pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

The Equals, Baby Come Back LP Sunday Review needed

and in the 90s Pato Banton covered Baby Come Back and took to no. 1 (which CAYA never managed) and brought it full circle (!!)

Dunno if anyone else listens to the Pitchfork podcast, but I thought you sickos would be interested to know Pitchfork's process for its year-end lists, as articulated on a recent episode featuring editor-in-chief Puja Patel and editors Ryan Dombal and Jeremy Larson:

PUJA PATEL: So, we basically start this late September, early October. And honestly, bless everyone at Pitchfork -- shout out our fellows, shout out our associate editor, shout out our executive assistant -- because they spend so much time literally pulling from the reviews archive and from Forktracks, which is our internal kind of tracks uploads and message board, everything of note that has happened, year to date, which ends up being thousands of albums and songs collectively.

Then we send out what we call the long-list ballot to the entire staff and I would say, 40 or 50 contributors. They do a round of voting. Internally, meanwhile, on the inside of Pitchfork, we have litstening rooms by genre, we have listening rooms of underrated staff faves, lots of listneing, lots of talking. Then a select group of people, I would say the people in this room right now, in conversation with other editors and staffers, cut that down by two-thirds. That's when the knives come out, that's when we really take the shears to the hedge.

Then the short-list ballot goes out, to the same group of people. More listening, more internal staff conversations. That's when the whole thing gets fun, not to say that this whole thing isn't fun. But this is where we start, like, needling at the music, which is the thing that we all came here to do. ... Second ballots go out, they come back in, and then it's a couple of editors in the weeds, looking at spreadsheets, talking to staff, and doing what we call a "this or that" Slack battle.

RYAN DOMBAL: Yeah, so it's basically if there's an artist who has a bunch of songs that everyone likes, or if their album is so good that there's three or four songs that people all voted for, we will go into our listening rooms, which is either listening IRL or over Zoom and talking back and forth on Slack, and people will fight for their favorite song on the SZA album, let's say.

JEREMY LARSON: And another point that we should note is that, like the Grammys, we have a window of eligibility, so it's not January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023. So the eligibility for this list starts, what, December 9, 2022?

PUJA PATEL: I would say once our lists are locked and loaded, it's very rare that they change. So let's say like the 1st of December.

(I think Larson said December 9 because that's when the SZA album came out last year. Their 2022 list was published on Dec. 6 and omitted it, so I assume it will show up this year.)

And honestly, bless everyone at Pitchfork

https://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/default/poster/5.375/8.000/break/images/artworkimages/medium/1/tiny-tim-from-a-christmas-carol-garland-johnson.jpg

another year, another reader's poll where i complain about their calculation of bpms!

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/2023-readers-poll-results/

that king krule song is not 200 bpm! same thing with that sufjan song, only way you get a bpm so high is if you count the eighth notes as quarter notes. the legitimately high bpm songs like the jpeg/danny song and kendrick/keem song should stand out among the midtempo indie, but nooo.

i'm sure they've just run everything through an automated tool that often gets the tempos wrong and don't bother to check the results

oh i'm sure, but still. i remember when they did a poll of 90s songs and listed heart-shaped box's bpm as 201 or something

definitely embarrassing that they're still doing it list after list

heart shaped box gabber mix

lol @ the bpm thing, but ultimately it doesn't surprise me that the people at this publication are musically illiterate

becoming musically literate is a gateway drug to Yngwie Malmsteen fandom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxY5tivTr-I

becoming musically literate is a gateway drug to Yngwie Malmsteen fandom

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Friday, December 8, 2023 12:19 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pitchfork adding a dedicated column to super fast shredder guitar mag metal guys would be awesome

"paul gilbert revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces"

god, i hate to ask, but wtf is that Nirvana cover. is that indicative of some larger trend or is Nightcore huge and i don't know it or ... ?

is it even a cover or did they just take the track and speed it up in a DAW? i don't notice anything new?

when you accidentally type "pitchforj.com" into your browser

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

even that sped-up version doesn't touch 203 bpm!

it's not a cover, it's just sped up yeah. nightcore is this weird youtube phenomenon that dates back over a decade where teens post sped up songs with anime pics (usually) and credit them to 'nightcore'. nightcore was originally some norwegian dj duo who made sped up remixes of trance tracks (i think actually doing some remixing), but then kids decided to imitate them by just speeding up anything while calling the result nightcore. there are nightcore videos with hundreds of millions of views

should be called anti-Screw

In 1971, at 26, Rod Stewart thought he was an old man.

haha tell me about it ;_;

This way this sentence is written made me laugh for some reason:

For her performance of “All-American Bitch,” Rodrigo transformed the stage into a tea party and destroyed it, hopping on the table and stomping all over all the cakes.

outrageous! what will the duchess say.

sry xpost tangent-
i remember hearing about nightcore for the first time about a decade ago when i encountered a youtube of "this charming man" basically being played on 45rpm.

it reminded me of how i had this cassette player in my childhood (late 80s/early 90s) with a broken pause button. if you pressed it, instead of pausing, it sped up the tape. i loved it. that was my preferred way of listening to janet jackson rhythm nation, actually. it would be a shot straight into a wormhole of nostalgia if any "(sped up)" janet jackson versions hit streaming.

(idiot time: did 8 year old austin accidentally invent nightcore????)

(also the inverse: the syr records series is mostly pressed for 45rpm playback, but all of them sound way better at 33⅓)

(also one more thing: there's been an influx of "slowed and reverb" versions hitting streaming over the past couple years. i'm a fan.)

It's always been a bit of a thing on the Balearic scene, playing records at the wrong speed: Jolene, Payola$, Deniece Williams, TC 1992 etc

Everyone who had the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas record inevitably turned them into demons from hell at 33 1/3.

i mean...

that’s just dave’s normal voice

and it's just lovely, isn't it?

https://x.com/PhilipSherburne/status/1734276629357093166?s=20

Hmmm.

News: In a note to staff, Condé Nast announces that Pitchfork is being moved under GQ. pic.twitter.com/8NzvtYKFLB

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) January 17, 2024

GQ's been doing some good work lately. "The Best Athletic Fit Jeans for Your Big, Beautiful Thighs" is a banger.

Lovely.

Per the link, Puja Patel is out as editor. In a Bluesky response to my posts over there just now, Marc Hogan is saying more layoff meetings are happening and he figures it'll hit him in half an hour.

Whoa

I can't underplay how grim this is.

Agreed.

Nothing will ever again exist as a synecdoche for Everything Wrong With Music and/or Music Journalism in the way Pitchfork did. What will we all bitch about now?

have the most obnoxious people on Twitter come out of the woodwork yet to say this is because of poptimism

this is disgusting, short-sighted, stupid decision

have the most obnoxious people on Twitter come out of the woodwork yet to say this is because of poptimism

― Murgatroid,

yes?

I've referred to my job at pitchfork as being on a ferris wheel at closing time, just waiting for them to yank me down. after nearly 8 yrs, mass layoffs got me. glad we could spend that time trying to make it a less dude-ish place just for GQ to end up at the helm

— Jill Mapes (@jillian_mapes) January 17, 2024

Nothing will ever again exist as a synecdoche for Everything Wrong With Music and/or Music Journalism in the way Pitchfork did. What will we all bitch about now?

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Wednesday, January 17, 2024 1:35 PM (fourteen minutes ago)

My pitch: MTV restarts Total Request Live as some sort of Twitch/Tiktok thing. The rotating cast of hosts is pulled from the most popular music review youtubers

barf, imagine accidentally pulling up F@ntano on your big screen

I started interning at Pitchfork in January 2010, and after a short gap, was hired part-time in March 2012. This job has been a big part of my life ever since. Today I was laid off.

— evan minsker (@evanminsker) January 17, 2024

Mapes posted that Ryan Dombal -- who's worked there for 15 years -- is also out.

They were the features editors when I still wrote there.

left Game Informer about 9 years ago now, after 16 years, I always wanted to be an entertainment journalist and getting to write about video games was a blast for most of it but at the end of the day I just didn't see the future...I hate to be discouraging to a kid that still asks me about it but the job of entertainment journalist basically doesn't exist anymore than a job of making wheels for a covered wagon does, outside of people with day jobs who do it as a hobby (much like how music itself is!)

but it's just over and you can't pretend otherwise anymore :(

really heartbreaking

I have been writing for Pitchfork regularly since 2004. I joined full-time in 2016. I know music journalism isn't exactly brain surgery, but I have been privileged to do a bunch of work I'm really proud of, with amazing colleagues. Like too many of them, I was laid off today.

— Marc Hogan (@MarcHogan) January 17, 2024