what does this pfm song review thingy even mean anyway?

-- Dan (You Aren't Writing An Essay) Perry ([email protected]) (webmail), January 6th, 2006. (Dan Perry)

OTM

(xpost: Tom is OTM; the ridiculous binary is what I'm primarily reacting to up there. I've lauded oblique reviews in the past when I've thought that I had a good idea of what the music was like and whether or not I would like it, especially the Nick S. Pitchfork reviews I've read, so I'm not advocating a strict binary as much as forcefully asserting that reviews have a primary purpose at the end of the day and that primary purpose is not to satirize government or to paint poetic images.)

There is nothing wrong with music writing that makes you think. There is nothing wrong with reviews that make you think. But if you're not interested in performing the basic functions of describing and evaluating, you are not writing a review.

All that said, as I think some people have agreed above, this particular review does fulfill all the functions of a review while also being well-written and thoughtful, which is why it's a very good review.

I dunno, it just seems like reading a review isn't like driving down a road--if there's something you can't get through, you can always skip it, it's not like you're just stuck there, unable to go on. Half the things I read I end up skipping things, and that's cool.

Prefuse has always been scattered by design, interrupting his grooves with bouncing shards of jazz pianos or light static. But once upon a time there was a method to it, a dude who loved rap paying tribute to it by freaking its conventions. Somewhere along the line, his switch got stuck on autopilot, and now we get stuff like this, a couple of seconds of flipping-stations noises mutating into a half-realized lope, its backwards synth-tones paying no attention to its blip-drums, its non-sequitur Spanish guitar making no attempt to interact with the zip-blurp sound effects. This is not music, this is dicking around-- and I'd actually put some mud in my mouth if he'd stop. [Tom Breihan]

this is a matter of wordcounts, not fundamentals.

obv i agree, basically, eppy, except that "review" is a pretty shitty word, in this context, because it's going to cause all the confusion that appears in this thread.

"Reviews" are for most people "writing on a given album/song/gig, which appears in a paper, magazine or webzine, and has a heading like '[artist] - [album name]'."

If someone writes a review^eppy that's actually just criticism^eppy, but it appears in the form of a review^sean, people are gonna call it a review. but if they're like dan or mickey, and of course if we live in this world where everything fits into nice binary categories, then they're still gonna hate it because it's secretly criticism^eppy..

That sounds like the definition of a terrible review to me.

"first this skin-and-bones drum/keys intro, more guitars hiked up like mismatched tube socks tucked into pants, a bendy plywood voice emoting like Miles Kurosky or even Alex Greenwald"

-- i don't understand, not just cos i don't know who miles and alex are, but all i get from this is that there's an intro involving drums and keys (it sounds thin? intros should have more instruments? what?), and that there are some guitars (loud? to high in the mix? how the fuck do you tuck socks into pants? as in, to make your cock look big?)

Pants in US English = trousers

And is this unreasonable or unfair for some reason? It seems to make perfect sense to me. These "nice binary categories" aren't some construct I'm opposing on the text myself and attacking this straw man. I want you to load pitchforkmedia.com right now. There's a heading called "Record Reviews." See what I mean? If music critics (^eppy) want to start analyzing the inner meaning of a record and see what they sort of Marxist criticism they can construct to satirize goverment or something, so be it, but add a "Criticism" section. Let reviews be reviews. To repeat the same comparison I made before, it's like opening your car manual to find it's a series of haikus.

wtf does it mean that the faces are "petals on a wet, black bough"? are they flower people? are they not wet and just the street is? are they climbing trees? do they have no bodies? or are their bodies black too? (and wtf "apparition of faces in a crowd"? isn't a crowd mostly faces anyway!?)

---

Mickey - My point there was not a criticism of your position, which I understand. It was a criticism of Eppy's name for it. Because I totally disagree that "pure" criticism^eppy (i apologise for the retarded nomenclature) can't appear in a "record reviews" section.

we're not jsut talking about criticism that's heavy marxist shit - we're also talking about exaggerated-vsns-of-Rachel-Khong, where you write "this song is a merry go round staffed by a hispanic immigrant who only knows the english word 'RIDE!'" and that's it.

80% of the posts at my blog, which you would definitely hate, are mostly unhelpful in most of the functions you're asking for. but they're still clearly (to me) "reviews".

-- jz (j...), January 6th, 2006.

yeah, this is what i thought. so how do you tuck socks into trousers? vice versa i can see, to avoid getting oily legs while on a bike.

"secretly criticism" would be a good album title.

The hilarious thing about my position in all of this is that I am the first person to throw out an imagery-based description of a piece of music, but I'm not a music critic and I usually (not always) follow up with a breakdown of the musical elements that made that image come to mind.

so how do you tuck socks into trousers?

It depends entirely on how baggy your socks are. Or maybe she miswrote. Or perhaps she's trying to tease out an ineffable quality of the music that she finds utterly confounding in as few words possible.

If I'm writing something about music I want it to be effective.

"This made me buy/steal the record" = effective.
"This made me decide not to buy/steal a record" = effective.
"This made me play a record I'd already bought/stolen" = effective.
"This made me think about stuff" = effective.
"This amused me for thirty seconds" = effective in a limited way.

"I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about" = ineffective, usually.

(If I'm writing it for money I want it to be my editor's definition of effective.)

There are lots of ways to get to effective.

?

Wait no...

I also want constant bait and switching of "hipsters".

Instead it's being raised from the dead to use as the template for a whole new generation of snob publications. A shame because it often tends to overshadow good writing (in the same publications) along the way.

Only if it's released on Secretly Canadian.

*Pitchfork has plenty of good writers, and some of those responsible for the at times bad writing are plenty capable of not pulling this shit either.

Can't there be some balance between labyrinthine turns of phrase AND comprehensibilty? Isn't that what made Lester great?

In the five years, webzine reviews are just going to be comparisons to philosphical constructs and references to arcane Cam'ron lyrics.

haha wait so ilm doesn't frequently call bullshit on pfork's more impenetrable pieces? thats a bit disingenuous, no? maybe the reason more people aren't doing it in this particular instance is because the review is not actually that hard to understand?

Of course there can, but it's in a different place for everyone.

I just think it's bad writing period, and an obvious, rather old style utilised more for the benefit of the business interests and identity of the enterprise, than for it's usefulness (it's not) in exposing and celebrating great music.

Wait wait wait. Hold on. You can think it's bad writing, that's fine, although I disagree. But making the leap from the first part of this sentence to the second partis like jumping the Snake River Canyon. Are you saying that Pitchfork deliberately decided to get people to write badly in order to burnish its "image" of, what, bad writing? Being like Melody Maker? (College freshman: "You guys, check this site out, they're totally like this British magazine from when I was 3!") You think there's some lab where Pitchfork grows their writers, that they're not, like, real people?

Look, I know we all hate Pitchfork and stuff, but it's not an "enterprise," no matter how much you want to talk about its advertising income or its editorial oversight or anything. It's a bunch of writers and editors doing what they think is right and good, just like anything else, and treating it as an enterprise is just monumentally disrespectful to the individual writers involved. (If you want to talk about the "enterprise," at least say "Ryan.") It's been clearly demonstrated on this thread that many people think this is a good piece of writing, so if you want an explanation for how it got up on the Pitchfork website, why construct this whole devious scheme that apparently involves Pitchfork staking its identity on "obviously" bad writing (muh?) when it's much more likely that the editors liked the piece and decided to run it? Is that really that hard to believe?