The Pitchfork People's List - top albums 1996-2012

i don't think the tendency of male writers and fans to latch onto and elevate male artists is the key issue here. the preponderance of male viewpoints in music criticism is a much bigger problem, imo. if we say that male writers have an obligation to balance the scales by publicly liking more female musicians, then we leave all power in the hands of male writers. that's fucked.

thing about radiohead as a negative example is that their ubiquity really does threaten to make them seem boring. constant critical celebration and a rabid fanbase have turned them into an exemplar of something irritating. this isn't their fault, of course.

Ok, so why don't women want to write about music? Obviously that's a massive question, and we already know the answer; because they're made to feel that their contribution to the discourse isn't valued, essentially.

well that's that figured out, on to ending world hunger

i'm all for giving critics a hard time for their tunnel vision, but the idea of putting an obligation on anyone, critic or otherwise, to like things for the sake of "balancing the scales" makes me uneasy. lots of women make amazing brilliant music, that is often not given due recognition. bringing light to that issue should not take on the tone of homework or affirmative action. (xpost)

Why shouldn't it? Serious question.

Why shouldn't it? Serious question.

Well, who's gonna be in charge of maintaining charts to make sure that 50% of the artists covered in each issue of whatever music magazines still exist, or on whatever music site we're worrying about - whether it's Pitchfork or some other - are female, or that a proper percentage are non-white (or hell, maybe we could reverse engineer it by saying no more than 20% of artists covered can be white males), etc., etc.? How is this to be implemented?

I dunno, ime turning people onto music always seemed to be more effective and enjoyable for all involved when it came from a place of "this is great, check this out" and not "shame on you that you haven't already checked this out for what I assume are reasons of ugly prejudice" (xpost)

You don't frame it like that, though, if you're any good at it. Yo make sure the things you're saying are great and people should check out are from a wider base.

women still mostly shut out of the power epicenter that is music criticism in 2012

Well, who's gonna be in charge of maintaining charts to make sure that 50% of the artists covered in each issue of whatever music magazines still exist, or on whatever music site we're worrying about - whether it's Pitchfork or some other - are female, or that a proper percentage are non-white (or hell, maybe we could reverse engineer it by saying no more than 20% of artists covered can be white males), etc., etc.? How is this to be implemented?

This seems to me to be the definition of what the editorial voice of an organization could do. What exactly do editors do if not manage the content of their publications?

I dunno, ime turning people onto music always seemed to be more effective and enjoyable for all involved when it came from a place of "this is great, check this out" and not "shame on you that you haven't already checked this out for what I assume are reasons of ugly prejudice"

The conflation of critics with "ordinary folks just talkin' baout music" is somewhat disingenuous; if your job is to cover/report on music, it's not entirely unreasonable for the expectation to be that you are looking at the wider demographic of musicians rather than just following the "oh hey this is cool" rabbit trail. It's akin to saying a occasional software hobbyist and a professional software engineer should be held to the same standards of rigor in their work and background, and that that level should be the software hobbyist's level.

I honestly think a lot of arguments on here come down to the old objective/subjective argument. This one also has some nasty political correctness thrown in.
I'm sure this has been pointed out before, here's the list the girls/women voted for:

1.Radiohead OK Computer
2.Arcade Fire Funeral
3.Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
4.Radiohead Kid A
5.The Strokes Is This It
6.The xx The xx
7.Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago
8.Radiohead In Rainbows
9.Arcade Fire The Suburbs
10.Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion
11.Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
12.Sufjan Stevens Illinois
13.Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes
14.The White Stripes Elephant
15.Grizzly Bear Veckatimest
16.Interpol Turn On the Bright Lights
17.Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever to Tell
18.The Postal Service Give Up
19.Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend
20.Arcade Fire Neon Bible

the music industry would not exist, if it weren't for girls loving male artists.
99.999% of the people who love music are not politically correct males who think their taste is objective.

women still mostly shut out of the power epicenter that is music criticism in 2012

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2), Thursday, August 23, 2012 11:59 AM

this reads as "lol, music criticism" snark, but it's absolutely true, and critics have a great deal of cultural power

It's akin to saying a occasional software hobbyist and a professional software engineer should be held to the same standards of rigor in their work and background, and that that level should be the software hobbyist's level.

i don't disagree but I'll note that the income of your average rock critic helps explain why they often show the effort level of a hobbyist.

this reads as "lol, music criticism" snark, but it's absolutely true, and critics have a great deal of cultural power

Could you expand? I'm not in the field but it does not seem obvious to me that music critics have a great deal of cultural power.

here's the list the girls/women voted for

well, it's the list of artists that female pitchfork readers voted for, skewed by the mechanics of the voting process. possibly skewed further by pitchfork's editorial slant. i mean, if they really do promote a vision of "artistic quality" that consistently elevates male artists and marginalizes women, then you'd expect their readership to share this attitude to some extent, even their female readership.

The conflation of critics with "ordinary folks just talkin' baout music" is somewhat disingenuous; if your job is to cover/report on music, it's not entirely unreasonable for the expectation to be that you are looking at the wider demographic of musicians rather than just following the "oh hey this is cool" rabbit trail. It's akin to saying a occasional software hobbyist and a professional software engineer should be held to the same standards of rigor in their work and background, and that that level should be the software hobbyist's level.

― Lil Swayne of Pie (DJP), Thursday, August 23, 2012 3:02 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

well it's not conflation so much that, y'know, critics are just music fans first and you listen to a lot of stuff besides what you cover so you can't really address one without the other. but i mean, i probably had a much more heavily male-oriented music collection before i started covering the live beat in Baltimore, not out of any sense of equality but because by far the majority of the best bands here have female members, which was one of the things that made my listening habits a little closer to equal, gender-wise. i guess it's silly or idealist to think that other people could take such a path and kind of end up with more diverse interests as a happy accident, though.

your clarification about editors managing the balance in what they publish, though, i agree with that much more -- i kind of feel it's more an editor's job to figure out that stuff and let writers listen to and pitch whatever they're passionate about, whether those writers are super open-minded or just have a niche they excel in.

i mean i published a rant a while back bitching about "women in rock" type coverage of female musicians that linked to/drew heavily on things maura has written about the topic, and her attitude toward that kind of thing, while passionately covering female musicians in a way that never ever feels like meeting a quota, has been influential on how i've attempted, somewhat less confidently as a guy, to navigate that territory.

I'm not in the field but it does not seem obvious to me that music critics have a great deal of cultural power.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:09 PM (35 seconds ago)

the history of music - and especially of "importance" and "quality" in music - is written as much by criticism as by popular taste, marketing and other forces. this has long been true in all areas of the arts. perhaps it's less true in the contemporary world, where everything is logged, all voices are digitally empowered, and there's no real need for anyone to rescue anything from obscurity, but i think critics still have a great deal of power, both individually and as a class. pitchfork has been instrumental, i think, in mainstreaming indie music. it's not just that they happened to be in the pool when the water level was rising.

I do feel that, in a perfect world, music critics would be more in tune with the full breadth of musicians out there doing the types of things they're writing about, but my main point really was more about editorial "failure" (for lack of a better word; if anyone has something else with negative connotation that isn't quite as strong throw it out there) than anything else

there are few cultural trends I have found more depressing than the mainstreaming of indie music. indie rock is now basically the musical lexicon of commercials and movie trailers/sdtks and very little else

xp

nah every action movie trailer has a Kanye or Jay-Z song now. although that's obviously still in the PF ballpark.

This is like a fucking whack-a-mole. The way arguments you thought you had effectively countered 500 posts ago just come back up again and again.

1) "Because women vote for male artists, too, that means sexism/male privilege has nothing to do with it." RONG. If women are existing in the same culture which is supersaturated with male ideals, they pick up those biases, too.

2) "If we want to have more women artists covered, we have to get more women critics." RONG. More women critics would be a fantastic and good thing for many different reasons. But that thing where they get us in as tokens to cover "female music" so that men won't have to - that's worse than wrong. And it's part of that whole bullshit fallacy of "men listen to music, women listen to woman-music, black people listen to black-music, gay people listen to gay-people music and so long as everyone stays in their ghetto, there is no problem here." <- NO. This *is* the actual problem.

And it's really, really frustrating, when I am constantly on threads which get about 3 or 4 responses, going "check out Cooly G! check out Zavokoka! check out Deniz Kurtel!" ALL. THE. TIME. and it gets 0 attention - but when you finally lose your patience and go "for fucks sake, what IS IT with all these white dudes?" then there's a 1000 post clusterfuck. I rave about great artists, no one listens. I go "ENOUGH WITH THIS" and suddenly there's dudes complaining "well why don't you tell me about good music instead of shouting at me about the lack of women?" I have been! For about 12 years now! You just haven't been paying attention!

there was a time when critics in indie zines did not review releases by established indie bands unless that release sucked.
they reviewed good/great releases by unknown bands, to help get them exposure.
what is the point of 200 reviews of an animal collective, arcade fire, or kanye release.

If women are existing in the same culture which is supersaturated with male ideals, they pick up those biases, too.

I would be interested in what one or two of these male ideals might be?

No, what I meant and expressed clumsily is that the *ideal* or default in music and culture and everything is almost always portrayed as male.

Not that ideals have a gender.

please quote people whose statements you wish to respond to instead of writing your own versions in deceptive quotation marks, even if you're not strawmanning it kind of comes off that way

Fwiw, this thread 8 years ago dealt with some of the same issues as this one:

Feminists and Feminist Sympathizers Unite: A Bold Call for Pazz & Jop Activism

~~

^^^^tilde of facetiousness for some dude, because that is the only answer he deserves any more

if i don't deserve to be loosely paraphrased with the word "RONG" after it i'm fine with that.

Every single post on the internet is directed directly and solely at you, some dude. Every single one. Everybody in the world is paraphrasing you poorly, even when they are talking to other people.

i didn't say you were addressing me w/ those posts. i was hoping to figure out whose posts you were paraphrasing so i could go back and read them.

1) was nicky lo-fi and 2) was contenderizer

*tension breaking animated gif*

~~

^^^ DJP gets the tildes of awesomeness for reading comprehension!

thx djp

it's a long thread, i can't really easily recall whether i've read everything or when i read it or who said it

it helps that I'm killing time before I leave for the airport so I'm not actually doing anything important at work

lol u guyz read pitchforks

I cannot believe I am back on this thread when I said I was gonna answer some overdue emails tonight. :-(

I'm just going to leave this as a parting gift in the spirit of teh funnies and get back to it:

http://masonicboom.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/men-in-music.html

lol ilu

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m983jeO0FT1qb4lmho1_500.gif

lol

People who doubt the cultural influence of music criticism in 2012 are forgetting that Pitchfork singlehandedly got Brooklyn incorporated as its own city.

thanking you WCC

wk: lol

2) was contenderizer

― Lil Swayne of Pie (DJP), Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:40 PM

2 was WCC's characteristically dimwitted strawman version of something i didn't really say. my point is that pop criticism is still in many ways a boy's club. this is to my mind a bigger problem than what the boys are listening to. i get the impression that WCC disagrees.

you are making a distinction between two things that are hopelessly intertwined and inextricable and suggesting a separate-but-equal solution that assumes bringing in more women will automatically change the demographics of the artists being discussed

and I say that as someone who thinks more diversity of opinion is a good thing; the point is to actually focus on the opinion

there's a different issue to look at if you have a publication full of men writing about a gigantic spectrum of music that may not actually be a problem

(btw this is the real world so odds that it isn't a problem are super, super low, but you're kind of leaping over several steps and reaching for a panacea that glosses over the initial complaint)

you are making a distinction between two things that are hopelessly intertwined and inextricable and suggesting a separate-but-equal solution that assumes bringing in more women will automatically change the demographics of the artists being discussed

― Lil Swayne of Pie (DJP), Thursday, August 23, 2012 1:10 PM

no, i'm straight-up saying that pop crit is a boy's club, and that's fucked. i consider that a much bigger - and more pragmatically addressable - problem than disparities in what critics as a whole consider worthwhile. at the same time, i'm not denying that SWM critics should push themselves out of whatever SWM-favoring boxes they may have bought into.

and i'm not leaping for any kind of panacea. i'm just placing primary emphasis on hiring practices.