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

I'm starting to think the taste thing boils down to : people like music that's either made by people they could beat in a fight, or people that might want to sleep with them.

as for critics, there are a lot of good writers out there, but also a lot of people too interested in trying to write "like a music writer" than trying to communicate something interesting about the music. This influences the choice of music too - ie "I enthusiastically want to be a music writer, so I should write enthusiastically about music-writery music, woo Merriweather!"

I'm starting to think the taste thing boils down to : people like music that's either made by people they could beat in a fight, or people that might want to sleep with them.

So all these P4k writers are totally gay for beardy white dudes?

I said "people", not "writers"!

also with pfork and beardies, reckon it's 50% beatup and 50% shackup

WRITERS ARE NOT PEOPLE?!?!? WHAT ARE THEY?!?!? SOYLENT GREEN?!?!?

mmm, tasty.

Hi Sterling, how are you distinguishing between these two groups of aims? i.e to be provocative w/r/t writing vs to be outrageous w/r/t the music? I mean I can see ho wn article might be one and not the other but in many cases you achieve one through the other. "True" writing about music is synonymous (though not identical) with writing that is "true" to the music, I would have thought?

w/r/t provocative vs. outrageous i'd say it has something to do with the emotions and thoughts the writer is trying to evoke, which maybe can't be determined always simply and obviously, but then who said that things being simply and obviously determinable was a criterion for good criteria? true writing can be true about many things. the fact that it happens to be about music doesn't mean that it should focus on being true about that in particular. also, being "true" to music is silly because almost all music is full of lies, even if they're wonderful lies, and its rotten and deadening for crit to perpetuate that, which is what it generally does. I mean, you don't have to get all nasty or whatever, but you need to convey a sense of perspective. otherwise what you've got is words and conversation, but i'm not sure if you could properly call it writing.

framing it as an issue solely about the writing rather than about the music has led to, and will continue to lead to, the same ol' same ol' music getting the coverage.

frankly, i don't know if there's any way to frame it that would change things. because framing things is a pretty weak thing to do to them, and the things you frame generally don't even notice that they've been framed.

anyway if you want ambition, why care about what p4k covers? why not care that there's increasingly no outlet for long-form crit that covers everything else? or that there's no (apparent) audience for it? what would it take to create such an audience? what would it take to build an audience of people who already listen to lots of things that maybe you want to discuss, and want to read about them the way you discuss them? what would it bring to their lives for them to do this? what are the reasons that's infeasible, either in the small, or in the large?

and want to read about them the way you discuss them?

"I enthusiastically want to be a music writer, so I should write enthusiastically about music-writery music, woo Merriweather!"

Of course! I should've known I should be giving Daniel Merriweather the time of day over at the Jukebox...

I sympathize, empathize with this tendency, actually, but tbh it's not really a Big Problem -- the big problem seems to be more that there aren't any Big Problems and most issues in music writing c. 2009 have to do with the fact that a ton of music writers and music conversation-havers don't know how to write or talk about music well and don't have the (er, paid) opportunity to do so even if they could. I worry that music as cultural object may be going the way of...oh, I dunno, what's an overreaching analogue...FOOD maybe, where it's not usually assumed that one is supposed to have a critical conversation about it, but rather just sort of appreciate and accumulate it in a relatively unquestioning, if occasionally consciously "tasteful," way. (Which makes Pitchfork TV the Food Network?)

I worry that music as cultural object may be going the way of...oh, I dunno, what's an overreaching analogue...FOOD maybe

Well aside from the 'must eat to survive' part.

So I guess before long there will be a Ratatouille co-produced by Stereogum in which the cranky critic ultimately decides to found his OWN label, maaaaaaaaaaan, and assume that everything produced on it is beyond criticism.

I dunno, I used to forgo having lunch so that I could go buy an album after school!

(I mean, an album at the end of the week. I hadn't yet limited my max album price to $1.99.)

That's a good question for the board, who here actually skipped a meal precisely to purchase a new album? (And when was the last time you did that?)

why not care that there's increasingly no outlet for long-form crit that covers everything else? or that there's no (apparent) audience for it? what would it take to create such an audience? what would it take to build an audience of people who already listen to lots of things that maybe you want to discuss, and want to read about them the way you discuss them? what would it bring to their lives for them to do this? what are the reasons that's infeasible, either in the small, or in the large?

There IS an audience. If anything, the long-term existence of Plan B proved that there was.

However, the decision to tie that outlet to print media in an economy that can no longer sustain print at the quality that Plan B wanted to do it, meant that it would collapse. Not through lack of interest, but through decrease of advertising coupled with the increase in production costs.

I know I bitched and moaned and fired off angry letters to the editors and the like for most of its existence (and before, at CTCL) - but for gods sake, Plan B was one of the few magazines that LISTENED when you brought up complaints, and if they were valid, did something about them. They weren't always perfect, but they *tried* in a way that I don't see anywhere else even attempting at the moment.

Tired and bored with having this argument over and again. I guess I just miss Plan B on so many levels.

(I should note that I don't actually buy my own paranoia about the role of music, just have the thoughts occasionally. I wouldn't write about music if I actually believed it was possible to kill the conversation about it. Just makes the conversation feel smaller, maybe.)

Ogmor, who are you? I'm an upcoming outfit soon to have a heavy rep. Thanks for yr kudos ppl, it is mutual.

WTF ogmor? Yr consistently reducing what I say to one-dimensional nonsense, then sneering at it as if that has anything to say with my basic argument. I've been clear from the beginning that we're "allowed" to talk about all taste, any taste. It's all fair game, though I have strong reservations about the tendency to treat expressions of personal taste as political speech However, since Pitchfork's lists are an aggregate, institutional expression, they're not "sacrosanct" in the quite same way.

It's hard to distinguish because “one's atavistic responses” is a pretty murky notion. Is it too complicated for you to try and unpack? Too complicated to be convincing?

I've unpacked the idea elsewhere in this thread, and I think it's fairly straightforward to begin with. But. Music can speak to us in very direct, emotional ways. We have ideas about music, and these ideas exist in relation to the feelings that music triggers, but the ideas don't really explain or encapsulate the underlying reactions. We feel an intense surge of joy when the singer's voice does this or when the guitar does that, and while we may understand the mechanics of the response, our understanding doesn't diminish its intensity. The feeling isn't something we control; rather it controls us. We like that song not because we have consciously decided to, but simply because something deep within us has responded. That's what I mean by "atavistic". And none of this opposes in any way the idea that tastes change, or that we can intellectually engage with and even shape them.

their narrow range is not the only reason for their success, being smart selling advertising, Brent D-style ridiculous shit getting ppls backs up in a famous fashion and the frequency/quantity of their output are more significant, all more distinctive than being 'an indie-centric site'.

I said something very similar about Pitchfork's success a while back. But I think yr. seriously underestimating the importance of their basic taste and POV. I suspect that if they were dance- or metal-centric they wouldn't have enjoyed the same level of mainstream success and influence. It's not just that they were selling ad space, attracting gawkers and cranking out news/reviews. It's that they were interested in the same things as a lot of other people and were able to use their influence to turn those people on to other things, things they actually liked and wanted to hear more about. I suspect that indie was ready to be mainstreamed (for a number of reasons) and that Pitchfork was catapulted to prominence by its association with the genre as much as anything else. Their success is therefore hugely dependent on their collective taste and sensibility.

Listening habits/taste are/is not purely passive like a mirror but formed through constant engagement, like browsing certain sections of the record shop and not others. Maybe what ppl here are really calling out it is Sartre-style bad faith in listening habits & it's weird that you'd want to defend ppl's lack of responsibility for what they listen to, playlists cruelly thrust on them by nature.
I genuinely do think yll be a little wiser about the world if you engage w/a wider variety of stuff, it's the goal for everyone, a quest to always improve.

I don't know what you're responding to, here. I agree entirely that taste is not passive. But nor is it entirely active. It's a combination of the two, of active interest and deep affinity. Both can and do change all the time, though the former more quickly than the latter, and in a manner more subject to the application of will. I do not "defend ppl's lack of responsibility for what they listen to." I defend people's right to take joy from that which gives them joy, and I'm not inclined to fault them for failing to experience joy in response to other things. Sure, I agree that it's good to be open to new things, but I'm not going to sign on with the idea that we should all strive to "improve" ourselves by liking more and different music. Music plays different roles in different people's lives, none more intrinsically valid than any other. Some people may only be interested in the music that most appealed to them in their youth, others may seldom venture beyond the confines of a comfortable genre -- and that's fine, either way, so long as the people involved are satisfied with the music in their lives.

Personally, I'm curious about and open to all sorts of music (though I find that I have a core affinity for upbeat/aggressive guitar rock with giant hooks, and I think that's been true since I was a kid), and therefore I'm most interested in critical voices that are similarly inclined. But I'd never argue that my tastes are or should be universal, or that critical voices that don't cater to them are less valid. I'm surprised by the fact that the Pitchfork list is so male-dominated, but that surprise doesn't incline me to the knee-jerk/reactive assertion that Pitchfork needs to pay more attention to female artists. Rather it inclines me to pay some attention to who writes for Pitchfork, at which point I notice that, hey, it's (almost) all dudes. And that seems a much bigger problem.

kate, apols for never having read Plan B, or for that matter, much else in the way of musicwrite these last x years, but you and i apparently have a different idea of "everything else" when wikipedia tells me that its covers featured: "Chicks On Speed, Joanna Newsom, Magnetic Fields, Smoosh, Afrirampo, Arcade Fire, Black Dice, Sonic Youth, The Research, Cat Power, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Long Blondes, Silver Jews, The Gossip, CSS, Boris, Sunn O))), Deerhoof, Herman Dune, Electrelane, Grinderman, Battles, Wiley, Björk, M.I.A., Animal Collective, Scout Niblett, Prinzhorn Dance School, Billy Childish, Dirty Projectors, Earth, The Breeders, Glass Candy and Chromatics, No Age, Sparks, Los Campesinos!, Roots Manuva, Rolo Tomassi, Gang Gang Dance, Grace Jones, Micachu, Bat For Lashes, Dan Deacon, PJ Harvey & John Parish, Grizzly Bear."

yeah, anyway.

We did cover a hell of a lot more besides that. yes, they stuck the big indie stars on the cover to get Ver Kidz to buy it, but what was interesting was actually the breadth of the stuff inside - I used to get much more of a kick (fnar) out the little stuff covered in The Void and the various columns than I ever did out of the big cover articles.

But also, say what you like, there's a heck of a lot more women in that list than in the P4k top 20.

there's also a lot more than 20 artists in that list

Micachu

that was the worst ever.

question i'm going to totally regret asking: is counting the number of women on various things a valid metric?

frankly, i don't know if there's any way to frame it that would change things. because framing things is a pretty weak thing to do to them, and the things you frame generally don't even notice that they've been framed

^^this doesn't actually mean anything.

i suspect k8 and i both regularly shouted at plan b editors, as is our wont, about its indie focus and indie cover stars when it was around, but as k8 says it was ridiculously open to covering other genres as and when they were pitched - i don't think i EVER heard "that's not our thing" or "that's not what our readers want" from them - as well as constantly questioning its own taste-consensus, and trying to avoid received wisdom about hyped acts.

question i'm going to totally regret asking: is counting the number of women on various things a valid metric?

nah. it's not about quotas. equal numbers of male and female artists wouldn't necessarily mean fair, open-minded coverage. it's just that when the male/female ratio is so disproportionate, this should be interrogated beyond just going "eh, writers' taste, what can you do!!!"

honest questions: which artists were covered somewhere in plan b that made it such a diverse magazine, and how often would those artists appear?

^this -- vs., say, Pitchfork...

his should be interrogated beyond just going "eh, writers' taste, what can you do!!!"

― lex pretend

not that anyone here has ever said such a thing...

it was ridiculously open to covering other genres as and when they were pitched

Pitchfork has reviewed country and opera, what do you want?

More stuff they like?

nah. it's not about quotas. equal numbers of male and female artists wouldn't necessarily mean fair, open-minded coverage.

hey cool we agree on something!

By my count, of Pitchfork's top 104 songs of the 2000s*-- a list to champion of white straight male guitar music only surely-- shockingly only has 24 songs by white straight male guitar bands. Someone start a thread on that cherrypicked statistic, use it as the only information you want to receive about who we are and what we do, and beat it into the ground for a month.

*I guess none of the rest of this counts as "our canon" though, just the parts that support what people want to get upset about.

oops, stray words!

As for Bat for Lashes, mentioned in the other thread, ok she isn't one of the three artists that made the 2000s list with a 2009 LP. Not sure what a sample size of "three" is supposed to prove (or "20")

B4L will do very well on our 2009 list; I imagine so will the YYYs, xx, Dirty Projectors, St Vincent, Fever Ray. And maybe Pains of Being Pure at Heart will make our year-end top 20, I dunno? Would we still be sexist then, if seven of our top 20 artists were in some part female? That's less than the m/f ratio in the world, but surely greater than the ratio of m/f making music, so I'm confused.

Who else might do well? Antony, Atlas Sound, Grizzly Bear, Raekwon, the Very Best, DJ Quik, Freddie Gibbs, the Hyperdub 5 comp, Bibio, Neon Indian, Mt Goats, CamOb, AnCo, Flaming Lips, Japandroids, Girls, jj, and Phoenix off the top of my head. That's 25 total: Let's say that ends up being our top 25. That could easily happen, it's as good a guess as I could make right now. Only five of the 25 are white straight male indie guitar bands, so if it shakes out close to that I anxiously await the complaints in a few months about how much we hate and are holding down white straight male indie guitar bands. (aka the Stereogum comments)

again, look, you can cherrypick facts and stats and easily use them to prove your agenda! Hey, it's fun!

anyway...I will leave alone the idea that a defunct magazine somehow proves there is an audience for what that magazine used to do. Especially since it hardly matters bcuz what that magazine did, from what I can tell, was "indie." And I think it strayed less from that than ours does.

songs vs albums.

Well, I just looked at the 40 reviews on Plan B's site, and there's not a single album among them that I couldn't imagine Pitchfork reviewing.

britfork tbh

For reference:
Manic Street Preachers, Wounded Knee, Fever Ray, Isaac Hayes, Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware, Marissa Nadler, PJ Harvey and John Parish, Beirut, Antony and the Johnsons, Telepathe, Frida Hyvonen, Women, Neil Kulkarni on DJ Gone, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Peter Rehberg, Sebastian, Anni Rossi, Fujiya and Miyagi, Suicide, Harvey Milk, Kayo Dot, Plush, Stanley Brinks, Death Cab for Cutie, Silver Jews, The Last Shadow Puppets, Thalia Zedek Band, Robert Wyatt, Boredoms, The Gossip, Rocket from the Crypt, Peter Brotzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love/Mats Gustafsson, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Cath and Phil Tyler, Mountain Goats, Helen Love, Los Campesinos!, Mogwai, Ponytail, Conor Oberst

http://buzzofla.com/Detail.aspx?aid=417

sad/hilarious irony to some of this complaining - though others would of course disagree, I would guess, if such a thing could be quantified, that Pitchfork has done as much this decade to assist the push against rockism than just about any other media outlet.

considering where the site was 10 years ago, where the audience for it in general 10 years ago, how many people we communicate to, and the ripple effect we lately can have on u.s. music criticism (unless those burial and field records somehow got into pazz/jop placements some other way, etc), our constant redrawing of our "borders" and what makes our year-end lists and what we cover, etc., might not be as demonstrative and combative and flag-planting as one NYT article about Christina Aguilera but I think we've changed the landscape more, and for more people. In 2001, indie and PItchfork WAS pretty much white straight male guitar rock; five/seven so years later, it was a no-brainer that M.I.A., or Ghostface, or LCD, or Burial, or Tim Hecker, or Robyn was "ok" for indie kids to like-- the things they got all pissy about was stuff like the Hold Steady! Or folky/jammy Grateful Dead/classic rock types. In any event, I think we've taken a lead with that and continue to do so. Maybe not at the pace some of you would like, but some people we can't please no matter what anyway, so...

nipple effect?

innovation. technology. yes, here at pitchfork media we're leading the way into the 21st century.

In fact, if we let Mats Gustafsson stand in for his collaborators, Pitchfork actually HAS reviewed 32 of those 40 artists. And most of the ones they haven't certainly don't seem far outside of Pitchfork's sphere. No Pitchfork review for Peter Rehberg, for instance, but plenty of reviews for other albums on Mego. Ditto for SebastiAn and Ed Banger. Or: no P4k review of Stanley Brinks, but two of his old band, Herman Dune. Etc.

Would we still be sexist then, if seven of our top 20 artists were in some part female? That's less than the m/f ratio in the world, but surely greater than the ratio of m/f making music, so I'm confused.

Well, it's really frankly amazing how the pop charts and best selling artists manage to be gender split pretty evenly 50/50 over the past few decades, as discussed on that poll (and how, as discussed above by Dan and myself, that even the retrogressive world of classical music is split pretty evenly between the genders) and yet your supposed progressive website seems to think that 7 out of 20 is ABOVE average?

classical music isn't necessarily more "retrogressive" than popular or folk music imo

you would hate the brass band world, kate

(no women in the major bands, there are a couple of women-only bands, but they're not very good)

I should have put "retrogressive" in quotes.

I don't think that 35% of the records released in the world have female artists on them, no. Particularly not rock music.

And I didn't claim that anything made us progressive! I was questioning your sample size and selective use of statistics, and then challenging the notion that we only cover and champion white guitar indie rock.

(I do think that, yes, female pop stars have dominated pop/R&B in the past decade though, as has been discussed here on other threads-- and when it comes to pop and R&B we do skew female more than male I would guess. Amerie, Beyonce, Rihanna, Ciara, Britney, Robyn, Annie, Kelly Clarkson, etc-- the vast majority of the pop/R&B performers who have placed on our year-end/decade/book lists have been female.)

the pop charts and best selling artists manage to be gender split pretty evenly 50/50 over the past few decades, as discussed on that poll

Link?

I just looked at all the #1 albums in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009. Discounting mixed-gender bands like Black Eyed Peas and Sugarland, as well as soundtracks and compilations, there have been 41 albums by men or all-male groups to hit #1 and only 19 albums by women or all-female groups.

bands with one woman in them are female, much like ppl with at least one black grandparent are black