pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

my point was not "duuuuhhh you are a dummy jon," it was "thinking of a publication as having a singular authorial brain should not be encouraged. it is good if outlets pay different writers."

thinking of a publication as having a singular authorial brain should not be encouraged.

p4k kind of encourages this though, and there's at least regular enough occurences where the editorial team overrides the reviewer's score leading to a weird disconnect that people online get annoyed & confused about

Not now.

that's certainly an improvement for everyone then

I propose a score, it's usually within three or four tenths of a point. But I don't give a shit about the score: I'm more interested in whether editors understand what I write and when they edit offer suggestions that make me more intelligible to an audience. But that's me.

i think they should let the writers assign the scores

but they should have a rubric that is used throughout the department for summative evaluations

Is it really that big a deal

To me it's redolent of sports bulllshit

the degree to which editorial interfere with the scoring has been greatly exaggerated imo

Maybe this score obsession irritates me because student fight me over two tenths of a decimal point and I'm like, YOU EARNED AN A -- YOU WON.

one i can clearly remember is i wanted to give bieber's purpose a 5-point-something bc it is a dismal and depressing record and it got bumped to a 6.5. which was fine, who cares

well you're on that thread

ohi don't think it's super prominent and i honestly can't think of a case in the last three years? but there used to be the occasional issue where it was noticeable and then the writer would get twitter hate bc no one understands the process

in the era of stan attacks creating fraudulent racist tweets from freelance record reviewers, scores should be abolished

oh yeah ultimately all scores should be stripped from the site imo, i hate coming up with them and i even forgot to assign one to clarity when i filed. it'll never happen

also someone should shut down metacritic

I'm not sure what this means?

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, June 7, 2021 4:23 PM

jesus fucken christ

and by paying you guys well, i meant i hope you're at least taking them for all you're worth. because they certainly deserve writers of yours and brad's calibre.

and, while i understand their purpose, i absolutely agree that the overall scores can distract from the substance of the review.

because they certainly deserve writers of yours and brad's calibre.

certainly DON'T

Am I the only one who remembers the Brent DiCrescenzo review actually being fun back in 2000, or am I going to get chased off the board for mentioning that? I mean back then, I was used to reading stodgy Rolling Stone capsule reviews, and that blogger style was pretty new.

Yup, I had the same experience. Not with that particular review per se, but when I first started reading Pitchfork in the late '90s, I loved that half of the reviews felt like wacky creative-writing exercises, with albums as prompts. Not really what I'm looking for out of music criticism these days, but it did feel fresh and exciting at the time, IMO.

I also loved it at the time. I subscribed to spin around the same time, and enjoyed reading pitchfork reviews a lot more. I was 17 or so

As an aspiring music critic in ca. 2000-2001 P4k era, I used to see them as amateur hour and never really got over that feeling and thusly sought validation through the traditions of old legacy media. Long story short, Ryan is a millionaire, Pitchfork is the last website standing and I had to learn to code

I remember being actively annoyed by that style of reviews at the time, usually. They weren't always terrible, but those creative writing exercises very often gave little attention to what the record sounded like. There was also a tendency, sometimes, among certain writers of that era that readers had already heard the album and already had more than a passing familiarity with the artist, which came off as a way to prove their bona fides and "right" to write about them, but alienated readers who had little frame of reference.

i theoretically love the ambition of early pfork, it was what attracted me to the site as a kid, but the great majority of the writing did not live up to that ambition

^^^ otm

don't get me wrong, I still read it daily back then.

stating the obvious here but tim f reviews from the late-'00s are roughly 10000x more lyrical and erudite than any of the gonzo pfork stuff

very confused by austin’s moral crusade itt, i mean it’s fine to dislike a website

there's a lot of that here tbh but Pfork's the last monolith standing, I guess.

There was also a tendency, sometimes, among certain writers of that era that readers had already heard the album and already had more than a passing familiarity with the artist, which came off as a way to prove their bona fides and "right" to write about them, but alienated readers who had little frame of reference.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, June 8, 2021 8:43 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i remember this from the mid/late 00's. it created a sort of mystique around the site for me.

that era feels really different from the earliest reviews, which seem like college newspaper reviews, with all the charms and limitations that this comparison entails

one person's mystique can be another person's patina of unearned soi-disant authority tbf

soi-disant, I learned that word from the Silver Jews

hah was gonna comment something similar

why can’t monsters get along with other monsters

among certain writers of that era that readers had already heard the album and already had more than a passing familiarity with the artist

because coolness in hip music circles was once measured by the vastness of one's perfect & complete knowledge of all artists and albums, so the default mode of communication was "as you know..."

miss those days, when knowledge was social capital

I'm going to sell my knowledge of obscure music as an NFT

Instead press it on hand numbered limited color vinyl with gatefold tip-on and we'll talk

a lot of people take issue with the site's omniscient voice-of-god authorial point of view, and i personally don't love it when writers feel that they must convey an encyclopedic knowledge of all music in their reviews. tho some like philip sherburne do the encyclopedia thing well.

"the most trusted name in music"

(proceeds to lie about its own history)

also funny that this is the thread for criticizing them and i (or anyone else) get dogpiled on every time i attempt to do so.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
―Carl Sagan

Long story short, Ryan is a millionaire

Should've posted that Sagan quote to the Xgau thread instead.

the kinfolk said, Ryan, move away from there

more like soy disant

Should've posted that Sagan quote to the Xgau thread instead.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, 8 June 2021 15:15 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol I thought this was that thread reading it for a second

oh yeah ultimately all scores should be stripped from the site imo, i hate coming up with them and i even forgot to assign one to clarity when i filed. it'll never happen

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 8 June 2021 02:15

What's funny is that the moment I saw that there was a Sunday review for Jimmy Eat World's Clarity and it was written by Brad, I immediately guessed that the score would be 8.6, and I was right. I'm not really sure what that says about me, Pitchfork or Brad at this moment.

sorry, i'm still on my old school pitchfork remembrance journey. the writing was definitely sometimes very bad - even as a teen i knew that some of them were like HS creative writing exercises. however, they were very frequently experimental, and i REALLY liked that as a kid. and sometimes - frequently, even - they were better than anything in the print outlets, even if they combined typos and if the writers weren't really pro critics. that's why i (and i suspect many) kept reading every single day for so many years.

pitchfork needs a new vertical for "the experiment zone". sure to be profitable for conde nastay

speaking of,

We aren’t on strike yet, but we will be picketing @CondeNast Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour’s block tomorrow. Join us at 6:30 P.M. at N.Y.U. Stern, and then we'll march over together. Solidarity! pic.twitter.com/gKOYl4ezBC

— The New Yorker Union (@newyorkerunion) June 7, 2021

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
―Carl Sagan

applicable to so many threads but gonna resist the urge to post this to the Spotify thread because I have discovered that people there are really, really protective of Joe Rogan's meal ticket for some reason

maybe using that quote to apply to a site that reviews music is a tad dramatic? again, i understand disliking p4k and disagreeing with its institutional opinions, but i don't really see the basis of a moral crusade here

Pitchfork is a big windmill.

acting like writing a freelance review for pitchfork here and there - especially as the number of venue for serious rock writing continues to shrink - is like being a lawyer for monsanto or something is pretty weird

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2771-the-eminem-show/

voodoo chili otm, Sagan was talking about science v. pseudoscience iirc ffs. but this thread has been locked in the same groove for years now, so I accept that posting at all is part of the problem