pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

jace:

November 5, 2008
even better than Arabic “rye” is cumbia sonidera, i mean “Sonny Guerra”!

that mis-hearing may send people on some frustrating Google searches… maybe we should invent a person called Sonny Guerra and attribute a new style of music to him, retrospective reality google hack

Jace/Rupture on his blog comments

Since Dave Stelfox left for a fulltime journalist job in the mideast, I do not think Pitchfork has added a new reggae/dancehall columnist. Although they did at least run an obit for Byron Lee.

Miles Davis:
Dark Magus
[Columbia; 1974]
Rating: 9.5

* Buy it from Insound
* Download it from eMusic

Good old Japan. We bomb them, so they horde this Miles Davis gem, out of print for ages in the U.S. It's the best $27 spent outside of the massage parlor in eons. Yeah, I buy CDs sometimes, too. Why? Friggin' label won't send 'em to us. I'm willing to look the other way this time, because this two-disc set, to put it simply, rules.

Recorded at Carnegie Hall in '74, Miles leads a spacey Bitches Brew-esque jam session, always loose in the middle but tight at the ends. The band of two guitarists, a bassist, drummer, percussionist, sitar player, and a couple of sax honkers launches Dark Magus upwards. Just when you think the shit can't get much higher, Miles comes in and hits the wah-wah down hard on the horn and the next thing you know, you're slappin' five to the man upstairs. Four jams, each divided into two parts, no rules except to keep it real.

You think I know what I'm talking about? Damn right I don't. I couldn't be this cool if I smoked menthol PCP and changed my name to Charlie fucking Parker. I probably don't have enough street cred to give it up for the late Satchmo. Yeah, I know Louis Armstrong was Satchmo, but it's a pretty cool name. I think I'll change my name to Satchmo. Oh, and my last name to Bronson. Satchmo Bronson. I could kick ass and have a five-octave range on the trumpet. That'd be awesome. Whoops, left the sentence hanging. But that's none of yo bidness. By the rite of Dark Magus, I can fake the cool in no time flat.

- Jason Josephes, August 1, 1997

Yes it's a dumb review.

if anything it's disappointing in its dumbness after the heights of that Coltrane review linked upthread

the kanye review had the 808s song cited as "see you in my knightmares" -- the way it came on tagged on the leak -- instead of "see you in my nightmares", which is the way that it appears on the back of the album

There's really no factual error Pitchfork can make anymore that would bug me more than them always putting commas and periods after endquotes.

Alex in SF I see you have received my communication!!

DUDE that pisses me off soooo much!!!

xp

surprised this revive wasnt about this:

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=132958

There's really no factual error Pitchfork can make anymore that would bug me more than them always putting commas and periods after endquotes.

this is the british way (sometimes).

ummm i successfully avoid pfork these days but sometimes i want to read tom ewing's stuff and accidentally click on another link once there, which is to say that the pfork beyonce review was hugely dumb and annoying.

Man wasn't pfork in '97 like schr1eber and a couple of high-school buddies or something?

that's the grammatically incorrect way you mean

i prefer the british way of periods/commas

looks way better imo

I used to think it looked better or at least OK when I was much younger (and still writing for pitchfork lol), but after years of doing it the U.S. way it really gets on my nerves, especially from a place staffed almost entirely by Americans.

the british way is if it's a full sentence the full stop goes inside the quote marks, if it's not then it goes outside, which makes sense. when it comes to song titles, putting commas and full stops inside the quote marks looks unbelievably retarded to me.

agree

lex otm about commas and beyonce reviews

i thought scottpl's kanye review was alright

lol @ josephes, though. yeah, he wasn't a great writer, but i still think his Soft Bulletin review is classic, if only because i need a six paragraph memoir appended to my two paragraph reviews every once in a while. not enough writers do this.

lol xpost

Man wasn't pfork in '97 like schr1eber and a couple of high-school buddies or something?

That's how I understand it, but you'd think they'd be embarassed about it or something. Jason Josephes turned in some particularly ridiculous crap, such as this one and the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin review, which contains the following text before even mentioning the album:

"Hey, Jason. Where you been?"
That's an awfully good question, kids. Never let it be said that I would forsake the fine people of Pitchforkmedia.com, and by "people" I mean esteemed editor Ryan "Come On!" Schreiber, our other fine writers, and you, the reader. Let me fill you in on everything; trust me, this is all going somewhere.

I recently moved out of The Box. The Box was where I lived in Seattle for my first year-and-a-half-- a small room in a terrible house. I had an ogre of a next door neighbor named Richard who didn't like any decibel level that went above a whisper. Another neighbor, a homely looking mama's boy of some sort, had weird nasal problems that forced him to make this really loud noise that sounded like a collision between an orgasm, a yawn, a primal howl, and the deafening roar of a tortured honker.

The morning of my move, I checked my e-mail only to discover a rather unfortunate note in my box. A particular woman whose only flaw was in her geographic location (Jerusalem) told me not to come and visit her this summer, and that it was time for her to "get on with her life." I'll translate that: "bang other people without guilt." I saw it coming, but by e-mail? A year and a half of tortured long-distance amore dissolved via Hotmail? By a certain point, you're worth more than e-mail. A phone call. Shit, a letter would have done. No. Not only am I being broken up with, I also have to look at a banner ad for TalkCity.com. Can my life sink any lower?

Last night, I tried to figure out where my life was going. It seems to be on the course where I'm just thinking about where my life is (or isn't) going. Great. Wake me when it gets exciting.

Well, today, it got exciting. I was at work for about six hours when I decided to call my old number and retrieve my messages. There was my temp agency telling me not to go into work today. I guess the object was for me to find out before I left for work (it was 7:30 when they called), but instead, there I was working when and where I shouldn't have been. I called the agency and they said they'd call me back. I sat at my desk awkwardly. Should I be working? If so, why? If not, what should I be doing? I tracked down my supervisor who gave me two reasons for my termination. One was that the workload had dropped and they didn't need that many people. The second reason, of course, was that five people had commented to him that I didn't seem to love my job.

Well, duh. Sorry to go monosyllabic, but... well, duh. I sit at a desk. There's some asshole who insists on whistling all day, and man cannot live by headphones alone. Even today, before I found out I was already yesterday's employee, I commented to a co-worker, "Pretty soon, I'm gonna stab that guy in the throat." Of course, I wouldn't do that. But sometimes, I think that's my big misgiving in life-- no follow through. "I don't hate my job," I told my supervisor. This was true. Boring? Yes. Hate? No. This was going to be the job that gave me enough money to go on a vacation this fall.

"Well, I noticed it, too," he said. "If five people see it and I do, too, then doesn't that tell you something?"

"Did you ever think of asking me?" I asked.

Of course, there wasn't a good answer for that, so I immediately shifted gears. "Hey, if five people came and told you that I was practicing black magic, would you believe them?"

"That's completely different." When I asked him why it was different, he changed the subject to me leaving.

eh, i'd much prefer they leave warts-and-all early reviews in the archive than start deleting or editing that stuff way after the fact.

Two weird things about reading Pitchfork in the mid/late 90s: (a) it was not hard to assume that you were the only person you'd ever met who read it (apart from friends you yourself had pointed it out to, or who'd pointed it out to you),* and (b) you had zero idea what sort of people were behind it; they weren't "proper" critics, obviously, just people talking on the internet in an era before message boards and mailing lists and whatnot had made us all so able to sort people's tastes and rhetoric into predictable camps. Point being it kinda worked for them to do big digressions about temp work, because you weren't necessarily approaching the site for authoritative, useful information -- you were going to this random bit of internet you'd found where people shared opinions about music (many of them amusing or strange or half-assed) almost more as a form of shit-shooting entertainment than anything else,** and I for one recall actually enjoying weird glimpses of who these people were I was going to this place to listen to and be entertained by.

* In fact, for all you knew you were one of two dozen readers, total, and this was true for lots of non-corporate websites you'd look at; there was some other site at the time that did short indie-rock capsule reviews and rated things with, if I remember correctly, between one and five puking-baby icons (?), and I still have zero idea whether I was one of 10 people who looked at it or 10,000.

** Let's not forget that a way-higher percentage of internet use in those days consisted of "I have found this weird and lovable thing floating in the ether," and there was, briefly, an actual level of fun and humor in the idea that people would put up stuff on the internet that would read kinda crazily in print equivalents -- these days, with internet critics, we write that off to Lester Bangs worship, but really I think early internet writing just naturally grabbed onto that same "hahaha I can write this as bizarro as I want" spirit.

Yeah, as cringe-inducing as it is now, I remember reading that stuff at the time and finding it incredibly refreshing, just in the way it broke through the usual staid models of criticism. I remember telling a co-worker in late 2000 or early 2001 about the site (a guy who was very much into indie rock) and using DiCrescenzo's review of Stereolab's Cobra Phases Group as an exemplar. (I disagreed with the score but was captivated by the outlandishness of the review.)

(a) maybe in the mid-90s that was true, but by '98 (when I first got internet access at work haha) it was pretty clear that it was being read by quite a few folks (it was linked a lot of places.)

(b) uh what? It seemed pretty clear what it was to me (a couple of guys with some free time on their hands and decent web design skills who wanted have a music website--probably to get promos in those pre-filesharing days--and had some friends who were willing to write for them--promos that is.)

so basically no one cares about this Pitchfork/Fader thing

I care. But I had nothing to say, so.

Stopped reading that story as soon as the Fader dude said "leverage"

I don't even know what you are talking about.

Fairly or not, I didn't read Pitchfork for years after glancing at stuff like this. But this was a blessed long time ago.

Pitchfork essentially becoming a marketing dept

xpost

- not arguing with the first one

- not sure "guys with free time who want a music website and want promos" is really a very specific sense of who people are or what "sort" of people they are

Yeah, J, this was probably my own failing for not buying more books, but most of the music press available to me back then was glossy-magazine stuff -- which made it fun to see stuff bubble out of the internet that was more just ... talking crap about music.

and per Alex in SF's appraisal of PFork in the late 90s, I have to agree that even then they had some serious cachet on the internet and it was fairly accepted that if you got a decent review on PFork, it meant your band was gonna get a huge boost in listeners. which was indeed the case.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/20825-pet-shop-boys-nightlife

peep the last line in this PSB review, al

"- not sure "guys with free time who want a music website and want promos" is really a very specific sense of who people are or what "sort" of people they are"

They were dorky white guys who were in (or had just graduated from) college. Is that a specific enough "sort"?

If you want to be incorrect and/or boring, maybe

hahahahaha that Nightlife review is amazing

peep the last line in this PSB review, al

Sunshine on a cloudy day.

xxpost Haha I'm pretty sure none of those statements is incorrect.

Despite myself, I'll seek solace in my beloved Gay Dad album.
- Paul Cooper, Drummer of Gay Dad, December 31, 1999

The one fan.

Yeah Alex I can tell you're confident in your wrongness, but Ryan didn't go to college

And (wild guess) Samir Khan wasn't white

Oh no my illusions are shattered!

Okay exceptions to the rule noted, I think my generalization stands and regardless of race/education level there wasn't much mystery here for most of us.

I mean, you are basically saying "I'm guessing the people behind an indie-rock website fit what's come to be accepted as the core demographic of indie-rock listeners," which isn't a particularly clever proposition, and did not really answer any of the questions I'm saying I'd have had about the site in the mid-to-late 90s, e.g. where are these people from, are they younger or older, are they nuts or not, why is this person called "Richard-san," etc. etc., and all the elements of constructing an image/personality of a writer in your head as you read

This is a simple point that a lame zinger does not really undermine

I guess you thought about it a lot more than I did then.

I mean I just assumed they were mostly around my age, had some time on their hands, were not nuts, called themselves whatever they pleased and wrote about what got sent them.

^^^this. Especially since a lot of their staff were on the same message boards as me at the time.

It didn't require thinking -- my original point was that if one of the writers went on a bit about moving or temp work, this read not as an annoyance but as a tidbit of information about the person whose reviews you'd been reading blind. This wasn't a point about the writers being fascinating enigmas, it was a point about readers' relationships with the personalities beyond the screen being very different at that stage than they are now.

I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who, when reading a given periodical, becomes interested in the personalities and circumstances of the people I'm reading -- especially in a context where it's somewhat non-professional and there's no concrete information available.

^ make that "when REGULARLY reading a given periodical"

I do that with ILX.