pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

lol i love a pedal geek fite broke out

THE HAND PAINTED HERMANEUTIC LABS ORANGE-O-MATIC SPIRALPHAZENEBULIZER IS THE NEW PUNK ROCK

last year every issue of RS had some bit about the 50th anniversary, it was a banner at the top of every issue

Anyone else notice the summaries popping up on (some) artists' pages?

https://pitchfork.com/artists/2173-jay-z/

i loved the 1998 list; imo it's great to go `deep' on the near-past as things become just-out-of-the-rear-view mirror, at the vanishing point of retro horizon. it was interesting for me, personally, as someone who came of age musically just a couple years later; a lot of the albums on that list i was introduced to by friends' older siblings and will always have, for me, the mythic status that confers. also it's crazy that 98 is considered 'maybe the decade's worst year for music' there's so many classic albums on that list

actually my favourite thing about Late Fork is the older gen of critics doing revisionist reviews of classics, the Sunday Review series has been really excellent

a stretch

Police say one woman, the suspected shooter, is dead following YouTube shooting. Four people have been hospitalized https://t.co/xHr1bnlaJI pic.twitter.com/AKN2y8NHdc

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) April 3, 2018

xpost
What are the 1998 albums you consider classic? I'm genuinely curious...

They should do 1988 IMO - that was a killer year for albums!

arab strap, gang starr, aquemini, american water, black star, hello nasty, refused, big pun, atcq, 400 degreez, dmx are all classics to me!

I agree on "American Water" for sure (and also "Super AE" and "Accelerator" for me).

I also highly rate that year’s Liz Phair album (which didn’t make the list).

decent record but i never thought of it as psychedelic when i could go to Spiritualized or Beck or the Flaming Lips or Cornelius. tbh i find that album a bit monotone and dull.

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, April 3, 2018 11:10 AM (six hours ago)

I dunno. I think it's extremely psychedelic. MHTRTC suggests and (IME) complements psychedelic experience. All those soft yet vivid kaleidoscope patterns shifting and repeating in elastic time, devoid of meaning but dense with implication, charming as they are inexplicably threatening, the whole ghosted through with the echoes of human feelings that can no longer be understood. Good cop.

I mean, the ability to perceive repetition (or, in fact, anything) as "monotone and dull" tends to fade as the chemicals kick in.

Their Q1 top 100 is like 90% garbage.

So this site where the most active threads right now are about wonderwall and the smashing pumpkins is complaining that pitchfork is being too nostalgic?

Ilxors are just gushing over smashing pumpkins and oasis constantly.

I was watching Alex Gibneys documentary on Rolling Stone a short while back, and it was striking how soon that magazine turned into a boomer nostalgia project. Basically, by punk, they pretty much gave up.

I’m sitting here looking at an issue from 1987 that calls R.E.M. “America’s Best Rock & Roll Band”!

(Also, the issue that I thought had Brian Wilson on the cover actually has Tom Cruise on the cover, ha ha)

they loved the nu-jangle in the 80s. kinda like how they like stuff like wilco now. they always gave lots of ink to roots rock. joe ely and ry cooder could always count on a pat on the back.

Calling music has the right the most psychedelic album reeks of wanting to establish a new canon for millennial trash

when i used to do acid pretty much every album i listened to was the most psychedelic album ever made.

I mean the audience not the record which is very good

i mean acid is good that way.

Lol Scott

ha yes, 18 yr-old me on acid, confused about why John Wesley Harding wasn't supposed to be a proper psychedelic record

more like john owsley harding amirite

ha

i remember tripping and sitting by the speakers listening to a college radio new age show once and i was like omg, this stuff is more insane than anything i have in my record collection.

it was so geometric.

"there are seven levels"

xxxxpost
R.E.M. were at their LEAST rootsy/jangly in ’87! Obv. RS wasn’t putting Live Skull on the cover. But that particular tagline was a Big Fuckin’ Deal.

Anyway, I never argued ’80s RS was MaximumRockNRoll... just that I don’t remember it being as backward-looking at Pfork is at the moment.

Ilxors are just gushing over smashing pumpkins and oasis constantly.

― Evan, Wednesday, April 4, 2018 5:09 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

new board description

But MaximumRockNRoll would be extremely backward looking in 87... I don't think it's particularly backward-looking of Pfork to have done one 20 year poll and one retrospective. They do five record reviews a day!

i've watched pub covers bands on acid that have been the most out there thing i'd ever heard

xpost I guess what I'm saying is I want twice as many articles on what Will Headrest is posting on Twitter! :P

Part of my "problem" may be that I'm looking for Pitchfork to be something that it's not. It's the only music site I visit daily, out of habit I guess, but I've never found a site that replicates what others offered years ago (daily music news / reviews across multiple genres). Maybe that old model wasn't sustainable, as part of Pfork's success is clearly its specific focus/p.o.v./"brand."

I mean, I don't think you're wrong about pitchfork, probably, they've changed. But I think the change was after 2009, when the rest of the music world more or less left pitchfork style music behind. What's the last band that could said to owe their career to pitchfork in any way? Instead, Pitchfork mostly follows the times.

I'm just commenting because I was really surprised at the Gibney film and how quickly Rolling Stone seemed to become the old guys. I specifically remember thinking that something like Pitchfork seemed almost impressive in comparison. I don't think p4k has done anything as bad as this: http://www.adweek.com/creativity/perception-vs-reality-a-look-back-at-rolling-stones-greatest-ad-campaign-ever/

Wow, that campaign is bonkers... (but doesn't it sort of support my point, in that RS was pushing back against the "faulty" perception that it's a crusty hippie mag, and pointing out how current/relevant the mag -- and its readers -- actually are?)

I don't think that seems incredibly off-base because as opposed to funneling product advertising to readers, they were using their internal marketing to do self-definition and market themselves to advertisers. It's telling that they're not straying far from their original market, in that all of the stereotype-breakers imply their readership isn't a different young person, it's a settled, monied reader that's been with them all along. It reads as a cynical ploy, but it's relatively honest about who their market was all along: readers who were interested in culture and commentary but were more likely to be consumers than outliers or artists.

I don't think p4k has done anything as bad as this: http://www.adweek.com/creativity/perception-vs-reality-a-look-back-at-rolling-stones-greatest-ad-campaign-ever/

― Frederik B, Wednesday, April 4, 2018 2:57 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow

lmao re: cobain & morrison - "the emptiness that we feel in their leaving is a living testament to the passion of 8 million readers whose attitudes, ideas, and life styles continue to change the world"

lol/holy shit at the pig/cop ad

our readers actually hate drugs and sandals and love cops

http://static.adweek.com/adweek.com-prod/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/rs-4.jpg

Mushrooms appear on salads instead of on horizons. And that's no hallucination.

that pig/cop ad is the most amazing terrible thing

Wait when did this campaign run? It's all from the '80s, except for the Cobain thing stuck in there(?)

(And the mushroom ad, too - the Cold War sure as hell wasn't "on ice" in the mid-'80s.)

Ok, it says "beginning in 1985...". (Beavis & Butt-head also obv. not from the '80s)

the Beavis & Butthead one, along with some of the later ones, is where they finally admit they do have an upper/lower age range imo

the two thoughts that stick with me are my parents, who are definitely in the original age range for RS, griping about their peers dropping ideals as soon as they were making a paycheck and punishing the next generation for having any ideals

the second would be my friend who is in marketing very insistently explaining that "advertising" and "marketing" are two distinct things. advertisers are definitely RS's actual market, and somehow they decided to market themselves to both advertisers and readers with the same "this is us" stereotype set, which is... something

i remember tripping and sitting by the speakers listening to a college radio new age show once and i was like omg, this stuff is more insane than anything i have in my record collection.

Dude, ambient music on psychedelics is the absolute best. David Sylvian's Approaching Silence is all time, in this regard. I mean, for me, music on psychedelics feels "stretched out" anyway, but it's so magnified with that stuff, in the best way.

i know this is against the rules of the thread but i really enjoyed their write up on Beetlejuice & Harry Belafonte. it was more interested in digging into the historical contexts of the song itself & Belafonte as musician & Burton as filmmaker than the usual wide-eyed blog wonder at the machinations of music marketing and product placement.

^^^ otm

Half the fun of American Recordings is knowing that it’s not the end of something, but the start of something. It sends him down a road that ends with him writing some of the best songs he’ll ever write and it nets him an immortality-cementing hit in 2002 with “Hurt.” Which, by the way, is unthinkable. To begin your career in 1955 and have a hit in 2002 is like starting out in 1971 and having a hit in 2018. Who the hell could even do that?

Does Blackstar count as a hit? David Bowie started in 1967 and had a hit in 2016.

I wouldn’t say so, no. It didn’t cross over to youth culture in the same way.