Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

I found it an enjoyable read but maybe it's because I am a cynic and/or naive

i ask victor, "does being in das racist get you laid? has it helped you get laid more since you got Best New Music?"

and he looks a little surprised and looks at me and then looks at the Showpapers hanging on the wall and thinks about the question for a while. we look around the room while he thinks and listen to the song that he's playing, which is a Beenie Man song, and kids are singing along and dancing, there is a photographer standing on a stage by the front of the room taking pictures and there are kids playing video games around us, and then Victor starts saying something about how when you are in a fairly popular indie rap group and girls see you on stage, you sort of have an automatic advantage, but then he stops himself and looks down at my Blackberry screen, where i am taking notes, and realizes that maybe he doesn't really wanna give away trade secrets or sound like an asshole and he indicates that he doesn't want to answer anymore and then he smiles and i say "okay i understand"

and then he looks sort of uneasy and says "talking about game kills game, you know?"

and then he thinks again and says "but maybe we owe it to women to talk about game in front of them?"

and then he looks at my Blackberry screen where i have written "maybe we owe it 2 wmn 2 talk abt game in front of them tho" and he points to it and says "yo that sounds corny in print!"

This = AWESOME

reviewing reviews kills reviews, you know?

Well maybe, but he's not talking about his own reviews (unlike how Victor was talking about his own game).

that last part was kinda good - i don't think his writing is horrible - it's just mediocre overall - like i have a friend that used to write me rambling unedited emails that are better than this guy's stuff.

x-post. bad riff i guess. i just mean, his original premise of reviewing reviews (one step removed from music criticism) has devolved itself into something at least two steps away from criticism. which is fine, i'm actually kind of taken with these awl pieces, but in the way that i enjoy, like, cometbus or burn collector, not in the way that i enjoy music crit.

xp, King Cat. the honesty in the stream is a huge component because he's flatly unctuous and creepy in any number of these situations and not only is it very difficult to bring that through in print, and he does, it's a fairly brave thing to (repeatedly) reveal, to self-indict or at least leave it up to the reader to interpret.

he just seems fairly incoherent and inarticulate most of the time and does a piss-poor job of describing things and people with occasional exceptions.

I'm sure this was covered upthread, but I've just been reading some more stuff on his site and it sounds like this guy is around 21 years old. Mind you that only makes me four years his elder, but I think that while there's a very obvious youth and naivete to the writing which is part of the appeal/schtick, for a 21-year old he displays a surprising amount of perspective and self-awareness and, dare I say "wisdom" in some of his writing. I mean my younger brother is the same age and I don't think he'd ever be able to write with this kind of clarity and perceptiveness, but maybe it's more common than I think.

xposts I guess I have a pretty different take on it than some other folks here, huh.

i can't understand applying structural or grammatical criticism to what he is doing. the whole idea is expository writing 101. it's talking therapy. the guy's not Spalding Gray, he's doing writing exercises, these are workouts. do not underestimate the long-tail value in that, in setting yourself up with this reputation as your first outing. think of the opportunity to capitalize on this as a phase.

regardless of how old this dude actually is, to me, he comes across as a precocious 14 year old.

as in - everyone upthread comparing his style to vintage livejournal entries is otm

dude your burns are so vicious

seriously sarahel what do you REALLY think about this guy

Funny you say that sarahel, because I think one of the things he does well is write about teenage-angst-type situations in a kind of believeable, relateable way, and I say that as somebody who usually hates that kind of thing, despite having once been an angsty teenager.

I usually think that kind of thing either comes off as false, because you can tell you're experiencing something created by an adult who has maybe become too-far removed from their actual teenage experience and is trying too hard to appeal to current teenagers, or it comes off as gag-worthy because it's written by a real teenager and it's just live-journal-ish and shows no insight or perspective. Whereas when he's writing about being a fat kid or having this dramatic secret relationship with an older girl when he was in high school, I find it engaging and realistic but also kind of insightful.

what do i really think? i think his pieces have some good elements and a few good lines/observations amidst a majority of filler and wasted words. And I also think that most people who practice writing, and are writing about things that happened to them or things that are close to them will have the same amount of good elements and lines - e.g. a comparable shit:gold ratio.

the whole idea is expository writing 101. it's talking therapy. the guy's not Spalding Gray, he's doing writing exercises, these are workouts. do not underestimate the long-tail value in that, in setting yourself up with this reputation as your first outing. think of the opportunity to capitalize on this as a phase.

This also totally describes Pfork c. 1996 ^^

i think he'd get a "needs significant improvement" in expository writing 101 - his descriptions and narrative structure are really weak

maybe if he were enrolled in "expository writing 101" at an ivy league college he'd get a "b" as opposed to a "c" because of grade inflation

I guess we're working with different standards here. I don't think this dude is Hemingway or anything, but I spend a fair amount of time reading things people write on the internet, mostly in an informal context like on message boards and such, but still this guy's writing stands out to me as being thoughtful and evocative and I like a lot of his observations about the culture surrounding indie music.

well, i'm applying the standard of writing on the internet in the context of it being published in a blog that is somewhat popular (the awl stuff, not his personal site).

ya but what do you REALLY think

huh?

lol

m actually kind of taken with these awl pieces, but in the way that i enjoy, like, cometbus or burn collector, not in the way that i enjoy music crit.

yeah, i feel exactly the same way as a sometime/longtime cometbus reader. enjoy this stuff as dashed-off "dispatches from somewhere", only with PRR the somewhere isn't "punk rock planet," it's "inside this weirdo's head."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFVseEeuHKM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joc98x3dKYU

the honesty in the stream is a huge component because he's flatly unctuous and creepy in any number of these situations and not only is it very difficult to bring that through in print, and he does, it's a fairly brave thing to (repeatedly) reveal, to self-indict or at least leave it up to the reader to interpret.

― cee-oh-tee-tee, Wednesday, October 13, 2010 12:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah, this [emphasis mine]. very true of the awl pieces. he documents his own awkward/creepy behavior in a way that suggests self-awareness without ever quite admitting anything. he just wanders around taking pictures (going back to the Todd P party piece). i like that a lot, as a device.

Turning me off more and more is his tendency to evaluate the legitimacy of all these people he's interacting with, and then weasel out of it by saying "Oh, maybe that's just me being cynical". No doubt there are plenty of showbiz phonies but still....

yeah, that angle is handled really clumsily in the art party piece

could not resist:
http://pitchrevvyrev.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/life-after-death/

Awesome. A+.

punctuation at the end of paragraphs = you already lost me

jaymc shame on you i thought you'd catch that

someone should set up a pitchfork reviews reviews reviews

punctuation at the end of paragraphs = you already lost me

jaymc shame on you i thought you'd catch that

― guanciale diary (s1ocki), Thursday, October 14, 2010 3:25 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookma

u didnt have the stomach for it

after I recover from the experience, if I ever decide to do one of these again, I'll make sure it's ALL THA WAY TURNED UP

punctuation at the end of paragraphs = you already lost me

jaymc shame on you i thought you'd catch that

Ha, I did catch that, but the rest of it was so good, I decided it didn't matter.

Eventually the bus showed up, and the guy in the Enyce shirt got on it, which made me feel good because it meant that he had actually been waiting for the bus and was not just a homeless or carles person trying to get out of the rain.

is this a sly HRO reference

;)

man, was gonna pull the carles person line, but go1db3rg beat me to it

someone should set up a pitchfork reviews reviews reviews

― rmde @ thehttp://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPGDUMPLINGS! (history mayne), Thursday, October 14, 2010 8:26 AM (4 hours ago)

thread deserves at least one (1) hatcat for every time someone makes that joke

maybe if thread got twelve (12) hatcats in a row, then maybe people will stop making that joke

mmmmmmprobably not

BERNARD SNOWY

u called?

I also c+p'ed the carles line to bring back here

The brilliance continues:

my favorte tweet on the lead guitarist of famous rock band Kings of Leon’s twitter is when he writes, referring to the band’s new single, “Everyone liking ‘Radioactive’?” like a housewife hosting a dinner party and hurrying around to all the guests making sure everyone is pleased with the hors d’oeuvres. there’s a timidity about how he phrases it, like a really personal and insecure exercise in market research, and it feels like if someone replied to him and wrote, like, “no, bring the drums up in the mix”, he would blush and forward that to the record’s producer

I quite like the observation in there but drop the "famous rock band Kings of Leon" bullshit. Only the New Yorker can get away with that kind of overexplaining.