pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

did scott just compare the Pitch to Street Sheet

xp yes that was my intended point - the responsibility is with the editorial function as a whole

imo we all just need to start saying HOOSTEESIA social

i think the pitch overall is a good addition to the site, even if much of it is very bad though. i think it is cool to have this loose informal place with lots of new writers, many of them fairly young. never really got a sense that the pitch is ruining the "pitchfork brand" or whatever, to me it seems like a place given over to individual writers to talk about often very personal stuff about their relationships to music, or maybe just like half-formed thoughts (which is part of the fault of the pitch too, even the best posts tend to be a little scant). idk about reader demographics but i'd guess too that the pitch has improved or continued p4k's relevance among younger readers, seems kind of wise tbh to have this place on the site where they can run stuff like that while doing the more "official" stuff elsewhere on the site e.g. reviews or features. the regular features section or BNM seems like more of the "branded" official p4k stuff, e.g. the "official" interview w/ whoever.

Yeah, but doesn't that create the "this doesn't really count/matter, it's just The Pitch" feeling discussed above by Katherine and others? I think if you're going to run this kind of hyper-earnest I've-just-discovered-racism-and-must-teach-the-others stuff, you ought to give it the same amount of editing and polishing you give everything else. (Which editing admittedly isn't as rigorous as it could be - there are plenty of typos and grammatical fuckups in the reviews and features.)

Yes, there's a sense in which it's a romper room where Pitchfork exiles nettlesome thoughts about gender, sexuality, etc.

yea i won't argue that it could use a little editing

hyper-earnest I've-just-discovered-racism-and-must-teach-the-others

tbf most of the writing on racism/social justice in the pitch is by people of color afaict and many of those pieces draw from the writers' personal histories of being discriminated against

I like katherine's "glass platform" idea. The Pitch's non-editing invites young, engaged writers to tackle tricky topics and then throws them to the wolves, in the process adding to the pile of lousy writing about those topics, thus doing a disservice to the writers, the readers AND discussion or race, gender and sexuality in music.

I think "hyper-earnest I've-just-discovered-racism-and-must-teach-the-others stuff" might be the synonym I'm looking for. Bit long though.

"sanctimonious," "condescending," "didactic" etc all work. if the problem is that shorthand making clear you're talking about liberals keeps being stolen by people who would use it less judiciously...well...

'sophomoric misdirected political earnestness'

i think marcos is on point btw. on the whole the pitch feels like an overdue corrective and better reflective of what people are looking for from an alt music publication! you can criticize the execution of certain pieces but i think the direction of the pitch generally is good

not sure whether I coined "glass platform" but it's fitting, I keep thinking of the ones in videogames that break or fall

"Sanctimony" works if your looking to actually critique an aspect of the work rather than razz people to the left of you

― da croupier, Thursday, October 1, 2015 9:05 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty sure there's a left critique of "SJW" or whatever you want to call it -- slacktivism, social-media activism, whatever. that is, the critique isn't necessarily from "the right" or "the center."

see e.g. adolph reed

the critique i always see is college professors writing about how they are scared of their students. which gets boring after awhile cuz everyone already knows that college professors are boring and college kids are annoying.

there should be a "hangry" type adjective that covers both of those
bornnoying

my wife is going through this big nightmare with college kids now and it sounds horrible and i'm glad i'm not in her shoes. though i do have to hear about it a lot. college radio turmoil. it's a bloodbath.

Do tell! We endured grueling college radio turmoil last fall.

ugh, it's a very long story. but it does involve a lot of au courant political stuff.

http://dailycollegian.com/2015/09/29/wmua-community-members-look-to-administration-against-student-leadership/

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/volunteers_at_troubled_wmua_as.html

http://www.gazettenet.com/news/townbytown/amherst/18746942-95/umass-amherst-chancellor-responds-to-petition-delivered-by-community-members-of-wmua-radio-station

(it's a student -vs- community volunteer battle. in the latest salvo, on the new fall schedule all the most vocal critics of the students - it's a student-run station - had their shows moved to 4 a.m.)

Just clicked the first link and came back to say that Kumble Subbaswamy is an awesome name.

i went to college in the late 90s and the shit that went down (and was quickly forgotten) would probably fuel a million twitter wars today.

i mean at the radio station in particular

why was Shea fired? sexual harassment?

i went to college in the late 90s and the shit that went down (and was quickly forgotten) would probably fuel a million twitter wars today.

ditto

the students claimed.....a lot of stuff. none of which has gone anywhere. the consensus among community members is that they just didn't like having him around. so they got rid of him. and they got rid of the student advisor who had been there for decades. it will end in lawsuits. the students REALLY want the station to be a CMJ-style indie rock station. and the WMUA charter is not about that at all. it's been a completely free-form non-commercial station forever. to be reductive, the kids don't want to deal with the olds at all.

x-post

the community/student thing was a little fraught at my school, too, and as programming director (for two years anyway) i tried my best to mediate.

on the one hand, the students were--with some exceptions--about as callow and immature as you'd expect 20-year-olds to be, and some of them definitely shouldn't have been entrusted w/ leadership of an institution like a radio station.

some of the community DJs had been around for decades and in many ways they were the carriers of the institutional memory. some of them; others really just came in, did their show, and left without so much as saying "hi." at times i was inclined to challenge the sense of entitlement some of the long-time community DJs seemed to have developed. on the other hand i respect that they had loyal audiences who didn't want the shows to be moved around.

the big shitshow was when i didn't include college football games as part of our programming schedule because the athletic department didn't bother to actually fill out the form to apply.

i think it's really important to have a university employee--someone who's been around for a while--as a kind of bridge between students and longtime community DJs. you need someone from the university community who knows the station and can carry that institutional memory, since students by definition are around for a few years (at most) and then leave. even basic things like knowing when/how to fill out our FCC license-renewal application were made difficult because nobody had done it before.

what is this thread about again?

the students claimed.....a lot of stuff. none of which has gone anywhere. the consensus among community members is that they just didn't like having him around. so they got rid of him. and they got rid of the student advisor who had been there for decades. it will end in lawsuits. the students REALLY want the station to be a CMJ-style indie rock station. and the WMUA charter is not about that at all.

we've been dealing with this for years. We employ student volunteers and paid student directors who pay nominal attention to the thousands of other students who pay fees towards the station. Whenever we reminded them of obligations, they accused us of trying to get'em to sell out. "Selling out" in this case is...playing their music at museum and ratskellar events? idk

I use the "guys, I'm a freelance music critic" card as much as I can

(i think my position was made easier by the fact that i was never all that into indie rock, and i was sympathetic to the diversity that the community DJs brought to the mix... reggae, gospel, oldies, folk, etc. stuff most of the students didn't bother with.)

college station deejays are a reaaaaallly insular bunch. Unlike our newspaper students, the deejays actively want to withdraw from campus life and anything related to college. Hence why we had so many deejays who stayed at the station years after graduating (or never graduating). We changed our bylaws last year and it's helped clear much of the bad air.

our campus newspaper made a huge deal about being independent of the university and university funding but I wouldn't say they actively wanted to withdraw

just to bring this discussion (almost) full circle

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wesleyan-newspaper-black-lives-matter_5602f1efe4b0fde8b0d0f40d

there's some seriously illiberal campus-activism BS that can be easily critiqued from any political position btw

We thought about going indie for a while but this is a commuter university in a major urban environment; we never had the ad rate necessary to do it. Now lots of colleagues around the country who helped make their papers independent are in serious trouble.

the biggest shows on WMUA are the weekend polka shows. and they are consistently the biggest money-makers when it comes to donations. by, like, a BIG margin. tens of thousands of dollars a year that goes to the station. and these students have alienated them too. and they are the nicest people you will ever meet. they have a world-wide audience. they don't need this kinda stuff. they are total pros.

ha, Maria was all about that Wesleyan story. that's her alma mater.

...and mine :)

she went to school with the guy who did Mad Men. though i don't think they knew each other well. and johnny temple from girls -vs- boys. i will just never get over the fact that alvin lucier was her music teacher. hipster cred for days!

matthew weiner is a wesleyan alum?

hey alvin lucier... and anthony braxton.

Really cool stories way more informative than anything I've seen on pitchfork in a long time.

Honestly was more like "kids still do that?" than "kids today!" about this college radio stuff. I thought they'd all be podcasting their vines, not squabbling with the olds over what's on ye olde dial

Still feel frazzled thinkin bout four hour meetings at the ol alma mater

at the end of the afternoon when your work day should be ending and they're getting out of bed

ha i still mostly keep college-student hours, i just work a lot more

Discovered recently some bullshit in-studio fight with communication dept profs I barely remembered from my time 15 years ago has been chronicled like The Shot Heard Around The World on Wikipedia, with new students played recordings of the affair so they can realize their debt. College radio is mental.

that's a bummer -- i liked having the olds at my college radio station ... so many of them definitely had better shows than anything the kids were doing. i'm sure there was a little tension there, but i can't remember any real conflicts.

Ime a knowing, wise community elder can often be a naive, self-righteous student who stuck around town.