P2K: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1

these demands need to be a new thread

9 times out of 10, i agree with jon lewis--a writer's emotional connection to the music is uninteresting. of course, it depends on the writer, doesn't it?

Should Brent's Kid A review be brought up again?

hahahahahahahahahahaha it should ALWAYS be brought up

for better or for worse, it is one of the most memorable reviews I've ever read and it never fails to brighten my day

i have never seen a shooting star

Yeah, a good writer can do that no prob and not have it unbalance the review.

Anyway, obv writers in a low-paying high-volume forum have to learn in public to some extent, I'm sure most come to grips with these principles at some point.

xpost please refresh my memory!

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap.

some days I think this is the funniest sentence ever written

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax

the structural problems inherent in starting a review of Kid A with three paragraphs of your orgasmic experience of a live performance of "Pyramid Song", which doesn't even appear on the album and which you actually call "Egyptian Song"... Brent D, I kiss you

Qualities which one associates with wizard's caps: 'perfect' surely must be first, no?

xpost now I am v v frightened.

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.

that is fucking godawful

i for one miss the days of batshit crazy pfork reviews

i want to do a poll of the best parts of that coltrane one that is no longer in the archives

At times like this I refer everyone again to a particular Bloom County strip from 1987.

I imagine Brent reciting it with a braces induced lisp in front of his high school creative writing club.

Will happily accept Que's suggestion: 9 times out of 10, the deep emotions and personal life situation stuff has got to go. Really good writers can pull almost anything off. Framing conceits, loopy metaphors, easy comparisons to other music, life stories, whatever. And bad writers can't be saved. It's to the vast, gray midfield that I speak.

Hilarious opening line aside, "little crustaceans of worries" is the only non-horrid portion of that review Que posted.

And it oughtta be "worry".

http://twitter.com/BDicrescenzo

That review 'takes chances', I have to say that for it.

these two posts on the same page is kinda funny imo

bdicrescenzo

Why Fallon has already shockingly surpassed Conan in my mind: Yacht Rock party. Christopher Cross with the Roots. http://bit.ly/3U62sMabout 21 hours ago from web

How did new age music and smooth jazz get so popular with hipsters?11:52 AM Sep 30th from web

Gah why is my link not working.

Scratch that, it is. ANYWAY.

Ugh display name fail

aw

don't worry Jon - I also suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible poo

(with good reason)

Incomprehensible poi.

They poo incomprehensibility.

That was the Final Fantasy review.

wow that christopher cross/roots clip he linked to is pretty sweet tbh

Lets not forget: http://pitchfork.com/features/guest-lists/6044-david-cross-albums-to-listen-to-while-reading-overwrought-pitchfork-reviews/

Actually Forced Exposure reviews used to be pretty overwrought in their own special way back in the late 80s pigfuck era. "This record will chew off yr arm like a month-starved boar" etc etc

Byron Coley still does that sort of thing all the time, in the Wire at any rate

Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid). RATING: 8.2

lol "(also on acid)"

hurrah for excessively extravagant language, naked enthusiasm, blatant silliness and raving hyperbole... boo to critics taking themselves seriously.

louis?

B-but those things are usually encountered AS A CONSEQUENCE of critics taking themselves seriously.

I thought Coley generally pulled off the absurdist tough-guy metaphors in his FE writing. They only got to be a problem when other ppl started ripping em off (Your Flesh gang, etc). Then again, it's been a long time since I've read an old issue...

I'd love to read a bunch of those tbh

Ha!

# Who ever said Cobra and Phases is a bad Stereolab album? This record blows me away. 24 year old critics can be pretty stupid.2:36 PM Oct 2nd from web

That's one of my favorite batshit Brent D. reviews, even though I like the record.

I think a critic's job is to place a particular album/artist in its social/political/economic/gender context for the reader, or speculate about what such a context might be. [...]

― Mordy, Thursday, October 8, 2009 6:22 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahahaha, oh god.

should email this to frank kermode, i'm sure it'll give him pause.

― history mayne, Thursday, October 8, 2009 6:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't see where Kermode would disagree with that at all.

― Mordy, Thursday, October 8, 2009 6:56 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

don't think you're very good at reading, tbh. but use your imagination, what kind of a critic gets out of bed in order to place a book in its economic context...? total hackademic move. i'm not saying these aspects are irrelevant, of course, but they are second-order.

I would argue that once you start doing that, you are basically saying there's no difference between a critic and a historian, and really I do not want to read historian writing when I am looking for info on a new album.

also I think it is more the music historian's job to be extra-inclusive and broad in scope in the music/information covered moreso than the music critic's

If a critic was a historian, then an album review would just be a band bio.

Jaymc that Stereolab review reads like Dave Eggers.

I guess I'm a bit late to the discussion prompted by my criticism of Daft Punk above as "twee". (I should have guessed that should prompt the most outrage on ILM of all my snarky dismissals of the bands on the Pitchfork list.) I don't agree that all disco and house are by their nature twee. It seems to me that the "tweeness" is a special sauce that the Daft Punksters add all on their own. My working definition of "twee" is taken from definition 4 here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twee

"Something that is cute ironically, with the irony taken out."

That nails it, I think.

Related discussion here:

Is Daft Punk's "Discovery" supposed to be ironic?

# Who ever said Cobra and Phases is a bad Stereolab album? This record blows me away. 24 year old critics can be pretty stupid.2:36 PM Oct 2nd from web

otm

To bring it back to a bit waaaaaay upthread: "believe that pforks big audience is pretty conservative in their tastes, and its not easy to convince people other wise (especially because--and maybe this is another discussion--the kind of music consumers listening to pfork, i would wager, are maybe more stubborn than more 'mainstream' consumers."

And Contenderizer talking about it being good that they're conservative.

It's weird, y'know, the vast majority of stuff that I listen to is "indie," in that, y'know, it's on tiny little labels and comes on 7"s or whatever, but very little of what I listen to is "Indie," the Animal Collective/Arcade Fire/hell even Radiohead despite being on a major. One of my biggest problems with "Indie" is that I feel like a conservative approach to the sound has ossified, exactly like "Alternative" before. And in the places where "Indie" listeners have branched out, they've brought that same conservative, petit-outsider aesthetic to their listening that really seems to compress the options of whatever genre they're ostensibly listening to. I was writing a letter to a friend the other day, contrasting "quirky" with "weird," and writing about how "quirky" has supplanted "weird" as the dominant aesthetic of independent music, and how by embracing that quirk, it's undercutting the weird. I do think Pitchfork is, as Scott said, ahead of their audience, and I realize that these are the same complaints that get raised about any counter-culture as it gets broader.

And, to switch gears rather completely, this discussion about taste and presenting it as something that precedes all judgment and experience, so is unquestionable and sacrosanct, reminds me of the discussion going on on Metafilter about whether or not institutional racism is observable in the OKCupid data regarding response rates as a function of race. A lot of folks there are like, I just don't ever find black women attractive. So what? Which seems like a really odd view (and different than just having never dated a black woman or whatever). But there's that same "Don't question my taste!" thing going on here. I tend to think that taste is changeable—there's a lot of music that I love now because I learned to listen for different things in it, even though I didn't like it—and I think that, yeah, one of the roles of a critic is to always be questioning why the critic/the public likes what they like.

But then, there are more proper roles for critics than there are baseball cards, so I realize arguing over that is a bit of a non-starter. I don't fault consumer guides for not putting Mariah Carey into existential context.