pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

The one fan.

Yeah Alex I can tell you're confident in your wrongness, but Ryan didn't go to college

And (wild guess) Samir Khan wasn't white

Oh no my illusions are shattered!

Okay exceptions to the rule noted, I think my generalization stands and regardless of race/education level there wasn't much mystery here for most of us.

I mean, you are basically saying "I'm guessing the people behind an indie-rock website fit what's come to be accepted as the core demographic of indie-rock listeners," which isn't a particularly clever proposition, and did not really answer any of the questions I'm saying I'd have had about the site in the mid-to-late 90s, e.g. where are these people from, are they younger or older, are they nuts or not, why is this person called "Richard-san," etc. etc., and all the elements of constructing an image/personality of a writer in your head as you read

This is a simple point that a lame zinger does not really undermine

I guess you thought about it a lot more than I did then.

I mean I just assumed they were mostly around my age, had some time on their hands, were not nuts, called themselves whatever they pleased and wrote about what got sent them.

^^^this. Especially since a lot of their staff were on the same message boards as me at the time.

It didn't require thinking -- my original point was that if one of the writers went on a bit about moving or temp work, this read not as an annoyance but as a tidbit of information about the person whose reviews you'd been reading blind. This wasn't a point about the writers being fascinating enigmas, it was a point about readers' relationships with the personalities beyond the screen being very different at that stage than they are now.

I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who, when reading a given periodical, becomes interested in the personalities and circumstances of the people I'm reading -- especially in a context where it's somewhat non-professional and there's no concrete information available.

^ make that "when REGULARLY reading a given periodical"

I do that with ILX.

I think that REGULARLY is probably key here.

I would assume that the bulk of Pitchfork's readership in those early days was regular.

Really? Why would you assume that?

I found all their digressions stupid and irritating and signs of bad writing more than anything else

cf wizard's cap

Even if you were a regular reader, i.e. clicking on the site every day/week (it wasn't always daily updated was it? I can't recall now) I think how invested even a regular reader was, probably had a great deal of variance.

xpost - It was a small unpublicized sometimes-amateurish site with a niche audience and a lot of voice/style involved; its selling point was regular coverage of music that wasn't covered a ton of other places online; it eventually put up a reader-mail page that usually contained missives from people who seemed to follow the site. It seemed like the sort of site that people would either click across once and forget, or else start reading regularly because it covered stuff they were interested in (what review outlet isn't kinda like this?), and hindsight/history seems to confirm that this was the case. I'm not sure how, at this point, to imagine some kind of shifting/sporadic readership in those days, but maybe you know something I don't.

xpost - okay, we're either talking in circles or you're just disagreeing with things for the sake of it, given that my whole point was that pretty much anything I read repeatedly over the course of more than a few months will prompt some kind of "I wonder who's writing this" curiosity

(I'd note also that people still engage in lots of weirdo imagination of who the site's writers are or what they're like, though it's very, very good that no multi-paragraph review intros are answering those questions)

I'm sure there were plenty of people who read the site obsessively and wondered "who's writing this", but I think there were also plenty of people who clicked on the site, checked if anything looked interesting, glanced at a review or two, and then went on their merry way (hell this is how I still read the site and many others). They didn't care whose name was on a review and they didn't give much thought to who the writers were than I did above.

I don't think I've ever read a music review

Alex in SF you are obtuse.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Triangle-obtuse.svg/460px-Triangle-obtuse.svg.png

When I wrote this:

Do we need to go back to those PFM reviews that start out with awful academic presumptuousness and opening sentences like "Poor black Americans in 1973 thought that Nixon was..." and other shifting viewpoints and strawmen?

When I wrote that a few weeks ago I had no idea it was such a close parody to an actual PFM review opener. That is, until I saw Shakey Mo's Motown excerpt upthread.

Again, the real thing.

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 totally want to avoid getting all Captain Save-a-Prose on this or any other thread, but Cunga, can I just ask what's bad or incorrect or non-illuminating about that statement (the 60s one)?

Some will quibble about "true democracy", I suppose. And the "now I'm going to teach you kids a lesson about this" tone never seems to make friends around here.

Somebody was saying something about comma placement.

load all messages nabisco

Oh right, I forgot we went over that. But I get the feeling that Cunga's objection to that sentence is not the same as Shakey's. Cunga seems to feel there's something horrible about it as a sentence (?), whereas Shakey was just making a substantively questionable nit-pick about what constitutes a "true democracy" (a nit-pick I still find completely baffling and silly, sorry).

pitchfork was a pretty special place for me in the late 90s, and as a teenager then i thought i stumbled upon a pretty awesome little corner of the web.

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

^yea this gets at what i liked about the early site.

i do cringe now at some of the old reviews (the coltrane one upthread is pretty awesome) but i think those reviews had a lot to do with why i liked the site then. as some have alluded to, that kind of amateurish, but very enthusiastic tone kind of paralleled how my friends and i talked about music at that age. i hadn't heard of a zine at that time and pretty much read about music in spin, so to find the site at that time was pretty cool.

It's weird for me to think about how upset I used to get about Pitchfork reviews in 2000-2002. Now it is one of the blandest websites I can think of, and I miss all those old wars.

It's like Pitchfork's been soft ever since Snoop came through and crushed the buildings.

LOL at this - I don't think Marissa'a PR company could have licked her colon cleaner:

Hells Yeah, New Marissa Nadler Album!
Blonde Redhead, Beachwood Sparks members guest

Sub-zero temperatures, snow quietly cascading onto barren branches, and Marissa Nadler playing on the stereo; some things were just made for each other. Hopefully snow will still be falling on some parts of the world come March 3, as that's when Ms. Nadler's due to drop her fourth full-length, Little Hells.

The follow-up to 2007 breakthrough Songs III: Bird on the Water and likely little bit o' heaven, Little Hells collects 10 new tracks and features production from Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, !!!) and contributions from Blonde Redhead's Simone Pace, Beachwood Sparks' "Farmer" Dave Scher, and Black Hole Infinity's Myles Baer. Kemado will have the pleasure of releasing it.

And just in time for this chilly season, relatively new Kemado offshoot Mexican Summer (named after a Marissa Nadler jam, no less) issued Marissa's debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, on vinyl this week. Swap out "stereo" for "creaky turntable" in the scenario above, and you really have some things that were made for each other.

In other Marissa rumblings, the lady has a new original track due on a forthcoming compilation to benefit the Save Darfur campaign and the World Food Programme, and a cover of Judee Sill's "The Kiss" is set to appear on another upcoming comp. Nadler notes that the Sill cover will be credited to Marissa Nadler & Black Hole Infinity and marks her first "attempt at electronic drum beats." Nice.

I can't wait until this album comes out so I can forget all about killing myself.

Also LOL at 'attempt at electronic drum beats' garnering a 'nice' from Pitchfork - if Rivers Cuomo or Ryan Adams said that shit they'd open up a can of nerd whoop-ass to beat the (Beta) band.

Oh, hilarious, increasingly ridiculous Pitchfork.

tbf, given the way they used to gather their news, Marissa Nadler probably wrote that item.

Oh, hilarious, increasingly ridiculous Pitchfork

Hilarious, increasingly, ridiculous, gay, homo, awful, Pitchfork, media

For those of you nostalgic for odd tangents in a review lede, I recommend checking out today's Cat Power review. The critic's sister just had a baby!

That's not at all irrelevant to the review, though.

dude it was a pretty lame review

is it really that hard to just write "this Cat Power record, like all Cat Power records, was boring"

no, but they won't pay you for a review less than 20 words long unless there's an accompanying dog or monkey-related visual.

what about a picture of chan marshall's bush

or a lolcat power

"I can haz cumpleet silenz wile I restarts song fiev times?"

That "Blind" song they named song of the year is a piece of shit.

blind is awesome imo

HOMOPHOBE!!!

haha. anyone who hates hercules and love affair= homophobe. i think we established that over on the NME best of poll.

yeah I saw them on Sunday and all of a sudden regret not hanging out in the VIP all day in case Nomi came out for a cocktail

though Erlend Oye did come out and dance with me during H&LA

Three years passed between the Austrian electronicist's landmark Endless Summer and 2004's relatively underwhelming Venice.

Nuh Uh.