The Pitchfork 500

The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 2008) is Pitchfork’s alternate history of popular music, selecting 500 songs from 1977–2006 across indie rock, hip-hop, electronic, pop, metal, and experimental scenes. Organized chronologically into nine mini-eras with scene-setting intros and sidebars, it aims to chart how key tracks shifted the culture outside the usual classic-rock canon. Edited by Ryan Schreiber and Scott Plagenhoef and written by a bench of Pitchfork critics (reported as 42), it’s a staff-curated, narrative guide rather than a ranked, vote-tallied poll.