pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

his "taste" is also a byproduct of him reviewing literally anything. first time i saw a fantano video on youtube he was reviewing a free jazz record i really loved (little women's throat).

he's evidence that it's possible to listen to a ton of music and put together one's thoughts on all of it and literally never get better at articulating yourself or developing your reasoning

he has a decent to good taste imo

― And the cry rang out all o'er the town / Good Heavens! Tay is down (imago), Wednesday, May 4, 2016 10:23 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this how british ppl say this? it sounds like you licked him

I think he mentions in an interview somewhere that he'd needed someone to show him the joys of music prior to the year 2000 (I think). So his take on music is through a lens that doesn't necessarily consider that music made before the 00s is "cool" and not just historically important. I'll look for it if I can find it.

Was there a direct reason it was posted here buried in those 19 minutes? Not thread policing just curious.

whiney is p into this guy and likes to watch the videos and then post them on ilx

The "Who Gives A Shit" stamp of quality

i've never watched one of his videos because i hate his dumb face

Ok redacting my last post, it was the Nardwuar interview I was thinking of and he said he was in high school when he was called out for only listening to music from the 00s. So not entirely fair on my part.

crüt otm

whiney is p into this guy and likes to watch the videos and then post them on ilx

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, May 4, 2016 1:58 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can't watch more than a few seconds of any "nerd talks at camera" video but it's fascinating to me how this dude is probably a more influential critical entity in 2016 than Pitchfork, yet ILX isn't nearly as obsessed with him

Because analyzing a piece of writing is more interesting to a bunch of writers than suffering through some jabbering clown's 20-minute monologue about Beyonce?

what does influential mean in that statement

from youtube comments apparently his fans (gonna call them "fanstano") think he's fallen off in the past year or so. no idea how they can tell

this dude is probably a more influential critical entity in 2016 than Pitchfork, yet ILX isn't nearly as obsessed with him

what does influential mean in that statement

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, May 4, 2016 2:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think festival bookers or whoever have picked up on it yet but I would bet there is a better good-review-to-purchased-album ratio from a Needle Drop than Best New Music at this point unless Anna Meredith and Kevin Morby are secretly topping the charts

I would bet there is a better good-review-to-purchased-album ratio from a Needle Drop than Best New Music at this point

nfw

also a lot of his reviews are requests by fans who i assume have...already heard the records they're requesting. not sure that amounts to the same ratio

I agree with Whiney. Y'all are severely underestimating AF's popularity and influence. I don't watch him regularly but I don't find him disagreeable at all, certainly not repulsive. He's pretty fair. I mean, yeah he's a hack, but so what? He knows his place, I feel. The Stephen King of YouTube stars?

i literally cannot bear to watch him for multiple seconds

Yeah, I mean, I've said this before, I can't be mad at dude because he's pulling it off, living off it and not trying to get in any of our lanes.

Pitchfork is less interested in talking about indie music these days. I think people are looking elsewhere these days more and more to hear about newer acts.

I watched a few of his videos years ago and, an unexpected fondness for Brandon Flowers aside, his opinions mostly just seemed like reiterations of conventional P4k wisdom. I have nothing against him; he does his thing and it just happens to be of very little use to me, probably because when it comes to post-00s music, I'm more selective than consumptive (in that I feel like I fall in love with fewer and fewer new acts each year). I have had more than one friend (both born after 1990) reference his reviews/opinions to me out of the blue, so I'm guessing that for a certain strain of this generation of music fan, his reviews have some utility.

That's also really interesting to see what looks like a very aggressive rebrand of Pitchfork to include more R&B and Datpiff rap mixtapes instead of like reviewing 300 Burger Records clones and letting Grayson and Marc talk about Hair Police or w/e. All of which means more POC, more women, more LGBT — all unquestionably awesome and great from a purely ideological and philosophical standpoint that I'm sure 100% of ILX (including myself) would laud.

But Conde Nast has made it abundantly clear that their audience is still millennial males, so time is only gonna tell if a huge indie-centric audience is gonna change with Pitchfork; or fully jump ship to Fantanoy shores.

speaking for myself, i am willing to bide time for the next ten to twenty years until millennial males no longer have key purchasing power before making any rash decisions regarding what youtubes i have to watch.

hear, hear

i feel like millenial males are down with the rebrand though

Feels like pitchfork has been about 80% r&b and mixtapes for years now.

also metal

I would bet there is a better good-review-to-purchased-album ratio from a Needle Drop than Best New Music at this point

nfw

A bit of anecdotal evidence to back up the "nfw" stance, he did a glowing review of the new Drones album a few months ago and they are still totally invisible stateside.

wait, what's wrong with Fantano

dude is a genius:

381,739 views

I always thought it'd be funny if someone cut his hands off so that when he gesticulated it would just be these bloody stumps splattering blood on his walls.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Thursday, 10 April 2014 14:26 (2 years ago) Permalink

metacritic is prob more popular and influential in a scores-to-purchases-ratio sense than p4k or fantano but i'm not sure if that means we should dissect its every move

metacritic is so fucked too

i met someone irl recently who seems to legit like fantano (unsurprisingly his main determinant for whether to check out music is -- openly -- whether it's been well-reviewed... for SOME REASON he started listening to contemporary rap for the first time about two years ago). he says he often reads what has been written about albums on wikipedia before listening also.

so basically

(album) received generally (positive/mixed/(almost-never-)negative) reviews from contemporary music critics. ((writer) of (publication) praised the (thing), writing (quote).) x n

is the way a probably-not-insignicifant number of "passionate millennial males" are deciding whether to listen to music now

oh i forgot to include the obligatory sentence about its metacritic score in my wikipedia "critical reception" section formula, sorry. it should always be the second sentence in the section fyi.

hey there, not saying that fantano is necessary to any discourse or that his opinions are law, just that he often likes good stuff regardless of its pitchfork cachet

pitchfork is manifestly a greater force for cultural arbitration (and thus evil) than fantano but ilx treats its opinion like a fucking holy book sometimes

fantano is easier to pick on coz he's a wacky dude who makes wacky youtube videos and so ilx picks on him in lieu of trying and failing to pick on pitchfork which it can't pick on because it's in fealty to it

mercifully free of this complex i say fuck pitchfork and fuck what it says, forever

except for when it employs brad or the other ilx people who sometimes write for it *crosses self*

Fuck Complex too, now that you mention.

ilx treats its opinion like a fucking holy book sometimes

this is such trash dude

verily I cast thee out

like you are posting in a thread called "pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series)" created almost a decade ago xp

imago thinking fantano has great taste is definitely ... well its not surprising, thats for sure

this thread is the fond mockery of the obsessed and the besotted

"passionate millennial males"

https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/top/?sort=top&t=month

almost a decade ago xp

also i was wrong, more than a decade! like 15 years ago!

on our year-end polls, each album and track's pazz and jop placement is announced...and then its pitchfork placement too. no other publication receives this privilege. of course there are countless other examples of pitchfork's centrality to the discourse

idk aren't there a lot of p4k staffers past & present who post here

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imago thinking fantano has great taste is definitely ... well its not surprising, thats for sure

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Wednesday, May 4, 2016 8:25 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

known for your critical rigour, you have extrapolated 'great' from 'often likes good stuff' and are surely bound to strike again