pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Thank god for small favors I guess.

xxp

The review of Black Flag in that Converge review is worse than the review of Converge.

Converge are this generation's Black Flag. This generation might not remember Black Flag, so here's a refresher. In the early 1980s, Black Flag and peers like Bad Brains and Minor Threat took punk beyond "three chords and the truth." The result was hardcore punk. It was deliberately ugly and harsh; Clash-fetishizing critics have mostly ignored it.

this is just so horrific on so many levels

Maybe I'm old and out of touch but who, exactly, is ignoring Black Flag, Minor Threat and Bad Brains?

(yeah I know beating dead horse etc)

this generation is ignoring it, and also old critics.

critics who are really into the Clash? i guess? (i've never seen evidence of this.)

i'm just glad someone finally started talking about black flag, minor threat, and bad brains after years of them languishing in obscurity.

Haha yeah the idea that you had to be able to "remember" them is just...

xp if this was in a British publication, thinking of one of the more middleaged ones, the there would be a little more resonance to it, although I'd stil consider it spurious at this point in time

Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.

FYI, most bands have to break up eventually, except for the Rolling Stones.

actually i feel like bands are lasting a lot longer than they used to. 80s bands aside, it's kind of crazy to me that even, like, Spoon has been around for over 15 years.

wtf Bad Brains made UGLY music? This is news to me!

Yeah. I had never considered Bad Brains this way. So, so wrong.

"Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself."

This part of the sentence is even dumber.

i agree bands are around a lot longer these days. it still seems like a ridiculous thing to say.

Read that yesterday and was totally boggled. Unfortunately, I was so put off by the bit about "Clash-fetishizing critics" that I quit before the "ethnic cleansing". Who does Cosmo Lee even imagine he's talking about there?

A couple more choice bits:

"Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end."

"The face on the cover of 2001's Jane Doe, the hand on the cover of 2004's You Fail Me -- they are the Black Flag bars of today."

jesusfuckingchrist

I know that, before Black Flag, I felt I had to totally sublimate my desire to fight fans and fight cops; thank you, Henry Rollins, for letting me be myself again!

(in fairness, once you get past the awful revisionist history part, the review does spend some time describing what the music on the album sounds like, so good job on that)

i agree bands are around a lot longer these days. it still seems like a ridiculous thing to say.

not debating that, just sayin'.

I think I'm more critical than any other genre(s) of people writing about hardcore and metal in publications that don't focus on it a lot, but there are so many little needles poking in me w/ this one

"Kurt Ballou is this generation's Steve Albini" is highly debatable - dude produces almost nothing except hardcore and beardo metal bands

Doesn't Cosmo Lee post here sometimes? And do the Invisible Oranges blog?

he posts as "Mr Snrub"

hey, i know him!

yeah i don't wanna be mean but i'll just say it was a non-shocka when i scrolled down to the author of this review

Doesn't Cosmo Lee post here sometimes? And do the Invisible Oranges blog?

And former Stylus writer.

Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.

FYI, most bands have to break up eventually, except for the Rolling Stones.

― TGAAPQ (Mr. Que), Friday, October 30, 2009 2:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is particularly weird because Black Flag were going at it for almost 10 years, and outlasted a lot of peers and kinda trudged on well after people stopped caring

Esp. stupid American Clash-worshipping critics.

This part of the sentence is even dumber.

Hope you don't mind but I lol'd and then I....

Has anyone heard the last two songs to make it to their 'best new tracks' section? A band called Think About Life and another one called Sleigh Bells. I must be getting old because I found them very increasingly annoying.

think about life are the best band in montreal at the moment. the album was released this spring in canada and they played a seeminly endless string of incredible live shows all summer. i think they could do a lot of good if they got big, i think the world needs a good 'ole high-energy indie-friendly cut-and-paste dance pop slap in the face.

and i think the annoyingness was even adressed in the sleigh bells review iirc. the song's not so bad.

like both of those songs a lot, but i guess i'm pretty young

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q77Zu75JtY
they should have hyped this as the next "paper planes"

belated zing

but i'm now listening to dashboard confessional so it's all good

I really hate that band name but I just listened to Johanna by Think About Life and it's pretty decent so I must apologize for my previous diss on them.

Wont be sold on the Sleigh Bells tho, I dont really care how or artsy or ironic it's supposed to be. Sounds annoying to my ears to me regardless of the 'immensely interesting' statement they're trying to push on.

did you listen to the one i posted above?

Yes. It still sounds like shit to me. I really hate that blown speakers aesthetic style. Can't really tell if I'd be more interested in the song buried underneath if they fixed the treble, i find somewhat annoying that those twee vocals never really quiet down and allow the other elements to breathe (if they could) except in the intro and the finale. I don't know, I could see some sort of people excited about this sort of sounds but it's really not my thing.

Also, Gucci's line about how his little boy one but his shoes 400 isn't that thematically far from "My Girls".

I don't know much about Gucci Mayne, but I'm having problems parsing this sentence.

"i just want adobe slabs for my girls" = "my little boy one but his shoes 400" (as in $4000 dollars, as in both just want to provide for their families)

er $400 dollars, obv

perhaps there's additional context that supports your analysis but, on its own, it looks like Gucci is bragging about how much money he can waste on baby shoes, not saying that he just wants to support his family

i don't even know what the context of the original statement is but it's a pretty easy connection to draw at a baseline just from the one excerpt that kingkong c+p'd in here

i'm not saying it's not tenuous at best, but that is what whoever wrote that sentence is saying

yeah I thought that was a c/p from upthread and you were fleshing out yr own argument, oops

okay

what is that from though anyway?

http://pitchfork.com/news/37038-mia-working-on-gucci-mane-meets-animal-collective-album

i would smh @ tom but he's just bravely trying to make sense of some diplo bullshit soundbyte

obviously any "has gucci caught on with the hipsters yet?" convos can get sewed up now

the most dismaying thing in that story is the mention of the Major Lazer Adult Swim show