pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Bobby Rhubarb, a dog, would support Jenny Lewis on her summer tour dates.

depends on your definition of support i guess

Definitely depends. I don’t know this Rhubarb dog but I can only assume that they WILL be there to support Jenny Lewis every step of the way, no matter when or where

For anyone looking for more evidence of Pitchfork's metamorphosis into Rolling Stone, the latest 3 reviews on the site right now are:
- Florence and the Machine
- The Black Keys
- Richard Thompson
(that is, if you can find the reviews section amongst all the breaking news about the new Kendrick album)

Rolling Stone only publishes 2 reviews a month now, and probably not by those artists?

pitchfork was reviewing all of those artists back in the 00s

"Major Online Music Site Remains Major Online Music Site in Absolute Shocker"

There are a lot of legitimate Pitchfork complaints, but "metamorphosis into Rolling Stone" is not one of them

Also the reviews are not exactly hidden away - they're still fairly prominent on the homepage

www.rollingstone.com

But also, it's like— they might be reviewing these record by legacy acts, they're also reviewing the latest releases by KMRU, Whatever the Weather, Oren Ambarchi, Jeanines, and any number of niche/somewhat more obscure groups. The hand-wringing over the inclusion of more mainstream stuff is weird, as much as I agree that most of the mainstream stuff is garbage.

^^

Winter term" just ended a few days ago at my university, for example

Haha definitions of "winter term" and "spring term" always lead to mild US/Canada cross-border confusion ime.

Reviewing a Richard Thompson album (ft. Henry Kaiser) is a good thing for a music site to do, IMO

I'm not a disinterested poster, but are we complaining about a Richard Thompson review?

i'm complaining about the bonnie raitt review. she's shifted over 16 million units in the united states alone! i am sick of being smothered by bonnie raitt every time i walk outside

do you raitt her

I can't make you love her.

Bonnie Prince Billy gets a raitting of 33.3333333333

I can't make you love her.

i see what you did there

at least it gave us something to talk about

Richard Thompson is good.

that's one stellar Richard Thompson reissue, deserves every review it gets

I enjoyed the Black Keys review, which was not at all dumb, but when exactly did this band ever count among its fans "wayward factions of 78-collecting blues traditionalists?" As far as I can tell they were beer commercial fodder from the jump, pretty much anathema to the crusty blues collector demographic

the first few black keys records were definitely "cool" in my memory

Yeah the first album came out on Alive Records, a small label founded in the 90s by a French dude who was in thick with the whole extended Bomp Records empire; IIRC Greg and Suzy were their distributors from the get-go. So there was a definite cachet in that vein among those of us following/interested in such things when that came out, "Oh, another thing on Alive, could be good."

And after that they were on Fat Possum and (rhetorically at least) part of the whole "rural blues is the new punk" thing. Their fourth album was all Junior Kimbrough songs.

Black Keys were cool enough for their cover of “Have Love Will Travel” to appear on the John Peel Festive Fifty in 2003, which was my introduction to them.

And I have receipts:

John Peel Festive 50

I was hoping Bonnie Raitt would get someone like Dan Auerbach to produce her next album, but I guess that would be peak irritation for some of the posters here if Pitchfork covered it.

oooh!

good Bonnie Raitt review, Alfred!

Hey, Pfork reviewed a Kelly Clarkson album

Her debut, Thankful, didn’t challenge expectations. With the exception of tracks like “Miss Independent”—a boinging R&B-pop single originally written for Christina Aguilera—it was a fairly uninspired attempt at pop-gospel.

Honestly kudos to pitchfork for having the guys to write a not entirely glowing review of the Kendrick album rather than immediately giving it a perfect score like seemingly so many other outlets did. Like I think it deserved a bnm but all the fawning around Kendrick is a bit much

*meant to say “having the guts”. Autocorrect strikes again

I was surprised too, especially after six of the seven top stories on Friday being about Kendrick

They haven't been afraid to give Kanye low scores despite him owning the news section

agreed that it's okay to not just blindly give out high score/bnm, but there is no way DAMN. is the better album.

Everyone overrated DAMN! when it came out.

I think the pitchfork score is fair. It’s definitely a flawed album.

my opinion could yet change, but i think damn. is certainly a better album. it's better than most albums, to be fair.

Haven't heard this yet but I will be astounded - astounded - if it's anywhere near as great as DAMN, from what everyone's been saying

Haven't heard the Quelle Chris either ;)

Everyone overrated DAMN! when it came out.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Monday, May 16, 2022 8:41 AM

even pfork, i guess.

(i thought DAMN. was a huge disappointment at the time. it made me start saying things like "welp, guess kl is just not my kind of music.")

Haven't heard the Quelle Chris either ;)

― imago, Monday, May 16, 2022 10:54 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's really good!

They haven't been afraid to give Kanye low scores despite him owning the news section

― Chappies banging dustbin lids together (President Keyes), Monday, May 16, 2022 9:45 AM (five hours ago)

they gave ye a 7.1 and jesus is king 7.2. granted both are lower than this kendrick score but are still inflated by 2+ points and i'm being nice. it wasn't until donda that they acknowledged what had been clear for several years which is that his music isn't good anymore

this year i've been impressed by them resisting rosalia backlash and giving this kendrick album a mid 7, two big albums where they could've gone either way and i think they nailed both scores

A solid, thoughtful review that I (for one) am grateful isn’t a fawning rave.

The kind of review with which I'll disagree with judgments but respect its intelligence.

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-nfts-are-shaping-the-way-music-sounds/

By now, you would be forgiven for being skeptical of, if not outright exhausted by, the entire concept of NFTs, the cryptocurrency-adjacent digital vouchers that took over the art world last year and quickly infiltrated the music industry.

...For the most part, these were business endeavors by artists with vast experience in branding, household names simply lending their imprimatur to NFTs the same way they might license songs for car commercials.

...nothing that their most equipped proponents have done with them so far feels very revolutionary.

...Still, corporate America has been betting on NFTs the way regular people buy lottery tickets

... Holding back our skepticism for a minute, let’s consider a future in which NFTs are a normalized way of releasing music, no different from uploading your songs to Spotify or selling a record on Bandcamp.

...Looking past the blockchain aspect, the files that music NFTs represent could be thought of as similar to a Bandcamp stream,

...So what flowers might bloom from this unwieldy and already-polarizing new format? An NFT music chart called Top of the Blocks, published weekly since March 2021, offers clues to what’s worked so far. The chart is based on sales volume, and the amounts required to crack the top 10 have soared over the last year, from the equivalent of $200 or $300 to $2,000 or $3,000 prior to cryptocurrency’s recent crash, says founder Robin Spottiswoode. Though electronic music dominated the chart in the early days,

...n the summer of 2021, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Violetta Zironi—a former X-Factor competitor who placed third in 2013 but didn’t find much industry success thereafter—vowed to give music her all for one more year. If it didn’t pan out, she would quit. “And then, when I went home for Christmas, my mom told me about NFTs,” she recalls.

...A lot of NFT-based music may not sound drastically different from what streaming has wrought—but could some characteristics of NFTs help music that’s a bit weirder? Some of the biggest nonmusical NFT projects have been released in mega-batches that include thousands of similar but distinct pieces of art, with repeating elements arranged in different configurations. For instance, CryptoPunks are a set of 10,000 algorithmically generated pixelated cartoon characters, some of which have rare lipstick or mohawks that somehow make them more valuable—and even the most ordinary CryptoPunk is still trading for about $100,000 these days.

^^^are you fucking me? gtfo

...The gambling-like appeal of NFTs shouldn’t be overlooked. “Suddenly these artists have these collectors who are financially invested in their future success, which is a huge shift,” says Spottiswoode. “There are definitely people that invest a lot in music NFTs because they think it’s the future.”

The speculative aspect, with risk diffused from a single patron or label A&R to “true fans” and wealthy patrons, could also affect the sound and creation of music. Will artists think differently about the way they plan and pace their careers? If the music matters less than the investment and proof of concept, then maybe more outré sounds will keep bubbling to the top of the NFT charts. One optimistic view is that artists could become less likely to make short-term compromises that will burn them out. Dance-pop singer-songwriter Aluna, who recently raised around $13,000 from a set of 69 music NFTs, tells me, “You need to think about the possibilities of building something that you and your fans own forever.”

All of these fun hypotheticals aside,

...“We’re not going to see all the messy stuff,” says Dwight Torculas, co-founder of the music NFT platform Mint Songs. “Artists are going to make money off of the tokenization of their assets, and the secondary royalty sales from it, and then we as the end consumer will be able to participate in a streaming app that allows us to listen to music for free.”

Great article Marc Hogan!!!!!

i didn't excerpt all the paragraph sized "anecdotes" about unknown musicians who have recently made it rich. Marc Hogan (and Pitchfork/Conde Nast) are effectively advising all of their young readers to buy crypto and NFTs, highlighting the rare cases where it did "work" for some shitty musician, and minimizing and downplaying all of the risk. Did Marc Hogan bother to interview one who thinks all of this is an awful idea? Does he know anyone that minted an NFT and totally failed? That might seem similar to the stories of millions of artists who have tried to sell something and failed. but the whole reason people (I) get worked up about NFTs and Crypto is because it is NOT just some mediocre piece of art that wasn't purchased, and lands in the basement storage soon later. The bare minimum of participation in NFT requires buying into the whole crypto mindset. You have to. That, alone, is not something to be minimized And god, if some person really likes your tacky art so much that they buy an NFT, then you're REALLY into crypto, at that point.