pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

It also kind of writes off the band’s music as generic.

less than zero is the worst book i’ve ever read

stop mentioning it in music reviews!!!

The myth-making/speculation in one paragraph is directly contradicted by the matter-of-fact mundanity of the next:

Su and the Suburban Lawns treated their music like an art project or an accident. Everything they did was part of a performance of being in a band and being public-facing. Maybe that’s why they burned out so fast. They couldn’t sustain that momentum, literally-go-fuck-yourself level of punk rock anonymity.

The band got bigger, enjoying the kind of cult rock band success that led the freaky miscreants to open for U2 and the Clash. And after the release of Suburban Lawns, they went on to release one more EP for IRS, Baby, where they ditched Emmons as a producer for Richard Mazda, who had produced the Fall and the Fleshtones. It wasn’t nearly as well-received, and the band split up shortly afterwards.

"And when it came to Los Angeles, they wrote about it from the margins, freeways, and from a deep anger towards the superficial quality of Hollywood." Freeways?

"The cold hard facts are sparse. They were probably art school kids." The first sentence of their wiki: "Suburban Lawns were an American post-punk band formed in Long Beach, California in 1978 by CalArts students William "Vex Billingsgate" Ranson and Sue "Su Tissue" McLane."

The review wants to drum up some "Searching for Sugar Man" narrative as if the author is blown away that there exists something or someone that would not be easily Googled.

And, that it is weird and remarkable and even a "conceptual art project" there would even exist a human being who would not want to hop promptly onto whichever self-mythologizing nostalgia bandwagon rolled their way.

When these are good they're good but some of them are ridiculous...

On the positive side I'm listening now to her LP "Salon de Musique" and it's very cool.

less than zero is the worst book i’ve ever read

― roflrofl fight (voodoo chili)

agreed with this, or at least worst book i've finished. holy shit, i felt so empty after that

holy shit, i felt so empty after that

...kind of the point?

(I'm one of the bigger Ellis apologists on ILX. I think LTZ and American Psycho are great, and Glamorama is fucking brilliant.)

It’s fine to hate a song, but maybe mention that it’s a cover and the “tone-deaf imitation of a muezzin’s call” is actually a sample from the 90 year old original? https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/jack-white-hi-de-ho/

I think there are plenty of runs equal to Stevie's

xp Pfork is all – "'Cab Calloway'? OK boomer! I'll be using Lyft while you call that cab"

I predictably do not like that Pitchfork review for the reasons stated.

Going to use this spot to talk about how I feel about that Jack White song. I thought the intro sample collage / vamp part was cool, and I don't actually enjoy the song overall, but I do enjoy how little sense it all makes. Q-Tip continues his tradition of collaborating with absolutely terrible rock bands.
Pitchfork review otm in the sense that it has an air of aloofness to it, which makes it come off very unappealing. At least it made me laugh with its nonsense.

Looks like they’ve updated the review to include a reference to the “Cab Calloway sample” (complete with YT link).

Best retroactively edited website in the biz!

Oh, there’s this at the bottom (LOL):

Correction, 03/03/2022: An earlier version of this review mis-identified a sample of Cab Calloway’s “Hi De Ho Man” as an imitation of a muezzin call.

It’s not even that it’s obscure as a sample. It was also used in Jaden (Smith)’s biggest song, “Icon”, from 2017.

hahaha I tweeted that at the writer after reading this thread

i refuse to believe the pitchfork sunday review has given a john legend album the same score as the blue nile's hats. maybe the title of this thread is right after all

i found this lede, from the review of the new superchunk album, to be wildly presumptuous projection

You are probably having a bad time right now. You have been stuck at home in fits and starts for so long that it’s increasingly difficult to remember what that didn’t feel like. A bad situation that seemed like it was going to end soon didn’t, and now you’re not sure if it ever will—or if it does, it will surely be superseded by something even worse. Maybe you have some sense of what that even worse thing might be, maybe you don’t, but you’re feeling it hovering regardless. Even if you’re the type to find ways to remain hopeful—and God bless you whoever you are—you may concede that the search is getting a little more fraught each day.

Are people still stuck at home? I wish.

I can't stand the sleeve for that Superchunk album. If I want Babybel cheese, I'll go to Publix.

I'll say this much, most bands I've wanted to see at Fork Fest in a long while.

This is @pitchforkfest 2022

Catch @thenational, @mitskileaks, @theroots, and more, in Union Park this July. Tickets go on sale this Friday, March 11 → https://t.co/ZDV3bYJlNM #P4kFest pic.twitter.com/XPYJiVB9k5

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) March 8, 2022

Sunday looks very nice

Wait . . . Karate??!??! The Boston band??!

YEP!

Yeah Saturday looks like my speed

Wait . . . Karate??!??! The Boston band??!

YEP!

― Let's disco dance, Hammurabi! (Austin), Tuesday, March 8, 2022 bookmarkflaglink

First reaction - is there some new band called Karate or is that the Boston band from the 90s?

Second reaction - do they still have enough of a following / nostalgia factor to warrant a spot that high up in the lineup?

I liked Karate back in the day, circa 1997-98 but I can't say I've thought much about them since.

whoa that's awesome, karate kicks ass

Judging by the EOY ILM Poll, ILM would looooove the p4k festival this year

Kind of funny that this is the sort of audience Noname is choosing to perform to after “she retired”

If I had to pick a day, it'd be Saturday for Low and Jeff Parker.

jeff parker was my last pre-pandemic show - they were so great

kinda nbd because this is how the world works but when you go to pfork site today it's header articles are entertainment and movie ads and then when you scroll down its news about a new musk baby. The only reason this is slightly interesting I guess is because this seems to be the only main music news organization left standing today

are there just a bunch of things I don't know about like powerful substacks discord channels tik tok ppl or something that work as music news or release info channels outside of this or has everything been winnowed down

depends on what kind of music you're interested in I guess

sure, I mean like in the sense of general music news orgs in legacy org veins, you're right, everything music news/release-wise has prob been atomized

I just follow a bunch of musical acts/labels/etc on a twitter list, listen to new music streams, whatever

It would be an interesting thread to pinpoint when people stopped caring about "music" as a single tent/interest...

Maybe 2004/2005 OK Go-era end of MTV/beginning of YouTube for normies and then and then the 2016/2017 Beyonce/Kendrick/Solange/Drake/Kanye nu-poptimism celebrity web-traffic suffocation for nerds

yeah thanks Whiney that's what I think I'm getting at with this

Yeah, the example I always point to is the movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which is one of the funniest movies of the 21st Century but presupposes the viewer has some interest/connection to things as wide as Justin Bieber, Macklemore, Odd Future and Marshmello. It was a huge flop and I think because people weren't as invested in pop music to see a send up of big-tent pan-genre popular music (see also every music award show plummeting in ratings over the last 10 years).

Meanwhile, the MTV era had room for Spinal Tap, CB4, Fear of a Black Hat, 2Gether, A Mighty Wind...

it's almost as if some powerful force has completely devalued music (and musicians) for basically everyone

the novel coronavirus

yeah my questions is also kinda like: Is pitchfork the last legacy supposedly music covering thing in existence that moves the cultural needle in some way (way less than before, but still)

and if so that's pretty funny as it seems the conde nast thing has put it into heavy musk kanye new movie star news territory in a av club style or something

I guess cult of personality style things like needledrop still have music front and center but I've never really paid attn to that so maybe he covers video games or something instead now (or always has idk)

It's funny because in that 2004-2016 span, the internet basically said "OK, here's 8000 cheap and easy ways to find the music you connect with" and essentially killed off all monocultural institutions for delivery (MTV, terrestrial radio, cable TV, record stores) and most monocultural institutions of thought (Village Voice, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard becoming completely unusable). Then once 2016 rolls around all 8000 of those sources became "oops, it's only scalable if we cover the same 5 artists as everyone else"

Stereogum is still humming along and hasn't turned into covering Euphoria or whatever

yeah, stepping outside of the new org realm for a sec, those post-oink invite only music torrent music sites (which were all a good source for discovering things) have communities that seem like they've dried up, even the active ones

xp cool good to know

yeah man #no1curr

Yeah, there is no real "catch-all" "music" website other than Pitchfork, at least that I know of.

I follow Foxy Digitalis, The Quietus, and Aquarium Drunkard, RA only sort of, and a few columns here and there (unperson's jazz column for Stereogum, good example), plus this site. Even back in the heyday of Pfork, though, I was going all over the place to search for stuff, which is how I came to be here.

What I miss is spending hours sifting through fusetron and sending money orders in the mail.

i might add npr music (whose scope is necessarily narrower than a place like stereogum because demographics, but in other ways much more expansive and inclusive than a place like stesreogum) and (even though the brand has been worthless for at least 20 years) rolling stone.

I mean, pitchfork has a bunch of cultural/maybe unrelated to music stuff at the top of the page but they've published over 30 album reviews since the beginning of the month and we're only ten days in?