pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

that's a good headline

Woodstock 50 Is Canceled, Unless It’s Not—Here’s Why (or Why Not, and That's Okay)

fixed

Pitchfork is finally covering the law of excluded middle.

The Libertines’ Peter Doherty Hospitalized After Being Injured by a Hedgehog

^now, that’s a good headline!

Quite the news cycle for hedgehogs

There's a pretty hilarious piece of sponcon up today:

The Glorious Past and Promising Future of the RV

SPONSOR CONTENT GO RVING

This has probably already been done, but why are the Isley Brothers headlining the P4K festival?

gotta get those R. Kelly songs in there somehow

lol

the thing about pfork fest compared to other festivals is that it's remained pretty small and accessible (hasn't moved off it's small-ish site on the west side in years) & as such legitimately serves a local audience. you'd be surprised by the number of ppl who live in chicago and show up to pfork fest w/o knowing that there's a music review site of the same name, or with only the vaguest idea, or have heard of the site but don't ever read it. further -- and this is just a hypothesis based on having attended the festival a few times incl the year r kelly played -- is that part of the legacy of pfork booking r kelly is that it opened the festival to an audience of local black residents, esp older black ppl who, again, broadly speaking likely have no idea what pitchfork.com is all about. i think you can see this reflected in recent bookings incl isely bros, chaka kahn, raphael saddiq etc.

cuz funktimism!

Whether they're lip-syncing at this point is irrelevant— the Isley Brothers will be a good party. That's what matters at these outdoor festivals.

Chaka Khan was fucking great last year. No signs of slack. The Sunday-in-the-park crowd loved it and even the white people were, holy shit.

cosign on Chaka Khan absolutely *destroying* the Oakland Pride crowd almost ten years ago. never seen a more diverse, happy crowd just feeling ecstatic.

Looks like the Fork got all Sonic Youthed out overnight. I still don't understand the point of dishing out 9.8s.

I skimmed the EJST&NS piece — it’s all “historical context,” and says very little about the music.

Writing about music is hard.

there are all manner of guitars doing things that seemingly only Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo knew how to make them do. Buzz Bin-worthy single “Bull in the Heather” and “Skink” are Kim Gordon at her Kim Gordon-est

Lee and Thurston were doing Lee and Thurston stuff. Kim was being Kim. What more do you want? A sentence about Steve Shelley?

uh I thought "Bull in the Heather" did make Buzz Bin

"Lee and Thurston were doing Lee and Thurston stuff. Kim was being Kim. What more do you want? A sentence about Steve Shelley?"

Ha ha ha ha

steve shelley pounded his drums in trademark Steve Shelley-style

Kinda weird to me that in the review of Washing Machine there’s no mention of the title track, while “Junkie’s Promise” and a song from Dirty each get heir own paragraph.

Also - The song is sung by bass player Kim Gordon, who actually really speaks more than sings

Washing Machine review is painful. The album’s middle section is hit and miss, though the same could likely be said for all alternative rock records made in the mid-’90s

...On the other hand, reading a review of a guitar album written in this tone of clueless faux-professorial unearned authority on pitchfork dot com in 2019 makes me kind of nostalgic tbh

well i recognize some of the bylines from way back but how many of these reviewers are writing about records older than themselves

On the sequel to last year’s Eat My Pussy, the Chicago rapper’s songwriting is at times more brazen and at others more introspective.

this reads like satire

lol straight outta Fear of a Black Hat

The first thing I thought of when I saw that review was that "King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with his hit single "Goop on Ya Grinch" [7.6]" tweet.

I still don't understand the point of dishing out 9.8s.

Mathematical precision obv. Need more significant digits, though.

There is something kind of admirable about sincerely believing that the different in quality between Sister and Daydream Nation can be rendered as '0.2'. (Tbf it should be the other way around.)

*the difference

.23, surely

Needs more π.

If you take a test and get one question wrong you get a 98. It’s possible to be nearly perfect but not perfect.

Do you hear albums that way?

X got one question wrong on ‘Los Angeles’ and they got a B- and a stern essay on their permanent record

Sister doesn't have Lee Ranaldo yelling "kick it!"

therefore, 9.8

I don't know if it's a common thing but when I was an undergrad you couldn't get more than an A in the humanities at my university because they deemed it impossible to objectively determine how much an essay deserves past a certain point. I still think it makes sense.

we really need an additional decimal point here

They should really get someone who has never heard of Sonic Youth to blind review these things.

the tricky part is finding someone who has never heard of Sonic Youth but is also qualified to write music reviews

qualified? qualified!? hey buddy don't get all conde nast on us

yeah... thanks...yeah, we're going to need employees who haven't obtained their SY qualification certificate to go ahead and move down into the basement by end of day, yeah, it's only temporary until the certificate program is completed and verified by HR, thanks...

Like a young person who is very interested in audio sensations from sound waves. Wish there was a name for that

"hipster"

You could also hire a jazz/classical gatekeeper to do it. Chances are he (yes, he) has never knowingly heard Sonic Youth.

Lol, Evan

that's a pretty cool concept, but if i'm honest with myself, the historical/cultural context is most of the reason i read those reviews. and some reviewer coming into it blind isn't gonna be able to offer anything on that front.

"Sonic Youth? But these guys are old. Must be some of that 90's 'irony.'"

Looks like there are a lot of SY reaction videos on YouTube. Whether they are good/qualified, idk.

yeah, i was gonna say this is a whole subgenre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bOxB41ZCbg

which leads to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9ROT_o4q30