pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

oh yeah and not the country roger miller it was mission of burma roger miller, deep birdsongs of the mesozoic jam FUCKERS and then my vows were lecturing everyone about how eno left some really crucial no wave bands off No New York

Dudes my sister and her significant other played "This Will Be Our Year" at my wedding. By trying to avoid cliche we become cliche.

i fuckin played metal machine music on 8 track and everyone fuckin appluaded when i got married

j/k i'm unloavable no one will marry me

damn, i was hoping you and Treeship finally made it official

if only he would have me!

Maybe my experience is just different, but I feel like tons of music nerds are more than happy to dance to "Livin' on a Prayer" or "Brick House" or whatever at a wedding. I'm not putting on my critical thinking hat when I'm at a friend's wedding; the whole "will the people who mocked my road trip playlists judge me?" seemed like a comic level of over-thinking.

The main thing that's cleared dance floors at weddings I've attended is music people aren't familiar with.

bingo

outside of the 'special' songs, it's probably best to just let the DJ do her job, which in the case of a wedding is not really being a tastemaker. it's probably more just doing whatever's been successful lately.

just put on hot 97... and RIP THE KNOB OFF

The reviews for the Butterz Fabriclive CD and to a lesser degree the Hyperdub 10 year anniversary comp are pretty bad.

From the former:

"[Elijah & Skilliam] peddle a distinctly UK sound" as opposed to what, a distinctly American grime sound?

"It's difficult to imagine dancing to much of Fabriclive 75, but it is party music, better suited for having some beers and bouncing around than getting stoned in your living room." huh?

"In retrospect, it's obvious why grime MCs never made good hip-hop records: these guys are inveterate shit-talkers, not storytellers."

Why get a writer who appears to not know much about a certain type of music, why have them review it?

p4k is always so terrible on uk dance, lmao @ kicking it off with a reynolds nod. useless

the universally acknowledged dearth of shit-talking in american rap

That Reynolds quote is actually v. interesting. "Instrumental music goes international so much easier" - true? I thought the Streets drew a decent crowd in the US mainly because of how blimey-guv it all was, but I could be totally wrong about that.

IIRC no one outside of ILX/Brooklyn actually knows anything about The Streets

he had a number one single over here, guv

when was the last time the streets did a us tour? 2009?

it's kinda like novelty music for yanks. like dizzee rascal. or the sleaford mods. people are amused by it for a while but i don't think they listen to it beyond its sell by date. it's a fresh new thing that people forget about. (too early to tell about sleaford mods obviously.)

(speaking of which, it's criminal that The Streets charted higher in the US than Dizzee Rascal)

"Instrumental music goes international so much easier" - true?

within a specific niche maybe, but it's a niche which is defined by its localism in the first place. right now british pop acts are breaking america surprisingly regularly

an autechre reissue series would do REALLY well in the united states. if anyone from Warp is reading this thread.

From today's review of the new Roots album:

Their last album started with a neck-kicking snare and closed with a 40-minute, four-movement wordless jazz suite; it sold about 35k in its first week.

Uh, it ended with a 4-minute jazz suite. The entire album was 38-minutes. A small typo, but a pretty crucial one that really misrepresents the previous album.

how does a snare drum kick someone's neck

when it's like a whip lash

copyright 1987 laffy taffy inc

Genie: "Oi! Ten thousand snares will give you such a kick in the neck."

Their last album started with a neck-kicking snare and closed with a four-movement wordless jazz suite; it sold about 35k in its first week. Around the same time, the Roots backed Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, who played their Bruno Mars-assisted single "Young Wild & Free", from the execrable 2012 stoner movie Mac and Devin. The soundtrack debuted in the Top 10.

not only is this kind of a hollow false binary but it's also incorrect. Undun did 48k the first week and charted higher than the Mac & Devin soundtrack, which sold 38k the first week.

Also, they backed Snoop and Wiz as part of their job on Late Night, right? Nothing I've seen indicates that they are on the studio track.

I guess they should have realized that movie was execrable and refused to back the show's musical goest on principle.

Obviously still a hollow false binary, even if they were on the track, but just more evidence of what a stretch that passage is.

What is up with them referring to "Jon Richman" in the Priests review today?

"punk progenitor Jon Richman" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22jon+richman#q=%22jon+richman%22

partial Jon Richman discography:
Jon Sings!
Jon Goes Country
I, Jon
Surrender To Jon

After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop, 1986's C86 compilation is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs have been assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes.

officially canonized in the compilation's canon

The Guardian recently [published? presented? wrote?] a piece titled “C86: The myths about the NME’s indie cassette debunked”

if you go through for typos you're basically one of those cranks who reads the New York Times front-to-back every day and writes a strongly worded letter about every spelling mistake

i don't go through for typos. i notice the ones i can't help noticing, and sometimes find it funny, since it's a pretty stuck up, self-important place

I write letters to PF every day about putting commas and periods after endquotes.

me too. it's the dangling participles that really get me

When lines like these pop up on the record, I find myself chuckling, sometimes laughing out loud, which might seem anachronistic on an album about sadness.
Wait, so people were sad before they learned to laugh? Or does Mark Richardson just not know what the word 'anachronistic' means?

'Creating a semi-fictional delivery system for your creative ideas is nothing new, but few have had Del Rey’s commitment to the idea...' Oh come now, even Ziggy Stardust hung around for two albums... and that's in your second of three consecutive paragraphs dealing with (the we don't actually give a fuck) question of the authenticity of Lana Del Rey.

I feel like I could type forever about "how I wish men would write about not-men". Clauses like: "you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant" really grate on me, the writer presuming to speak on behalf of a large group. I want to underline "many people" and ask "who?" because as far as I know, everybody fucking loves LDR. Plus the deliberately unsympathetic connotation of the word "repellant", this is coded abuse.

Other than that, I was prepared to hate that review but thought generally it was OK. She inhabits such the Marilyn trope so wholly that many people I trust and respect seem unable to conceive that she is doing so willingly. Kind of a cool Gordian knot, really, "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap" turned into "it takes a lot of commitment to appear so inauthentic". Mark Richardson wrote well about it imo

also, it's spelled "repellent", not "repellant"

Clauses like: "you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant" really grate on me, the writer presuming to speak on behalf of a large group. I want to underline "many people" and ask "who?" because as far as I know, everybody fucking loves LDR.

otm, richardson is generally a good writer imo but i can't stand it when writers assume internet/blog chatter about some artist to be the defining narrative of his/her work. lana del rey's music isn't really for me but regardless i don't really give a fuck that some music bloggers were shitting on her for not being authentic? it's the same kind of spirit (constant references to bullshit on the web) when pitchfork reviewers have links in every other sentence to fluffy p4k news articles and minor twitter beefs.

the LDR backlash wasn't just some music bloggers going on about her authenticity. like her appearance on SNL was reviled. there was a massive "wtf is this" reaction to her first album, and i think relegating that to "internet/blog chatter" is sort of missing the point. especially since the review is pretty well geared towards convincing people that were sure there was nothing in them from LDR that maybe there is after all.

i mean at this point all criticism is just internet chatter before we die anyway but i did check metacritic for born to die and it revealed yeah there was a large _critical_ spread of opinion that mark was responding to. what else is he supposed to respond to -- the album as a cultural artifact with no context? or just like interview people on the street about it until he hits a sufficiently large sample size?

what's the difference between a blog and a review in a major pub now, views-wise? is there one? (either way born to die got panned in both, so..)

what even is a blog, anyway

I like that Lana del Rey review. Does Mark Richardson post here? I seem to remember him doing so.

Yeah, I'm with s.clover. The backlash wasn't restricted to Hipster Runoff - there was a widespread desire to take her down, from Twitter to most US critics. Most of her 7 million albums were sold outside the US so it's reasonable to frame a review on a US website in those terms. I think the review's generally OTM.