pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

ok

my larger point is that when you're on the other side and looking at hits and traffic and clickthrough and all that the numbers tell a different story than what ppl say

also listicles with the right editorial shape and direction can be awesome, see most of rs's listicles from the past two years

Agreed. But Pitchforks listicles arent awesome. They are arbitrary, have the word "staffers" in every single clickbait title which puts me off clicking on it already. Could be good, but they're not doing it right.

'staffers' is kind of admitting that the underlying motivation for the listicle is economic/labor-determined rather than being determined by the culture or the significance or whatever they're supposed nominally to traffic in

i know this isn't exclusive to p4k by any means, but i hate the trend of capitalizing a phrase instead of putting it into quotes. for example:

With all due respect to her abilities, Sheila E has not been A Name in a couple decades.

where/when did this start? i know DFW did it a lot. bugs the fuck out of me.

i think that piece is really good though

I can't even get past this AREN'T I CLEVER tag

Blink-182's seventh album wants to be a pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that this aging pack of skater brats is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22057-maxwell-blacksummersnight/

^^^This review is absolute bullshit^^^

i'm confused? there's another review from 09 at the bottom

BLACKsummer'snight vs. blackSUMMERS'night

i knew that review was going to show up here.

You want both in your boudoir, but Maxwell is the yin to D’Angelo’s yang: While D’Angelo’s steamy devotion makes you kick off the covers, Maxwell is the cool side of the pillow.

it doesn't really "get" maxwell does it

BLACKsummer'snight vs. blackSUMMERS'night

― Immediate Follower (NA), Tuesday, July 12, 2016 2:21 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ahhhh well played maxwell, until we meet again

when does blacksummers'NIGHT come out

it actually is a trilogy

hoping that pt. 3 comes out before 2023

"staffers" generally means it's done in-house rather than by freelancers, or with very select freelancers, it isn't rocket science

we get that? it's the rhetorical implication of using it as a tag for content that's the thing.

^^

Or maybe we're all better at rocket science than we thought

i think you *might* be making too big of a deal about the word "staffers"

i was part of a "staffers" list picking old records that we'd recently discovered way back in he olden times of 2006. this is not exactly new. also i don't read pfork much these days, mostly because like most sites covering new music it's skewing to a younger demographic that I am no longer a part of, but the site was pretty damn different in '06 than it was in '96. it's not really shocking that the tone/format/content would again be different 10 years later.

woah strongo retroactively sold out to the man smdh :(

LOL @ "Life on Mars" being the best song of the 70's

i mean, i guess i understand the Bowie clog, but why the fuck "Life on Mars"???

it won ILM's Bowie poll so you might be asking the wrong message board.

the laughing gnome got robbed

i can think of like 12 todd rundgren songs from the 70s that are better than life on mars

hell there are like 6 songs from something/anything? that are better than life on mars

life on mars is a p good song, cool video too if you can find it

although it does perhaps belong on a thread for removing one verse from an almost perfect song to make it perfect, since 2nd verse is a bit of a letdown imo (morrissey tactics of just repeating 1st verse wld maybe have been better)

Pitchfork being typical contrarian bastards digging out this obscurity from a very much of-his-era cult figure just to prove how much cooler they are than the norms

as long as 'a plague of lighthouse keepers' was #2 i'm cool with that

what a fucking risibly dull list though! they're such imaginationless hacks. no change really

have always struggled to understand why people like that song as much as they do - the changes are nice and there's a turn of phrase or two but there's also "it's on america's tortured brow / mickey mouse has grown up a cow"

i'm the biggest fan of Prince's self-titled album but "I Wanna Be Your Lover" is not one of the ten best songs of the '70s, that's way more of a ridiculous response to a recent death than Bowie at #1 imo

i think my views on lists as a whole are pretty well known but furrowing your brow about why "Life on Mars" might end up at the top of one of these things is just daft posturing

some #1 singles of the 70s: Neil Young, "Heart of Gold." The Jackson Five, "ABC" and "I Want You Back." The Temptations, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." Stevie Wonder, "Superstition." Roberta Flack, "Feel Like Makin' Love." Dionne Warwick & the Spinners, "Then Came You." Earth, Wind & Fire, "Shining Star." David Bowie, "Fame." Michael Jackson, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." Blondie, "Heart of Glass."

Life on Mars peaked at #12. Yeah Noodle you're right, it's a total lock for best single of the decade, how could anybody be at all surprised that it'd rank above those

waiting for a redditor to c/p the list in text format, guessing you'll get a cool playlist from excluding all overlap with acclaimed music's aggregated list http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/Current/1970-79s.htm

JC come the fuck on where i have said "IT'S CLEARLY THE GREATEST THING EVER" or even that I'd pick it over a kajillion other things?

just saying - voting demographic, site demographic, necro-nostalgia, a v. popular slightly maudlin slightly epic ballad, these things are not mysterious

all lists that aren't predicated on being individual, personal and transitory are the height of bullshit - that's the game

Life on Mars is a British song, and went to #3 in Britain. Not everything revolves around the US.

half a degree in a given direction and this is some bollocks like "Stairway to Heaven" or "Bohemian Rhapsody", why would an indie-ish internet music site's "best of the 70s" poll thing have anything to do with merit or history or my or your personal predilections?

having said this i would like to distance myself from Fred because clearly everything does revolve around the US

Wow, "Hammond Song"... I don't think I've heard this before.

lol where is Stairway on this list anyway

As always with pitchfork or any other list, the first 100 songs are way more interesting than the top 100.

Too many token 70s tracks from 80s bands on the list and I love I Wanna Be Your Lover but it's hardly a top 15 Prince song let alone song of the 70s

no Aretha!

On one hand I'm not surprised because Pitchfork has tried to form its own counter-canon comprised of equal parts familiarity and woven from the most acceptable parts of punk and disco; this leads to oddities like fucking Dinosaur, whom I love but no way does "Kiss Me Again" belong on this list, in part because no one heard it in 1970-whatever.

On the other hand, it still leaves them gasping for air because no counter-canon would be complete without the one-offs and oddballs that characterize any decade: "In the Summertime," Jim Croce, "Sweet City Woman," etc. And, you know, country was crossing over in the '70s. Loretta Lynn's "The Pill" is an ideal Pitchfork song because It Breaks the Mold but not the Conway Twitty duet "After the Fire is Gone. But not Don Williams. But not "The Fightin' Side of Me." And so on.

It makes more sense for Pitchfork to compile a 100 Best Disco Songs. At least it'll force them to dig through crates.

man yeah Jim Croce was such an essential sound of the early/mid-seventies, you can't really fully tell the story of the decade without one or two of those tunes

This list is way better than their recent 80s one, which seemed like it was expressly designed to annoy old Gen Xers like myself and shame us for not likeing Whitney Houston.

The big WTF placement was Anarchy in the UK at just 118, and not even having the insanely great Public Image make the list. And no Shake Some Action? Come on people!

A handful of obscurities I would have put on there to introduce to the youth:
Saint Dominic's Preview - Van Morrison
The Everlasting First - Love
I Bet You & Red Hot Mamma - Funkadelic
Say It Ain't So Joe - Murray Head
Brother John - The Wild Tchoupitoulas