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

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.

you are [...] 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

i never said that. i suspect that in the long run, if criticism weren't such a boy's club, then yeah, the demographics of what gets covered and praised would probably shift. but i see the boy's clubbishness as a problem in itself, maybe even problem #1. like if your magazine or website regularly employs 20 critics and only 3 or 4 of them are women, then your hiring practices are completely fucked. it's evidence of massive bias.

even if the excuse is that the people interested in writing crit are mostly men, i think those doing the hiring have an obligation to do what it takes to get past that.

There are many professions with gender imbalances: engineering and nursing are two examples. Is this necessarily evidence of massive hiring bias in each case? (I don't know the situation in music journalism itself tbh.)

in engineering it's because engineering educational programs are overwhelmingly dominated by men. (because women don't like math, iirc)

You can only hire from the pool that applies. How you alter that pool is a more difficult question, I think.

recruitment issues stemming from entrenched social biases

http://www.good.is/post/a-byline-count-for-the-next-generation-how-diverse-are-the-blogs-and-magazines-most-millennials-read/

If you're like us, you think of pioneering indie music website Pitchfork as an emporium for alterna-bros. We're wrong. On a week-to-week basis, the website publishes an impressive number of female bylines—in our count, 59 percent of Pitchfork's top-level content was written by women—even though its editorial staff leans heavily on male names. Next stop: SPIN.

woops, should have deleted the "next stop: SPIN" which refers to the next graphic in the gallery

It actually doesn't, though -- the next slide is McSweeney's.

ha i just assumed! weird

i think there is bias in both engineering and nursing. not just hiring bias, but bias in the culture that produces engineers and nurses. same applies to crit. but i'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that engineering and nursing are different from music criticism in a key way: they depend on the correct application of a very precise and technical skillset. crit doesn't. you just have to write and think well, and be interested in the subject. i'm gonna go out on another limb and suggest that there are TONS of smart women out there who love music and could write well about it. i bet that if pitchfork put up an ad on their site saying that they're interested in hearing from women who'd like to write crit for them, they'd receive a massive, massive flood of applications - and that among them, there'd be at least a few good ones. if any similar organization really wanted to hire more female critics, it could do so in a heartbeat.

If you're like us, you think of pioneering indie music website Pitchfork as an emporium for alterna-bros. We're wrong. On a week-to-week basis, the website publishes an impressive number of female bylines—in our count, 59 percent of Pitchfork's top-level content was written by women—even though its editorial staff leans heavily on male names. Next stop: SPIN.

― da croupier, Thursday, August 23, 2012 1:38 PM (8 minutes ago)

by my count, 33 of the last 200 reviews published on the p4k site were written by men. about 16%. if it's true that 59% of their "top-line content" was written by women, it only makes their reservation of critical arbitration as dudespace all the more strange.

Fair point, although, if da croupier's source is to be believed, they are already employing a large percentage of women.

xpost!

hold on folks, we're just about to hit critical dudespace

Isn't that the name of an Umphrey Mcgee cover band?

corrections dept.

33 of the last 200 reviews published on p4k were written by women. about 16%.

and 11% voted in the poll

11% of less than 1% of the normal readership right?

a friend:
had a fun thing happen on twitter where I said "lol you know how you know that pitchfork list is garbage? clap your hands say yeah is like number 6 and nick cave and sleater-kinney aren't on it at all."

and one of the members of clap your hands say yeah actually responded to me saying "I'm IN the band and I agree"

Couldn't help but notice the yearly results between 1996 and 2006 are mostly packed with awesome records that I listen to on the regular, whereas the results between 2007 to the present are chock full of bullshit.

it is kind of remarkable how much acts who peaked post-'95 that would ordinarily be considered indie royalty like Sleater-Kinney and Tortoise didn't make the list, really illustrates the generation gap.

wow. yeah thats crazy

was there a list of 30+ voters only?

yeah there's a bunch of lists for 31-35, 36-40, etc

ok cool i will go have a look then

Would anyone have fun with doing a 15 years prior list?

It seems to me that the list just shows how much influence Pitchfork has over its readers. Their favorite albums and Pitchfork's favorite albums are nearly one in the same.

Pitchfork's are actually more interesting.

both of you otm