I’ve been rereading Questionable Content lately (don’t judge). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a webcomic set in Northampton, Massachusetts, chronicling the lives of a bunch of twenty-somethings who have complicated dating lives and way too many opinions about music. When I was a high schooler in 2005 with way too many opinions about music, it was basically catnip.

One of the early strips makes the joking assertion that a band’s quality is inversely proportional to the number of people who’ve heard of them. It logically follows, says a character, that a band no one has ever heard of must be the greatest band there ever was. You can probably see where this is going.

For this week’s signment, I created an ode to the hipster mecca that is Pitchfork Media, which is a little too easy to mimic. As a literal site of authority about a particular scene, it has its own vocabulary and grammar. And so I present to you @PitchforkBot, which automatically produces album reviews for imaginary bands every two hours.

The syntax is pretty straightforward. It’s (band name), (album name): (score). (Critical statement) from this (adjective) (genre) (synonym for band). Best track: “(Track)”

To fill in the blanks, I ended up making a spreadsheet that looks like this.

As you can see, the band names are actually combinations of existing band names, both within and without the ~hipster~ category. The inclusion of Das Racist is probably going to wreak some interesting havoc. (“Noah & the Racist,” anyone?) The album names were randomly generated from, well, a random word generator; the ratings are random; the genres were pulled from Wikipedia and the adjectives from Pitchfork itself. And the songs, of course, are mostly real songs, though there are a few books in there too, and a phrase or two that I made up. It looks just random enough to maybe actually be real – those youths and their loud music.

I made the Pitchfork bot in part because I have a lot of nostalgia for the time in my life when genre distinctions were the most important thing in the world, and partly because I think that the vocabulary of a self-defined subgroup is really interesting. There’s a way to write about bands, a way to name those bands, a way to authenticate your appreciation of those bands. It’s scripted. So I scripted it.

I’m always looking for more words, so shoot me a few if you like. Especially if they aren’t, like, TOTALLY played-out right now, man.