This chart shows shifts in the makeup of Pitchfork’s roster over time. Genre areas are stacked, not overlapped—with the exception of “Indie rock,” each begins at the top of the genre beneath it, not at zero. “Heavy music” includes metal as well as whatever Swans and Lightning Bolt are. “Experimental” and “Miscellaneous” might seem interchangeable, but DJ sets and comedy fall into the latter (along with the likes of Bjork and Yoko Ono). And of course the porous border between, say, indie rock and indie pop (or between garage and indie rock, et cetera) means that many artist classifications could’ve gone another way. On the plus side, though, this arbitrariness and imprecision kept the number of genre categories small enough for the chart to be readable. —Philip Montoro
