pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

say what you want about ikea but if you have a shitlaod of books like i do their cheep bookcases are a fuckin godsend

-- s1ocki, Friday, June 20, 2008 3:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

just a lonely guy thinking baout a shitlaod of books

BRAGGIN 2008

say what you want about ikea but if you have a shitlaod of books records/CDs like i do everyong on ILM does their cheep bookcases are a fuckin godsend

if you have a shitload of CDs and DVDs you really need to grow up and get some of those pleatherized case logics

records obviously another story but seriously those "limited edition digipaks" are just silly

That all said I am a big MARKOR fan

i want a pleatherized case logic for my books so i can rip out the pages and be done with them

also THE CONTAINER STORE people
fills more inches and is less done

-- El Tomboto, Friday, June 20, 2008 5:01 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

OTM

plus shit is even cheaper

all my records are in container store boxes now

i want a pleatherized case logic for my books so i can rip out the pages and be done with them

http://www.aarongershfieldsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/kindle.jpg

Pretty sure the first time I'd ever heard of IKEA was via the Pavement song "Date w/IKEA."

Same here, and I thought it was about a girl!

Quirky Swedish indie girlfriend

someone's been reading ILM:

Back when Sweden took up less of the average indie fan's headphone space-- remember two years ago?-- it was annoyingly common for critics to compare Swedish pop to the Scandinavian country's most famous non-musical exports: IKEA, H&M, Saab. The Swedes aren't much on inspiration, these metaphors (tritely) suggested, but boy are they good at turning others' ideas into safe, efficient, everyday-luxury items.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/51447-love-is-all-wishing-well-5-ep

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/144530-various-artists-the-complete-motown-singles-vol-10-1970

it's instructive to realize that what we figuratively consider "the sixties" is roughly the period from 1965 to 1973, when the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and undergoing the paroxysmal changes that made it into a true democracy for the first time in its history.

I stopped reading after that.

someone's been reading ILM

Haha, I like how he posted like two posts above that, too.

Curious - what don't you agree with there, Shakey?

its a tossed off historical generalization without any actual thought behind it. I assume he's implying that black people (and women) not having the vote meant that America was not actually a democracy...? Except the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 (granted, Voting Rights Act was 1965)...? And most of the real civil rights work was done pre-1965? And America isn't technicallya democracy anyway, its a republic? Was Greece not a democracy because they had slaves? What kind of democracy is the writer referring too anyway? Its just lazy writing.

I mean, it's potentially a dubious claim, but I have a hard time getting upset about it when they have stuff this this in their archive:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/16264-john-coltrane-live-at-the-village-vanguard-the-master-takes

Shakey I am tempted to say that's lazy nit-picking

I mean, for one thing the word "true" seems to have been used specifically because of all your rhetorical questions there. (This is leaving aside that you're objecting to a "historical generalization" in a record review, which seems to me a fine place for historical references to be a tad generalized.)

I'd say its out of place in a record review, period. Mostly it begs the question of what happened between '65 and '73 that turned America into a "true" democracy (hint: it wasn't passage of civil rights legislation, cuz that happened mostly pre-65)

(and it goes without saying that schreiber penned some terrible crap)

It might raise questions. It's not an example of something that "begs the question," though. (See? Nit-picking is fun!)

hahaha okay you got me

Shakey, it's only really out of place if you ignore the sentence that comes directly after it:

Indeed, the social concerns of the 60s are on bolder display here than on any of the series' previous volumes

... which is kind of why it seems like you're nit-picking: it's a slight generalization that leads into the substantive point (which I'm assuming you don't object to)

the substantive point about Motown transforming to incorporate social issues of the day is totally relevant. what that has to do with America becoming a "true democracy" is rather dubious.

I've been listening to lots of Rye and Arabic music, so it's not really "a song," but I've been listening to a lot of really poorly labeled mp3s, and Auto-Tuned-out North African pop stuff.

Wed: 11-05-08
Guest List: DJ/rupture
Guest List by DJ/rupture
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/145972-guest-list-dj-rupture

It's "rai" music not cornbeef on rye.

Rye and Arabic music sounds like a good combination.

lots of wry and arabic music

Rye and Arabic foods: wld eat.

i want matzoh ball soup now, damn you curmudgeon.

jace:

November 5, 2008
even better than Arabic “rye” is cumbia sonidera, i mean “Sonny Guerra”!

that mis-hearing may send people on some frustrating Google searches… maybe we should invent a person called Sonny Guerra and attribute a new style of music to him, retrospective reality google hack

Jace/Rupture on his blog comments

Since Dave Stelfox left for a fulltime journalist job in the mideast, I do not think Pitchfork has added a new reggae/dancehall columnist. Although they did at least run an obit for Byron Lee.

Miles Davis:
Dark Magus
[Columbia; 1974]
Rating: 9.5

* Buy it from Insound
* Download it from eMusic

Good old Japan. We bomb them, so they horde this Miles Davis gem, out of print for ages in the U.S. It's the best $27 spent outside of the massage parlor in eons. Yeah, I buy CDs sometimes, too. Why? Friggin' label won't send 'em to us. I'm willing to look the other way this time, because this two-disc set, to put it simply, rules.

Recorded at Carnegie Hall in '74, Miles leads a spacey Bitches Brew-esque jam session, always loose in the middle but tight at the ends. The band of two guitarists, a bassist, drummer, percussionist, sitar player, and a couple of sax honkers launches Dark Magus upwards. Just when you think the shit can't get much higher, Miles comes in and hits the wah-wah down hard on the horn and the next thing you know, you're slappin' five to the man upstairs. Four jams, each divided into two parts, no rules except to keep it real.

You think I know what I'm talking about? Damn right I don't. I couldn't be this cool if I smoked menthol PCP and changed my name to Charlie fucking Parker. I probably don't have enough street cred to give it up for the late Satchmo. Yeah, I know Louis Armstrong was Satchmo, but it's a pretty cool name. I think I'll change my name to Satchmo. Oh, and my last name to Bronson. Satchmo Bronson. I could kick ass and have a five-octave range on the trumpet. That'd be awesome. Whoops, left the sentence hanging. But that's none of yo bidness. By the rite of Dark Magus, I can fake the cool in no time flat.

- Jason Josephes, August 1, 1997

Yes it's a dumb review.

if anything it's disappointing in its dumbness after the heights of that Coltrane review linked upthread

the kanye review had the 808s song cited as "see you in my knightmares" -- the way it came on tagged on the leak -- instead of "see you in my nightmares", which is the way that it appears on the back of the album

There's really no factual error Pitchfork can make anymore that would bug me more than them always putting commas and periods after endquotes.

Alex in SF I see you have received my communication!!

DUDE that pisses me off soooo much!!!

xp

surprised this revive wasnt about this:

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=132958

There's really no factual error Pitchfork can make anymore that would bug me more than them always putting commas and periods after endquotes.

this is the british way (sometimes).

ummm i successfully avoid pfork these days but sometimes i want to read tom ewing's stuff and accidentally click on another link once there, which is to say that the pfork beyonce review was hugely dumb and annoying.

Man wasn't pfork in '97 like schr1eber and a couple of high-school buddies or something?

that's the grammatically incorrect way you mean

i prefer the british way of periods/commas

looks way better imo

I used to think it looked better or at least OK when I was much younger (and still writing for pitchfork lol), but after years of doing it the U.S. way it really gets on my nerves, especially from a place staffed almost entirely by Americans.

the british way is if it's a full sentence the full stop goes inside the quote marks, if it's not then it goes outside, which makes sense. when it comes to song titles, putting commas and full stops inside the quote marks looks unbelievably retarded to me.

agree

lex otm about commas and beyonce reviews

i thought scottpl's kanye review was alright

lol @ josephes, though. yeah, he wasn't a great writer, but i still think his Soft Bulletin review is classic, if only because i need a six paragraph memoir appended to my two paragraph reviews every once in a while. not enough writers do this.

lol xpost

Man wasn't pfork in '97 like schr1eber and a couple of high-school buddies or something?

That's how I understand it, but you'd think they'd be embarassed about it or something. Jason Josephes turned in some particularly ridiculous crap, such as this one and the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin review, which contains the following text before even mentioning the album:

"Hey, Jason. Where you been?"
That's an awfully good question, kids. Never let it be said that I would forsake the fine people of Pitchforkmedia.com, and by "people" I mean esteemed editor Ryan "Come On!" Schreiber, our other fine writers, and you, the reader. Let me fill you in on everything; trust me, this is all going somewhere.

I recently moved out of The Box. The Box was where I lived in Seattle for my first year-and-a-half-- a small room in a terrible house. I had an ogre of a next door neighbor named Richard who didn't like any decibel level that went above a whisper. Another neighbor, a homely looking mama's boy of some sort, had weird nasal problems that forced him to make this really loud noise that sounded like a collision between an orgasm, a yawn, a primal howl, and the deafening roar of a tortured honker.

The morning of my move, I checked my e-mail only to discover a rather unfortunate note in my box. A particular woman whose only flaw was in her geographic location (Jerusalem) told me not to come and visit her this summer, and that it was time for her to "get on with her life." I'll translate that: "bang other people without guilt." I saw it coming, but by e-mail? A year and a half of tortured long-distance amore dissolved via Hotmail? By a certain point, you're worth more than e-mail. A phone call. Shit, a letter would have done. No. Not only am I being broken up with, I also have to look at a banner ad for TalkCity.com. Can my life sink any lower?

Last night, I tried to figure out where my life was going. It seems to be on the course where I'm just thinking about where my life is (or isn't) going. Great. Wake me when it gets exciting.

Well, today, it got exciting. I was at work for about six hours when I decided to call my old number and retrieve my messages. There was my temp agency telling me not to go into work today. I guess the object was for me to find out before I left for work (it was 7:30 when they called), but instead, there I was working when and where I shouldn't have been. I called the agency and they said they'd call me back. I sat at my desk awkwardly. Should I be working? If so, why? If not, what should I be doing? I tracked down my supervisor who gave me two reasons for my termination. One was that the workload had dropped and they didn't need that many people. The second reason, of course, was that five people had commented to him that I didn't seem to love my job.

Well, duh. Sorry to go monosyllabic, but... well, duh. I sit at a desk. There's some asshole who insists on whistling all day, and man cannot live by headphones alone. Even today, before I found out I was already yesterday's employee, I commented to a co-worker, "Pretty soon, I'm gonna stab that guy in the throat." Of course, I wouldn't do that. But sometimes, I think that's my big misgiving in life-- no follow through. "I don't hate my job," I told my supervisor. This was true. Boring? Yes. Hate? No. This was going to be the job that gave me enough money to go on a vacation this fall.

"Well, I noticed it, too," he said. "If five people see it and I do, too, then doesn't that tell you something?"

"Did you ever think of asking me?" I asked.

Of course, there wasn't a good answer for that, so I immediately shifted gears. "Hey, if five people came and told you that I was practicing black magic, would you believe them?"

"That's completely different." When I asked him why it was different, he changed the subject to me leaving.

eh, i'd much prefer they leave warts-and-all early reviews in the archive than start deleting or editing that stuff way after the fact.

Two weird things about reading Pitchfork in the mid/late 90s: (a) it was not hard to assume that you were the only person you'd ever met who read it (apart from friends you yourself had pointed it out to, or who'd pointed it out to you),* and (b) you had zero idea what sort of people were behind it; they weren't "proper" critics, obviously, just people talking on the internet in an era before message boards and mailing lists and whatnot had made us all so able to sort people's tastes and rhetoric into predictable camps. Point being it kinda worked for them to do big digressions about temp work, because you weren't necessarily approaching the site for authoritative, useful information -- you were going to this random bit of internet you'd found where people shared opinions about music (many of them amusing or strange or half-assed) almost more as a form of shit-shooting entertainment than anything else,** and I for one recall actually enjoying weird glimpses of who these people were I was going to this place to listen to and be entertained by.

* In fact, for all you knew you were one of two dozen readers, total, and this was true for lots of non-corporate websites you'd look at; there was some other site at the time that did short indie-rock capsule reviews and rated things with, if I remember correctly, between one and five puking-baby icons (?), and I still have zero idea whether I was one of 10 people who looked at it or 10,000.

** Let's not forget that a way-higher percentage of internet use in those days consisted of "I have found this weird and lovable thing floating in the ether," and there was, briefly, an actual level of fun and humor in the idea that people would put up stuff on the internet that would read kinda crazily in print equivalents -- these days, with internet critics, we write that off to Lester Bangs worship, but really I think early internet writing just naturally grabbed onto that same "hahaha I can write this as bizarro as I want" spirit.