Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

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.

it's not so much the seriousness that's the problem, though, but the comprehensive obsessiveness -- e reviews every review

which means he reads every single review

The post about interviewing Wavves is kind of embarrassing in how much it reveals his youth and self-consciousness: first that he purposefully buys new clothes on the way to the interview so Wavves won't think he's uncool, then the degree of awestruck wonder when he sees the band ("in their natural habitat"!) and the venue up close, and then the crushing disappointment when the shroud of Cultural Importance he's bestowed upon them (via Pitchfork no doubt) drops to reveal that they're just stoned goofballs who play music.

thought it was super O_O that he asked the band how much money they make

yikes

I'm just glad there wasn't a coda about him scooping their eyes out of their severed heads with a soup spoon and dejectedly slurping them up

yeah I finally went to this site and it's just kinda sad and innocent

this is, like, one of the craziest things i've ever seen. it almost seems fake.

re: the innocence and naivete, it kinda blows my mind that he lives in nyc and not in some small town.

i mean, dude, spending enough time in a bathroom stall to type a multiple paragraph review of pitchfork reviews at WORK? and then worrying about losing your job? if i were him, i'd worry more about me finding him and slapping the living shit out of him.

hang on what, re: the wavves interview, a professional journalist actually let this kid sit in on the interview?!

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

at least it's kinda sweet how much he cares about music writing, but otm

lex, I think the journalist was his friend

re: the innocence and naivete, it kinda blows my mind that he lives in nyc and not in some small town.

Totally.

Is this really that crazy? I think it's just a transparent grab at publicity and it has worked. The author is clearly one of the countless New York indie rock fans who thinks they have something unique/interesting to add to the already full to bursting world of music crit, he's just better at branding and conceptualizing. It's such an obvious idea I'm surprised it took this long to become a website. There is a potential "this guy" working a low-level corporate job in every office building in Manhattan.

oh come on, NYC is large but it's not like living there REQUIRES you to be worldly

maybe im reading into it something that isnt there but i dont nec take him as 100% naive, indie kid...the style seems too aware of itself like it's affecting that persona for the effect

im dont really get the "embarassed for him" or that he doesnt understand culture/hipness

his posting frequency and style of writing is largely crazy, yes

i think johnny is also otm