pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

just four guys in a room getting back to how it was in the early days

Thing was, I wasn't able to write for some reason. After Anthem, I just had writer's block, so I rented this cabin in Big Sur, brought my guitar and a hot plate, and just forced myself to write, man. And something about the peace and tranquility of being up there, man, songs just started pouring out

^the cabin would be in the UP, tho (as they’re Michiganders)

"We've been listening to a lot of Yes."

"We want to take advantage of the studio as instrument, you know? Brian Wilson. Pet Sounds."

Well, the "new tracks" page seems to be finished. Nothing at all since December 4 and it's now January 10.

Shame, that page introduced me to some absolutely incredible music.

looks like it's back:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/ariana-grande-7-rings/

Won't argue against the track being a letdown, but not because of its "sneering tone" or lack of "empathy"... weird critique.

lol what the hell is with giving the dreaming 7.7 but the sensual world 9.4

and i really object to kate bush being called "very queer" in the dreaming review - "gay/queer icon" would have been fine but she isn't a queer person

Some more good GVF rock-cliche quotes here: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/greta-van-fleet-on-the-grammys-why-its-time-to-stop-the-zeppelin-comparisons-779296/

“We hope to get an album out this year. This time, we feel less pressure than we did before the last one. We can’t wait to explore a little more of the Greta Van Fleet universe.”

You may be interested to learn that he has “always wanted to play with Paul McCartney.”

Tracy Chapman gets a 9.4 in today’s retrospective review, yet it was not among Pfork’s “Best 200 Albums of the 1980s”: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracy-chapman-tracy-chapman/

Meanwhile — to pull a semi-random example of an album that is on the Top 200 list, and which has also been retroactively reviewed by Pfork in the past year — Raw Like Sushi only received an 8.0: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-raw-like-sushi/

Two great albums, one rated higher than the other... yet only the lower-rated one made the Top 200 list. Is it b/c Tracy Chapman doesn’t meet the criteria of being “influential”?:

But Tracy Chapman didn’t change the course of a Top 40 ecosystem in tune with the era’s glorification of wealth and greed. Rather, the album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it.

I disagree strongly with those premises. "The era’s glorification of wealth and greed"? More so than hip-hop in the go-go '90s? And what makes this (solid) album an example of innovation in the Suzanne Vega era?

Yeah, one could make the same statements about, say, Graceland, a big hit album released a year prior to Tracy Chapman, and which lands at #49 on the 1980s list (Pitchfork hasn’t given that LP the retrospective treatment, tho its expanded reissue got a 9.2 in 2012: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16843-graceland-25th-anniversary-edition/).

(The only reason I’m playing Pitchfork Police here is that the Chapman album felt like one of the more notable omissions on the 1980s list, and the 9.4 rating shows they rate it highly, so...?)

Tracy Chapman gets a 9.4 in today’s retrospective review, yet it was not among Pfork’s “Best 200 Albums of the 1980s”: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracy-chapman-tracy-chapman/

Meanwhile — to pull a semi-random example of an album that is on the Top 200 list, and which has also been retroactively reviewed by Pfork in the past year — Raw Like Sushi only received an 8.0: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-raw-like-sushi/

Two great albums, one rated higher than the other... yet only the lower-rated one made the Top 200 list. Is it b/c Tracy Chapman doesn’t meet the criteria of being “influential”?:

But Tracy Chapman didn’t change the course of a Top 40 ecosystem in tune with the era’s glorification of wealth and greed. Rather, the album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it.
― i stan corrected (morrisp), Sunday, January 20, 2019 4:55 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Confirming this will flag the post for the attention of the moderators. Posters whose posts get many flags may be limited from posting or banned from the site.

Flag this post?

make it so

?

oh man did you guys know that if you type ‘what does’ into google one of the first autocompletes is ‘what does sb mean’?

man wow that Tracy Chapman review is ridiculous

We didn't talk much about Saturday's Kate Bush reviews (outside of Carr's problematic characterization of Bush as "queer"), but I found this bit, from her review of The Dreaming striking:

Then there’s “The Dreaming,” a parable of a real, historical, and contemporary group of Aboriginal people as timeless, noble savages in a tragically ruined Eden that lectures the center of empire about their (our) political and environmental violence. Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent over a thicket of exotic animal sounds, both holdovers from music hall and vaudeville’s racist “ethnic humor” tradition, a kind of distancing that suggests that settler Australians are somehow less civilized and thus more responsible for their white supremacist beliefs than the Empire that shipped them there in the first place. In telling this story in this way—without accurate depictions of people, and without credit, understanding, monetary remuneration, proper cultural context, or employment of indigenous musicians—she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. As a rich text to meditate on colonial, racial, and sexual violence, it is actually quite useful—but not in the way Bush intended.

My favourite song on the album (and one of my top 3 or so Bush tunes overall), I'm curious as to how I'll hear it from now on.

like it's weird how it promotes the "out of nowhere" narrative, ignoring, say, the context of Joan Armatrading as a precedent or Michelle Shocked and K.D. Lang as contemporaries

xps

also it's just... not a good album? The most memorable thing about Fast Car is the lick that's lifted from John Cougar Mellencamp, and lots of the record is suuuuuuper-clunky lyrically

the joan armatrading revival cant come soon enough though i guess it’s just as likely to never come lol

walk under ladders is at least a 9.4

Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent

literally just learnt that this is what she's supposedly doing here

the joan armatrading revival cant come soon enough though i guess it’s just as likely to never come lol

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Monday, January 21, 2019

check her out her very-1986 album!

Is that the one with all the Peter Gabriel folks on it?

I guess a lot of them have Peter Gabriel folks on them. Jerry Marotta, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Manu Katche ...

walk under ladders is at least a 9.4

agree

wait which JCM song does Fast Car rip

"Suckin' on a Chili Dog (Slight Return)"

the "Fast Car" guitar lick/chord progression has always sounded to me like it was lifted from the acoustic line in the verse of "Jack and Diane"

eh there's some similarity to say lifted is a bit much

also fast car is like 10X better of a song

^agreed

ok yeah I hear that, but it's only half of the riff and it's an insert that only occurs a couple times

THIS is the version of Fast Car to worry about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJWxkYu8WgU

always glad to see that video surface again

eh there's some similarity to say lifted is a bit much

also fast car is like 10X better of a song

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:56 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg that jim o'rourke thing is great

lol I love how he doesn't even play the riff himself, he just loops the intro to the song and sings over it before going bananas in MaxMSP or something for 20 minutes.

If Pitchfork goes behind a paywall I will scream a scream that cracks heaven and pass through all the known realms to fight God himself https://t.co/80uMMelnim

— Jeremy Gordon (@jeremypgordon) January 23, 2019

Oh boy

lmao no one will read it

So as someone who still relies on Pitchfork as my primary daily source of reviews and recommendations, what alternative would folks suggest if this comes to pass?

Why not pay for something that is your "primary daily source of reviews and recommendations"?

I dunno, paywalls are psychologically hard to accept. The internet's all about paths of least resistance.

The link about putting content behind paywalls is behind a paywall for me.

maybe it won’t apply to pfrok since it’s not in print?

lmao no one will read it

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, January 23, 2019 10:19 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah otm lol. won’t take em long to figure this out