Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

rip rolls royce

so glad that we've moved on to debating whether or not a blogger is a sock puppet to the crucial issue of how rich Karen O is/was

keep on elevatin the discourse guys

to from debating

xp - dude, i just wanted to know when this chick was at Oberlin because i have friends who went there -

she was class of '63 i think

"keep on elevatin the discourse guys"

Wait you are posting here for the elevated discourse? Wow did you make a wrong turn somewhere.

knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque

love how much this guy enrages u guys

congrats, you figured out it's a shtick. so what?

http://www.optimiced.com/wp-uploads/2007/02/minuscule-tv-spider.jpg

means... something...

shtick and voice aren't the same thing. i'd never argue that the PRR guy is as entirely sincere and naively guileless as the character he seems to adopt in his writing, but that doesn't necessarily make his authorial voice fake or a shtick. rather, i think he's probably using this somewhat affected voice to honestly present (and yeah, to stylize) his own point of view. nothing necessarily wrong with this...

i will concede that i've cut the guy too much slack. i don't love his writing. the little lost elf-boy style is sometimes gratingly coy. it's an awfully tired indie trope at this point, and it tends to soft-pedal the obviousness of some of his insights (as dorianlynskey notes). but when he's writing about something that he really seems to care about, as in the lil' wayne piece, his enthusiasm and depth of feeling are both convincing and appealing. i like the way he combines the details of his own inner and outer lives with his music writing, to produce something that reads more like fiction. and i don't think it's great fiction or anything, but i have enjoyed reading it from time to time.

and i don't know, maybe i'm just gullible...

your search for "gullible + dictionary" = 0 results

Honest truth: I thought his Awl piece was one of the best things he's written, just as a piece of writing. Yeah, his tone's incredibly stylized, and he uses a bunch of weirdly transparent conceits, like acting guileless in order to get across a perspective. (That's sort of a clever choice for talking about music, an area that's ripe with everyone having totally different levels of guile.) But in terms of how he uses detail and pace and constructs a piece of writing ... I mean, look, on some level I would have really preferred not to think he's a good writer, you know? But he knows how to put something like this together really well, and to be honest with you he's one of very few people who have even much tried to find a way to write NARRATIVE pieces about music.

^

I mean, look, on some level I would have really preferred not to think he's a good writer, you know?

this, especially

wait, i'm enraged?

because i thought i was enjoying a trainwreck that happens to have some vague connection to one of my professional outlets.

you are the hulk, according to your user name - hulk only exists when bruce banner is enraged

we've been doing couples counseling. it's been going okay.

the awl piece was the first thing of his i've read that i was actually able to get through from beginning to end and it's decently constructed, but his "point" in re cool bands of yore regaining their coolness or still being cool or whatever is shoot-me-in-the-face trite bullshit.

^ trigger-happy

We're really lowering the bar here: writer with nothing interesting to say builds up to his nothing interesting in a nicely paced way. I've read worse writers but they're not pretending to offer ingenuous "wisdom".

Nor do they make their name with a website passing judgement on other, usually better writers.

*shoots self in face*

congrats on generating interest in a terrible writer, guys

haha wow i always assumed that prr was an elaborate and not very funny joke..??! his writing hurts my head like a hundred dogs.

this guy is a horrible writer

But he is interestingly terrible. If you can't write properly, consciously making yourself the post-Pitchfork Forrest Gump ("indie rock's like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get"), and getting lots of attention out of it, is at least a novel solution.

did u ever read the one about how he used to be really fat before he got into music? it was really good!

the saddest part about that post is that he's too young to know he'll probably get fat again once he's old and jaded. u_u

just can't take the breathless no punctuation style it's grating and annoying and it just doesn't click with me if i want long endless sentences i'll pick up some thomas bernhard and not some dork-o with a music blog

he does use punctuation is the thing...?

more than u do tbh

well maybe he does, sometimes, cool, thanks slocks

.

;)

lol guess what day it is

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/

*moment of silence*

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/images/QuestionMarkNormaSMALL.jpg

4 u

i can't tell if that's a couple of pounds of uncooked sausage, a tumor, or a french bread pizza.

sometimes you really have to stare at a goofy internet photo for a long time to penetrate the veil of mystery

it's a meat loaf shaped like a question mark, strongo.

DUH

I think his thing is not punctuating at the ends of paragraphs, but he does it elsewhere.

He's good and thoughtful in a diaristic sense but this is not the kind of stuff I would want to read in a magazine proper! It's too personal.

And too internetty, and secretly assumes certain knowledge on your part to get what he's doing. And yeah, I think some of it is problematic if you read about music to really get information about music. But if you want to talk about magazines proper, I mean ... the more you get toward normal general-audience readers/listeners, the more people totally go for being narrative, or first-person, or "personal." E.g., Chuck Klosterman writing personal essays that happened to be about music a lot of the time -- and if you gave a bunch of young people a "name one music critic" survey, he'd probably come out on top. Not saying I get much out of his music essays, but "personal" and "narrative" are SO not sticking points for the vast majority of potential readers, you know?

can I point out that if you gave a bunch of young people a "name one music critic" survey, you'd probably get Gene Shallit as top answer?

Shalit's rap reviews are hot

"There's only one word for Gucci Mane: burriliant! When life gave him lemons, he made 'Lemonade!' No matter what 'state' you live in, I 'appeal' to you to buy this album!"

just wait until the inevitable book deal

when I sang with the BSO, we would periodically see Shalit out around town in the Berkshires wearing a child's sailor hat