Travis-ty or Something Else: Revisiting Pitchfork’s Most Infamous 0.0 Rating

During its long and vaunted history, the music website/indie tastemaking farm known as Pitchfork has done its fair share of tossing its now quite substantial weight around to influence its loyal readers to purchase albums, attend shows, and climb aboard the buzz express of certain artists and bands. The rise of acts like Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Crystal Castles directly coincided with gushing reviews and ceaseless coverage on the site. This symbiotic existence often makes it difficult to discern whether Pitchfork creates the initial buzz for such artists or whether the site merely rides the waves of growing external popularity. Whatever the case, Pitchfork possesses a great deal of power, which it wields primarily by way of its wordy album reviews, but more precisely by the numeric ratings that accompany each review. Albums, five of which are usually reviewed each week day, can receive anywhere from a 0.0 to a 10.0. Records that reach somewhere above the 8.4 mark receive a coveted “Best New Music” label (though this cut-off point seems rather malleable). Many of the albums that are reviewed, by virtue of the fact that the site selects ones that its readers will care about in the first place (which does include the Taylor Swifts of the world), end up getting relatively favorable scores. It is a rare event to see an album receive a score greater than 9.0, but equally as rare to see a score below 4.0.

As of this writing, Pitchfork has bestowed perfect 10.0 ratings on 12 albums upon their initial release—not counting dozens of others that have received the score after being reissued. Because of Pitchfork’s sway over the indie world, these so-rated albums may be recognized as being part of a pantheon of ‘indie’ music classics (at least until at some point later, slight revisionism occurs: see …And You Will Knows By the Trail of Dead’s Source Tags & Codes, which received a 10.0 upon release in 2002, but barely made the top 100 on Pitchfork’s best albums of the decade seven years later). On the other side of the coin that brings indie fame and notoriety is the dreaded 0.0 score, of which the site has doled out 12. This rating, from pretty much any angle, indicates that the album is worthless. It also alerts readers that the world may somehow be worse off just by the mere fact that the album exists in recorded form. This is harsh, to be sure, but the rarity with which this horrific score is handed out and the care with which the site ostensibly evaluates albums, this valueless rating must mean something. Most of the zeros-point-zeros have been awarded to albums that Pitchfork would not be expected to review at all—including two KISS albums, Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Greatest Hits,” and a Jet record (one that arguably got a 0.0, but no actual digits were present on the page— just a video of a monkey urinating into its own mouth). One can safely assume Gene Simmons and the guys in BTO were none too bothered by a severely negative rating by some indie music website, so the impact of these 0.0’s is quite negligible. Other 0.0’s were given to artists Pitchfork has at times adored (and even given perfect 10.0’s to), but were so far along in well-respected careers, the scores really wouldn’t have had much of an impact on their legacy or ability to sell albums in the future (see Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Robert Pollard).

After sorting through these other worthless records, we arrive a little review penned by Chris Dahlen, dated September 27, 2004, in which the album Travistan by Travis Morrison receives the dreaded mark of the beast and, in a flash, Morrison’s career as an independent artist immediately crumbles. Radio stations won’t play his music. Fans stop attending his shows. Record stores refuse to carry the album. (NB: While there weren’t many glowing reviews for the record out there, critics like Robert Christgau and sites like AllMusic did give the album at least decent marks). I understand this may all seem quite insignificant. Who is Travis Morrison anyway? Well, readers of Pitchfork in the early 2000s would have been quite familiar with the band Morrison fronted from the mid-1990s until 2003, The Dismemberment Plan. Pitchfork appeared to be staunchly in the D.C. band’s corner by the time the curtain closed on The Plan’s existence (though they have since reunited). The site gave the band’s final studio album, 2001’s Change, an 8.6, and the reissue of that album’s predecessor, Emergency & I, got the high holy honor of a perfect 10.0. So, when the Plan disbanded and Morrison struck out on his own, most indications—without even hearing the music—pointed to at worst a neutral review, buoyed by the fact that this was Travis Morrison and Pitchfork loved his old band. Surely Morrison had obtained enough good will over his career to avoid a rating worse than death.

Morrison was given no free pass. Aside from the stark “0.0” looming over the review page, the reviewer said this of the record: “Travistan fails so bizarrely that it’s hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place” and “Throughout the record, Morrison seems dead set on sabotaging the music’s few positive attributes with fatal dorkisms and a surprisingly dad-like sense of humor.” Call me anything, man, but whatever you do, don’t make it “dad-like.” The review sent shockwaves of sorts through the indiesphere that ultimately sabotaged any chance the album had for moderate commercial success. Morrison’s record label said the review’s effects were “immediate and disastrous.” Morrison himself said that fans’ view of him changed almost instantly due to the review. He later told the Washington Post that he felt Pitchfork was trying to “take him down a peg.” What many felt could have been a fruitful and productive career as a solo artist was pretty much over before it even began. The effects of the review were so far-reaching that in 2006, a Pitchfork managing editor told Wired Magazine that after Travistan, the site was making an effort to be “more careful about doling out such brutal reviews.”

But now, some eight years since the bomb went off, how does Travistan hold up? Does it still carry the fetid stench of that 0.0? Though I’ve long been a fan of the Dismemberment Plan (and saw them play live just a couple of weeks ago), I had totally and completely avoided Morrison’s solo album like the plague since it was first released. I didn’t want a genuinely horrible record to somehow color the way I viewed the band’s previous material. Yet I also have a morbid fascination with things that are considered objectively bad. So, after many years of delaying, I put my fears aside and listened. And while the album was not one I would recommend to a friend I actually liked, or turn on at a party unless I wanted everyone to flee for the exits, I didn’t turn to dust or stone once the soundwaves reached my ear canal. But for someone desperately waiting for a conclusion to the “ellipsis in sound” of the album closer “Ellen and Ben” from the final Plan album Change, I was sorely disappointed. And that perhaps is the whole issue. When you have lofty expectations for how something should sound and then the music goes in an entirely different direction, you’re naturally going to judge more harshly than you would had you no preconceived notion of what it should be like in the first place. So it is almost impossible, as someone who has heard Morrison’s prior work, to not yearn for something in the same vein as later Dismemberment Plan material. Travistan is decidedly not that. But I have tried, upon multiple listens, to divorce my expectations from what the album really is as a stand-alone creation independent of any precedent. Unfortunately, even after this effort, the record still sounds pretty dreadful.

The biggest problem with Travistan, which Dahlen mentions in his Pitchfork review, is the head-scratchingly dopey Schoolhouse Rock-esque interludes in which the presidents on various pieces of American coinage sing from their own perspective about wanting to be removed from said coinage. There are four of these on the album and if they sound like a terrible joke, they play out much, much worse in reality. They are silly and pointless. The rest of the album is all over the place thematically, as we cover zoo animals on “Song for the Orca,” the story in which Travis gets the snot beat out of him on “My Two Front Teeth, Parts 2 and 3,” the harsh reality of death on “People Die,” and modern political discourse on “Che Guevara Poster.” There is no apparent cohesion in these ideas, which makes one wonder why they are all here.  And the lyrics—the lyrics! They are almost completely groan-inducing and lame. For example, on “Born in ’72,” we get: “I'm born as male as can be/Well, I'm still more important than she/My friend got passed over for a raise/And she said she thought she'd sue for days.” And, honestly, it gets worse, but I’ll spare you.

The album reeks of someone trying too hard, yet seemingly not trying hard enough. That’s a symptom that shows up all over the album, in just about every song. We delve into a really heavy concept and then just dance around it until the time runs out, and the listener is left wondering what the purpose of even having bothered to write the song is. Yet, in spite of baffling rhymes, trite lyrics, and herculean efforts to sound ‘unique,’ there are moments on the album that approach ‘good’ And while these moments are rare and never hold a majority in any one of the songs here, they do exist and give the album some—albeit miniscule—value. Surely, the oddly listenable chorus on “People Die” or the sweet near decentness of “Angry Angel” must place this album somewhere north of ‘devoid of any worth whatsoever.’

Let me be clear: this is not a good album. I have now listened three times all the way through and I don’t anticipate putting myself through that ordeal once more. But how bad is it? I feel like a real 0.0-worthy record would have to be far worse than this one. There are a few stretches of a few songs that sound kind of interesting and, I admit, got my toe tapping. I figure an album that is one of the worst of all time would have to be unlistenably offensive musically and lyrically from the first note all the way until silence returns again. I am no Pitchfork reviewer, but surely this album couldn’t have gotten much lower than a 2.2.

I wish I could say I learned something from this experience, but just as my penchant for watching late era Eddie Murphy films (Norbit!) leaves me feeling nothing but dumb and empty, I don’t believe I gained much from thrice listening to Travistan. Though, I’d advise anyone who is curious to check it out to go ahead and do so, and decide for yourself what you think of it. We all see (and hear) things differently. I hope someone somewhere out there falls completely in love with this album and blasts it loudly from their car on warm spring days. But please, for the love of God, don’t do it while I’m around.