pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Good things, where have you gone?

I remember the first Menomena record being relatively tasteful and interesting at the time. The band got less and less interesting from then on.

Yeah, I saw them on a fine double bill once with Field Music.

i posted this on "kind of lol, mostly sad" but have since realized i've missed my core audience
http://pitchfork.com/news/61902-sufjan-stevens-covers-drakes-hotline-bling/

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/957-hey-whats-up-hello-9-songs-that-say-hi/

Okay, they've posted a lot of boring navel-gazy self indulgent shit but I have never seen something this absurd and lazy from them before. I don't think I realized until this article how pandering they've become, I mean Buzzfeed has written much more interesting music content than this. What IS this!??!

The "hello, good morning" gets repeated so often, and with so little inflection, that Diddy doesn't sound like he's talking to anyone. He's just repeating the greeting reflexively sans brain activity—which is how you say "hello" to most people most of the time, is the truth.

hi forks

hello

hello good morning

"Drake’s 'Hotline Bling' is another old-guard Drake song about longing for a nebulous time, place, and lover; Sufjan’s 'Hotline Bling' is a brilliant epilogue of survival. It’s some of our only concrete evidence, post-Carrie & Lowell, to suggest that he’s emerged from the darkness with fragments of joy intact. If Stevens can recover from his deepest valleys, swishing around onstage to a Drake song, then why can’t the rest of us?”

I don't even

The whole piece is full of these if you dare:

http://m.pitchfork.com/thepitch/961-hotline-bling-a-song-by-sufjan-stevens/

looool

whoever wrote that is so far down the rabbit hole that i can't imagine there's any light left.

Not all of us can relate to the precise trauma he details on record, but debilitating loss is among life's only guarantees. He understands that everyone walks into a Sufjan Stevens show with their own emotional baggage—whether it’s a roster of departed loved ones, or the people we can't imagine losing. Achieving a shared experience doesn't have to mean participating to the same degree, but for allowing the listener’s vulnerability to shine through. So when Stevens invites Gallant out for the final song, it’s an exuberant reward for everyone who’s spent the past two hours sifting through some serious shit.

Drake’s "Hotline Bling" is another old-guard Drake song about longing for a nebulous time, place, and lover; Sufjan’s "Hotline Bling" is a brilliant epilogue of survival. It’s some of our only concrete evidence, post-Carrie & Lowell, to suggest that he’s emerged from the darkness with fragments of joy intact. If Stevens can recover from his deepest valleys, swishing around onstage to a Drake song, then why can’t the rest of us?

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Sufjan's Hotline Bling are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9748-what-your-music-format-says-about-you/

I read this to learn more about myself, only found out that I must have a car, which I don't. Illuminating!

lots of dumb in a single sentence:

After a chance connection via a Facebook message, Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson) has teamed up with none other than Bobby Caldwell - yes, that Bobby Caldwell, the one with the 1978 classic "What You Won't Do For Love" has been sampled on approximately 21.9% of all hip-hop songs ever released—and the result is a smash, taking equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, (!) laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework.

If Stevens can recover from his deepest valleys, swishing around onstage to a Drake song, then why can’t the rest of us?

P4K does this a lot. The wannabe-profound closing line which suggests the record has important lessons for life and how to live it.

They're really into pushing the idea of music as therapy

everybody else is doing it, so why can't we?

now that j-hop has left the building i wonder what the status of the magazine is. i do enjoy doing my little column. guess i could ask someone. i do like that magazine. i swear this thread is the only time i see the online stuff.

xxxxp to jordan: dumb aside, that sentence is a punctuation abomination.

that's really the source of my pain, especially in an opening sentence.

Encountered now, in 2015, A People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm feels like a palette cleanser. Considered with Kendrick Lamar's layered and angsty self-examination on To Pimp A Butterfly, the blunting and numbing escapist bounce of Future's DS2, and Drake's bombastic and moody mythological affirmations from If You're Reading This It's Too Late

...what

that review really bugged me, both for its sad "it's relevant to the hip hop of TODAY!" appeal and for its gushing praise of what is maybe 2/3rds a great album. A 10 it is not, if just because Phife's skills are nowhere near what they would become on subsequent records.

Yeah, leave some points for low end theory

Also, like, as a "reissue" it's just an album that's been in print for 25 years with three new remixes, including one by J Cole

There's like legit B-sides that could have been on there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6BQnm9Bgo

yeah this doesn't seem like much of a "reissue"

https://medium.com/cuepoint/my-review-of-pitchfork-s-indie-500-album-review-358188d19ae2
who will review the review of the review

"Isn’t Pitchfork supposed to be the gold standard when it comes to reviews?"

well, hmmm....

"Who edited this review?"

well, you know, very busy at the office, you see....

Mosi is great, that's the most generous review anyone's gonna give a Talib Kweli album in 2015, and he doesn't know what a "straw man" is

i just read the last sentences of p4k reviews now

So even as My Name Is pulls back the curtain on Doug Hream Blunt’s mystery music, it also makes clear that the opposite sex will always remain one to him.

the opposite sex will always remain a curtain to him?

irl lol flopson

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/beef_curtains_bobs_burgers.gif

Ty Segall's T. Rex covers haven't gotten the attention they deserve.

...

Well? That's pretty subjective. So what?

i'm skeptical that the deserved attention for [Guy who already releases too much music that all sounds the same's] covers of [beloved band he lifted his songwriting and production style from] is more than zero

I guess I'm not as sour about Ty Segall as you to call p4k dumb for that.

Ty Segall's T. Rex covers haven't gotten the attention they deserve.

...

― flopson, Monday, November 30, 2015 9:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i saw this too and i'm just like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no thanks

Fantomas' T. Rex cover is probably my fave and deserves more attention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzvwgEaupo

From the new Parquet Courts review,

"A chugging number called "Monastic Living I." is Battles without the epiphanies."

Pitchfork needs their critic bait epiphanies people!!

lol otm flopson

irl lol'd @ this

http://i.imgur.com/KnWLbGL.png

Reminds me of this rating, which has been unfortunately rounded:
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11041-the-heavy-metal-box/

Bradford Cox Details Alleged Aggressive Encounter With Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins Crew

"Mr. Corgan"

This whole thing reminds me of a cover of a Pumpkins show in Feminist Baseball circa 95/96 that I still giggle at whenever I think of it

i dont hate p4k, but found it funny to read their review of adeles when we were young, and talking about trying to sound older, when so many of their reviewers now sound like theyre trying to sound like they are about 45 years old!

The sadness swells in her voice as she looks at her friends, who stand with her ravaged by time, knowing the moment won't last forever. What comes next is the inevitability of separation, and then the finality of death. "I'm so mad I'm getting old, it makes me reckless," she sings. But inside all this seriousness and all this sadness are reasons to be happy for what's happened. When she performed the song on "SNL", her hands flared as she hit that peak and went into overdrive. As her backup singers repeated the song's title a moment later, she began mouthing along to the refrain, putting on a goofy smile as she pointed back and forth between herself and someone standing offstage. In broadcasting this private interaction for millions, she reminded us that when you strip away the outsized emotion of her songs, you're left with the connection between two people—an intimacy she never forgets.

or maybe its just a particularly american music crit kind of earnestness i have a weird aversion to.