pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

and not xp

lol music as a hierarchy

the guy that is superior to petty conversations about p4k and who needs to obsessively establish his superiority to the thread that's been coating their monitors in spittle every time these guys cover something that is NOT MUSIC is really sticking it to people who obsess over petty conversations about p4k rn

Yeah, let's not act like these dudes on Reddit aren't bringing up some fair and valid criticism. Not in the most articulate or tasteful way, but they do make a few points.

the thread that's been coating their monitors in spittle every time these guys cover something that is NOT MUSIC is really sticking it to Reddit rn.

― Whiney G. Weingarten

yeah c'mon guys, pfork's explanation of why they cover "stranger things" was perfectly logical, coherent, and reasonable. what right do we have, really, to call out a site packed to the gills with white supremacists?

confirmed

wow how is ian cohen still this much of a meme to redditors?

fuckin seriously reddit, THIS HERE IS HOW YOU INTERROGATE P4K!! fuckin poseurs do you see the date on the OP in this thread it is MARCH 31 2002!!

p sure ILM was fighting with pitchfork back in 2000 tbh

shit, cat

Oh wow

The changing of scores though is a legit question I want answered too. If they edit a score they should at least leave a note of the previous score and a reason for changing it - well maybe just the previous score as I suppose every edit would be 'we were wrong this sucks/rules'

The changing of scores though is a legit question I want answered too.

you're in luck!

Changing grades/stars/points upon reflection is a pretty common thing--see the Rolling Stone record guides, the Source awarding retroactive 5 mics etc. The reason seems pretty obvious.

Are we talking about altering scores on old reviews, or publishing a new review with a new score? If they publish a new review with a new score, there's nothing wrong with that. Likewise, Rolling Stone album guides come in editions, which are expected to be updated. It's different if it amounts to misrepresenting their prior opinions.

But does Pitchfork even do that? What's an example?

P4K will sometimes change it if they review reissues of an album they reviewed in the past. If it's a new review I agree with the practice, but changing scores of old reviews seems like cheating... it also changes the context of the review no? If they give an album a 7 and the review is bashing several aspects of the album and its suddenly changed to 8.5 it can be confusing.

like voter fraud score changing happens way less often than you're suggesting

unless the russians hacked pfork

Deleted and changed reviews Edit
Pitchfork has been criticized for deleting older reviews from their archive in an effort to keep up with the changing trends in indie music.[29][30][31][32] One such example is the 9.5/10 review written for ska band Save Ferris' album It Means Everything.[33][34] Similarly, the original review of Psyence Fiction by Unkle received 9.8, but the review was later deleted[35] and when the group released their next album four years later, the website gave it a score of 5 and described it as an improvement on their debut, calling Psyence Fiction "one of the most anti-climactic and jaw-dropping disappointments of recent years" which "came up short on little things like, oh, vitality, restraint, emotional resonance, and tunes."[36]

Negative reviews of two By Divine Right albums were also removed from Pitchfork after members Brendan Canning and Leslie Feist became successful with the band Broken Social Scene and their own solo work. Steven Byrd's deleted review of By Divine Right's Bless This Mess, on which Canning and Feist play bass and guitar, went so far as to compare the band to "retard(s) with a guitar" who "wouldn't know Rock and Roll if she broke into their house and beat up their children," rating the album 1.8.[37] After Belle and Sebastian's "comeback" in the mid-to-late 2000s, Pitchfork removed their .8 review of The Boy with the Arab Strap from the site.[38][39] The reviewer lambasted the band for writing songs that were "so sticky they should be hanging from Ben Stiller's ear, and I don't mean that in a good way."[40] Pitchfork originally gave the Flaming Lips album Zaireeka a scathing 0 in a review that also derided all Flaming Lips fans.[41]

Pitchfork has also removed the 9.4 review for the album Things Fall Apart by The Roots.[42] They also removed the 1998 review of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, which initially received an 8.7.[43] Schreiber's review of the John Coltrane album Live! at the Village Vanguard was deleted after attaining notoriety for its supposedly poor writing and alleged racist stereotypes,[44] particularly in the lines, "It's like a dream I had: I floated on the River Nile, smokin' some fresh weed, relaxin'. But I ain't ever gonna see the Nile anyhow."[45] Additionally, Schreiber's original 7.5 review of a reissue of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which criticized the album for being dated and passe compared to more modern albums like OK Computer, was later removed.[46]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitchfork_(website)

Those are all examples of deleted reviews, not score changes.

lmao i never knew about this one, new hood classic

Some bands can pull off this kind of flippancy, but when you're walking that thin line between "talented musician" and "retard with a guitar" like these guys are, that lack of effort shows.

Allmusic changes scores all the time.

the original review of Psyence Fiction by Unkle received 9.8, but the review was later deleted[35] and when the group released their next album four years later, the website gave it a score of 5 and described it as an improvement on their debut, calling Psyence Fiction "one of the most anti-climactic and jaw-dropping disappointments of recent years"

continuity error by the P4K bot who writes all the reviews

That Coltrane review peeked my interest and I can see why they deleted it... it's all written in some sort of jive talk

https://web.archive.org/web/20040810064854/www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/c/coltrane_john/live-at-the-village-vanguard.shtml

Piqued not peeked

Those are all examples of deleted reviews, not score changes.

They gave In the Aeroplane a 10.0 when it was reissued, though.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5758-in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea/

it's all written in some sort of jive talk

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e3e270e4b0ad2a423bd11c/t/54ea62e7e4b0b080e15e843a/1424646888072/

reissues are a means by which... all publications revise their opinions about records over time?

Oh, I thought that's what we were talking about. Was someone claiming that Pitchfork was retroactively making up new reviews for old albums and backdating them?

i'm pretty sure they removed all reviews before 2000 many years ago, for good reason it seems

i think moka's referring to arbitrary score-changing based on a record's reputation improving within like, a few months. the only instance of this happening ever i think is sufjan stevens' greetings from michigan

Parts of that Coltrane review are a parody of Clockwork Orange, which was written in an invented teenage argot.

the reddit post specifically singles out sun kil moon's universal themes as an example of score-changing but the subtext of that complaint seems to be "you gave a mediocre mark kozelek record a mediocre score just bc you cucks respect women"

"Droogs" is the only thing that sounds like it's from Clockwork Orange in the Coltrane review to me, and that's a damn weird thing for him to throw in there. Are there other allusions?

They also changed Gas - Pop apparently from 10 to 9 according to that pedantic redditor. Too lazy to go through the archive

Coltrane review:
It was me and my four droogs. Them bein' Peter, Georgio and Dim; Dim being really Dim.

Opening sentence of Burgess' Clockwork Orange:

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

droogsplaining

Cool, thanks, Ward. I still don't get what the point was of referencing Clockwork Orange in that review.

this thread has gotten Reddit-level bad this morning

Gonna be capn-save-a-fork and say I hope every single person on ILX understands that A) it's achingly obvious, completely understandable and even a little empathy-inducing why 100% of these reviews are changed and deleted. And I would HOPE that any human being making the transition from a college-aged minneapolis coltrane cosplayer and ska apologist to an adult new york media mogul multi-millionaire under the conde nast umbrella would have the common fucking sense to delete their shit too

and B) Deleting P4k reviews from the days when they were out here calling people retards and talking about slaying pussy should make you LAUGH and not make you ANGRY. Reddit/chan/wiki/RYM types spazzing out because an opinion on Andrew WK changed in the span of a DECADE is way, way, way, way more embarrassing than copping to "not understanding a record when it came out"

xpost No, nor me!

I understand what he did there but it's still weird how he shifts from being "Alex" from CO and he's suddenly doing whatever he's doing. If the whole review was written as a CO hommage it would still be a terrible idea that makes no sense in relation to Coltrane but it wouldn't be as unfortunate.

This thread is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

whiney otm some of you are fucking crazy

i mean a pitchfork writer posted that reddit garbage on facebook like "who even has the time to write this bullshit," and there were five comments in a row that were like "these are legitimate questions i want answered!!!!"

I wonder if Schreiber's seen the River Nile by now?

I just like laughing at old Pitchfork reviews.

But p4k is a team of writers... some people like those ones on reddit don't understand those implications. A critic can give an album 9 and it never make it on their EOY list or ever be mentioned again but that doesn't mean it should be deleted. Being ashamed of things you wrote is ok.

Agree with everything you're saying Whiney, but your superior style of posting is just as annoying at the reddit-lite fare that came before it.