pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

it's sooo bad

3. Pokemon cards

I was kidding about justice for Travistan earlier, but really wish that Sonic Youth NYC Ghosts & Flowers one made this list, if only to nuke this part of the review from orbit:

In a way, Sonic Youth's offenses are no different than, say, the Bloodhound Gang's. Where the Bloodhound Gang push recycled Beastie Boys and "South Park" jokes on will-less consumers, Sonic Youth scrap together Yoko Ono, Glenn Branca, and Allen Ginsberg into major label product. But just like living in the Big Apple, you're merely paying more for it. These are not new ideas. These are ideas that were arrogant and unlistenable upon birth 30 years ago. Sonic Youth are even old enough to know that! Thurston Moore stuck the sleeves of John Cage albums into his spokes and Kim Gordon played house with her Kathy Acker action figures.

That review really should be “deprecated.”

These 40+ year olds continue to operate under the perception that they matter.

(I admit the final line is kinda funny)

I never got the hate for NYC Ghosts & Flowers

revisionism is for the birds, just write new reviews and post them side by side with the originals and do that ad infinitum. then have the new writer pick points with the old one. After you get through four cycles, we can just start reviewing reviews and remove the middleman entirely.

whose review will receive the first 9.7 is more interesting to me than what decimal point kanye achieves

We’ve got some big news: we’ve signed up Ryan Schreiber’s Weird Era! Ryan is the founder of Pitchfork, and served alternately as the site’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief from 1996 to 2019. Weird Era, which is scheduled for summer 2023, chronicles the rise of Pitchfork from basement blog to the world’s most trusted and influential music authority. Along the way, Ryan charts the artists–Arcade Fire! Radiohead! Grimes! Frank Ocean!–that Pitchfork championed, as well as the generation of listeners the site helped shape. We can’t wait to publish this book, which we know will be a defining account of music, media, and growing up in the 2000s

Hope this includes his Village Vanguard Coltrane essay, for which the dude should be laughed off the face of the planet.

I read lotsa dumb zines back in the day and nothing --nothing-- I read in a zine, no matter how dumb or trivial, compares to how horrible this is. This is like Trump making fun of the physically disabled reporter.

Shit cat

Yes awful but really, cat, as bad as Trump? That’s bordering on Godwin’s law. You went straight to thermonuclear warfare.

As someone who stepped away from ILM for a while, is ILM going through a similar identity crisis as Pitchfork?

Clearly much of this revisionism is rooted in idpol, which no doubt deserves a thread of its own. (And just to be clear about my position: I’m all for the decline and fall of indie.)

The outright revisionism isn’t so apparent around here although there are some perspectives on older threads that I’d guess would warrant a ban now. But generally I feel like there is a similar sociopolitical dynamic playing out here.

Or maybe I’m just struggling to cope with the death of old ILM.

a message board's tastes changing with both time & turnover in users is a little different to the same happening at a website which attempts to represent itself as more of an institution but neither is necessarily a bad thing at all. what's goofy is just the way p4k has gone about things this week so far, like the 'most influential' list was just "here are a lot of popular critical favourites" while attempting to present it as "the most important to pitchfork's history" when that was often blatant revisionism. a more interesting list could have dug into innovators who were influential but not as popular to some extent perhaps? i always found fact's retrospective decade lists to be interesting by directly taking that sort of approach. and then the "we were wrong" list was a fine concept just things like "the chairlift album deserved 1 point higher" and "room on fire was actually great rather than good" felt like navel-gazing even by the standards of such an exercise.

ilx was the first space i encountered online where being a huge music fan didn't necessarily mean "liking indie rock a lot," which is why comparing it to pfork breaks down immediately for me

albeit i started posting in 2010, old ilx might've been dead already

Given the results of the Best of the 00s Poll from a couple of years ago, I would say there is not nearly as big of an identity crisis.

ilx was the first space i encountered online where being a huge music fan didn't necessarily mean "liking indie rock a lot,"

even when i've gone back through early threads far predating me this has seemed like it was largely the case from the beginning? obv the exact nature of that has changed over time but

definitely parts of old ilx i'm glad i was not around for though

Right I’m probably conflating a few different issues here. I feel like both ILM and Pfork are struggling through this rockist to poptimist metamorphosis.

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 that was neither rockist nor poptimist. But it’s quite possible I have an unrealistically rosy view of that era, and since I haven’t been that active lately maybe I’m pretty wrong about what’s going on now.

Should probably just stfu and lurk more.

The secret is capitalism: pitchfork is run to gin up ad sales and ilx is only about spurning hat washing

a message board's tastes changing with both time & turnover in users is a little different to the same happening at a website which attempts to represent itself as more of an institution but neither is necessarily a bad thing at all. what's goofy is just the way p4k has gone about things this week so far…

Point taken and it’s valid for sure.

I should clarify what I’m referring to though. There have been some bigger issues raised about the general direction Pfork is turning towards, and exactly what niche they’re now trying to fill. This is where I feel like the similarity with ILM lies. Yes of course message boards evolve over time. But is the evolution of ILM sustainable? Does being a mainly mainstream poptimist message board with some nods to other interests appeal to new users? Personally I feel like if it’s actually sustainable then a significant part of new adds should be younger people too. Is there much appeal to them here?

Does being a mainly mainstream poptimist message board with some nods to other interests

idk that it's really that - we're not say, popjustice

Young people have multiple social apps and probably think message boarding is like hand-cranking a letterpress

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 that was neither rockist nor poptimist.

see I feel like it's much more that way now tbh

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 where Dom posted

I think the prevailing attitude on ILM in 2005 was poptimist in its original sense of being antirockist: that is, skeptical of rockist orthodoxy, which elevated certain values closely associated with rock music, and reluctant to dismiss *any* genre out of hand. This often meant championing mainstream pop music, by pointing out how it was more interesting and exciting that it was often given credit for, but that didn't necessarily mean that pop music was by de facto better than rock music (notwithstanding some posts by The Lex, maybe) because the point was to break down those kinds of hierarchies. This is different from a more recent critical mode that Whiney has called Poptimism 2.0, which praises pop through a new set of values that can be as limiting as old-school rockism.

but i think ilm is still more in line with the original poptimism than that newer one?

still think "anti-rockism" makes more sense, as in, actually encompasses how I think and work as a writer, than "poptimist."

xp Yeah, I'd agree with that; I don't think it's changed that much, especially since there aren't a lot of new people around.

jaymc, thanks for linking to that thread. I'd forgotten about it.

As someone who stepped away from ILM for a while, is ILM going through a similar identity crisis as Pitchfork?

Feel like this would be more applicable to ILM if ILMers were going back en masse and removing/editing early posts to change the opinions expressed therein.

Also, if ILM had a massive influx of new users over the past decade or so that were still listening to music via their toothbrushes during the time that people here were trying to get into Big & Rich.

xpost Dave Matthews Band: Why Are they So Average and Tolerated?

Though this is more comparable to instances where we've polled the results of previous ILM polls, as they didn't actually go back and take down those old reviews, but rather looked back on them.

And most of the time these type of anniversary exercises often get forgotten years down the road in favor of the original reviews anyways.

just a thought:

sometimes, things don't have to persist and evolve and grow and become larger and more influential to more and more people. websites, messageboards. starbucks. what if things just slowly died out, without intervention, when they were ready to die? it makes sense to try to preserve your own life and the continued existence of those you love. but maybe ilx/ilm doesn't need 1000 autopsies and an influx of young people. maybe it's just supposed to be a bunch of older people arguing about increasingly petty things until they don't, at the end

nah

regrading old scores hilariously petty and in-character

yo is it true interpol got sonned by a pitchfork after a aol beef??????

not being able to gatekeep or tastemake or "thought lead" isn't a pitchfork problem, it's a mainstream music writing problem. gatekeeping, tastemaking and thought leading is happening on tik tok, welcome to 2021. teenagers in their bedrooms aren't reading gorilla vs bear like they were when i was a teenager in my bedroom... they're scrolling thru tik tok and shazaming songs they keep hearing in algorithmically privileged videos. pitchfork can't wrest that power away. which also isn't to say that there is no room for tastemaking journalism on a smaller, more micro level, servicing a niche set of readers who aren't interested in tik tok virality or bad bunny or fireboy dml or playboi carti or whatever. but doing so isn't going to employ dozens of ppl at morally justifiable (and union negotiated!) salaries.

was pitchfork really that popular among teens during the era when were reading it as teens tho? other than a super narrow slice of precocious kids, i remember only a few other ppl i knew who read it or were aware of it. it seemed more for people in their 20s and 30s. i don't think the young ppl scrolling tik tok today are the equivalent of ones who were reading p4k and gvb in 2008, it seems like a different market segment

The influence that Pitchfork had, particularly in the early aughts, is often "outsized" retrospectively— only after the mainstream success of certain bands that have already been mentioned did P4k really start becoming more of what it is today. That happened around the time I graduated from college, 2007-2008 or so, when MPP was released.

It's worth noting that in 2005, Animal Collective were still playing shows to basements of 100 college kids. Same with Ariel Pink— in fact, I saw Ariel Pink open for AnCo in April of that year.

It was mostly read by older music nerds and/or kids who went to liberal arts schools then moved to Brooklyn, which tracks.

here's some data. organic search traffic has been on the upswing (for some reason the historical data only goes back to 2012) for a long time (generally). But they are getting over 5 million hits from search monthly.

https://i.postimg.cc/tJ90PvB8/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-14-27-PM.png

in terms of what's bringing people there, it's almost exclusively hip hop and R&B stuff (mostly rap), here are the top keywords, outside of riley gale from power trip and daft punk it's pretty much exclusively hip hop and weighted heavily towards new hip hop

this does not count any direct traffic (people typing in pitchfork and going there on their own, not through search) so it's far from a complete picture of the traffic. but overall, i would think that their audience is MUCH younger and much less indie rock focused than ILX generally assumes.

https://i.postimg.cc/g2X7wPYn/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-15-15-PM.png

https://i.postimg.cc/fWq5YgqX/Screen-Shot-2021-10-06-at-2-19-38-PM.png

also the recent years change in what they cover and the focus of what they cover is probably a whole lot more to do with the analytics and less about any kind of anti-rockist agenda or w/e

did dmx die

non-hip hop/new rnb/modern pop terms in the top 100 (in order)

daft punk
riley gale
lorde
glitchcore
electric guitar
erykah badu
led zeppelin
bluetooth speakers
jack antanoff
blink 182
bjork
linkin park
bon iver
etta james
eddie vedder

Hard not to read that list in the “we didn’t start the fire” cadence

or The Tubes' "Telecide".

most of the comments here are otm

I just remember it being a project ran by/for late-era gen x’ers and early millennials who didn’t necessarily have broad tastes, but felt there was some need to review things outside of their remit as an aspiring music website

the sneering bit is really a vestige of that demographic’s insecurity and a need to dunk on or joke about music they didn’t really want to understand

now pitchfork basically reads to me like any random mainstream music magazine of the late 90s, maybe a bunch of blind spots but a lot fewer niches that are really explored

well, that and the incessant need to create a new canon for past decades every few years

The secret is capitalism: pitchfork is run to gin up ad sales and ilx is only about spurning hat washing

― When Young Sheldon began to rap (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 6 October 2021 16:29 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Unless its Spiritual Hat washing.