pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I went home when it started raining, so missed the (truncated) set. But the first couple of things I heard were weirdly negative, so I watched the set before bed and thought, hmm, no, sounds like Stereolab! I wish I saw their full set elsewhere the night before. But they'll be back and I'll see them then.

even when I became obsessed with Stereolab in early 2016, ETK was the consensus "best," inasmuch as it's a good middle ground btwn their fuzz phase and their lounge phase. only in the last year have I seen D&L spoken of w/o reservation, and that's the first time I've ever read it referred to as their "masterpiece." I mean, it is, almost all of their albums are, but ETK is the only one that sort of shows you the many different areas they explore. Switched On comps are good for this as well but you'd need all three (Aluminum Tunes was my way in: Pop Quiz).

Cybele's Reverie is a beautiful lyric, one of my all time favorites. Even more beautiful in English somehow...

my favorite Laetitia lyrical weighting is the ending of Ping Ping: "Don't worry, shut up sit down / Go with it and be happy"

ETK is the consensus peak. D&L is the dividing line and also where I got off the bus (for awhile). I don’t like it at all, John Mcentire and mouse on mars et al were a bad influence.

omg Diagonals is my all time jam - that track at apocalyptic volume is untouchable

(and I adored the Lab from the moment I saw the video for "Super-Electric" in 1991)

Alfred, I didn't know you were at the fest! (Unless you mean you watched the live stream?) I had the odd but increasingly common experience (as I get older) of going to Pitchfork by myself and not recognizing a single person I know there.

Just copy-pasting the lyric from "Cybele's Reverie" that I adore:

Que faire quand on a tout fait
Tout lu, tout bu, tout mangé
Tout donné en vrac et en détail
Quand on a crié sur tous les toits
Pleuré et ri dans les villes et en campagne

Translated:

What to do when one has done everything?
Read everything, drunk everything, eaten everything?
Given everything in truth and in detail,
When one has cried on all the rooftops,
Wept and laughed in the towns and in the country?

idk I love rhetorical questions as lyrics

I think "en vrac" means "in bulk" not "in truth"

You are correct (I just copy-pasted from an online translation and didn't notice the error)

wow, with today's needlessly vicious, mendacious takedown, Pitchfork has managed to do something I would have never thought possible: it has actually made me want to root for Iggy Azalea

This line sounds like something from that David Foster Wallace book about rap:

Iggy Azalea is not the only current rapper who fills songs with dreary, monotonous references to sex and money, but many find creative, amusing, and even raw ways to write and spit about both.

Even raw, huh? Wow, I need to check out some of these amusing current rappers.

Oftentimes I've noticed a clear connection between the ways that arts reporters write about their subjects and methods of abusive control, methods of toxic fandom. Everything the author writes in this article smacks of entitlement, resentment, nudging their colleagues knowingly. Attempting to exert control and influence over an artist's career via a review that is entirely hollow moral judgement about How Iggy Just Isn't Contrite Enough For A Comeback to mask the author's complete inability to actually form and express critical opinions about the content of the music in front of them.

An inevitable side effect of reviewing an artist’s “narrative arc”

fgti otm

Didn’t we cancel Iggy Azalea?

That was the pitch in the editorial meeting.

No one has learned a thing from the 2016 election

bernie would've won BNM

Bernie would have 9.1

A penitent rap album sounds like a blast

any editor worth their salt would've printed that as

Didn't we cancel Iggy Azalea? (ed: The staff of Pitchfork have not, in fact, "canceled" Iggy Azalea, as proven by the publishing of this piece.)

This line made me laugh too, the scolding, disappointed tone: "Name a major artist—Halsey, Snoop Dogg, the cartoon character Peppa Pig—and Iggy has entangled herself in some sort of feud with them." Like gosh, imagine a rapper so gauche & clueless that they would actually feud with other artists rather than support & uplift them. Truly sad.

I have to think that they think that putting her review second on today's list is a humongous slam.

Am I missing something? Did she do something seriously bad, or was she just, like, mildly annoying to some people

The tone of this is like she's Louis CK and has some serious behavior to atone for before returning to the public eye

https://jezebel.com/iggy-azalea-is-sorry-she-used-to-be-homophobic-and-raci-1710047844

(first thing i found, probably not the best summary)

remember that time Iggy Azalea broke the L.A. Lakers?

thx karl

As a general comment (and without taking a position on Iggy or her shit) -- the tone of that Jezebel piece (“Whoops, sorry I was racist.”) suggests that apologizing is not necessarily a way to avoid being cancelled, which complicates Pfork's demand for "contrition."

I thought Azealia Banks was the one beefing with everyone and everything

at any rate it should be easy to pan an Iggy Azalea album:

It's difficult to measure how well a song is doing based on flow, lyric choice, subject matter, etc when the voice delivering it sounds like a duck constantly surprised by how thoroughly it is shitting itself.

etc etc

lmao

I just went to Pitchfork so I could read the review and I got distracted by this bit about Willow Smith:

The latest album from the child star turned Star Child can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, but her psychedelic soul music is no closer to showing us who she really is.

wtf why does Willow Smith need to show you "who she really is"?

willow smith is 18 years old now. obviously she knows who she is at this point in her life and should be ready to document that in a best selling album that millions of people will listen to

for reference, please see my best selling album from 1998, as a 15-year-old, entitled I Will Never Wear Jeans Again, Baggy Pants Are In, Mom and Dad Can Fuck Off

The Willow review has basically a single paragraph dealing with "the music" (yes, I'm still on this):

Willow was already getting into guitars on The 1st, but Cole’s influence is clear. He has driven her toward a more atmospheric sound. The music here is competent enough to pass for enlightened but it’s actually illusory. There is nothing tangible to latch onto. Listening closely feels like trying to identify solid objects when wandering through a fog, particularly on “Like a Bird” and “U KNOW,” which both seem to blur until they’re out of focus.

I mean, Iggy was problematic from day one and we all fuckin saw it, it's just the tenor of media changed to where that became the defining narrative as opposed to just *part* of the narrative

It's entirely possible that Post Malone, a white dorkus malorkus failed rock musician who says "shottas" and "jit" in his Number One songs will be persona non-grat-ta-ta for the next album cycle

your lips to god's ears

I said this in 2014, but no one listens to me

Iggy Azaelia talks like Nicole Kidman IRL but raps in Young Dro voice

Are we post-racial or just mostly unaware that this is kinda sus?

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) May 19, 2014

Despite my statement above, I must admit would very much enjoy reading "dorkus malorkus" in an album review

It is absolutely insane that Post Malone, a white man – born in New York, raised in Texas, groomed in Los Angeles – can jack the *FLORIDIAN* AFRICAN-AMERICAN regional slang term "jit" and then casually use it in the Number One song in the country.

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) June 13, 2018

wtf why does Willow Smith need to show you "who she really is"?

because reviewers still cling to bizarrely outdated assumptions about how music's purpose is to give us a window into the soul of the artist or some such bullshit. I hate this angle, and it's omnipresent.

subjecting us to the word “nut” 15 times in under three minutes.

^ my favorite line from the iggy azalea review

would never go to this website if it weren’t for this thread tbh

see also related unspoken assumption that an artist's output is supposed to follow some sort of identifiable path toward them becoming/revealing their "true" selves

xp

like, man by the time I got to Dylan's 12th solo album I really felt I had connected with the *real* Bob Dylan and surely that was the reason I had listened to all that music up to that point

I'd like to see a musician reveal his/her true self and it turns out they're a shape shifting cat

Like Coltrane?

lol

"Dorkus Malorkus" sounds like the name of a great lost Blue Oyster Cult album.

I think what the world really needs is a collaboration between the four women reviewed by Pitchfork today. At the very least I'm pretty sure Lingua Ignota can turn Willow Smith to the dark side.