pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

lol no worries, I usually regret posting on this thread too

obviously i am avoiding work. please carry on.

actually, while i've stupidly raised my hand, i'll suggest that maybe it's time for a "part two" P4k is dumb thread. this one is unwieldy.

i think you guys are giving this more 'naif' than it deserves. its a big talking pt on leftist podcast irony twitter that music writers are overhyping pop music or whatever. these are ppl who spend all day tweeting about sopranos. this is not an original thought or empirical observation, it's cool kid social climber bullshit from ppl who orbit Red Scare.

chris they're not gonna be friends with you just bc you adopt all their positions opinions and internet debate aesthetics

I disagree deeply on their opinions about the Alamo Drafthouse and Hamilton but agree that the Sopranos is good

For example, though, P4k didn't even *review* Azana's record from last year. That's insane to me!

it would be certainly be really cool if they had but non-western stuff that isn't getting an active push in the western music press from their label or agent or whatever still seems to very much be a non-starter, but also obviously not very many writers are pitching p4k reviews of that sort of stuff either. not really much to do with poptimism one way or the other

They haven’t reviewed the new Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective or Tune-Yards, all of which is really hilarious to anyone who lived through the Carles Age

wow yeah that's a legit sea change. Kind of odd that this week alone they reviewed Garbage and Sleater-Kinney

I did specify that that was my opinion and that all it demonstrated was that for any given listener, pop is not or should not be a monolith

imago genuinely have no idea who you're arguing with about that

I'm arguing with the person who made the initial tweet

oh i'd completely forgotten animal collective even put out a soundtrack this year

that tune-yards album was great though

no wolf alice review yet either which also seems strange

Aware we've all pointed out how fatuous the statement is by now though

has anyone considered the broad popularity of Mark Fisher in the Chapo-verse when it comes to this stuff? I remember him arguing with Tim F and Simon about this stuff on Dissensus at the time, and I kind of feel like "the [podcast] left'"s perception of these arguments is shaped a lot by him becoming this broad lodestar for this conversation. Simon was even on an episode of Red Scare talking about Mark

no, I have not considered the broad popularity of Mark Fisher in the Chapo-verse

is that before or after the Ant-Man sequel

I was also trying to locate why Lorde in particular has pushed anti-poptimist buttons, fatuous or otherwise

Simon was even on an episode of Red Scare

lol that's embarrassing for him

I mean there's kind of shit going on with conde nast

I would not necessarily draw any conclusions about Grand Musical Direction given that there are other variables

hyperbolic love of pop music & being corny about it are signs of being an earnest young person who is new to criticism, not signs of corporate strategy imo. there's some overlap there, but the objections are aesthetic pretending to be ideological, imo

hyperbolic love of pop music & being corny about it are signs of being an earnest young person who is new to criticism

Then what's ILM's excuse?

name names

Yeah, P4k’s slide to the Bieberverse is probably just a general shifting taste of young critics + now having someone to answer to wrt traffic goals + the fact that there’s like ~zero other places that do dedicated longform reviews so why tf not.

It’s not as sexy as a viral tweet or CONDE CONSPIRACY but what can you do

"Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star."

If you guys are curious to dig into what I'm talking about, I genuinely think the origins of the terms of this conflict can be found in this thread. See arguments from Mark K Punk, Simon, and Tim F, Woebot, others: https://www.dissensus.com/index.php?threads/1143/

"Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star."

― the mai tai quinn (voodoo chili), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 3:52 PM (eighteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

7.2 ... so hyperbolic

thank you for pointing me towards this review because it is hilarious

Bieber is not a powerhouse vocalist, but he is a compelling one, casually dropping in a stray yodel here, a Mariah Carey-indebted set of runs there. His voice has a palatable smoothness; he’s mastered push-and-pull dynamics, and he swings effortlessly from a placid chest voice to a zephyr of a falsetto. That litheness and control are on full display across Justice. Even when the songwriting is spiritless and the production rote—and it occasionally is, as on the confessional “Unstable” and the saccharine “Deserve You”—he still sings the hell out of it.

his voice ranges from placid to wispy, I cannot argue with this

"casually dropping in a stray yodel here" is also killing me, like does he just go full Lonely Goatherd in the middle of a slow jam

"Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star."

― the mai tai quinn (voodoo chili), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 3:52 PM (eighteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

7.2 ... so hyperbolic

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 3:52 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh i wasn't commenting on the rating, i just thought that quote was funny

but isn't it true the writers don't determine the actual score

kidding, kidding

hyperbolic love of pop music & being corny about it are signs of being an earnest young person who is new to criticism, not signs of corporate strategy imo. there's some overlap there, but the objections are aesthetic pretending to be ideological, imo

completely otm

Then what's ILM's excuse?

there's obviously a difference between a message board & actual published music criticism

that's right, ilm's where all the money's at

#paymentforposts

like just personally I find the conspiracy theorizing very fucking weird since I started writing for them in 2012, I had almost entirely written about pop music, and that was pre-conde

i think the other thing that rankles about the original tweet is that pure poptimist pop is really at a low ebb commercially right now... olivia rodrigo & doja cat are basically the only two breakout pop stars of the last year and a half, and pitchfork barely covers them, at least from a critical POV. what's driving authentic rock music down and off the review pages is moneybagg yo, lil durk, lil baby, rod wave, polo g etc ... not exactly rich white girls on pills. and of course, pitchfork is actually ambivalent about much of that music as well despite its immense power in the marketplace, while on a daily basis putting its critical weight behind tons of underground rap music that is more artistically pure than the above artists and which would never get any coverage elsewhere. pitchfork was the first/only critical outlet to write about i.e. capella grey "gyalis" which is a great independent song w/ a localized fan base, but of course red scare hangers on have no idea what that song is. so really what you have is culturally out of touch ppl RTing themselves to explain why they don't ideologically align w/ a culture that they don't, in reality, understand

xp -- to be fair I think what people are reacting to are year end lists which do tend to skew more pop. like someone posted a screenshot of the WAP writeup

this is the problem ofc ... people think if you're criticizing The Bad Tweet you're defending Pitchfork

xps eh dua lipa has been a huge success lately both commercially & critically (though of course p4k hasn't been that on board) but i get the broader point

but yeah the problem is the twitter op etc. don't understand shit at all on top of the lazy purely reactionary rockism

this latest poptimism fuss having started from Red Scare should be deeply embarrassing for us all

xpost - re: Dua Lipa, most artists would kill to be ignored like this

https://pitchfork.com/search/?query=dua%20lipa

It’s hilarious to think of some nerd Walkman fan triggered by the Pitchfork tweet and visits the site for the first time in 8 years and then trying to figure this out

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-slitherman-activated/

xp p4k covers any pop star these days that has any sort of 'cred' at all

what i meant is they were cooler on the album than a lot of places, didn't give it the fabled bnm etc. when it was quite a critical darling elsewhere

It’s hilarious to think of some nerd Walkman fan triggered by the Pitchfork tweet and visits the site for the first time in 8 years and then trying to figure this out

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-slitherman-activated/

― bruce spr!ngisH3r3 on broadway (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 4:22 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean, its a pan, and ian cohen likes it ... not too different from cam'ron era really

xpost - re: Dua Lipa, most artists would kill to be ignored like this

https://pitchfork.com/search/?query=dua%20lipa

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 4:20 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

She had one of the biggest albums in the world and it wasn't reviewed, though they did review the follow-up and its pfork-baiting project of club remixes with like, theo parrish on it. She had some stuff on year end lists bc some hits are always on year end lists. pretty modest treatment again imo

not defending pitchfork -- just arguing that these broad characterizations of its pop coverage are misleading

she could've gotten a review if only she'd included some ill-advised mlk quotes

well, pitchfork covers pop stars heavily when it comes to news bcuz news is what drives traffic on a daily basis and you can't employ 50+ ppl at living wages by posting updates on indie rock music. simply put, it's not feasible. the incentive structure as it pertains to that part of the site is pretty clear and unavoidable. but is that what bothers ppl? the news coverage? maybe it is idk. bcuz as many ppl have pointed out on a critical level what the site gets behind has, if anything, retreated further back towards indie rock, outsider type music and away from poptimism

variables:

a) as mentioned there is an impending conde nast strike
b) there just was a global pandemic that shut down the global economy
c) stan backlash has gotten a lot worse than it was in 2015 so writers may be more hesitant to jump on big pop albums, many writers (who aren't me) have explicitly said this was a factor in declining to write about certain pop albums
d) pop music has kind of diffused into 50 million tiktok kids who may not have "albums" to review
e) did I mention there was a global pandemic

I really, really would not draw very many conclusions about editorial strategy from 2020-21

xp as you already basically pointed out it's people who aren't really paying attention at all to any of this stuff & as katherine suggested it's probably mostly in reaction to the year end lists etc. mostly because they're what seems to get the most wider traction and has the most people quoting goofy blurbs etc. to mock on twitter

c) stan backlash has gotten a lot worse than it was in 2015 so writers may be more hesitant to jump on big pop albums, many writers (who aren't me) have explicitly said this was a factor in declining to write about certain pop albums

oof this didn't occur to me but of course, not worth the hassle