Back to the ’90s, Tootling a Flute (Published 2011) (2024)

CHICAGO — I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?

Flute.

That’s poppyco*ck, you’re probably thinking. There’s no way that forward-thinking bands of the sort that played the Pitchfork Music Festival would ever consider introducing an instrument so prim, so saccharine, so shrill into their music. Didn’t New Age kill off the flute? Or Jethro Tull?

And yet there it was, twice, during performances by the purposefully and precisely schlocky soft-rock revivalists Destroyer and the angelically pleasant and soulless Fleet Foxes. It wasn’t much more than an accent piece, but possibly it augured things to come. In an era of voracious music makers everything old or tacky or obscure will be made new again.

These life cycles are played out in real time on Pitchfork, the music news and criticism Web site that, since it was established in 1995, has been a committed outlet for indie rock and its many tributaries, real and imagined. The Pitchfork Music Festival, which has been held in Union Park here each summer since 2006, is part of the site’s continuing quest to document and capitalize on artists looking for the next history to reclaim, and also a decent roundup of those acts from generations past: sometimes influencer and influenced perform just hours apart.

The 45 acts spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday only partly encapsulated the Web site’s taste, or the movements more broadly in the music world. But several individual acts told bigger stories. Animal Collective, the Friday night headliner, performed on a stage decorated like a huge Etsy sale, with cloudlike stalactites and crustaceanlike cutouts hanging from the sky.

Its show was alternately psychedelic and straightforward, and sometimes majestic, a wonder of accrued small details filling up the air. Whether it wants it or not, Animal Collective could have a long afterlife on the jam band circuit; same goes for the festival performers Battles and Gang Gang Dance, acts that stretch their songs out past melodic relevance into rhythmic trance.

TV on the Radio, the Sunday night headliner, has inadvertently become the most exciting funk band of our time, and its show was searing, a precise collection of art-soul songs by a band that’s happy to appear sloppy from a distance but knows exactly how all its parts are moving.

Trombone was important to TV on the Radio’s set — another unlikely instrument, in the context of the weekend, but seemingly more of an isolated case than the emergent flute infestation. The flutemongers here were among the more adult-contemporary acts on offer. But still, maybe flute will become the new saxophone, which just two years ago was an outcast instrument but is now used in Lady Gaga songs and was deployed by at least four bands here. Sax has become the new cowbell, and there was some vestigial cowbell here too, in Cut Copy’s wildly popular, overlong set of slack-muscled almost-disco almost-rock.

More interesting than instrument revivals were other budding strategies. Connoisseur hip-hop was well received here — from the South there was Currensy, whose weed rhymes were more lucid than usual, and the excellent G-Side, a duo that delivered one of the festival’s high points with a crisp performance that bridged the space between moralist gangsta rap and spacey soul and gospel.

Mylan Cannon/The New York Times

She was one of a few artists who embraced the dark side here. Others included the morbid and clean-cut Sun Airway; Gatekeeper, with its brooding ‘80s-influenced club music; and Cold Cave, dressed in all black and playing fluent Depeche Mode-isms, for what appeared to be a site-specific art piece as much as a concert.

The clouds hanging over those bands were tempered by strong rays of light and soft rock: Destroyer; the refreshing, beach-minded Woods; the slick electro-yacht rock of Toro Y Moi; even James Blake, the mannered post-dubstep producer, whose songs sounded huge but were harmless. The least thoughtful of this group, surprisingly, was Thurston Moore, who missed the opportunity to slash through the humidity with some of his signature scraping noise, instead going with a head-scratching lite-folk set that featured a harpist who was not Joanna Newsom.

Of the elder statesmen he fared the worst here; Guided by Voices stuck to its bruising singalongs and did just fine, and the hardcore supergroup Off! was stellar, one 75-second squall at a time.

The festival even hosts artists who have taken swipes at the Web site. Tyler, the Creator, of Odd Future (full name: Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All), throws barbs at the Web site in “Yonkers”: “Oh, not again, another critic writing report/I’m stabbing any blogging” — here is a slur for emphasis — “hipster with a pitchfork.” Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan missed an opportunity for style and comedy by not wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with 0.0, the score his 2004 solo album, “Travistan,” was awarded by the site.

That the festival welcomed him back into its embrace, and he accepted, was notable, but it also recalled a time when more was at stake for the sorts of artists Pitchfork covered. Pitchfork reviews albums on a 0.0 to 10.0 scale — well, mostly on a 6.5 to 8.5 scale. A decade ago it was often the loudest voice weighing in on small acts. Now even small releases get a chorus of replies. But in changing the game Pitchfork helped create its own ecosystem of stars, making the idea of being indie, whatever that might mean, less of a frightening, tenuous, risky thing.

It also means that these artists grow up faster than they might have in an earlier time, as was seen in some performers here. The Dadaist jokesters Das Racist began, effectively, as a commentary on hip-hop groups; at a Friday performance the group showed off its evolution into being just a rap group, and a good one. Less than a year ago How to Dress Well (a k a Tom Krell) was making oodles of no-fi home recordings that took ’90s R&B and fed it Percocet. Here he’d bulked up, performing with a small string section that added its whine to his own.

This year’s festival heralded the arrival of the 1990s as the loudest influence on young musicians. Here, there was the progressive hip-hop of that era. Shabazz Palaces, the new project of Ishmael Butler, late of Digable Planets, played elegant, spare songs that bridged the digital and the organic. DJ Shadow, whose light show was spoiled by that other light show, the sun, was initially visible only on a large overhead screen, displaying video of him inside a huge onstage orb D.J.-ing a set that spanned hip-hop, trip-hop and funk.

And Sunday featured an implicit faceoff between a pair of pitch-perfect and affecting re-enactors of early ’90s indie rock: Superchunk, the recently reassembled masters of the era, whose set seamlessly blended songs from its early years with ones from its recent comeback record, and Yuck, a fantastic British band that began releasing songs just last year, as if unearthing them from a vault locked for 20 years.

Finally the festival was home to another 1990s revival: the culture war around offensive hip-hop lyrics. During the festival an anti-domestic-violence group called Between Friends handed out thousands of fans that read, “Cool It: Don’t Be a Fan of Violence,” a response to the booking of the snarling Los Angeles group Odd Future.

Early on Sunday some members of Odd Future brought cupcakes to the protesters’ information booth, but soon after the group delivered what was easily the weekend’s rowdiest and most vitriolic performance: stage diving (including Tyler, the Creator, in a leg cast); smashed microphone stands and other fixtures; deeply scarred lyrics about rape, family neglect and mayhem. There were pieces of the Beastie Boys, MF Doom, the Sex Pistols and more in its act, and yet it felt like something new, in no one’s shadow.