pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

In that you will never listen to Youth Lagoon again

it's like chicken pox, it happens once and then you're inoculated from it ever happening again

They did review sremmlife wtf

Huh? did you guys think they weren't gonna review it? That's definitely still something in their wheelhouse

the jazmine sullivan album? they didn't review her first 2 albums

oh i was talking about sremmlife my bad

paragraph 2:
There are no new directions or tweaks to their approach.

paragraph 3:
Here and there some new flourishes pop up.

given the way this is blowing up the internets today, i'm surprised it hasn't shown up here yet:
http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-of-indie/

the way to solve the problem is to give Heems and MIA higher scores.

that was mentioned yesterday on the "indie" thread. I dunno where it's blowing up, but not surprised, it reads like grade A trolling

Partly blowing up due to Stuart Murdoch being a twat on Twitter about it. Depressing.

Stuart Murdoch's fictional world being one snugly enveloped in white privelege I would think is pretty obvious/one of the less arguable positions in the piece, he should just own up to it. Exclusive enclaves of white privelege exist, I don't see why it's wrong to document them or address them in a creative work. (tho I am unaware of and can't defend whatever Murdoch's said on Twitter fwiw)

looking at his twitter feed now = eh could be a lot worse. at least he doesn't lash out at the writer.

I can count on one hand the prominent performers in the independent scene that look like me

Pretty rich coming a paragraph after making fun of Vampire Weekend, whose Rostam Batmanglij probably looks as much like her as Natasha Khan, and who has repeatedly taken umbrage at being categorized as "white."

Anyway, yeah, pretty ill-devised, selectively trolly essay. Like saying the Magnetic Fields need more Africa in it or whatever.

does/should it matter that B&S are Scottish? I mean, when American artists depict an all/mostly white world I feel like they're maybe cherrypicking the American experience in a way that is open to these criticisms, but a place like Scotland, I dunno (although I know nothing about the B&S film beyond what's said in the article and don't know where it was filmed).

I googled her name after skimming the article and one of the first results was a reddit thread that I then clicked on

I never read reddit, I've maybe been on the site once or twice before

the forum name the thread was on was named punchablefaces

I found it pretty stomach turning that something so small and irrelevant as a pitchfork article in 2015, which, after skimming, I don't really care about or even agree with that much, generated this insane racist and misogynistic whirlwind

I suspect that was the intention, to some extent

prob was about baiting people, but I seriously doubt the intent was to get a "DEPORT ALL MUSLIMS AND SEND HER DEATH THREATS" kind of thing going

While Hanna has, historically, played with sarcasm and irony in her lyrics, her work has never been derided as a joke

I am deeply queasy about the personality cult that has sprung up around Kathleen Hanna over the past decade, but, holy shit, Kathleen and BK took so much shit in the 90s. They were pretty much constantly derided by a male-dominated punk scene. You can still meet male music fans/critics of a certain age who are quite vocal about what a joke they think "the whole riot grrrl thing" was.

assuming they've seen the internet before, idk what other reaction they would have realistically expected

xp

Kathleen and BK took so much shit in the 90s.

this is absolutely otm

worst

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/715-bitch-better-have-my-roundtable-rihannas-bbhmm/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=roundtable&utm_campaign=thepitch

should have swapped out Hanna for S-K and made the same point more strongly imo (but maybe S-K don't do as much sloganeering as Hanna and MIA are prone to? idk)

xp

stuart murdoch's response is definitely unedifying but yeah, glasgow + scotland more generally is preeetty white

You'd think Murdoch would've remembered that at one point Orange Juice had two black dudes.

Pretty rich coming a paragraph after making fun of Vampire Weekend, whose Rostam Batmanglij probably looks as much like her as Natasha Khan, and who has repeatedly taken umbrage at being categorized as "white."

the article did originally mention him in this sentence (i got confused when i read your post b/c when i read the article [the day it was published] he was indeed mentioned) but for some reason he was taken out?: https://web.archive.org/web/20150326011049/http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-of-indie/

i don't really think the article is bad or even controversial? and it's not like the entire premise falls apart after one points out one mistake or w/e

for those who don't wanna click that wayback link, that part of the article originally read as follows:

I can count on one hand the prominent performers in the independent scene that look like me: M.I.A., Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), Himanshu Suri (Heems and Das Racist), Dapwell (Das Racist) and Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes). Five people. Batmanglij and Khan are highly visible but have never courted controversy, and rarely acknowledge their ethnic heritages through their art. What we hear in their work is artistic assimilation, their careers evidence the easy acceptance that comes of that. However, both Heems and M.I.A. ...

and then continues as currently published

yeesh i always forget how this stuff brings the crepes out of the woodwork en masse /dude post

i think there's some begging the question going on as far as the definition of 'indie' where you're talking about not-very-integrated scenes producing artists who are then scalable to similarly non-integrated populations and lots of artists who could easily qualify as indie get left out but then 'indie' is a dumb idea/identity anyway

the article is getting at something important & i wouldn't want to pile on to discouraging some young writer from articulating their truth, but i am not sure that it was quite capturing the mechanics of a problem that is partly definitional & doesnt understand the way art is linked to communities or something idk

the responses to it are gonna be dumb & ugly, she's more right than wrong

The more I think about it, the more that Murdoch's "Sorry for being from Scotland in the 80s" is bullshit. Apart from Orange Juice, there was POC's in Simple Minds, Soup Dragons/BMX Bandits (same guy in both), Big Country, Win, Del Amitri, Gun (I think)...that's without me thinking too hard about it.

xp yeah, in a general sense it's a slightly obtuse attempt at making a fair and important point

re soup dragons / bmx bandits, is that sushil k dade? iirc murdoch's actually worked with him

Indeed, and his sister.

the article had some faults but overall I thought it was right on and as a brown person it resonated heavily with me tbh, big reason why I never really felt like a part of indie (and punk for that matter) scenes despite being into the music at various points on my life

couldn't help but notice there's no link to that article (posted only 2 days ago) on pitchfork's homepage.

it was on the pitch which is their blog thing and it wasn't a main feature, same goes for the Philip sherburne piece on edm and women which was a very good but short piece

the article had some faults but overall I thought it was right on and as a brown person it resonated heavily with me tbh, big reason why I never really felt like a part of indie (and punk for that matter) scenes despite being into the music at various points on my life

as a brown gay person it underscored the problem with their own coverage and point system.

wait, what's the problem with a scale of 1 to 10? ableist towards people who don't have 10 fingers?

The recipients about Best New Music are not likely to be women or non-whites.

*about = of

xp yeah, in a general sense it's a slightly obtuse attempt at making a fair and important point

― cis-het shitlord (Merdeyeux),

This is the response that most resonated. It's weird how these kinds of articles make my blood boil even when it looks like I agree w/the intention.

i wouldn't want to pile on to discouraging some young writer from articulating their truth

this is like the backbone of what ilm does

lmao yeah tell that to ethan

The recipients about Best New Music are not likely to be women or non-whites.

Latest BNM albums:

Courtney Barnett
Kendrick Lamar
Tobias Jesso Jr
Levon Vincent
Drake
Father John Misty
Aphex Twin
Bjork
Natalie Prass
Viet Cong
Sleater-Kinney
Panda Bear
D'Angelo
Andy Stott
Ariel Pink
Clark
Arca
Run The Jewels (counts for 1/2 I guess)
Grouper
Pharmakon

Doesn't look that bad.

@anandwilder

@sahizzurp hey my mom wants to know why your article doesn't mention me

Hashtag Indian problems

The article could definitely have done with a good editor. The response has been telling though.

People had adverse responses to the article because it was lazy and glib. The writer says that African music has "effectively disappeared" because Vampire Weekend brought elements of it into the mainstream. Really?! How so? I think there's an interesting essay to be done on why POC don't engage with indie music but this certainly isn't it.

Pretty sure people were not sending death threats because the article was lazy and glib. The point about African music is about the critical erasure of acknowledged influences within indie rather than erasure of the music / musicians from existence within a wider landscape.