Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

"if he was writing this stuff for a publication you ran, and you were his editor, what specifically would you tell him to change about his writing?"

come back when you've edited it at least once yourself.

for starters.

and that's if i was saddled with the prr "column" idea by higher management.

also there's no really polite or acceptable way to write "seek professional help" using your work email.

it's kind of amazing that he hasn't gotten burnt out doing this yet

self-regard disguised as self-effacing humility is a hell of a drug

I always thought this thread was a hoax. Wow.

you know I even read some of this thread and the other Pitchfork threads and I still was hoping this was a hoax

mo "writes like his age" shouldn't be an excuse or explanation applied to anyone over, like, 20 -- if you're an adult you should write like an adult, after a certain point precocious naif shit is either an act or just plain sad.

plz post this on the Arcade Fire thread thnkx

lol

i don't know wtf this is all about but anyone who's been reprimanded about excessive blackberry use but is still scurrying into the bathroom to secretly use it is living on borrowed time at his job and could probably use an intervention.

I actually like some of this dude's writing, but I really can't imagine why someone would want to think about the mechanics of P4k reviews so much. I know I post about P4k here pretty often, but I pretty much never read the reviews anymore and never think about it when I'm away from ILM. I think a kid with this much energy and passion for music could find a lot of better things to do with his time

kid just needs to man up and developing a drinking problem if he's gonna shit his job down the tubes

the hilarious thing is that a. he doesn't have a deadline and b. people are always checking the internet, so it's not like he couldn't write when he got home from work! don't get fired, man!

dude needs to get laid, start his own indie band, or join the tea party.

whenever someone walks into the bathroom i have to stop typing because i don’t want people to go around the office saying that i was feverishly using my phone while on the toilet. i also feel silly sitting here because i don’t even have to use the bathroom

rock bottom

i really wish he'd just find this thread already. so many questions need answering.

Z S already said he sent PRR a link to the other Pitchfork thread

i usually go into the bathroom to use my phone to go on the internet during work, but that's out of crushing boredom, not because i'm feverishly typing blog posts into my phone

don't give him the address, strongo: he might send you tweets from a bathroom stall next Tuesday and get him fired.

Pitchfork

haha it depresses me on some level that this kid has been written up in both the times AND the post in part for commenting on my work.

I think we can all agree that there's an unhealthy focus on p4k in this guy's life, right? Like it's one thing to make a snarky comment about the website once in a blue moon to friends, or to check it out to see the latest news about bands you're into. But like, what does it mean that it's p4k reviews reviews and not Rollingstone reviews reviews or Alternative Press reviews reviews or Spin Magazine reviews reviews? It probably means that he's confusing the teleology of p4k with the cultural hip cache, and he hasn't figured out yet that being that explicit about what things are 'hip' is actually really uncool. It's kinda an aspie thing (and reminds me of that dude in that other thread who discovered the SFJ Radiohead lie thing and who @ to Chuck Klosterman every other line on his twitter).

Like, the truth is that being uninterested in Klosterman or p4k is also signaling certain hip poses and stuff, but generally apathy is coded as a little hipper at the moment than obsessiveness and enthusiasm like that. (there are ways of being enthusiastic + hip obv, but that's a tricky thing.) so really it's not hard to understand what's going on with this guy. he's just not good at signaling.

"pitchfork reviews reviews rationale"
http://www.pitchforkreviewsreviews.com/post/448812178/pitchfork-reviews-reviews-rationale

"anyway i read the reviews on the subway today and sean fennessey’s Queens of the Stone Age review was magical, impassioned and convincing and comprehensible. Pitchfork reviews are better when they’re counterintuitive and feel like they have to prove soemthing. who knew Pitchfork was gonna pull that record out of their bag of popist tricks you know?"

i really can't decide what's the most wtf thing about this.

i'm totally thinking about starting Alternative Press Reviews Reviews and just basing a whole site around the 60 reviews in some back issue from 1996 that i may still have in a box somewhere around here

I can't fathom writing that much to answer why I decided to write reviews of music reviews

like, he could have just said "I am totally fucking crazy ;-)" and called it a day

in the spirit of horsing around, i’m gonna be reviewing my own entries after i write them. but i’ll post the scores at the top so you don’t have to read the entries but you will know what entries are good. except for this entry, which gets an 8.2 but NOT A COVETED BEST NEW ENTRY due to some unforeseen gaps in my logic and grammatical tense errors that may be addressed by commenters. but i have a feeling that the reissue of the entry which i will post in a few months will get a 10.0 for influencing so many of my other entries.

this is quite a site

i think it's pretty telling that he listed "comprehensible" fourth behind "magical", "impassioned" and "convincing"

haha it depresses me on some level that this kid has been written up in both the times AND the post in part for commenting on my work.

depresses, confuses, angers. as much pity and contempt i have for this kid, i have even more for any writers who pitched a feature on him and any editors who commissioned it, because they should know better, due to not having any mental problems

in the spirit of horsing around,

ksh, here's his rationale:

so anyway the problem in pitchfork’s (or any single cultural critic’s) hegemony wouldn’t make me mad enough to start a blog about it and think about it constantly except A) they’re wrong a lot and B) there’s no way for you to tell them that. it’s ironic that a website built on the notion of the fundamental validity and necessity of criticizing other peoples’ work has no forum for you to criticize its work. right?

So the question is: Why would someone think that a) It's important about a music review website being 'wrong,' and more importantly, b) Why would he think that other people would care? There's a huge signaling problem going on. He thinks that he's doing something (maybe taking an important position that's not actually important, or a compelling position that doesn't actually compel anyone) but it's not being received the way he thinks it is. He's confused about how important this thing actually is, probably because he's confused about stuff like taste/class/hipness/etc.

i think you're wrong about the last part

part b

You think people do care?

I get the sense this dude is also confused about things like underwear, showering, and the social unacceptability of peeling cats

You think people do care?

― Mordy, Friday, August 6, 2010 3:01 PM (50 seconds ago) Bookmark

there are definitely people who do care, yes

i wonder if this guy goes to a party and a cute guy/gal says, "I really like X album," and instead of nodding or smiling or whatever starts to pontificate in the middle of the party why X album is inferior to Y album and everyone starts edging away towards the door

probably

the real problem is that his posts aren't speaking truth to power so much as mass-blowing the pitchfork staff on the daily

Mordy:

okay so like sometimes, when you’re seeing a girl and she gets mad at you because all you talk about is reissues with insane packaging and how much harder it is to live in this world now that mininova and bolachas are both gone and what you think is gonna be best new music this week, she’ll say something that she really wants to make feel like a knife through the heart like “you only hear about all the music you like from pitchfork!” implying that you’re not a real head, that anyone can just read pitchfork and find out about the music you do, that you don’t even really have to go that deep into the site to find out about a lot of obscure music that hundreds of thousands of other people are listening to at that moment and that maybe even the wall street journal is writing a feature article about.

i can't imagine he's the party sort

you're taking a big leap of faith w/r/t him getting invited to parties

oh god i never thought about it but it makes total sense that this guy is one of those people who thinks it's SO WRONG and UNFAIR that Pitchfork doesn't have a comments box

didn't make it to the end of that post where he talks about his site's rationale, but as far as I can tell he just thinks it's a venue for him to write about P4k, since P4k (rightfully, in my opinion) doesn't provide its readers with a space for commenting on their stuff on their own site

I know people like this guy -- they know nothing about books, jokes, or making out, they just wanna go to indie shows and feel Part Of It. One of the problems with the theory of evolution is my disappointment that every generation has its hippies.

this is like taxi driver but instead of buying cybill sheperd a kristofferson album he buys her a wavves cd

okay so like sometimes, when you’re seeing a girl and she gets mad at you because all you talk about is reissues with insane packaging

da fuck does he know about packages?

He should just hang out on ILX and post long posts about the p4k hegemony. Really speculating about reviews on ILM is the only context in 2010 that I can imagine where it's not totally weird to be discussing p4k with that much seriousness.