Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

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

you think he's playing into some sort of a persona? no way

it's like when people thought I was a sock when I started posting here last year. I wasn't playing into a persona, I was just pretty naive

So now we're suggesting that this is performance art where he's a worldly ironic dude who is affecting the voice and persona of a naive indie music fan?

ksh otm. no way this is just a persona. (except in the sense that everything is a persona - lol Goffman, but I think he thinks he's presenting a different persona than he actually is -- that's the mismatch)

actually on second thought this blog could probably only be written by a kid in nyc

this is a calculated publicity grab like wesley willis' career was a calculated attempted at working his way onto kylie minogue's songwriting team

yea not performance art but just, you know, being hyper-aware of like hipster runoff, etc and the shit that comes w/ being wrapped up in p4k "culture"...like hes embraced all the stereotypes that go along w/ it & amplified them in his writing

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

I agree, but it would just make a lot more sense if he was this kid in Dubuque for whom Pitchfork represented a bright, shining beacon of culture.

wait can we all agree that this person should be destroyed.

yeah johnny, idk, i think you're misreading it completely

there is nothing ironic about this venture from what i can tell, tho Poe's Law is in affect

This kid writes as if he lived in the house where Winter's Bone is set.

so anyway the reason i’m reading Master of Reality is that i stopped reading Our Band Could Be Your Life for the moment because i carry a tote bag and the book is really heavy so it makes me hunch over in one direction and i don’t wanna get adult-onset scoliosis, and i guess i’ll pick it back up when i get a backpack, but for now i’m reading 33 1/3 books because they’re light.

you know, I don't necessarily think it's a problem that he's doing this blog. he's, what, 22? if he's still doing this in a year or two, sure, he'll definitely need an intervention, but as of right now he's basically just some kid "critically" & enthusiastically engaging with music writing, albeit in a really obsessive way

someone should tell him, though, that he doesn't want to become permanently known as "dude who spends all his time thinking and writing about one indie music website." if writing about music is already seen (perhaps unfairly) as somewhat lesser than actually playing music, writing about other people's writing about music way more than you write about music yourself is really down on the scale of things worth spending your time doing

i agree that it's a total and complete embracing of taboos and stereotypes, not naivete -- i never read the latter into it at all