pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

“if”

I would be very keen for music writing to finally move beyond the consumer guide model

people would have much more interesting and idiosyncratic tastes if they didn't rely on critics to frame everything for them

I would be very keen for music writing to finally move beyond the consumer guide model

people would have much more interesting and idiosyncratic tastes if they didn't rely on critics to frame everything for them

I would be very keen for music writing to finally move beyond the consumer guide model

people would have much more interesting and idiosyncratic tastes if they didn't rely on critics to frame everything for them

so nice I posted it etc

brimstead otm

"get rid of the scores" is basically saying everyone should have to do all the work... pfork reviews are like 800 words long, and there are 20 a week. how do i know which ones to bother reading?

Putting aside that even negative reviews can be worth reading(!), ideally the subhed will give you the flavor of the piece. At S0nicn3t, we published dozens of reviews per week, and didn't use ratings (even Rolling Stone did away with ratings for years!).

NB, I don't care whether Pitchfork does away with ratings or not (and suspect they won't).

I only listen to albums with middling review scores

aka The Dirty Work Dictum.

y'know, this brings up an interesting sidebar:
every album that pfork has given a 0 to, i've checked out. however, there are still some 10s that i've never heard.

make of that what you will.

(probably more of a reflection on my idiocy than anything else)

people would have much more interesting and idiosyncratic tastes if they didn't rely on critics to frame everything for them

― Left, Sunday, 5 November 2023 7:45 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

100% opposite of this is true fwiw. music criticism has all but vanished from the world and people’s music tastes are less idiosyncratic than ever. the world is awash in middlebrow lcd gruel. people liked to complain about them but critics, tastemakers, hipsters etc were good. also the pitchfork scores are fun and quite informative if you know how to read them imho

music got way better in the 10s, imo

wasn’t a statement about the quality of “music”

hipsters were not good

kids listen to all kinds of things that aren't supposed to go together according to old school hipster ideology and that's really cool

maybe you just know the wrong people

Whew, glad that's settled

I don't think "maybe you don't hang around enough kids" is as effective a zing as you think it is

do you really want to go back to the days when all the critics agreed that animal collective was the most important band of 2009 because that was fucking painful

whiney classy as always

I don't know that peoples music tastes are less idiosyncratic at all. Average listeners are being exposed to decades and decades of obscurities that have reached them via smart music supervision and algorithmic buoyancy.

Yeah I agree – from what I see IRL (I’m not observing kids but more grownups, fwiw) people’s tastes are pretty darn diverse… (notwithstanding the Taylor hegemony).

Yeah, tastes are all over the place these days but the music still sucks, so win some, lose some

not talking about people i know but congrats on being friends with the cool young kids lol

On the flipside, I’m also not sure how many people’s taste were ever really influenced by music critics, in the grand scheme of things?

Sounds like someone does not remember Northern State

The average critic's review only generates a few thousand hits, but everyone who clicked on the link joined ILM.

I voted for Gore

music criticism was already like 90% of the way dead in 2009. now it’s like 99.99%

100% opposite of this is true fwiw. music criticism has all but vanished from the world and people’s music tastes are less idiosyncratic than ever. the world is awash in middlebrow lcd gruel. people liked to complain about them but critics, tastemakers, hipsters etc were good. also the pitchfork scores are fun and quite informative if you know how to read them imho

― flopson, Sunday, November 5, 2023 5:35 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

100% otm

Average listeners are being exposed to decades and decades of obscurities that have reached them via smart music supervision and algorithmic buoyancy.

I think this is true, but I also think this reliance on prestige tv music supervision and algorithmic buoyancy can engender an incredibly superficial relationship with music. Then again, you did say average listeners.

like if you transpose this to film, would anyone argue “people should just scroll netflix and watch whatever idiosyncratic garbage they find there” and that critics like pauline kael roger ebert—or just the random critic in any local news paper before that industry died—would occasionally have some influence in getting random ppl to go see something new and good they wouldn’t otherwise. seems obviously wrong, because it is. true for music too

the music in prestige tv (the curation of which is complete shit) is a good example of a negative consequence of the degradation of music criticism in society. the fact that that feeds into peoples music tastes is a feedback loop into yet more crap. critics were better gatekeepers

Ppl seem really into “film” these days though! To a degree that surprises me

kids must be lost at sea these days without robert christgau to tell them who's fuckable and who's a prude

I’ve also found some really good and (genuinely “artistic”) movies on streaming services that I never would’ve heard about otherwise, and I have to imagine the same thing is happening with music for some folks…

Male kids never read reviews -- too busy in school figuring out who's fuckable.

That doesn’t take so long

merriweather post pavilion was a bit overrated, but “my girls” is an incredible song. 2009 was a weird time in music, but even the modal critic wasn’t entirely wrong

“combining music that isn’t supposed to go together” is the essence of og hipster ideology

some of the post punk/whatever u wanna call it music that young people make now is quite good, and those bands would be more popular and would be able to make more money if a media ecosystem with prominent music critics existed. much harder for bands who generate buzz today to get off the ground

My generation was toughened up by having to read two-star ratings and single-line toss-off reviews of great records in the Rolling Stone Album Guide. All the 9.1 retrospective reviews in the world will never allow us to forget.

it’s super weird because I used to go to somewhat fringe music festivals with a lot of acts I hadn’t heard of that I’d listen to ahead of time or get into after attending. I didn’t make it out to much of anything this year but the festivals I missed had a lot of acts I do know, from other artists and friends mentioning them on instagram, bandcamp articles, curated (and sometimes algorithmic) playlists on streaming

then I ride in my friend’s car and she’s pleased by a spotify playlist it made for her that’s playing mid-00s fare

weird!

lol fwiw I missed a couple posts while writing and my friend’s spotify auto-generated playlist included “my girls”

the idea that people left to their own devices to trawl some streaming archive or other platform will watch or listen to good stuff is a fantasy. everyone i know who watches lots of good films, listens to lots of good music, is also interesting in reading criticism, following some curators, djs, or other tastemaker/gatekeepers. partly because they’re intelligent and curious people, but also for the obvious reason that it’s an efficient and reliable way of aggregating lots of information

But that’s social media and that’s vibrant, right?

the idea that people left to their own devices to trawl some streaming archive or other platform will watch or listen to good stuff is a fantasy. everyone i know who watches lots of good films, listens to lots of good music, is also interesting in reading criticism, following some curators, djs, or other tastemaker/gatekeepers. partly because they’re intelligent and curious people, but also for the obvious reason that it’s an efficient and reliable way of aggregating lots of information

― flopson, Sunday, November 5, 2023 3:52 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is 100% true, ime. a friend of mine who is 18 years older than me and i were talking about this the other day— while we're both not young any more, we follow music actively and voraciously, whereas many of our peers seem to have stopped caring in their mid-to-late 20s. frankly, it's fine with me and i'm not complaining, but the argument that streaming allows people to actually engage with stuff they wouldn't normally hear otherwise is, simply put, wrong.

also re: 2009— it was a pretty good year for house and techno, if my memory serves. that was the year i began working for XLR8R.

Those ppl wouldn’t be reading music reviews either

even if you grant that older millenial pitchfork critics have been supplanted by a new vanguard of young cool kids who make garish mashups or w/e, that's ultimately just an inter-micro-generational narcissism of small difference among the top percentile of music nerds. criticism is arguably irrelevant among this group who are getting it "straight from the source" (going to shows, parties, socializing with other ppl into music). criticism had a broader impact among the bottom 99 percent. the notion of something being "critically acclaimed" as separate from commercially successful shaped what stuff people were willing to try out, which then went on to influence their tastes. nowadays people have a naive belief that taste just exists in some ambient space. they say things like "people can listen and figure out if they like it why do they need a critic"--imho the people who say this are deeply wrong, and dumb

yeah but critically acclaimed stuff is often garbage so where does that leave us

Commenting on a message board.

I do read criticism btw that's partly why I came here but critics have frequently lagged behind both mass culture and subcultures when it comes to recognising the most vital and interesting music of their times

also this implied listen to the gatekeepers or surrender to the market dichotomy is just as nonsensical as it was when people were using it during the r****** vs p******** wars

critically acclaimed music is pretty good. like i have my own tastes that diverge from critical consensus in some respects, but pretty often i'll re-listen to something i thought was overrated and find that it was actually good all along. so i err on the side of giving critics the benefit of the doubt on the downside. like for the longest time i thought i didn't like planxty, turns out i was wrong and i actually love planxty. that may not be a good example, i dont actually know how critically acclaimed planxty are (i'm not irish)

Alfred you're a good critic even though I disagree with half your opinions so I'm not saying all criticism is shit but I have no desire to return to the days of old p4k, wenner stone, nme ladrock etc