pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

good music = memes

thx, pfork!

integrity

there's a whole bunch of factors behind weezer's strange continued ubiquity compared to all those other 90s acts:
-they're really prolific and have only been getting even more prolific - they released seven albums in the last decade
-they never broke up & kept having radio hits long after they lost the plot, due to being fairly pop-minded even at their worst
-they're still on a major label with the extra promotional pushes that can give them
-some of their more recent stuff has actually been ok-to-good, somehow - the white album is genuinely a very good power pop album that's up with their peak period material
-their bad stuff is bad in often fascinatingly strange ways rather than just being bland & hookless (though there's plenty of that too), and even on some of their weakest albums there's sometimes glimpses of what made them good originally. i think that last part is what helped drive the really hardcore fans particularly mad - the sense that cuomo is actually still capable of writing songs of the quality he once did & just isn't interested in that anymore (and that actually turned out to be true with the white album lol)

even despite all that they're very clearly third rung on that upcoming stadium tour behind green day and fall out boy - unlike those two they don't manage to play arenas on their own or anything.

i don't think smashing pumpkins really do take up much air at all these days. there was some brief excitement for the semi-reunion tour a few years ago, but no one has really cared much about new material forever. corgan gets some attention in the media when he gives a particularly dumb/weird quote about something but that's about it. obviously peak pumpkins >>>>>>> peak weezer though & both are very well cemented in the alt rock canon. would probably be better if no teen was encouraged to listen to pinkerton again though

The fact that Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins still take up so much air is baffling to me since both of these bands lost the plot 20 years ago.

Weezer had only first signaled that they understood the plot 20 years ago, on May 15, 2001, when they returned from hiatus with their triumphant Green Album. They quickly lost it again, but let's get the timeline right.

As a non-fan, it was the only moment where they briefly seemed interesting/cool.

I saw them with the get up kids on that tour, they were great. Too many green album songs though

'green is the best weezer album' people are the most confusing of all weezer fans to me

weezer fans are the most confusing of all people to me

Fans are the most confusing people

Interesting array / arrangement of reviews for Monday… I probably would have featured Alfred’s favorable (7.3) piece on a new album from a well-known band, over the mixed (6.0) write-up on an artist who seems interesting to the reviewer mainly from a semiotic standpoint.

Slayyyter is a Big Deal On The Internet

As a non-fan, it was the only moment where they briefly seemed interesting/cool

good morning!

It was a great piece, Mr. Soto.

Apologies if this appears upthread and I missed it

https://www.thecut.com/2021/06/new-yorker-employees-protested-outside-anna-wintours-house.html

As one of the few who've kept up with Garbage all along, it was great to not only see that review, but even better to see who wrote it. Excellent job, Alfred.

I love some of y'all who write for Pfork but also have some tendency toward this viewpoint ngl.

pitchfork brainwashed everyone into thinking pop music is sacred poetry that reflects the national cultural spirit back onto itself. Like no... this is just a rich girl on pills

— personal anatomical (@collnsmith) June 13, 2021

oh boy poptimism discourse

also who among us has the tendency toward that viewpoint

shitty tweet on several levels

holding pitchfork entirely responsible for critical elevation of pop music feels... ahistorical somehow

case by case it can be one or the other or both at once depending on the album right? Usually no matter what it's not-for-me but that's fine too.

I assume that was sparked by the lorde track review which was pretty spectacularly pointless tbf

lorde's whole thing is pop-music-with-readable-depths tho

i mean i have not read the track review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIAkRVBS-0U

I don't think the motivation of the tweet is to provide results of a thoughtful nuanced analysis.

just clicked that tweet again and noticed the original tweeter is using it to hawk some kind of twitch streamer lighting, who's the sellout now

"Lure nubile teens back to your place with this fab sunset lamp! They love this kind of thing"

You realize that's a joke.

this is the thread to complain about Pitchfork, i was just posting it because it immediately got a "yes, well, but..." from me. that's all.

it's a gross joke trying to pass itself off as "ironic" while conveniently still sponning the con

xpost tbh this kind of stuff is under almost every viral tweet

(Also, I found the tweet funny)

pop-poptimism discourse is even stupider than the normal sort

going through some of the replies... "In fact that's exactly what happened. Poptimism became a major thing right around the time Condé Nast bought Pitchfork." lol

you're right and you should say it

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) June 13, 2021

https://media.tenor.com/images/160d117c737caec24882db70c222dc48/tenor.gif

poptimist silvia

people on twitter think that "poptimism" means "pop music is inherently better than other music because it's popular," which, uhh, no.

seemed to me at a distance on ilm that the semi-popular stuff was always more the focus, say, Robyn for example

this phenomenon has nothing to do with any website (and especially not one that barely covered pop the first fifteen years) and in 10 years of "poptimism" debate i've yet to be successfully convinced why i should take white folk in vineyard vines making indie shit more seriously https://t.co/WQSrg0XQAk

— Craig Bro Dude (@CraigSJ) June 14, 2021

maybe we should just accept that the term "poptimism" means a new and different thing now

I saw that tweet earlier, and then spent a few minutes reading their timeline. They struck me as an absolute, yet extremely banal, paragon of the affectless irony-poisoned terminally online shitposter whose socialist/progressive/shrug politics are entirely opaque because they only exist in relation to twitter. Felt pretty depressed after scrolling through it for a while. The replies are a dizzying but also sad combination of "reads The Culture Industry once" or "I hate indie" or "rockism was 100% correct actually"

I guess with pitchfork basically being the only music crit venue with any significance, it's become this rorschach blot for people's anxieties about taste + literally anything?

i didn't realise until recently how many people there are online who think p4k used to be cool before it sold out. surely back then no real hipster would ever admit to thinking it was cool even if they secretly took it v seriously

Devastated to learn a new breed of poptimism-haters have an ahistorical understanding of the discourse that gave rise to such an invaluable mode of criticism. Oh, no!

— willy 💧 (@willystaley) June 14, 2021

I guess with pitchfork basically being the only music crit venue with any significance, it's become this rorschach blot for people's anxieties about taste + literally anything?

Once upon a time entire books were written about how unfairly certain bands were treated by Rolling Stone.

They struck me as an absolute, yet extremely banal, paragon of the affectless irony-poisoned terminally online shitposter whose socialist/progressive/shrug politics are entirely opaque because they only exist in relation to twitter. Felt pretty depressed after scrolling through it for a while. T

I had the same reaction a little while ago too -- I couldn't figure out what this person loved, hated, was bored by; it was like watching someone acting out their version of Warholism without ever seeing a Warhol painting.

rob otm

re: simon, the "things are good because they're popular" straw man version of it isn't a view point anyone actually holds. the twitter OP said she'd never even heard the term poptimism before people brought it up in response to that tweet anyway. this is all just people who don't really pay much attention to any of this stuff going "lol there are some pretty goofy/embarrassing writing on pitchfork sometimes" and "isn't it weird pitchfork likes beyonce these days when they used to only like indie music" etc. and then ending up in weird conspiracist places

Its hilarious that everyone's flipping out because you could totally read the phrase "pop music" as "popular music (i.e., everything that's not classical music) but everyone apparently chose to read it as (**soy facing in Swans shirt**) YEPPERS YEPPERS CARLY RAE JEPPERS

^^^

going through some of the replies... "In fact that's exactly what happened. Poptimism became a major thing right around the time Condé Nast bought Pitchfork." lol

lol at deej getting "doxxed" as Pitchfork staff

xp to whiney: oh come on lol she says "the more highly produced/marketed the greater reverence you should afford it when listening. Absolute cuckoldry" which is clearly directly aiming at actually popular pop (genre), so not crj and also not "everything that isn't classical music"