pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

"I can't wait to measure Mike Powell's career in a show of hands"

are you jk w/ this shit

Well tbf there are only so many hours in a day in which to pontificate on the minutiae of rap mixtapes

imo this is an extremely valuable service

FSA's Dave Pearce came to Terrastock for his first U.S. performance, but none of his usual collaborators made the trip. Instead, he was backed by Chicagoan Jim O'Rourke, who overpowered Pearce's gentle picking with his white-noise guitar, and ruined the vibe by telling a dumb and seemingly endless joke midway through the set.

I like Powell and I hope that if/when his own writing is compiled the foreward doesn't concern itself so pettily with the visibility of his work

it's such a lukewarm and tossed off 'retrospective'... he doesn't even like Insignificance !

everything is ok now.

pitchfork has reviewed built to spill.

omg, I'm glad the mike powell o'rourke article is mentioned here so I don't have to bring it up myself. on those rare occasions when pitchfork covers artists that I like (this is rare because there isn't any new bands that I really care about), pitchfork mentions the most annoying shit in their reviews regardless of whether they get the score "right" (usually not).

take the o'rourke article for instance:
1) paragraph #1 - let's write about how no one really knows anything about this artist because the way I judge their popularity is important criteria for this review
2) paragraph #2 "sprawling, orchestrated suites that sound like progressive rock played by a somewhat irritable marching band".
-Admittedly I haven't listened to much of the improv stuff but never once have I heard anything similar to a marching band
3) paragraph #2 "He is one of those musicians whose admirers call him a "composer," as though what he does requires a level of thought and expertise that places him above people who just pick up a guitar and start shredding, which O’Rourke often does"
-Are you shitting me? It's only the 2nd paragraph and you've already proved that you are annoying as hell 3 times. How does a non-Jim'O admirer know anything about Jim'O admirers at all? Has he actually ever heard anyone call O'Rourke a "composer" or is that just what the voices in his head are telling him when he trys to get in the mind-frame of a Jim O'Rourke admirer by listening to his music.

actually I'm gonna stop here. it never fails. i read one article and I have a renewed hate for pitchfork. the kind of hate that ultimately means jack shit because pitchfork is just gonna keep on being pitchfork and I'm gonna keep on reading their articles whenever they cover a band I care about. god damnit

its not a review, its a primer, he is mentioning the popularity as a reason for the article. he thought people who were unfamiliar with his work would find it useful

why do you think he's a non-jim o'rourke admirer?

maybe he is a jim o' admirer but why would he show it by writing shit/shittily about him

some more quotes from that article:

"This is the record I like to imagine Sufjan Stevens might’ve made had he not been polluted by wonder."

about my favorite O'Rourke album Insignificance:
"I don’t listen to this one much, and have a somewhat active distaste for "All Downhill From Here", which reminds me of Collective Soul and a host of other meaty, neo-buttrock bands that inadvertently got me into indie music to begin with."

Sure it's not Mike's fault that he judges one artist based on similarities to another artist. But the Sufjan comparison is far fetched and the collective soul comparison is an important lesson why you shouldn't let your opinions on band x and genre y influence your album experience of someone, that despite the similarities, is doing something very different. Post-buttrock maybe

"mildly godlike"

"subtly defiant"

For when you want to be subversive and challenging but not to the point of attracting attention.

actually now that I think about it, I don't even know what buttrock is

To me it fails as a primer because it doesn't really make O'Rourke's work seem particularly appealing or worth revisiting. It also doesn't make a good case that the work is worth grappling with despite its flaws, or influential, and it doesn't make a point about, say, why O'Rourke isn't as "famous" as he used to be. The basic format is:

a) Here's this guy who used to be revered
b) No one's heard of him anymore I guess.
c) Most people who like him are pretentious assholes
d) I like his records fine, here are some lukewarm descriptions

slow news day?

i mean you gotta write about something.

To some people this will mean a great deal; to the other 99.99% percent of the population it will mean nothing at all.

jim o'rourke should do a Back To The 90's tour with built to spill. get his name out there to the kids.

It's abt the writer and what he wants us to think of him, I think

powell otm re: insignificance afaic, that is a shit record

what triggered me about that release is my own personal baggage re the-way-people-talk-about-jim-o'rourke. dude has been working his whole career on projects of all sorts of scale and levels of visibility, and yet mike powell essentially reduces his output to a ranking of his five DC releases. which is how most people approach him, ignoring his other contributions. i can't imagine any jim o'rourke retrospective not starting with fenn'o'berg. and also how most people deal with him now, like, "oh where's he been all these years?" as if a working musician's existence hinges exclusively on their visibility. maybe it's just my own baggage. i just think the "lol what happened to HER?" kind of US weekly approach is suuuuuper out of place when you're talking about a friggin drone musician / producer-mixer of weirdo records

*article, not release

Jonathan Zwickel's review of Sherwood at the Controls is a million times better than that horrible O'Rourke thing, maybe he's Pitchfork's finest

Agreeing w/ the ppl who are saying that that O'Rourke article is absolute dogshit - I'm not a regular PFork reader, but my memory is that they did used to have writers who knew SOMETHING about improv/noise etc, and who might have been able to write something interesting and useful about some of the hundreds and hundreds of non-song based albs that O'Rourke has made.

FWIW, The Wire ran a much better, more comprehensive and less ignorant O'Rourke overview a couple of years ago.

Wasn't O'Rourke pretty involved in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Only mixing, but a lot of what people like about YHT is the mixing, right? Wouldn't it have been the logical thing to tell people to drum up interest, or have the kids these days already forgotten YHT?

Yeah! Good chance the reviewer forgot/didn't know/cldnt be bothered doing research, to (maybe unfairly, oh well) judge by his tone

he has a fair few performance credits on yhf too so i'd be surprised if he didn't have at least something to do with the arrangements on it.

The O'Rourke albums Powell includes are, in fact, the only ones I've heard. I like all of them, but I've never had much interest in checking out his other stuff (besides Gastr del Sol, which is what got me into him in the first place). I suspect that there are would-be O'Rourke fans with interests and sensibilities similar to mine, so a primer explicitly restricted to his Drag City output makes sense to me.

I do see fgti's point that it inadvertently reduces his career to those five albums ... but if it's written for people who haven't heard a lick of O'Rourke, are those not good places to start?

Eureka is kind of a perfect pitchfork album. but do pitchfork readers still care about van dyke parks? the world moves so quickly now...

i've never heard a jim o'rourke album or an album that he was a big part of that i needed to keep. he's done a lot for sure, and worked with lots of people i like, but his stuff always feels like exercise to me. the trying on of hats. talented in his way, for sure!

in fact, my primer would be a list of recordings by people he has played or worked with. there are borbetomagus and voice crack albums that are way more essential to hear then any o'rourke record. same goes for haino, ambarchi, faust, tony conrad, uh, it's a long list. brice-glace and gastr del sol were "avant garde" within the context of chicago indie rock of that time, but in the wider and wilder world of weirdness, they are pretty low on the totem pole.

Those yearly Haino/Ambarchi/O'Rourke live recs are some of the best things any one of them have been involved with, imho, and O'Rourke's solo alb on Mego - I'm Happy and I'm Singing - is as at least as good as any of the Drag City albs

i actually see a lot of his activity as boosterism for other people and he probably does bring attention to other people who i admire more ( kinda like thurston does) and this is always a good thing. if only one indie jim o'rourke fan buys a hafler trio or christoph heemann record....the world will be a better place. or loren connors. or zeena parkins.

at the end of the day, weasel walter is a more compelling figure to me in the world of prolific and hyperactive 20th and 21st century american composition.

Yeah, was just going to post that a better Primer would also include some of the things he's reissued, like Plux Quba or the stuff on Dexter's Cigar.

That Nuno Canavarro album "Plux Quba" on Moikai is an all time top 10 or so for me, so yeah

Whoops yeah as said, sry

the o'rourke (via sonic youth) gateway into improv etc was definitely a big one for me in my late teens, yeah. he's also a much more appealing ~character~ (which is presumably useful for this kind of primer) as this roving polymath doing electroacoustic albums one day and indie pop ones the next than as just some dude who released a few nice indie-ish albums a while back

i actually see a lot of his activity as boosterism for other people and he probably does bring attention to other people who i admire more ( kinda like thurston does) and this is always a good thing. if only one indie jim o'rourke fan buys a hafler trio or christoph heemann record....the world will be a better place. or loren connors. or zeena parkins.

― scott seward,

if only one scott seward could crawl out of their asshole....the world will be a better place.

I want to make a comment/retort here but I keep circling back to the idea of a group of people sharing an asshole and shuddering

i was just hoping for a gif

you sure about that?

well... I don't want spread cheeks if that's what you mean

this sure took a turn

And coughed

You need to find another doctor.

human centipitchfork

pinch forks's bum (#3438465

http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9634-boss-status-speedy-ortiz-make-power-moves/

I feel like in 2015 we can concede that it's not interesting or unusual for someone who plays "indie rock" to enjoy hip-hop music.

Hip-hop has been mainstream popular for over 30 years. It's not interesting or unusual for anyone to enjoy it.

the resilient, outspoken, and autonomous attitude of rap