pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

Yoko has had like 13 Number One Dance hits

Was "Hurt" a "hit?" It was a "hit" video, but that's really not the same thing, is it?

pretty sure Johnny Cash was immortality cemented long before he did a NIN cover

I saw Johnny Cash at a club here (probably his last Chicago show) not long after "Unchained" came out, and my friend and I were pretty much the only ones there under the age of 40.

Only 1,000 kids bought American Recordings but all of them grew up to own a craft beer bar or a bespoke barbershop

hurt was on mtv a fair amount in the early 00s which i think counts

that piece is very uh.... indulgent

"Hurt" hit me hard when I heard it upon release, and I was not familiar with Johnny Cash at all - made me want to check out those American recordings

I think it had huge "youth culture" crossover appeal, it's difficult to cram more pathos into a song and that's always been a hit with (a lot of) teenagers, myself included. Interesting, since it's basically a hymn of atonement from an old man's perspective (that's the way it's sold in the video), that it would hold such appeal for young people.

This probably belongs in controversial opinions thread but god I hate that Rick Rubin Johnny Cash shit.

there's also a bit of "look at this AUTHENTIC cover of a song" going on (the song doesn't quite fit that, but I would guess the reception does)

I love appraisals structured around ambivalence.

xp not sure it's that controversial, I never revisit them and don't particularly like the authenticity schtick, but at the time I did and they were important to me (I would retell a story I'd read somewhere about how Rubin would push Cash to rehearse the songs again and again until he truly understood them and could deliver them authentically)

I love appraisals structured around ambivalence.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, April 8, 2018 7:17 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just kinda sounds like he doesn’t know what to say throughout

lol anyway i don’t know why this is bothering me so much so i’ll stop

Beethoven began his career in 1795 and had a hit in 1976