what does this pfm song review thingy even mean anyway?

If I'm writing something about music I want it to be effective.

"This made me buy/steal the record" = effective.
"This made me decide not to buy/steal a record" = effective.
"This made me play a record I'd already bought/stolen" = effective.
"This made me think about stuff" = effective.
"This amused me for thirty seconds" = effective in a limited way.

"I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about" = ineffective, usually.

(If I'm writing it for money I want it to be my editor's definition of effective.)

There are lots of ways to get to effective.

?

Wait no...

I also want constant bait and switching of "hipsters".

Instead it's being raised from the dead to use as the template for a whole new generation of snob publications. A shame because it often tends to overshadow good writing (in the same publications) along the way.

Only if it's released on Secretly Canadian.

*Pitchfork has plenty of good writers, and some of those responsible for the at times bad writing are plenty capable of not pulling this shit either.

Can't there be some balance between labyrinthine turns of phrase AND comprehensibilty? Isn't that what made Lester great?

In the five years, webzine reviews are just going to be comparisons to philosphical constructs and references to arcane Cam'ron lyrics.

haha wait so ilm doesn't frequently call bullshit on pfork's more impenetrable pieces? thats a bit disingenuous, no? maybe the reason more people aren't doing it in this particular instance is because the review is not actually that hard to understand?

Of course there can, but it's in a different place for everyone.

I just think it's bad writing period, and an obvious, rather old style utilised more for the benefit of the business interests and identity of the enterprise, than for it's usefulness (it's not) in exposing and celebrating great music.

Wait wait wait. Hold on. You can think it's bad writing, that's fine, although I disagree. But making the leap from the first part of this sentence to the second partis like jumping the Snake River Canyon. Are you saying that Pitchfork deliberately decided to get people to write badly in order to burnish its "image" of, what, bad writing? Being like Melody Maker? (College freshman: "You guys, check this site out, they're totally like this British magazine from when I was 3!") You think there's some lab where Pitchfork grows their writers, that they're not, like, real people?

Look, I know we all hate Pitchfork and stuff, but it's not an "enterprise," no matter how much you want to talk about its advertising income or its editorial oversight or anything. It's a bunch of writers and editors doing what they think is right and good, just like anything else, and treating it as an enterprise is just monumentally disrespectful to the individual writers involved. (If you want to talk about the "enterprise," at least say "Ryan.") It's been clearly demonstrated on this thread that many people think this is a good piece of writing, so if you want an explanation for how it got up on the Pitchfork website, why construct this whole devious scheme that apparently involves Pitchfork staking its identity on "obviously" bad writing (muh?) when it's much more likely that the editors liked the piece and decided to run it? Is that really that hard to believe?

Seeing as it's a project and a business, isn't it an enterprise?

you want the Voice to be more like Guitar World? why would music theory be relevant to a critique of music that largely rejects the "design" (to use Xgau's word) it allows?

I don't hate Pitchfork! I'm probably just getting old and bitter. I think it's poor writing just because it's SO exclusionary (to my admittedly subjective, English ear) and painfully 'fashion' conscious, whether this has any relation to keeping an identity going, and helping bring advertisers in better...

Yeah. I'm probably reaching. Guilty as charged. I'm just baffled trying to think of other reasons why they would persist with it, whatever efforts (admirable!) have been made to broaden the scope and ambition of the rest of the site... I still cringe hard at these kind of pieces. And it undercuts the cohesion, credibility even, of the whole website for me.

Not that I mind that much... I'll still read and enjoy the pieces/writers that aren't so painfully twisted. So, I probably am grinding some axe here (which is why I'd have been better staying out of it).

Ok some of my language choices there seem overly aggressive. Sorry! *Pitchfork has plenty of good writers add-on was my lame attempt at tempering my ire & frustrations with a compliment.

Calling it an "enterprise" rather than a website just seemed to fit better at the time, seeing as I was bringing the demographic angle into it. I think it's naive not to assume Pitchfork, Ryan, whatever aren't unaware of their position in the universe of influence these days. Quite a way from just a simple review page on the internet I'd have thought.

ROFL! Fair point. I guess as I don't pay anything to read Pitchfork I should get over myself here, whatever issues I have with it's odd desire to unnessecarily alienate massive sections of it's potential readership for what exact reason I'm pretty unsure of.

I actually assumed that she's English, and I mean that as a compliment.

If it wasn't totally totally obvious, I'm arguing with Mickey because his examples of unncessary opacity seem to be things that don't exactly take Ph.D.-level reading skills to work out, and I'm arguing him because he's throwing out this ridiculous across-the-board demand that criticism only ever do one thing and never ever aspire to being good writing along the way. His analogies are also kind of strange, in that if you followed them to the letter reviews would probably consist of a list of factoids about bands, ranging from town of origin to, say, the frequency range of each track. Also I like how he objects to the use of metaphors to express that a band's "sound is gigantic," which is ITSELF a metaphor, for god's sake -- reinforcing my sense that Mickey isn't actually against metaphor or stylish writing and is just asking for it to peg itself closer to his level. Plus let's just note that some of us don't read novels and such as some kind of arduous task for our self-improvement; some of us like lively prose because it's enjoyable, a pleasure in itself, and we kind of like the idea that a good writer might be able to bring some of that pleasure to WHATEVER he or she is writing about, whether it's speakers or desk-assembly instructions or whatever.

Okay. That said. Of course Dan's agreement with Mickey is right, too, because no shit, there are a lot of modern-day music writers who's "lively style" isn't actually that lively or stylish. Here's the thing: the problem is not that they're using literary tactics, it's that they're using them BADLY! So I cringe when Mickey's solution to this problem is for everyone to dumb down to some kind of ulilitarian Dick-and-Jane level (why not just list bmp and chord progression for the song in question?) as opposed to, duh, asking writers to WRITE BETTER. And I cringe, additionally, because I feel like I see way too many people doing some kind of knee-jerk dismissal of any music critic who asks them to invest the barest minimum of actual reading comprehension into the work -- like HOW DARE a critic ask me to actually read on anything higher than a fourth-grade level. If you don't want to invest that two seconds of energy to understand a sentence, that's fine, but don't leap to the assumption that the writer "makes no sense" until you've put that tiny bit of work into deciding whether it actually does "make sense" or not. (Otherwise this "doesn't make sense" complaint becomes like skimming two pages of Kant and then saying "that guy sucks, he Doesn't Make Sense.")

Okay and I would hope that anyone who's read any of my reviews will see where I'm coming from on this, because I make a definite effort to be clear about things (possibly even too much of an effort) -- I'm a big fan of clarity, just not in the terms that Mickey's preaching for it.

Which is kind of sad, if you ask me, but then I have whole other horses in this race w/r/t the survival of serious print culture.

So basically I think I'm not really in the Pitchfork demographic because the only writers they have I consistently like are the ones who I talk to here. Also pretty much everything you've written here is totally, absolutely OTM; if you're going to be "literary", study some literature first.

otm, but this happens across all the art forms. "i don't see a clear meaning in front of me, therefore it's meaningless." or "the artist is just trying to be difficult," regardless of what ELSE the artist is trying to be.

No

Anyway yeah, I'd like to think that if more people learned about writing criticism from the whole 20th-century history of critics and non-fiction writers and New Journalists and such -- and not primarily from the rock-crit establishment -- then the whole world of music writing would be less insular, less specialized or over-people's-heads ... both more sophisticated AND more "utilitarian."

and, yeah, technically, sure, you can learn lots of stuff from denby. just reading the new yorker, in general, you can learn a lot.