren't lying about), but I'm convinced there isn't a single black person in this country who's really into the Clipse. Otherwise, all of the rap acts I've seen at P-fork have been in a similar vein as the ones I saw this weekend.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why is that the festival relies heavily on corporate advertising, and they don't want too many black people to show up. If the rap acts featured at the festival were an accurate reflection of the rap acts featured on the site, that shit would look like Freaknik, and these TIs aren't about to pay any money just to advertise to black people. As I mentioned in my post the other day about the late, great Vibe magazine, a lot of black people are either on welfare, where you can only buy certain brands of food anyway, or they used to be on welfare, and so they're still really into Tropicana orange juice and what have you.

The way advertising works is they try to focus on people who haven't made their minds up about what brands they prefer. To use an example, that's why NBC isn't sweating the fact that David Letterman is drawing a bigger audience than Conan O'Brien, who recently took over for Jay Leno. They figure Conan can still draw a lot of people in that coveted 25-34 demographic, which is where you can charge the highest rates. Similarly, this is why advertising dwindled at Vibe magazine, when they started employing a lot of salty black chicks with Lauryn Hill-like views on race. I wasn't surprised in the least bit when I read, earlier this year, that the only ads they sold for the March issue were for Luster's Pink Oil Moisturizer and the US Army.

Pitchfork is probably feeling the recession as much as everyone else, even though they're popular amongst cracka-ass crackas. They're still a music publication, and people weren't spending very much money on music even before the economy fell to shit. Committed hater that I am, I check their site religiously, and I notice they ran a lot of ads for their own festival, which obviously didn't pay shit, even after it sold out. This weekend, I noticed they only had about half as many porta potties as they used to, and they must have let way more people in. There were so many people there, you could hardly move from one stage to another, or to the concession stands to pay $3 for some motherfucking corn on the cob.

As a matter of fact, I may have personally led them to order more porta potties for the second full day of the festival. Saturday, I mentioned on my Twitter that I had to spend like an hour in line just to take a piss in one of the eight porta potties in the park, and that some Woodstock '99-style violence might jump off as a result. It's a good thing my bladder is about twice the size of most people's, from all of the light beer that I drink. As was the case at my generation's Woodstock, it was mostly women hogging up the porta potties, taking a nap in there or whatever they were doing. Then they wanted to act all surprised when someone shoved his hand inside Courtney Love while she was trying to stage dive. If they want to be treated the same as men, they need to spend less time in the can.

But I digress. Anypiss, I woke up the next day, and I stumbled on a story by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim Derogatis, the same guy who got shot at by R. Kelly for leaking that watersports tape, in which he asked someone from P-fork about them letting way too many people in this year and only having eight porta potties on the premises. He even went so far as to reference Woodstock '99, though he stopped short of mentioning what happened to Courtney Love, which I took as a sign that he must have read my Twitter, but who knows? Maybe it was just that obvious to him, even from the VIP section. Of course P-fork tried to cop a plea on both counts. I guess they figured it's not like anyone could go through and count the number of hipsters per Johnny on the Spot and compare it to past years.

Speaking of the VIP section, of course I couldn't get in, but I could kinda see back there, and I didn't see any black people. Shocker! I didn't bother this year, but I've tried on a couple of different occasions to get press credentials both by myself and on behalf of XXL (my bad, XXL), and those fuckers wouldn't even return my emails. I figured my site and XXL might not be prestigious enough media outlets, despite all of the stories we've been doing on Fabolous, but then I saw a white guy walking around in a HipHopDX shirt and I realized what was going on.