pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

https://soundcloud.com/kabuto-el-pit-n/gamergate

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-prodigy-the-fat-of-the-land/

smack my pitch up

90stalgia is on its way out, shall we invest in early 00stalgia?

Soon, we're still in the middle stages of Nu metal revisionism.

prodigy is pretty bad though right?

Rating these legacy releases seems kinda... pointless.

yeah they must get a lot of traffic, the whole endeavor seems kinda weird

the writing on Sunday review has been great

Gloria Steinman

I like The Fat of the Land more now than I ever did at the time, tbh.

For instance, the synthetic plaid pants that make your grandfather the butt of snide jokes at family reunions might actually look pretty smart hugging the hips of that cute sales clerk at the record store.

coming in late, but o_0 at the anti-horny Rooty review opening with this.

Jesus that Fat of the Land review is terrible. Are we just gonna revisit every canon album out there and re-evaluate it using a woke-o-meter?

what if many of us thought the album had terrible politics at the time?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sublime-40oz-to-freedom/

this 40 oz to freedom review insightfully explains why it resonated with such a wide audience while not shying away from its bad politics, that prodigy one is just the worst kind of smug, self-congratulatory garbage.

is going from that ridiculous Rooty review to deservingly giving Kish Kash a 9.1 the biggest positive turnaround they've ever done on an artist

they gave Zaireeka a 0.0 and then gave The Soft Bulletin a 10.0. Not sure if it was the same writer though.

The Fat of the Land is a solid album fwiw

40 oz to freedom review is way way way too harsh

I think we bitched about that Rooty review here at the time as well.

When did the 'We Are The World' singles column start? Pretty sure it would have been at the time of or a bit before Kish Kash. So in between 2001 and 2003 there was probably the biggest and fastest shift in Pitchfork's orientation that it ever went through (I feel like everything since then has been more incremental) and Basement Jaxx were the kind of artist best placed to benefit from it.

The funniest part of the Fat of the Land review is that the author — who showily uses Britishisms like "naff" and "necked" — doesn't seem to know "Charly" is slang for cocaine

Are we just gonna revisit every canon album out there and re-evaluate it using a woke-o-meter?

Most depressing (because true) explanation for why I can no longer read (retrospective) music criticism

otm

I get the feeling that the writer was no older than 5 when that album came out.

Yeah the Zaireeka and Soft Bulletin reviews were both written by the same guy. From what I remember, he only gave it a 0 because he didn't have five stereos to play the thing

it was a classic goof

endearing in the same way that we all feel for the kid puking in the lawn

i'm sorry that i arrived to this place tonight, but

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2231-forbidden-love-ep/

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yAA37ld6ydk/SPilcsCa-hI/AAAAAAAABU0/B9OTU3vYbJ8/s1600/Picture+3.png

Yes, they obviously know what they're doing. But they've still got to change that name. I suppose it's working for them, though, what with the Seventeen interviews and all. For now, just hold your breath and hope they don't get huge and make the jump to the "adult" market. You'd have to knock them substantial cutie points if they appeared in Cosmo as delegates from the Land of Sensitive Guys, or to weigh in on blowjob technique, or worse still, to appear photographed hanging out with Courtney Love. Or god forbid, Drew Barrymore. Come to think of it, maybe they ought to just add five members and change that name of theirs to God Forbid Drew Barrymore. Yeah!

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/news/a13864/zooey-deschanel-separates-from-ben-gibbard-5/

https://i.imgur.com/lSBHKrq.jpg

shit, i was the kid puking in the lawn the entire time

I'm not against looking at albums in hindsight, and I thought the one for 'Bell Biv Devoe' was very good: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bell-biv-devoe-poison/ The problem with the one for The Prodigy is that it's kinda like shooting fish in a barrel, and it's sloppy to not explicitly point out that the chorus to 'Smack My Bitch Up' is sampled from Ultramagnetic MCs.

I'm fairly sure the words "Kool" and "Keith" showed up in the review

oh yeah, in the second sentence, right next to the words "Ultramagnetic MCs"

but you're right, at no point does the writer connect these words to the sampled chorus, leaving the reader bewildered

https://uproxx.com/music/mark-richardson-pitchfork-editor-celebration-rock-podcast/

Sort of interested in how candid Richardson might be, but ugh to Hyden.

The idea of a rave icon hadn’t really worked yet in America, in part because the movement of more or less anonymous producers rejecting the star system while taking drugged-up dancers on days-long trips didn’t easily fit into market capitalism

I'm confused about a few things here. Prodigy were icons? There hadn't been any dance music icons in America? There's a type of capitalism that doesn't ivolve markets?

and England wasn't capitalist?

By “market capitalism,” the writer seems to just mean “the record business”

snrk

There was a hard industry push for electronica as re Next Big Thing / killer of rock and roll, and Prodigy were absolutely the face of that trend-waiting-to-happen. Chemical Bros, Fatboy Slim, Underworld were all in the mix too but Prodigy had the biggest push. If there was some other icon of the “rave scene” that predated them and broke through to the mainstream, I can’t think of who it would be.

Moby?

nonetheless, even if the overarching point about their position/role in the market is correct, that review is really poorly written

https://wayoutradio.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/happy-mondays-mark-bez-berry.jpeg

Moby was in the mix in the mid-90s but Play was his big breakthrough, in 1999. Prodigy released “Firestarter” in 1996 and Fat of the Land was 97.

Anyway, not commenting on the quality of the review. Honestly not sure why digging this album up just to give it a 5.9 is a worthwhile endeavor at all.

Prodigy got the big push at that time and from those quarters i think specifically bc they resembled a rock band in a lot of ways. a very Poochie version of a rock band but still.

i did generally like that album but it didn't appeal as much as what i heard in early '90s dance music, but that was coming from an R&B direction and more a house music direction and it was a different demographic. in Chicago for awhile the biggest FM station was B96 and you'd hear this incredible music all the time on there, basically Black Box and Cathy Dennis and that sort of thing, mixed in with more R&B and pop rap and such. Prodigy et al were aimed at taking a bite out of the KROQ crowd.

Pedantic, but this--

On the album, Red notably sampled the 1983 crime thriller Scarface on the track “Balls and My Word”—even before Scarface joined the group.

--suggests some sort of coincidence, when it is well known that when Scarface joined the group, he was rapping under the name Akshen, and it was these very Scarface samples that inspired the change. In other words, the name followed the samples, not the other way around

googled for reviews of the Joe Armon Jones album and found this:

The six-song album opens with a stirring title track whose featured vocalist, Afrikan Revolution bandleader Asheber, proclaims, “Starting today, I’m gonna wipe the blood off these streets/ Starting today, spread love in the community.” Asheber’s reverential tenor casts him as something like the lost son of celestial jazz singer Andy Bey—and his improvised lyrics should resonate deeply in a Britain clouded by the murky haze of Brexit

Those lyrics are pretty clearly about London gang violence. Not every piece of British music is about brexit.

Growing up in the suburbs, you make formative bonds with people you might have almost nothing in common with. Most connections forged in high school—friendships, romances, career paths—don’t survive graduation. This includes Cap’n Jazz, a band that was created by two teenage brothers in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.

First paragraph, and I’m already giving this review the side-eye. How is this (obvious) observation about high school unique to the suburbs?

This is a very, very long review that gives zero indication of why I should care about this album or band

That review says Davey Von Bohlen explained, of the reunion, that:

...one thing that brought them together was the fear of losing “that emotional attachment where we feel like we could be defined for the rest of our musical lives by this one thing that happened in our teenage years.”

Actually he said almost the exact opposite:

This summer is 15 years since we broke up, and we’ve lost that emotional attachment where we feel like we could be defined for the rest of our musical lives by this one thing that happened in our teenage years.

A poor review. And, how one could write that review without mentioning Nation of Ulysses is beyond me...

I knew, after reading these posts, that this was an Ian Cohen review before I even clicked on it. Dude is consistently the worst Pitchfork writer, which is really saying something

he’s one of my favs for sure