pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

If You Don't Read This Website, We'll Kill This Dog

Interesting that the masthead hasn’t been updated.

"Validation of music is stupid and is a complete waste of time."

so what you're trying to say is that Pavement rule, right?

"Vanessa Williams - "Save the Best For Last."

would so vote for this to be best of 90s. best song ever. "this kiss" could be number two. "baby baby" and "every heartbeat" for #3 and #4. "vision of love" or "hold on" for #5. i'd be good with those. and then a bunch of my bloody valentine, pavement, and east coast rap with a special shout-out to Lord Finesse's "Underground Operations".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAqfftTSU1k

no one needs a music review site to do a “best of” list. they just need to read scott’s posts

"Save the Best for Last" is one of my all-time jams.

"Every Heartbeat" is only, like, the greatest song ever.

I feel like pop from the early 90s, particularly "Save the Best for Last", is my last lingering connection with my pre-teen self

(i Jan that song all the time, also loved "This Used to Be My Playground" as a kid)

Today's retrospective Jeff Mills review by Gabriel Szatan is excellent and provides a great argument in defense of music criticism in 2024

Fantastic piece

"Every Heartbeat" is only, like, the greatest song ever.

sometimes we disagree and other times we are a single voice existing in two bodies

The synth bass is a poem.

I dont think the pavement, mariah, or nirvana songs are particularly interesting #1s

ppl should adjust their #1s based on changing critical values and none of those feel 'right' for 2024

the problem is debating those votes on their own terms, as if they indicate some kind of new or interesting value system instead of calcified ones of past arguments remembered

to this day I've still never heard all of Crooked Rain all the way through, in the Pavement-Is-King years I was into 2nd golden age of rap & weirder indie & metal, but when I listen to Gold Soundz now it really feels very text-productive -- I mean that's Pavement's deal, right, all the impulses of the moment they inhabit, of the moment in the pocket they personify, are present in their work -- if you only hear one of the bands from this general moment, it's them you should hear, you can get the whole story from what they do, and that's nowhere truer than on "Gold Soundz" imo, a song I'm 100% certain I didn't hear until sometime this century. I've become a big fan of Malkmus become I'm bookish and his whole approach to making records is bookish as fuck but adjusting Gold Soundz for 2024 would feel like a deeply ahistorical move -- history and its reading shifts, but events of history are still events, and Gold Soundz, within a broad moment, is one worth establishing as a touchstone

also it's just a sick jam

although i agree w/ Whiney that *if* some sort of objective "songs of the '90s" list was possible, anything other than Smells Like Teen Spirit is kind of silly. obviously there are a handful of others that have an argument, but it sure ain't "Gold Soundz" which is one of my favorite songs by my favorite band ever!

although i agree w/ Whiney that *if* some sort of objective "songs of the '90s" list was possible, anything other than Smells Like Teen Spirit is kind of silly.

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

Boyz II Men and TLC alone should be in the conversation, let alone Mariah, Michael Jackson, and Janet Jackson

I think Pavement and "Gold Soundz" are fine, but in the fall of '96, during their imperial phase - or as close as they would have to one - there was always something about their catalogue that just didn't hit me in the way it seemed to hit so many of my friends. I used to ask "What am I missing here? Maybe I'm the one whose wrong, and I just need to give them a few more listens." But when I wasn't playing Yes or Rush (old prog habits die hard), I found myself far more interested in this R&B station called "The Beat" (1530 AM!) because of the ridic wave of awesome that regularly appeared (I remember one God-Tier sequence featuring Aaliyah's "One in a Million"; Rome's "I Belong To You"; Toni Braxton's "You're Making Me High"; and 112's "Cupid"). How the hell are Stephen, Spiral Stairs, and Bob supposed to compete with that!?

They can't.

I mean that's a sort of a flattening of the field -- how can Aaliyah or Braxton compete with None So Vile or Brave Murder Day, absolute titans of '96? well, there really isn't any competition going on, they're making different kinds of music, it's a bit silly to say "the one that's more popular is better" or to cower behind "relevance." Genre fiction is good and literary fiction is good and popular fiction is good and experimental fiction is good, but pitting them against one another is adolescent shit

would enjoy Toni Braxton's rendition of "Slit Yer Guts" tbh

cosign

or Aaliyah's take on "Gold Soundz" for that matter

I just played “Gold Sounds” for my partner, who knew of Pavement but had never heard them, and he looked at with a level of incredulous disgust I would normally associate with someone who has had a stranger fart directly in their soup in a mid-tier restaurant

so the line "we need secrets" contains more mysteries than we knew in 1994

"minestrone tastes a little off today"

soup farts ahead of their time for '96 grindcore tbrr

I prefer only Michelin star farts in my soup. Fuck the mid-tier.

This is why I love this entire convo about the Top Spng of the '90s - in the '80s, any #1 contender on the alternative side would be far-too obscure, and for the 2000s, music got too splintered after "Hey Ya" (no more monoculture/mono-counterculture dichotomy). This leaves the '90s as the one recent decade where we can actually argue whether a alt-goes-mainstream song like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Alive"; a big-but-still-indie song like "Paranoid Android" or "Windowlicker"; a hip-hop Pangaea like "Juicy" or "Supa Dupa Fly"; or the "how in the fuck does something this weird and askew become mainstream, guess I'm just gonna be thankful we live in that world" R&B like "One in a Million", "Tyrone", or "Brown Sugar" should be #1. And yes, the metal! While my knowledge is very tertiary - the Big 4 and Pantera; prog like Rush/Queensryche; and wherever the fuck you place Tool - I'm not well-versed enough to know what would qualify for a 'best of' list ("I'm Broken" or "Cut To The Chase" maybe).

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

― the new drip king (DJP), Sunday, February 4, 2024 7:44 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it should be said that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had a marked effect on black music that's still being felt today

And an openly acknowledged influence *from* black music per Grohl admitting to borrowing the opening fill from the Gap Band

It should be, like, a tie for first between the two songs titled “Creep” (…with The Fall’s “C.R.E.E.P.” as #1 song of the ‘80s). Why not?

It might be a topic for another thread, but it's pretty much the right answer even if it's not iNtErEsTiNg for 2024 or whatever metric we use to square up a song's actual impact with its ability to scale a list economically for a website. It's not even my favorite Nirvana song, but come on now. Even rockism vs poptimism doesn't have a leg to stand on considering it's literally a radio pop smash that hit the Top 10.

whatever metric we use to square up a song's actual impact with its ability to scale a list economically for a website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbqeZNeFMTY

you bite bite bite
all day long

sleeve so otm

"How Condé Nast bought and destroyed America’s iconic music publication"

https://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchfork

including the detail in the lede that CN bought P4k in 2015 only after David Remnick ("a music fan and Pitchfork reader") signed off

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

you're absolutely right, and that's why i said there'd be some songs with an argument. but i shouldn't have said "anything else would be kind of silly" - my bad

Internally, I spoke to staff across GQ and Pitchfork who seemed depressed and embarrassed. Pitchfork has been further hollowed out: the publication now currently has around a dozen edit staffers left, including several employees who work across multiple titles. GQ editors and staff, I’m told, have been embarrassed and bashful towards their new colleagues. In a meeting with staff after the decision, GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch said that he was not the editor of Pitchfork, but couldn’t offer specifics about who would be running the site long-term.

so even gq don't really know what they're supposed to do with p4k yet lol

lol at all the stories of cn execs having no understanding of p4k, lol at p4k already moving towards a subscription model (a sensible move) which this has now disrupted

I still don’t think anyone has won me over that a pavement song, that Mariah song, or smells like teen spirit are interesting or fresh choices for the number one song of the 90s

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be on the list, but if the purpose of this is to create a new conversation they just all seem like kind of predictable arguments from different heydays / value sets of shit ppl have been arguing about forever …

You can argue I’m overvaluing “saying something new” but I’m ok with that. I would like to overvalue that, at this point in time

A fresh choice for the number one song of the 90s would be a song from the 00s

the greatest song of the 90s is the Chili Peps "Under the Birdge"

interesting or fresh choices

"fake bullshit for clicks"

I was at a friend's birthday party where the theme was ostensibly "the 00s" and the youtube video playlist was all music videos and commercials for the era except for the weird outliers where whoever added things to the playlist had some misconceptions about what happened in the 00s. Fair enough, decades on the calendar don't work that well as cultural bookends, but the one that threw me was Warren G's Regulate.

I would lose my mind