pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

the idea of Swift being considered an “indie/alternative” artist is more a testament to the uselessness of genre in the current era.

It’s funny that they likely tagged her that way because they started covering her circa Reputation, so even their retroactive reviews of albums like her ST carry that tag.

(And yeah, I don’t understand why a genre tag has to be tied to an artist, rather assigned to each review individually)

I think it was because Apple Music categorized Folklore that way? It's just a weird way to think about how genre works, as though she was doing something so radically opposed to what she'd done before that it would require special expertise to analyze, rather than just using a slightly different set of sonic signifiers.

It’s funny that they likely tagged her that way because they started covering her circa Reputation, so even their retroactive reviews of albums like her ST carry that tag.

― Sony's Sports Walkman Universe (morrisp), Monday, February 19, 2024 9:41 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If you're talking about Pitchfork, it tags Swift "Pop/R&B." FWIW, I think these are the only genre tags that exist:

-Electronic
-Experimental
-Folk/Country
-Global
-Jazz
-Metal
-Pop/R&B
-Rap
-Rock

But some artists get multiple tags. For instance, Carrie Underwood is both Folk/Country and Pop/R&B. So is Anais Mitchell.

So I guess it would make sense to use that double label for both Swift and Beyonce, too.

Right, my point was that if they started covering her at the beginning, she likely would’ve been tagged folk/country (or whatever)… but they didn’t, so even her country albums aren’t tagged that way

It’s weird they didn’t give at least her the double tag that Carrie Underwood has, though…

"Global" = just insane that this is tolerated

A few weeks ago Pitchfork was dead. Now we're nitpicking genre labels. Quite a comeback.

pitchfork — still dumb

I've stopped looking at the site regularly, but this genre-tag discussion interested me (fwiw)

When I worked at a music website a million years ago, we had a problem where an artist could only be tagged with a single name in the back-end database; so when we ran a review of a Dion box set, the artist name appeared as "Dion and the Belmonts" – which ticked off B1lly Altm4n (for good reason). I remember delving into the limitation on the tech side. I don't recall any issues with tagging individual reviews by genre, tho

The guy who can fix it probably got fired

iirc, the p4k CMS only allows you to assign genres per artist not album, which was explained the last time there was a dustup over this

Reminds me of when Christgau had Fantano dead to rights with the genre tag "dark prog" and all his stans went ballistic because those words don't line up perfectly with RYM definitions or whatever

I've always wonder what led to Brand Nubian getting Metal and Rap genre tags

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1123-fire-in-the-hole/

Same with Juggaknots

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4310-rerelease-clear-blue-skies/

and Critical Beatdown lmao

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8383-critical-beatdown/

Taylor Swift fans harassed the New York Times over Jon Caramanica's review of Folklore because he is, according to his bio, the paper's pop music critic and was therefore biased against an "indie/alternative" album.

― jaymc, Monday, February 19, 2024 6:59 PM (yesterday)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8fK-z5eyeA

every editorial CMS is janky and has a 1,000 dumb little decisions that were made when it was rolled out that end up having unintended consequences that no one anticipated at the beginning

yeah that was definitely true at XLR8R way back when— lots of weird quirks on the back end that seemed easily fixable but weren’t

I recently offered my services to improve/optimize an editorial CMS with my new ReactJS skills and was basically told the whole thing is outsourced to a tech company

yeah and there's no appetite to fix it because it's really only making it more annoying to do work for the people who actually have to do it, but it's not preventing the work from being done, so the powers that be aren't going to say okay let's create a project to do this because some beyonce fans are upset about something for two weeks

the whole shebang:

because it is LITERALLY NOT SOMETHING I HAVE CONTROL OVER as i have said many times. the coding of the website assigns genres to ARTISTS, not to releases. if they changed it to country it would change every beyonce relese to country. please put this energy toward a real problem https://t.co/AHNCljpkzf

— nadine type beat (@FakeNadine) February 19, 2024

Never, Nadine will not know peace until my last breath

— Beyhive Central (@Beyhive_Central) February 19, 2024

cool, normal fans.

Ugh

She should ... ignore it/them?

In general, probably yes, but maybe stans should also stop being so fucking weird.

she got harassed by a lot of them when the review was first published, then when it got featured again a week later, they came back. this was just the last in a line of people

Agree 100%! (xpost) But she has zero control over that.

Also, that fan account has 225 followers. Do not give it any air.

Yeah I do not know why someone with a job/role like that would be (public) on Twitter, let alone engaging with such an acct...

Aren't most music journalists on Twitter?

By "job/role" do you mean Pop Music Writer? Seems like social media is almost required for that.

yeah, I'm not following you, morrisp; but, no, I wouldn't engage with a stan account.

If you say so... I suppose there must be more upside than downside (tho I've never followed music journalists there). I mean Twitter is a very bad place, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

I don't think I could do my job if I had randos online yelling at me about it, so kudos to those who can (and/or feel they must)

I was once doxxed by an artist's stans once but otherwise it's been okay. Depends how you set up your account.

that was the night Soto sent the tanks

You know what, I take it back – I do follow St3phen Th0mas 3rlewine on Threads; I ran into his acct. and he posts links to stuff he writes (which sometimes I check out, if not behind a paywall). So I see the value there (with the caveat that Threads ain't Twitter, which cuts both ways; maybe he's there too)

that was the night Soto sent the tanks

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal),

the tankies shut those stans down!

I don't think you could get hired at many places as as staff writer without a Twitter account.

(maybe now? not sure but certainly not at its peak. Posting links was part of the job.)

At the college newspaper we advise our reporters are required to create some sort of work/public social media account; otherwise the reluctance to promote their work gets the better of them.

From what I’ve heard, non-male music writers tend to get hassled more intensely on social media over their reviews.

xp I'm thankful that my college newspaper days were juuuust before that material starting being permanently archived online (not that there's likely anything too incriminating, but y'know... I was totally off the mark on what "post-rock" was, stuff like that)

I wonder if that European "right to be forgotten" law extends to cringy stuff written in one's past

But sorry, I'm getting off-topic. Yeah, being a non-male writer (or any kind of public figure, really) with a public social account must be particularly rough

It's just really bad database design to tie artists to genres 1:1. I could see maybe not wanting to go down the rathole of tracking musicians separately from their bands or instruments or whatever, but it should've been obvious that an artist might record in more than one genre throughout their career and it would've been simple to set it up that way if they had thought about it.

some of y'all sound like you've never worked with these kinds of softwares/platforms - not just in music website-ing but in any corporate environment ... they are *all* designed by someone who is not really thinking about the end use/product and therefore causes little problems that end up driving the back-end users (especially) and consumers crazy.

this is what happens when you try to automate the organization of humans and human activities. it's never quite as clean as the coders would like it to be.

like i don't blame P4k for this situation, really, because (a) they are probably annoyed by it too but can't fix it, and also (b) who cares! it's a little category thingy on a website. it doesn't matter.

it doesn't matter.

truth bomb, lock thread.

We need to get to 25,000