pitchfork

didnt we go over this like five months ago?

fun stupid fact: i almost had a piece published in this issue of n+1 but i couldnt finish it on time

oh i fucked that up: the same issue this appeared in

didnt we go over this like five months ago?

― 51 fewer calories (Lamp), Friday, January 20, 2012 9:36 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

did we? i'd never seen this before.

love the disp name btw

fun fact: I am a sentence in n+1

The footnote about All Music Guide is so inaccurate and funny that I don't know where to begin.

love when writers commission the ambitious musical revolution they fantasize about but have no ability to take part in or describe in any concrete terms. "ok, musicians, hop to it! i'm ready for some new forms!"

― @51TimesNo (some dude), Friday, January 20, 2012 9:36 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's particularly amazing in this piece because the guy never explains what he even likes about music or why he cares about this topic but he DOES cop to listening to indie rock!

i think before we were just discussing the opening excerpt that was online at the time.

fun fact: I am a sentence in n+1

that is fun!

'uh oh i'm having a fantasy' - keith gessen on his gossip girl appearance

yeah i think in a thread about n+1 rather than one about pitchfork. some dude is right i dont think it was online yet tho but whiney and nabisco weighed in, the merits of n+1 as a thing that exists were debated i somehow managed not to embarrass myself goodtimes

"it should be called h+1+n+1 because this shit is worse than bird flu amirite"

lonely guy thinking baout things

asks for something new, regurgitates 500 things already said

amazing, insightful, 90% spot-on article, but in the spirit of indie rock...

[i]Although Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, M.I.A., and Animal Collective all produced sophisticated, intelligent music, it’s also true that they focused their sophistication and intelligence on those areas where the stakes were lowest. Instead of striking out in pursuit of new musical forms, they tweaked or remixed the sounds of earlier music, secure in the knowledge that pedantic blog writers would magnify these changes and make them seem daring. Instead of producing music that challenged and responded to that of other bands, they complimented one another in interviews, each group “doing its own thing” and appreciating the efforts of others.[i]

total horseshit. i don't know how blinded by your own thesis you'd have to be to describe MIA and animal collective primarily in terms of their "tweak[ing] the sounds of earlier music", but, uh, it'd have to be a lot. a lot blinded.

you really think this is amazing?

fubk

he makes one valid and useful point afaict--that pitchfork is about curation not criticism

you really think this is amazing?

hell yeah, but i die inside everytime that PRR thread gets bumped, so what do i know?

he makes one valid and useful point afaict--that pitchfork is about curation not criticism

he makes an even more valid and useful point in describing what it meant to be a curator in the late-indie/early-internet era

the difference between this article and PRR is miniscule aside from the overall tone and intent

xp i guess? if you haven't been paying attention for 10 years?

this article is probably 5 years too late, seriously.

hope everyone is alright being quoted on your opinion a few years from now

Pitchfork’s endless “Best Of” lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions of the Billboard sales charts.

OTM, and it speaks to the weird better-than-ness that both indie and rock criticism assume without addressing

"rock criticism" meant as just that

acting like Pitchfork invented Best-Of lists is even nuttier than acting like Pitchfork invented the scale of 1 to 10

like people honestly have no idea how the grounds on which they get unreasonably mad at pitchfork totally give away the tunnel vision perspective that allowed them to get that heated to begin with

By keeping user-generated comments off the site, Pitchfork has behaved more like a magazine than the magazines have. The only major modification Schreiber made to the print template—putting reviews, not interviews or features, at the center—was an ingenious adaptation to the dynamics of internet buzz: interviews may sell the rock and roll lifestyle, but reviews are what blogs will link to and argue about. Finally, of course, there is the archive. By constantly updating and adjusting its archive—whether by deleting early reviews or by writing up a reissued album for a second time—Pitchfork has become the only music publication to attempt an account of what it felt like to be a music fan in the last fifteen years.

obvious as hell, and discussed to death around here, but OTM and well worth saying

acting like Pitchfork invented Best-Of lists is even nuttier than acting like Pitchfork invented the scale of 1 to 10

it's more the way pitchfork has defined (or at least prominently reflected) the function and implication of "best" lists in an online environment.

some cart-and-horsing there...

"i'm glad they finally kicked that horse, i was really tired of it just laying around all dead and stuff for the last few years" (xpost)

another thing i like about the article is that it admits, without ever quite saying, that online music-criticism-consumption has made contemporary music criticism exceedingly cowardly and self-protective. rather than being lost to a past curated only by a few obsessive, ratlike archivists, everything a critic (or person) says online is now made available right there, right now, ripe for mockery in retrospect. this in turn has made most criticism exceptionally dull and safe. it says only that which it believes it will be able to defend from the slings and arrows of wikipedia-armed internet snarkmasters a year or two from now. this is good in many ways, but it's also a bit dispiriting, tending more to snideness and buttoned-down authoritarianism than to wayward, personal self-expression.

i don't know who the piece's audience is because i don't know who reads n+1 and obv for some audiences (this one f'rinstance) it's nothing new, but i think the first two-thirds, where it's just a history of pitchfork, are pretty comprehensive and accurate and sometimes insightful, and then it does this:

+ + +

and on the other side of the pluses it's suddenly attributing the publication of jay-z's memoirs to his attendance of a grizzly bear concert and implying that all indie rock listeners can "go to law school whenever they like"

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead.

OTM regarless of how stupid the supporting anecdote abt jay-Z and grizzly bear may be. same goes for the bit about the increasingly obvious middle-classness of indie, despite its early, 80s-era pretensions to down and out chic. the author's self-indictment on this score, mocked above, only drives the point home. helps amplify the sharp arguments relating to the political dimension of pitchfork's endorsement of earnest indie pastoralism:

This new interest in pastoral nationalism seemed like a strange fit for indie rock; or at least it made plain that indie rock was in the hands of a new and different generation of fans. At the height of the Iraq war, college graduates poured into cities and took internships at magazines, nonprofits, and internet startup firms. They found themselves drawn, for some reason, to adorable music that openly celebrated our national heritage. They dressed like stylish lumberjacks and watched Sufjan perform dressed as a Boy Scout, and they remembered a disappeared world of the small and the tangible.

another thing i like about the article is that it admits, without ever quite saying, that online music-criticism-consumption has made contemporary music criticism exceedingly cowardly and self-protective. rather than being lost to a past curated only by a few obsessive, ratlike archivists, everything a critic (or person) says online is now made available right there, right now, ripe for mockery in retrospect. this in turn has made most criticism exceptionally dull and safe. it says only that which it believes it will be able to defend from the slings and arrows of wikipedia-armed internet snarkmasters a year or two from now. this is good in many ways, but it's also a bit dispiriting, tending more to snideness and buttoned-down authoritarianism than to wayward, personal self-expression.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Friday, January 20, 2012 11:12 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is silly. the age of instant feedback and scrutiny hasn't stopped critics and bloggers from saying flowery, extravagant, ridiculous things all the fucking time, maybe not in much on music sites as on other kinds of sites but still. and "safe" as pejorative always makes me wonder what kind of "danger" someone is romanticizing, especially a fucking record review.

the worst part abt pitchfork is how they express their ratings out to a tenth of a point, like is that really necessary

and your mom would stick a pitchfork review right into daddy's inbox and dad would throw the garbage all across the floor as we would lay and learn what each decimal point was for

the phrase "the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity" really underlines how most of the lols and total lack of perspective in this article directly stem from the author's age

i had some ideas about this article but it seems painful to even type them into a box on the internet so i admire everyone elses fortitude

At the height of the Iraq war, college graduates poured into cities and took internships at magazines, nonprofits, and internet startup firms. They found themselves drawn, for some reason, to adorable music that openly celebrated our national heritage. They dressed like stylish lumberjacks and watched Sufjan perform dressed as a Boy Scout, and they remembered a disappeared world of the small and the tangible.

massive bullshit generalizations funneled into one specific reference so it'll ring "true".

Those select few who did manage to hear everything—record store clerks, DJs, nerds with personal warehouses—could use this rare knowledge to terrorize their social or sexual betters, as in the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity. Napster made all of that obsolete.

fwiw the year High Fidelity came out i was downloading Kid A on Napster and discussing it on AIM with Ryan Schreiber so it's possibly i'm too close to all of this to have perspective myself, but seriously this is hilarious to me.

In Sufjan Stevens, indie adopted precious, pastoral nationalism at the Bush Administration’s exact midpoint. In M.I.A., indie rock celebrated a musician whose greatest accomplishment has been to turn the world’s various catastrophes into remixed pop songs. This is a kind of music, in other words, that’s very good at avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Pitchfork has imitated, inspired, and encouraged indie rock in this respect. It has incorporated a perfect awareness of cultural capital into its basic architecture. A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment.

this is key, as much as i want to defend MIA's catastrophe pop. it does a neat job of tying a good point about the basic structure of indie aesthetics (built in from its 80s-era roots) to the way indie tastemaking works online today, in a post-marginal commercial environment. carles uses HRO to make the same point over and over and over again.

fwiw the year High Fidelity came out i was downloading Kid A on Napster and discussing it on AIM with Ryan Schreiber so it's possibly i'm too close to all of this to have perspective myself, but seriously this is hilarious to me.

yeah, but come on, that's early adopter relative to what's going on today, and the culture depicted in high fidelity is clearly pre-internet (the author's point).

massive bullshit generalizations funneled into one specific reference so it'll ring "true".

plus dudes BEEN straight lumberjackin it since nirvana broke!

massive bullshit generalizations funneled into one specific reference so it'll ring "true".

no. i think it's extremely interesting to consider the commercial explosion of gentle, pastoral, nationalistic, nostalgic and overwhelmingly white indie pop in its larger national/political context. it's all but impossible to ignore the connections between 80s rural/small-town pop nationalism and reagan's "morning in america", so it doesn't absurd to draw similar connections wr2 the indie culture of the 00s.

fwiw the year High Fidelity came out i was downloading Kid A on Napster and discussing it on AIM with Ryan Schreiber

(losing my edge joke)

RichBeck Richard Beck
Now an assistant editor for @nplusonemag. That essay/story/thing that's been on your hard drive forever? Let me know about it!
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grunge lumberjack shit = ragged, smelly, "i don't give a fuck"

subsequent indie lumberjackin = neat, retro-50s, expensive

is that so

I really don't think that indie lumberjackin was 'a thing' in the same sense that grunge was 'a thing'