pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

wonder if it’s the same guy who is now a public defender and twitter guy in Virginia

it appears so

Indeed I was. During law school. I am not proud of it. My reviews were trash and I was an asshole to a lot of nice, creative people.

— Brad Haywood (@BradleyRHaywood) November 4, 2022

maybe i'm just being an asshole about it but i always imagined pfork authorities at the time encouraging that sort of thing.

"i am not proud of it" is very cringe for all involved. at least they own it. yeesh.

Sounds like he’s saying he’s not proud of trashing records, in that tweet at least

Yeah, for about a year. Then Ryan Schreiber fired me. For cause. The cause being that I sucked at writing about music.

— Brad Haywood (@BradleyRHaywood) November 4, 2022

at least he acknowledges it and is doing good work now

Don't worry, all this and more will be answered this summer in the fascinating journey into the mind of... https://www.mcdbooks.com/news/ryan-schreiber

jeez. ha, that webpage.. . . links to his weekly spotify playlist.

*wow* a playlist with Beach House and Mac DeMarco. *amazing*

In my day Pitchforkers would come here to explain their errors

It wasn't so much advanced planning as one early, internal joke that turned out to be the thing we ended up going with. We are also constantly working to correct and curb our CMS errors but a computer error and a human error are different things.

Whether a reader, or loads of them, finds it lazy or gutless is another matter, of course.

― scottpl, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 10:24 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

re: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/

I personally thought that was great though, ha ha

"The ghost of late-’00s indie rock will haunt the dentist’s office." 😂

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-sheeran-subtract/

it really has been a hot minute since a good old fashioned p4k scandal.

pitchfork's art director (I found her credited her as such in a Sherburne tweet #toomuchtimeonilx) is not only a plagiarist...

https://i.imgur.com/nNounzM.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Fc32S67.png

https://i.imgur.com/7PaREhT.jpg


...she has never looked at a guitar or heard the phrase "six-string", and is too lazy to even trace properly.

https://i.imgur.com/83bpMPk.jpg

uh thanks imgur

https://i.ibb.co/BwdHGDZ/pf01.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/jgd00cL/pf02.png

https://i.ibb.co/SnfFfmy/pf03.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/LhJKCDR/pf04.jpg

Looks like they took the image down, but no acknowledgement in story

I had noticed that too... I assume she figured she had "changed it just enough" or something, but it was pretty clear what the reference was.

thanks again imgur >:(

sic, they all loaded for me (both times)

thanks again imgur >:(

― least said, sergio mendes (sic), Saturday, May 13, 2023 9:15 AM

THE BETRAYAL IS REAL AND I FEEL YOUR PAIN

(I reupped them all to another host when the imgurs wouldn't work for me at first - then they showed up this morning)

what is The Pitch?

i seem to recall it started out as, like, Pitchfork's blog (?) for thinkpieces (maybe) and/or stuff that didn't quite fit elsewhere? Or something like that?

Now it seems to be half rap songs and half feature-y type things. But the site also has a Features section. So what's the difference between the Features section and the non-rap-song pieces in The Pitch?

i think if any distinction exists these days it's that the feature-y pieces tend to be a bit shorter than those in the features? but it's a weird thing now yeah

The RIYL blurbs in "best new music of 2023 so far" are super cringe. Wouldn't be surprised if they were AI-generated.

The Chicago post-punk quartet’s jittery second album rails against gentrification, algorithmic overload, and the bankruptcy of life under an extractive system

If the goal here is to describe music in a way that makes it sound as uninviting, tedious and missable as possible, mission accomplished

^I had the same thought. (To balance that out – this is terrific music writing.)

The RIYL blurbs in "best new music of 2023 so far" are super cringe.

otm anytime i read a recommendation that makes me feel second hand embarrassment, i'm officially uninterested. perhaps aggressively so.

Assuming it's just a temporary error or something, but I don't even see the "Reviews" section popping up on their home page today, tried in a few different browsers.

yeah, something very wonky going on. When I click on the Reviews section they come up all out of chronological order, with reviews from Oct. 2022 in between June 2023 and May 2023.

Reviews are now passé

the dream is happening

Everything is 10.0

yeah something is clearly happening on the backend

https://i.imgur.com/uaX0rQx.png

Yeah, the Twitter account is tweeting links to new album reviews that work, so something all futzed up. Sorry to crush your dreams Neando.

This new Longform piece ("The Secret Gay History of Indie Rock") begins:

“Is being a rock star the province of white, heterosexual males?” an interviewer asked Michael Stipe in 1992, two years before the R.E.M. frontman came out. Stipe answered evasively, nonsensically, queerly: “Look… I yam what I yam.” It’s a noncommittal attitude recognizable to anyone who minored in queer theory: the ambiguity, the absurdity, the refusal to represent oneself in policeable terms.

First, I don't think you need to have "minored in queer theory" to get where Stipe was coming from. Second, the entire piece is clearly written by someone, and for people, with a specific academic background. It's basically a few (small) steps away from a college paper. I don't know why you would write for a general readership that way.

Apart from one reference to an academic paper, it doesn't seem particularly academic to me.

Or to me.

Is it some kind of joke that everyone's minoring in queer theory now?

Might've if I coulda. Had to settle for philosophy.

it reads like a listicle disguised as an essay...

That article isn’t academic at all, and it’s also utter shit— low research listicle crap. If the umbrella of “indie” is going to be as broad as the author would like it to be, then there are many histories missing— Human Sexual Response, Kitchens of Distinction, Team Dresch and everything that was on OutpunK, the Dicks, groups like German Shepherds and Pink Section, etc etc etc. It’s as if the author came up with the premise with some more recent groups in mind and then didn’t bother to research anything other than most mainstream and obvious examples from pre-1995. Sophomoric.

(Journalists at the time generally failed to notice the inherent gayness of Morrissey’s Oscar Wilde idolatry, instead interpreting it as heterosexual sensitivity.)

shame Morrissey's sexuality wasn't more speculated on at the time

Why aren’t kitchens in distinction huge, feel like so many atmospheric “post punk” bands ride hard on their kind of style, idk miw

indie rock was a genre that took care to conceal its musical lineage, obscuring its Black, queer blues and rock’n’roll antecedents

first of all, huh? A lot of indie rock was some kind of blues homage. And second, was queer blues more of an antecedent than straight blues?

In the foremost sociological study of indie rock, professor David Hermondhalgh traced indie rock’s etymology back to the mid 1980s, arguing that the genre was defined by its institutional independence from major labels

some cracking academic discoveries here

brimstead at 3:52 5 Jul 23

Why aren’t kitchens in distinction huge, feel like so many atmospheric “post punk” bands ride hard on their kind of style, idk miw



I think the band name doesn't do em any favors

Bands of Indistinction

professor David Hermondhalgh traced indie rock’s etymology back to the mid 1980s, arguing that the genre was defined by its institutional independence from major labels

I remember this kid Zach from tenth grade making the same argument, he was pretty intense about it.

I was tripped up by the paragraph on suburbia ("While hip-hop and dance scenes developed in the States’ major cities, you’d more often find indie rock tucked into the country’s cul-de-sacs; in a place of uniformity and so-called safety"). Does this mean, like, Hoboken?

Incidentally, Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs is a paean to post-war suburbia that sounds to me like one of the most heterosexual albums ever released.

More heterosexual than Walking With a Panther?

So many words and so little said