pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

lollll voodoo

And @ Paul, you'd be surprised

I'm not. It's being confronted with the absurd "hype u today, drop u tomorrow" ethics of teh p4k that gets to me.

xp

Still think Currents is the most embarrassing review they published this decade: the album reimagines and expands Tame Impala's relationship to album rock—like Loveless or Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music while redefining their relationship to album-oriented rock. There's more care and nuance put into the drum filtering on "Let It Happen" than most bands manage in an entire career of recording.

Yeah I was also trying to point out that thing in how ANTI makes it safe for pitchfork to unashamedly like a Tame Impala song in 2019. Pre-conde nast those two albums would and were ranked very differently.

xp But does the review say anything about the band’s relationship to “album rock”?

They made Currents a BNM 9.3 album, a top 10 album in their mid-decade list and 5 years later it’s in the bottom end of their decade list. If they had released this list a year later or even after Tame Impala releases his new record - which I fathom wont be very well received by them - who knows if it would have even made it. They contributed in hyping him and then sort of felt ashamed of it.

Anti, meanwhile, got a 7.7

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It was a different Tame Impala album that made the mid-decade top ten, Currents is from 2015 :) The thing I hate about that review is that it wants to portray Tame Impala as innovators, but doesn't get that the three albums mentioned, Loveless, Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was all reacting to new music being made at the time. The best thing they can come up with is that Currents sounds like Random Access Memories. That might be my biggest complaint with pitchfork right now, it wants to seem like it's valuing innovation, but there's no newness there, it's just all going around in circles. Fuzz is in again this season! Now it's filters.

Dang, The Pinkprint blurb is full of shade / faint praise, lol

The Parquet Courts blurb makes the album sound significantly better than it is. The Car Seat Headrest blurb is a total whiff, really inadequate.

"im not like those other kids. i like pop, but like pop that's different."

everything is a band that will change your life.

Also it feels like a profound generational shift took place in the middle of the decade, as opposed to the 90s and the 00s when it happened at the beginning. Artists like Ariel Pink and Sun Kil Moon are definitely on the wrong side of that divide and with good reason.

Seriously 2010-15 might as well be a different world.

(this thread worthwhile mainly for introducing me to "poptimism 2.0" as a concept and fleshing it out much more elegantly than the original thread, which was rapidly derailed)

(i noticed but couldn't articulate something awry when in the midst of the ldr/ann-powers contremps backlash-backlash-backlash people kept discussing ldr as "pop" and the allegedly anti-critical sentiments she espoused as "poptimism" and i was beyond confused)

at the least, i would respect but not understand a list that was all things that sound like avicii

I think the shift happened in 2014 with black lives matter, tbh

Trying to read the blurbs and they're just so dreary. Everything is important, everything changed something or other, even if it's the slightest thing (from Angel Olsen: Her sophomore album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, was the kind of breakthrough that shifted the scene around it. Now the folkier corners of indie rock are filled with auteur singer-songwriters who are trying to be both timeless and out of time, intimate-seeming yet often fleshed out by a smoky full band, angsty like punk and sad like old country. That’s largely her influence. More people mix punk and country, who cares?) and there's nearly no pleasure and no joy.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, 8 October 2019 19:45 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I haven't written for pfork in ages, but this basically reflects the strong and explicit editorial directives given in respect of the last few polls that i wrote blurbs for: explain the impact of the record, how it changed music, why it remains important; try to avoid wasting wordcount on describing how it sounds, that's what youtube and spotify links are for.

It was always a struggle for me because "describing how it sounds" was basically my sole critical m.o.

But the at times stultifying impact on the writing is much more glaring for a 2010s poll than for an 80s or 90s poll or etc. because it's much harder to construct or evoke a convincing teleological framework for music in the last decade (both because of its recentness and because of changes to music consumption), so you end up with "changed the course of female indie-folk-crossover that dabbles in country and punk".

NFR! will place in the 15-25 zone.
― billstevejim, Tuesday, September 24, 2019 9:47 PM (two weeks ago)

I called this shit so hard.

"changed the course"/"altered the sound" is not an inherently positive thing! i can think of a dozen artists who have been the point of a spear that has resulted in great waves of shitty music.

12. Rihanna: ANTI (2016)

9. D’Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah (2014)

Can't argue with that, although they should be #1 and #2.

Is Anti in there because it has a Tame Impala song and they’re less ashamed to love him via Rihanna?
― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 2:18 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Because that album sucks.
― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 2:19 PM (four hours ago)

You can go straight to hell.

In theory, I get why they don't want to waste words where a link will do, but ffs, they should try and read the list. It's dreadful. Pitchfork was full of itself back in the old days, but those early lists were fun to read.

Even #1 sounds less like a great album than something that sounded like the times: The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. “Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,” Ocean sings on “Solo,” capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Blonde is one synonym for American. That sounds awful, why would anyone willingly listen to 'languorous'?

Also, lol at them saying jingoism is the problem, then literally ending the countdown by saying it's a 'synonym for American'. As if America was the only thing that mattered.

xxpost yeah it's the execution where it falls apart.

Another issue with it is that when you're talking about stuff from a few decades ago, the grandiosity of the scene-setting is either familiar-but-earned (e.g. why this Prince or Janet Jackson track is important) or it's at least partly necessary to introduce and explain the music to the intended audience (e.g. why this 80s R&B track that is not Prince or Janet Jackson is important).

Whereas for the most part neither of those categories can apply to music from the last decade that is likely to end up on a Pfork best-of list - given almost by definition it will be music that the publication has already covered extensively.

This may be one reason why the Sunday Review feels like the most vibrant part of the site now.

but oh yeah the "this is how WE felt in 2016" stuff is always always always a bad look.

Xxpost I already explained I was referring to Tame Impala album sucking not Rihanna haha

but oh yeah the "this is how WE felt in 2016" stuff is always always always a bad look.

Critics should never use the word "we."

Looking forward to the revisionist 2010s list coming in 2028.

On other note: I just assume Blond is like an actually good album that I just don’t get because everybody that loves it is insanely obsessed about it, I’ve tried at least 20 times to listen to it, even tried it with weed once and I just get bored. I wasn’t a fan of channel orange either but it sounds better to me, it’s the one that has the actually memorable songs, I feel like that should actually be the album considered the best one he did this decade.

Channel Orange is objectively better, but the narrative is heavier with Blonde or something. I recall liking 3 songs.

People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night

lol is this supposed to condescend to the opinion about anthems being described or to aggrandize it?! i can't really tell

i agree that frank ocean's music is absolutely 100% music that exists and sounds like other types of music. nothing about it is at all remarkable or memorable.

I’ll say at least I agree on their pick for best Beyonce album this decade. Nothing against Lemonade but I find myself preferring to play the self titled.

Best single this decade is Countdown by a wide margin though, they fucked up giving Formation a higher rank.

I suppose Formation feels “more politically important” which is what they’re going for in this thing.

Disrespectfully dropping Lemonade 2 days after Prince died is only the narrative I'll remember.

Lemonade is Beyonce's most fully realized album because, couple clunkers aside, she filled an album with sounds I cared about w/out my attention drifting. But that's my opinion. The eponymous album was rather long and text-heavy. 4, also not without its duds, was my former favorite.

So they’re pivoting from their indie rock roots. A little sad as someone whose early taste was formed by indie, but arcade fire, beach house, mbv, grizzly bear and other groups like that—tune yards—don’t reflect the 2019 zeitgeist.

― treeship., Tuesday, October 8, 2019 12:11 PM (three hours ago)bookmarkflaglink

pitchfork isn't a "they," it's a constantly changing roster of staff and contributors that is getting younger and pointedly more diverse partly as a reaction to the pitchfork of the past. jaymc's list of top 10 records that didn't make it onto this list is interesting, but it doesn't seem to me like there is less indie rock as much as there's just a different kind. yeah there are no ariel pink and swans albums, but there are albums by snail mail, soccer mommy, courtney barnett, frankie cosmos, mitski (multiple), jay som, downtown boys, GLOSS etc... draw your own conclusions

Putting Swans in that company is bananas

there was a discussion upthread about maxwell and miguel... i think maxwell is basically just a victim of timing. the first blacksummersnight and prob "pretty wings" would've made it onto this list if they had come out a year later. the second BSN def didn't connect w/ critics or the public in the way the first one did, i don't think that's just a pitchfork thing. as for miguel, leaving kaleidoscope dream off is a big misstep esp for an album that got best new music at the time, but i think his last two albums sorta wasted the critical goodwill (not saying i agree one way or another just an observation)

moka hating on anti confirms that it's great, which it is. i hated on it at the time, but it's a top 15 album of the decade for me bcuz it's the first rihanna album that really dovetails w/ what what her persona has crystalized as--the sort of cool, powerful, dgaf superstar who can do whatever they want. her previous records (even rated r) always reeked of label machinery, her personality rendered pretty one dimensional ("here's a reggae one", "here's an edgy one" etc). there's no shadow of the A&R man or label president looming over anti, and as such her personality shines thru in a way that comes off as more real and authentic than not just her previous albums, but most other pop albums released this decade. it doesn't necessarily make sense as a record but that's what makes it great -- its genre leaping really feels less adventurous than it probably should because the personality we understand from the public persona is so threaded thru the entire record.

but there are albums by snail mail, soccer mommy, courtney barnett, frankie cosmos, mitski (multiple), jay som, downtown boys, GLOSS etc... draw your own conclusions

with the honourable exception of mitski, my conclusions from that list would be 'indie has gotten worse'

fortunately there's loads of amazing indie that for various reasons pitchfork doesn't care about

A rockist argument for Rihanna then.

Also Bruno Mars ‘Unorthodox Jukebox’ is the best pop album of the decade

What is interesting to me: that apparently indie rockism is alive and well— preference toward authenticity and all— but it’s been kidnapped by a crew of young (mostly) women.

Goddamit I’m not hating on Anti, I’m hating on Tame Impala

I like Anti, which I guess confirms it’s not that good huh?

And makes the Tame Impala album a good one lol

A rockist argument for Rihanna then.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 8:06 PM (one minute ago)

i think it's pretty obvious that her albums pre-anti were as formulaic/mainstream as major pop music got during that era, even tho some of those records are good. is it rockist to say that it was clear even at the time that the constraints of being an A++ list pop superstar/cottage industry were drags on her music? this isn't true for every label-made pop star btw... katy perry is someone whose music started to suck precisely as she began to take more control of it. but w/ rihanna, it's clear now, there was an auteurism that needed space to flourish, and it is directly related to her relationship w/ the pop machine. it's not a coincidence that anti is her first album after splitting from the label that signed her as a teenager (the blurb on pitchfork elucidates all this pretty well)

Yeah she really demonstrated auteurism on this anti record for which she wrote 0 material on it.

Putting Swans in that company is bananas

I would bet there are a significant number of fans of 2010-and-after Swans who have never seriously investigated the 1982-1997 incarnation. It's totally understandable to see them as two entirely different things.

Yeah she really demonstrated auteurism on this anti record for which she wrote 0 material on it.

Auteurism in pop is demonstrated by choosing material, not writing material. This has been true at least since Elvis.