pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

There are two things going on at once:

1) DeBoer, as always no matter the topic, is asserting that everyone else on Earth is writing based on some hidden agenda, often one based on maintaining in-group status (the fact that said in-group has thoroughly and repeatedly rejected DeBoer has nothing to do with it, and how dare you even imply such a thing), and he is the one brave truth-teller who can see through everyone else's hypocrisies and social positioning

2) Like every writer who spends most of their time writing about politics, his taste in music is absolutely awful

third thing is that he demonstrates he has no real idea what he's talking about (as with pretty much everything), his criticism isn't even coherent

do not give him this amount of oxygen imo

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Saturday, February 11, 2023 9:11 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no one knows who that guy is or cares what he thinks

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Saturday, February 11, 2023 9:12 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

so otm

i will just say that i'm on this thread, i suck at new music but i still read reviews and listen to what you all say, and i have never heard of deBoer until he came up here, which led me to seek out this person to learn the context of how bad they suck, exactly. i am very willing to admit that, like pauline kael and film criticism, i'm just missing some easily well known figure in the field and i am a complete dumbass for not knowing, but on the other hand, maybe i pay more attention to music than most people and yet miraculously don't know who this dumbass is, perhaps because they suck so badly

it could be a number of things going on really

deboer is not a music writer, he's a politics writer and you should be glad to have never heard of him. one of the many supposed 'leftists' who've become increasingly openly reactionary cranks, that whole terrible niche.

i am very familiar with the guy and he was a fucking reactionary a decade ago

i mean maybe it’s a greenwald situation where the confirmed worst person on the internet just got worse and worse but i can’t emphasize enough how the only context in which i am familiar with deboer’s work is mercilessly making fun of it with other catty bloggers a decade ago. no one actually read him. if he has somehow managed to acquire an audience via substack well that sucks bc he’s just an awful writer and thinker. but this is also the first time i’ve heard his name in like ten years

I'm in the same boat. His name surfaced in 2015 (?) over drivel he'd written about poptimism.

Teedra Moses today!

There's this thing that happens when I read pieces like the DeBoer essay. I initially agree with the opening points, but then find myself disagreeing so strongly with the supporting arguments, to a point that I no longer agree with the opening points at all.

i mean maybe it’s a greenwald situation where the confirmed worst person on the internet just got worse and worse

yeah it's this. having gotten a much bigger audience because anti-woke "left" is an in-demand niche these days has made him a fair bit worse than before

could it be that this dude is a braying moron AND pitchfork is a commercially-driven enterprise whose reviewing range is quite broad yet whose vaunted Lists (and BNMing) are in some non-negligible sense a brand positioning exercise? from what little attention I pay I've noticed them shove loads of great stuff into the 8.0 non-BNM pocket

sure, it’s a publication. thank u for the contribution

lol, fair

my main incentive here is not siding with a prick so happy to yield

not to repeat myself, but to repeat myself, but shouldn't it be disqualifying from anyone ever taking him seriously for anything ever if he FALSELY ACCUSED ANOTHER WRITER OF SEXUAL ASSAULT and ADMITTED TO IT???

i mean the worst thing about these woke poptimism pieces is they might be close to highlighting a real dynamic if they didn’t get there through bad faith and relentless projection

this week i personally have beef with bands getting demerits for clunky political lyricism if they’re not making the “right” kind of rock music, which just makes me want to rate on a 10 point scale any paragraph of music criticism that says anything along the lines of “in these chaotic times” etc. etc.

re: my first point, iirc i think whitney’s poptimism 2.0 thread >>>>> any poptimism exposé

yeah I reread that thread recently and it's prescient & otm despite all the pushback Whiney gets at the start

I only know of FdB from him getting relentlessly clowned on tiger beatdown 10+ years ago, so it's surprising news to me that he's known as a "leftist" (not that I'm disputing it, just have no context for it). I don't know what incident Murgatroid is referring to, but yikes

I'm a look-to-the-language person, and if a writer makes reductive, contorted arguments I will mostly find a reductive, contorted person who traffics in bad faith.

any paragraph of music criticism that says anything along the lines of “in these chaotic times” etc. etc.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I guess some readers must dig it…

It's therefore no surprise for a writer who falsely accused a person of sexual assault can also write badly more banal things.

this week i personally have beef with bands getting demerits for clunky political lyricism if they’re not making the “right” kind of rock music

feeling useless behind this computer rn

DeBoer, as always no matter the topic, is asserting that everyone else on Earth is writing based on some hidden agenda

unperson otm. the brief bits I read from FdB years ago always left me wondering who the hell he was referring to

This review made me think of brad’s comment above… is it a record review, or literary criticism(?)

definitely not a fan of reviews that focus on lyrics above all else, even in genres where they're more of a focus

It's just one paragraph though

I'd say that my overwhelming preference is for music without vocals, but I think lyrics should definitely factor in when evaluating a record like this one. I mean it's not Cocteau Twins

i think lyrics are absolutely fair game but are also an easy target, and i’ve come to think over the years that lyrics do not need to be traditionally “good” writing to be effective or inhabitable

i’m not familiar with the quasi record so i’m just gonna talk about paramore:

paramore lyrics are always v plainspoken and sometimes more ungainly than elegant/eloquent but they often still pierce the heart of their subject matter, e.g. “crave,” a song that captures the difficulty of living in the moment as well as any i’ve heard

“the news” is the track that gets reamed in the pfork review and while i don’t think “every second our collective heart breaks” is like fantastic writing i think the song really effectively portrays what it’s like to be constantly aware of every horrible thing in the world and the feedback loop of helplessness and powerlessness this creates in one’s mind. it is also clearly uh in the lineage of hüsker dü’s “turn on the news” which has one of the most earnest and doofiest lyrics ever and that’s why it’s good

I have more questions about the writer's use of "middle class."

How many lyrics to cite in a review is a fascinating problem many of us love to tangle with. Writing a certain Pitchfork review last week, I thought I exceeded my lyric-citing quota (also: my biography-citing quota, a thread for another day), but I justified it privately with, "Well, it's a singer-songwriter album."

i mean i think also that lyrical analysis is important but uh v few critics have the chops for it

I mean, lyrics are part of most forms of popular music. The song is a literary form as well as a musical one.

A lyric for an English major is like a puppy for a Florida alligator.

Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go

Lyrics can be literary but they don’t have to be—expecting a rock band to provide answers to modern problems (like the review seems to imply) is kinda ridiculous

the entire radiohead catalog v. surfin bird

Brad otm, lyrics have a different standard by which they should be evaluated, I always say my favourite lyric of all time is simply "everything you think and everything you feel is all right all right all right all right all right" (simple as anything, reads as a message of encouragement on its own when it's being shouted on a dance floor, but check the lyric sheet and it's the tail end of an excoriation against individuals who are apolitical; it's a perfect line)

I was taught that composers oftentimes would go to the poetic masters for the lyrical material and quickly find that Shakespeare, Auden and Yeats are diminished when set to music. Good lyrics work in tandem with music, they will be weakened when it is extracted and printed on a page; good poetry works well on the page or in recitation, they will be weakened when set to music etc.

I didn't think there was anything weird about Nina's Quasi review I thought it was good if a little abbreviated

bernard sumner?!

That is so interesting. I've always thought of Sumner as the greatest writer of calorie-free lyrics

It's just one paragraph though

It’s the entire second half of the review. More to the point, though, is how “underwritten” lyrics lie at the center of the thesis for why it’s not a good record (see even the subhed). Maybe it’s not, but I can’t personally relate to that mode of criticism – knocking songs that “don’t meet the urgency of their subject matter,” etc. it is an album, not a treatise.

I dunno, feels like this is a trap set by critics themselves, who for decades have been heralding popular musicians as the “true poets” of their times. By setting up the expectation of profundity, particularly within certain song and genre forms, critics essentially created the situation wherein the lyrics of those forms are judged as “poetry,” not as a separate (but equally important and profound) part of song and language tradition/continuum.

^^^^^^^

Maybe this is part of why, these days, I try to write about music without lyrics.

I myself think it's maybe a little simpler than that. My observation is that music writers often lack the ability/desire to write critically about the musical material, and fall back on passing arbitrary (oftentimes summary) judgements on the lyrical material as a proxy. Quasi's lyrics might work just fine in other contexts, but in the context of This Album they don't work; let's blame the weak lyrics instead of unpacking why the Rocksichord is perhaps the problem

I dunno, feels like this is a trap set by critics themselves, who for decades have been heralding popular musicians as the “true poets” of their times. By setting up the expectation of profundity, particularly within certain song and genre forms, critics essentially created the situation wherein the lyrics of those forms are judged as “poetry,” not as a separate (but equally important and profound) part of song and language tradition/continuum.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

Boomers really do have so much to answer for.

I don't require lyrics to be literary or even good, I just ask that they aren't so bad that they are distracting and prevent me from enjoying the song

even the idea of what constitutes "good lyrics" is pretty loaded and as alfred alluded to very skewed towards the "singer songwriter" concept...like I dunno, I would argue very strongly that Bon Scott is a better lyricist than James Taylor but a lot of people wouldn't take that seriously

I'd agree with you, which is to say if I listen to James Taylor (not often but bear with me) I take pleasure from his voice and guitar work first.

fgti, I think your assessment is correct in a lot of ways, too— but it also begs the question: if one can’t write adequately about the non-lyric aspects of the music, even in a non-technical manner, then why is one considered a worthy music critic?

Because good music writing =/= good musical analysis, and vice versa. I look to music writing for "good writing" (obv), and broader, more holistic cultural insights.

when i said that songwriting is a literary as well as a musical art form i meant that in the most literal sense possible. the lyrics are there, and they either work (and elevate the music) and fail (or detract from the music). and what counts as good lyrics is dependent on context, of course.