pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

hey now

the only thing i would shoot someone with is my hurmor

humor

I like the review, I said it was mostly OTM and talked about the authenticity thing well.

My ish with the "many people/repellant" line was not its accuracy but its phrasing. That the "people" went unnamed, like, it didn't need to be said. I can't see a writer typing "you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant" about, say, Jack White, an artist whose whole project many people find repellent.

Speaking on behalf of other people is textbook abusive-language, even (especially?) when it's a method for framing a compliment. I dunno. Maybe I'm just being sensitive. My post was supposed to actually be in support of the review.

i've always thought that those casual asides are how received wisdom, both abusive and non-abusive, actually gets reinforced, rather than something actually being the subject of a piece, for exactly those reasons

iirc her last album sold 5 million copies worldwide but is just barely platinum in the US after two years, so Katherine otm re: her popularity outside the US.

How does observing that lots of people have a virulent reaction to her reinforce it? That's dumb

That the "people" went unnamed, like, it didn't need to be said.

argumentum ad populum as it were.

If anything the wild success of Lana del Rey pretty much proves that using blog chatter as a metric for anything is totally short-sighted

It shows Lana gallivanting around with an older gentleman, getting into a number of decadent situations. It's very Gatsby-core. Check it out below.

oh god

oh lord pac

they killin the spirit of gatsby

shoulda gone for broke and ditched the hyphen, editorial

i've always thought that those casual asides are how received wisdom, both abusive and non-abusive, actually gets reinforced, rather than something actually being the subject of a piece, for exactly those reasons

otm. Watching American political talk shows it's amazing how Dem and GOP guys will say "We all agree Social Security is out of control and the deficit is a problem" without fear of contradiction.

https://my.secondlife.com/gatsby.core

It's funny how they always stick metal albums in that #5 review slot. Kind of feels like "we hired a couple of reviewers who specialize in metal but now our audience doesn't care about metal as much as they did a few years ago."

otm

It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy.
It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy.
It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy.
It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy.
It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy.

You can sense that North Carolina rock trio Late Bloomer hears Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü, and Nirvana differently than most revivalists, that they’re doing so without any pretense of sounding cool. In fact, Late Bloomer don’t think of their heroes as "indie rock" at all, but rather as some of the most popular bands of their time, actual heroes who deserve to be spoken of with grand gestures.

A world where Nirvana was among the most popular bands of their time, what a thing to imagine.

Right? I noticed that too.

It's that weird "indie vs. mainstream" mindset that I never have, nor probably never will, understand.

Gotta do some serious crate digging to find out about Nirvana.

Pretty sure Ian knows nirvana was very popular

*makes swooshing motion with arm* "i speak of NIRVANA"

Nirvana, they were a Scream side project right?

You know, that band the dude from Sweet 75 was in.

expanding his sound to include bold elements of vintage country and R&B.

NEWSWORTHY

http://pitchfork.com/news/55871-laurie-anderson-was-trapped-inside-a-hyperbaric-chamber/

i get that there's a core of truth in even the dumbest/most poorly expressed criticisms, but this is still a pretty dumb thing to say:

And it doesn't render commonplace technology personal and alive—there's not much here that a savvy amateur couldn't do with GarageBand, a low bar to clear when grid-based composition with soft synths is so accessible.

I used a soft, clear synth to clean my coffee pot this morning.

Braff’s most vaunted position in pop culture circa 2014 isn’t as the actor who played the annoying guy on the TV show your college roommates watched all the time, or as a fervent Redditor who once assisted in helping someone propose to their girlfriend online, or as a distant blood relative to Mitt Romney. Arguably, he’s not even most known as the guy who directed Garden State—he’s the guy who put together the Garden State soundtrack

I'm always happy to read something taking down this dude, but the idea that he's most famous for putting together the Garden State soundtrack is kind of dumb.

Though I guess it outranks the random Romney factoid pointlessly thrown in there.

Scrubs ran on a major network for 8 years, but yeah he's definitely more famous for really liking Iron & Wine.

Obviously the assertion that the Garden State music is more renowned than Scrubs is silly, but I definitely know people that are still really into that soundtrack (I seem to recall someone I knew at university telling me it was her all time favourite album)

Yeah, I definitely feel that it's fair to say that the Garden State soundtrack--and the role it played in mainstreaming a certain idea of indie--is actually Zach Braff's most lasting cultural legacy. But that paragraph makes the odd assertion that he's actually most famous for picking movie soundtrack songs.

The whole review read like someone who hates everything he's heard about Garden State but hasn't actually seen it himself. And I don't mean that in a "he doesn't get it" way- I'm not a fan of the movie.

I guess I'm just referring mostly to this:

"...obvious visual framing, a reliance on juvenalia for comedic effect, a bizarre focus on discouraging the use of antidepressants for the mentally ill..."

1. Visual framing example was a joke in the movie, right?

2. "Balls" written on the forehead was pretty self-aware iirc (linked image in second point), and not exactly handled in a Dude Where's My Car? fashion.

3. Braff's character wasn't actually mentally ill so wasn't that the conflict? Just now I'm thinking there may have been some lame speech about widespread reliance on medications so that criticism could actually hold.

But this coming from someone completely indifferent to the movie overall. What do I care?

An editor once taught me never to start a sentence with "arguably." You're already making the argument. It's redundant.

Didn't people dress in trash bags in that movie? Something like that?

I think that was a makeshift rain poncho solution.

He spends four paragraphs talking about all the baggage of Garden Sate before getting onto the soundtrack at hand. a) who needs that recap after a decade of "Shins will change your life" hackery, and b) give the new soundtrack at least a little credit and try to judge it on its own terms.

yeah, i knew as soon as i saw that as the lead that it would be an extremely low grade plus some Braff-bashing.

I'm fine with Braff-bashing tbh just feel like this was a particularly low quality version.

@Evan Feel like he was trying to find new ways to criticize a move that's already been beaten to death. But the established things that are awful about Garden State (extreme solipsism, underwritten cliche as female lead, some random quirky idea functioning as the driving force behind each scene, Shins scene) are bad enough; "it includes visual gags" is a much weaker criticism.

Right! It's a weird position to be in when you have to defend something you don't like or are otherwise indifferent towards because the other person is criticizing minor or irrelevant details.

i think it's time to pack this one up guys

garden state is shit (#31467846953264847 in a series)

I've noticed a really irritating trend. So many of my favorite albums this year - like YG, tune-yards and Owen Pallett - has gotten 8.1 or 8.2, without a bnm-nod. Which, I mean, who cares, but the reviews never ever bother explaining why these albums - some of them from artists who were bnm'd before - weren't quite good enough this time. And todays review of Shabazz Palaces is just weird. It ends like this: The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond. How is that not a bnm? Tugging next-gen sounds as far as they've ever been pulled? But there's nothing in the review taking it down. It just seems as if they've completely giving up on the idea of innovation being anything to be aplauded.

On another note, no hip-hop albums have been bnm'd this year. The only bnm'd black artists - afaict - are Beyoncé and the Hyperdub-comp. They've really become Mojo for hipsters, haven't they?

I'm furiously tugging next-gen over here

there it is