pitchfork

what is n+1?

depends on what n is

srs question xp

“n+1 is rigorous, curious and provocative. Intelligent thought is not dead in New York. It has simply moved to Brooklyn.”
—Malcolm Gladwell

amazing quote

a Brooklyn literary journal

"blake eyed peas"

― mutant slow drum (BradNelson), Tuesday, September 6, 2011 10:33 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm gonna assume that this was nymag's mistake

Benefactor

We'll meet to discuss new projects and recognize your gift in each issue. We'll also send you an invitation to our annual party for friends and contributors as well as advance notice of all our public events. And we'll give a one-year subscription to you or a friend.

$10,000.00 USD

great value

wonder if any of their dads actually went through w/ it

*suppresses urge to stridently defend n+1*

'whiney's twitter is kind of famous' = 'jeffrey jones porn collection is kind of famous'

lamp, i'd be interested to read yr defense of n+1

then buy this month's issue of ilx

cancelled my subscription after that j4gg3r guy stopped writing for them

I like n+1 and all, but I had a real hard time reading the Pitchfork piece. For instance, here's a footnote from Beck, this August:

Lynn Hirschberg, writing for the New York Times Magazine in May 2010, finally made some of these points in a profile called
“M.I.A’s Agitprop Pop,” but the best critique of M.I.A. wasn’t made by a critic. It appeared in the lyrics to a song by Vam-
pire Weekend, in which frontman Ezra Koenig sings about a young woman attending what it seems obvious to me is an
M.I.A. concert: “A vegetarian since the invasion / She’d never seen the word ‘Bombs’ / She’d never seen the word ‘Bombs’
/ blown up to ninety-six-point Futura / She’d never seen an A.K. / In a yellowy DayGlo display / A T-shirt so lovely it turned
all the history books gray.”

Here's something I wrote last June, in a column Beck mentions a couple times:

She'd never seen the word BOMBS blown up to 96-point Futura
She'd never seen an AK in a yellowy Day-Glo display
A t-shirt so lovely it turned all the history books gray

It's hard for me to hear those lines without immediately thinking of M.I.A. And the last line, the way I understand it, is exactly the right kicker: Turning some of these things into an aesthetic-- or a cloak to be worn-- can step on the reality of them in a way that's worrying, especially if it's not coherent.

I mean, along with general lack of time, the fact that I'm fond of n+1 is a lot of how I've resisted the urge to sit around picking this thing to bits. The piece is well-argued and maybe "provocative" in its way, but it's so full of received wisdom and conventional poses (not just about Pitchfork but about criticism, music, and maybe especially class) that it's just ... about a billion times less insightful than it presents itself as.

Obv the issue with doing anything like this is actually getting past received wisdom.

Based on the opening section posted it seems that the writer falls into much the same trap he ascribes to pitchfork critic, being focusing on perceived values and intentions and motivations rather than the output. Does it get more concrete later on?

yeah i have zero interest in reading beck's piece but i think w/o bias that n+1 has published some really strong criticism in the past and has a reasonably 'worthwhile' pov

but i mean an n+1 article abt p4k that starts off talking about an ilm thread whos subject was pazz and jop is sorta grotesquely worlds-colliding to really sit down and read

yeah i have zero interest in reading beck's piece but i think w/o bias that n+1 has published some really strong criticism in the past and has a reasonably 'worthwhile' pov

agree with this.

well i mean less worlds-colliding than a collision at a heavily trafficked intersection in a busy part of town but yknow

*waves at richard beck*

hey guys let's really clusterfuck this thread up and maybe get Beck in here and then this could form the intro for a future article about ilx conversations about n+1 articles about ilx conversations about provocative p4k comments about village voice polls!!!

They've published loads of great criticism. I'm glad they exist. Beck does really good and ambitious work with the piece! It's just that a lot of the ideas he's coming at, in such authoritative depth, are pretty much the same as the obvious, lazy, weird, or knee-jerk ideas you get from the superior dude in the comments box. They're operating at a higher intellect level, perhaps, but they make the same blind assumptions.

I literally can't fathom the obscene lack of self-awareness it would take for someone to turn in a piece of print writing with the word "ILX" in it.

whiney did you go the symposium they had about h1psters last year??

i guess this isn't gonna be like the time EW wrote about ILX

xpost,

i didn't know about it (omg so unhip), but i read the book and, inside, one of my friends was there (no suzy) and asked a question based on one of my familiar talking points. so I was there in spirit.

I was gonna question you on that, Whiney, but Kelefa's rockism piece had the URL wrong, so it never actually said "ILX"

One important thing I should mention about the full piece: it actually winds up making the case that Pitchfork is not so much a problem as just a reflection of a bigger problem with indie-rock. And this isn't something all that many people would take issue with, but it drifts into question-begging, vagueness, and stock skepticism at exactly the wrong moment...

someone put this shit on a pdf because there's no way on earth i would sleep at night if i gave n+1 a single nickel to read an review of pitchfork

hahahaha

I just got a pdf. I'm blindly skimming through the fascinating-looking Juggalo article

"She lit a menthol and took a swig from her son's Faygo"

"Sometimes I got pushed into the hydrangea bushes and called white boy."

"Our senior class song was “Tipsy” by J-Kwon."

"I ate a few chocolate Luna bars, soft and fecal-looking in the heat; immediately regretted it."

gonna just blindly past shit from this Pfork article in quotes

And on John Coltrane, recorded live at the Village
Vanguard: “’Trane takes it to heaven and back with some style, man. Some richness, daddy. It’s a sad thing his life was cut short by them jaws o’ death.”

Faced with an album this new and this great, DiCrescenzo paid it the highest compliment he could think of: he made a list of Radiohead's influences.

where promoters like Todd Patrick—bet- ter known as Todd P—had begun to orga- nize DIY concerts

whiney cmon

i can't imagine anyone who would care at all about this not knowing every single fact Beck presents

pretty good example of this kind of indie rock fan is me. In the two years since I graduated from college, I’ve had a pretty good time being “broke” in New York and drinking “cheap” beer with my friends. But sometimes I remind myself that the beer I’m drinking is not actually cheap, and that furthermore I am not actually broke: if I married someone who made the same sal- ary I make, our household income would be slightly above the national median, which is also true of almost every person I spend my free time with.

But the story of The Beatles doesn’t begin with John, Paul, George, and Ringo deplaning at JFK. It begins with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1722 Treatise on Harmony, which began to theo- rize the tonal system that still furnishes the building blocks for almost all pop music.

wait the dude that wrote this is only two years out of college?

guys call an ambulance, i smh'd so hard i think i broke something

lol

has anyone written a thorough history feature of pfork yet? it seems like that'd be a better way of 'taking down' both the corny indie fuxxor 'stylised' pfork of dicrescenzo/bowers heyday and the dull consumer guide choking on our legacy pfork of today. it would also allow a writer to acknowledge that the pfork of ten years ago only barely resembles the pfork of five years ago barely resembles the pfork of today. why/how/when it surpassed cmj, spin, whether a conscious decision was made to turn away from unrepentant rockism and how, gossip, whether it still really does have the impact it had a few years ago, etc.

no because its a thing that 2 million ppl read but only like 2,000 people really care about

no genre’s fans are more vulnerable to music criticism than the educated, culturally anxious young people who pay close attention to indie rock.

how does this article not have the part about hipinion sneaking into the pitchfork servers?

http://i.imgur.com/lrpqD.gif

I used to read pitchfork in the mornings like 3 years ago and haven't really read it w/ any regularity since

like maybe once in a couple months when I'm bored and want to laugh at something for a minute