The Pitchfork People's List - top albums 1996-2012

DJP, uh exactly.

WCC I agree with everything you've said here 100%, without fail. But I feel that the relationship between this shitty list exercise and your arguments about SWM-dominated culture are ascribing too much importance to shitty list exercise.

@ croup yo I'm going out on a limb here please treat my opinions with the same respect as I'm treating yours instead of debating every detail

oh come on you said anyone discussing race, gender and culture in enslaved by pr

albeit you then noted that robyn was the jam

culture was enslaved, i mean

insofar as this list is concerned, yes.

well than forgive me if i sweat the details

This list has imo very little to do with anything more than a symbiotic relationship between Pitchfork and band publicists wherein bands seek to be myth-makers and create armies of enslaved fans who will vote for them online and make Pitchfork some Conver$e, yes.

did you scroll down below the top 20 yet?

sure, I wanted to see how many albums I worked on were on the list. Kanye beat me

lol i was totally going to make a "did you just look to see how many albums you were on and stop there" joke but i thought that would be mean

(The supreme irony of this is, I am trying to carry on this argument in one window and trying to train the new extremely Yorkeian new analyst to speak maths in the other window and one of these days I am going to tab to the wrong window and have the wrong conversation in the wrong box. Too many spreadsheets! He wants hedge funds, not Pitchfork bands!)

This is just a thought on the subject of Pitchfork and its coverage, and I don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but... Would it be fair to say that many SWM writers feel (probably in a highly irrational way) less comfortable writing about, say, hip-hop because of their disconnect to the subject matter - a feeling that they could be called out as a fraud if they try to dig too deeply? One thing that I fear most - something that literally paralyses me when writing a review - is the thought of a commentary box full of people saying "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?". These writers may well LOVE hip-hop and listen to a lot of it, but still feel awkward holding court on a public forum, not because they don't understand the lyrics but because they do not want to speak out of turn or appear insensitive or misinformed when writing about them. I can imagine a SWM writer would feel more at home discussing the production values and musical approaches on a hip-hop record than the issues being addressed in the lyrics, and this naturally gives them less to work with. It is therefore a much easier route for them to cover records made by other SWMs, as there's no fear of unintentionally upsetting the hornet's nest or being accused of pretentiousness?

That said, I don't think SWMs have ever had any problem writing about Public Enemy or Bob Marley - both staples of the rock-crit canon who actively and explicitly address black issues. But there seems to be a difference between the socio-political universality of these two examples (one that can be applied and mapped to similar values as punk rock), compared to the more specific localisation of a lot of modern rap lyrics.

What I'm saying here is that for an SWM to cover records outside of the usual SWMosphere involves making sure one does his research and is completely assured in what he is writing, whereas it's infinitely easier to discuss Thom Yorke and his paranoiac feelings towards consumerism. More often than not a white male writer is going to take the easy route, meaning a bias towards indie rock bands in the music press.

several xposts once more

x-post

I did something like that once when I was doing chat reference and chatting on Groupwise with a co-worker at the same time. I can't remember what I types but it was pretty weird.

xp: to be really real, a good 75% of the lyrics on most critically-lauded hip-hop albums have absolutely nothing to do with my life and I'm African-American, so that entire argument reads to me as an excuse to not write about the music

like, probably the hip-hop track that most closely speaks to my actual life experience is "Pollywannacracka" by Public Enemy

@ croup Thank you for not making that joke.

I think it is possible to write really awkwardly about types of music that aren't in their sphere. That's why they purged a bunch of early reviews, right?

it's possible to write really well about music that's not in your sphere, it's just that you have to be a bloody good writer and most people can't do it

ha they'd have to purge a lot more if that was the main issue (xpost)

i still love that pitchfork is celebrating a history they've tried to strike from the record

yeah a lot of hip-hop is about over-the-top fantasy anyway, and I think it's kind of silly to assume that there's the white outsider audience over here for whom it's fantasy and then a black insider audience that's like "Waka is telling it just like I live it!"

Although hip-hop is definitely quite consciously marketed to white people that way.

I realise that few African Americans are going to have any sort of connect to the kind of lifestyle expressed in a hip hop lyric, but there's a kind of bullshit mentality among a lot of people who read and comment on reviews to jump on someone and accuse them of having the gall to talk about a subject if they come across as an obvious white boy from the suburbs. It's a pile of shit and really writers should be encouraged to grow a pair, but that's easier said than done.

Celebrating 12 Years Of Covering Indie Rock Though You're Going To Have To Look Hard To Find The First Half Of That, Motherfucker

lol i can't count

I guess the experiences of like 51% of the human race must be outside of their sphere or something?

"Writing outside their sphere" is such a weird concept, jeez. Like say nabisco had to do some special research before naming Austra his favourite record of 2012-- i.e. he's a black straight man who needs to read a book before appreciating the music of white lesbians

(I actually don't know of nabisco's sexuality, <3 you nabisco and sorry if I guessed wrong)

it does not seem out of the realm of possibility that he has read books about white lesbians

My post was clearly not marked with the ~tildes of facetiousness~ because we are back at the start of the circular argument again.

Also, Austra are lesbians? Really? (And can you introduce me?)

But DJP raises an interesting point re: white people writing about the otherness of rap lyrics, that they might not be clear as to what language is "other" to your average black rap listener

~~

^^^^more tildes of facetiousness

Also, yeah, this is another (interesting) discussion but not one I'm interested in participating in b/c I have no opinion, "back where we started" etc.

WCC I love that you've replaced a "zomg not again" with such an economic and effective '~'

You guys are cool and this was fun, peace.

actually my brother did a song about being late for work which is pretty much my entire life between the ages of 25 and 39

also "Kick Push"

obviously there are race and gender and class divisions in the US but i think people in this country understand each other and each other's cultures a lot better than they tend to give themselves credit for (whether members of different groups always LIKE each other or have empathy or belief in equality is a different question). there's not a lot of music being made in America based on American traditions that i don't feel like i'm so out of my depth that i can appreciate it or write about whether i appreciate it. it's a big world out there, though, and i totally recognize how out of depth and intimidated i am by most non-American music, while recognizing that a lot of that is language barrier or not knowing where to find a proper foothold. people are more the same than they are different, that's one of the main things art exists to show us, over and over.

and "I Wish"

Haha no, Owen my tildes were in reference to my horndogging over Austra! Not telling you to go away!

I think his bus ride ended and he's going back to reality (however do you want me, however do you need me HOW)

I am up to the sugababes one btw

I hate to take it back this far when the conversation has moved on, but just for the record:

Post very much in character, I know, but you know it is possible to have "adventurous" taste and like Radiohead a lot, right? I mean I also find the list depressing and lacking in breadth and overwhelmingly dull and white and male and full of a particular strain of meat and potatoes indie rock that I just don't like, but obviously the preponderance of Radiohead in the list doesn't trouble me at all. I know (I hope?) that you're just using them as an example, but I just really hate the idea that any one band (or thinking that any one band has multiple great albums) can torpedo the adventurousness of one's taste

Yes, I know that, and yes, it was just an example.

i don't think the tendency of male writers and fans to latch onto and elevate male artists is the key issue here. the preponderance of male viewpoints in music criticism is a much bigger problem, imo. if we say that male writers have an obligation to balance the scales by publicly liking more female musicians, then we leave all power in the hands of male writers. that's fucked.

thing about radiohead as a negative example is that their ubiquity really does threaten to make them seem boring. constant critical celebration and a rabid fanbase have turned them into an exemplar of something irritating. this isn't their fault, of course.

Ok, so why don't women want to write about music? Obviously that's a massive question, and we already know the answer; because they're made to feel that their contribution to the discourse isn't valued, essentially.

well that's that figured out, on to ending world hunger

i'm all for giving critics a hard time for their tunnel vision, but the idea of putting an obligation on anyone, critic or otherwise, to like things for the sake of "balancing the scales" makes me uneasy. lots of women make amazing brilliant music, that is often not given due recognition. bringing light to that issue should not take on the tone of homework or affirmative action. (xpost)

Why shouldn't it? Serious question.

Why shouldn't it? Serious question.

Well, who's gonna be in charge of maintaining charts to make sure that 50% of the artists covered in each issue of whatever music magazines still exist, or on whatever music site we're worrying about - whether it's Pitchfork or some other - are female, or that a proper percentage are non-white (or hell, maybe we could reverse engineer it by saying no more than 20% of artists covered can be white males), etc., etc.? How is this to be implemented?