pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i remember watching MTV in 2003-2004 and seeing tons of videos during the afternoon.

Cash the man was country. But he was maybe more a ... folk artist?

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, April 9, 2018 11:00 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean like to me, stylistically most of his classic stuff is either really idiosyncratic rockabilly or basically folk music (ira hayes, man in black etc)...

he's really apart from i guess what i consider the main line of country descended from acuff/rose/hank sr/ernest tubb etc, whereas i feel like willie or merle or george jones are way more from that tradition of honky tonk

i think you trade in your "folk artist" card when they give you your own tv show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVu78DSovhI

Honky Tonk is only one strain of country music though. (And Gospel is way more important in country than people like to admit.) Cash was accepted and influential within Country music. (Where do guys like Roger Miller and Marty Robbins and Merle Travis slot in, exactly?) As recently as 10 years ago you had Josh Turner rise to country stardom with a Cash throwback image and sound.

stylistically most of his classic stuff is either really idiosyncratic rockabilly or basically folk music

Most of the classic Sun artists/recordings were 'marketed' as country, and recognised as such - rockabilly is really an after-the-fact genre, a bit like film noir. This is a good feature on Elvis' country roots, a lot of which equally applies to Cash:

http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-country-music.html

I was thinking of checking out "Wild Wild Country" last night but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Today Pitchfork posted a headline about it and I no longer want to watch this show.

It's pretty good, but not perfect. Check it out. There's a whole thread about it.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/captain-beefheart-and-his-magic-band-trout-mask-replica/

wrong thread, but at least PF made me smile with it's opening line, which i freudian-slippery misread as 'Though it's hard to listen to' .

I take issue with the idea that Zappa basically let things roll in the production. There are some very specific things he did that intensify the murk and confusion of the tracks, and add to the overall weirdness of the album vs various similar follow ups. I was amazed to hear the instrumental demos and hear how clear and crisp they were vs the final product. A lot of this is down to Zappa doing stuff like taping big chunks of cardboard to the drums and cymbals to muffle them, and making it so Beefheart couldn't properly hear the backing tracks when recording vocals so that the singing was somewhat out of sync.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/built-to-spill-perfect-from-now-on/

of course the same jerk that panned the new Andrew W.K. bc he was highly skeptical of all the "empty platitudes" is jacking off all over himself for generic 90s indie rock

The instinct to say something seemed so obvious that to just not somehow felt like a political decision, a meta-commentary on what it means to lead a band and manage the dynamic between performer and whoever you’re performing for.

haven't read that review but built to spill is a good band

hard to think of a record with more quality hooks than keep it like a secret, for instance

But there’s also something aspirational about being labeled “classic rock”—about wanting to make something that could both iconically represent a specific time and become unstuck from it.

unless you are Andrew W.K., then you are merely a poser wallowing in "mindless 1988-ass arena pablum"

i've tried to listen to Built to Spill. it's generic and boring indie rock. Keep It Like a Secret made me fall asleep the one time i heard it.

"generic 90s indie rock" is both v wrong and half-right bc they helped shape what "90s indie rock" sounded like

xp

first time i heard Keep It Like a Secret i literally fell asleep halfway through

thanks i didn't get it the first time

man ned fell asleep right in the middle of a godspeed show, you need to step your hater game up

Adam, does that mean that you haven't heard Perfect from Now On? It's just really good post-Neil Young guitar jams. I listen to it and Built to Spill Caustic Resin all the time but I don't listen to other BtS albums nearly as much. Not for everyone, of course.

Admittedly, I didn't make it all the way through either this review or the Andrew WK review.

It’s not a badly written piece. Could have stood to end a few paragraphs before it does.

Perfect From Now On is better than almost every Neil Young album tbh

i love perfect from now on, so i'll always take the time to read about it. the piece doesn't quite capture what i love about it, but then again, i've always had a hard time explaining it too.

The record doesn’t sound like 1997 or 1967; it and [sic] exists to get lost in, to make you want to carve out some time to get lost.

have to disagree with this, though, and the general thrust of the review that the album is timeless. martsch's voice is clearly post-nasal revolution, and the production clearly puts it in the 90s. the fact that it's an intricate, patient guitar-based rock album with no attempts at a single, no gimmicky video, and lots of people cared about means it can't be from the last 10 years.

it sounds exactly like 1997, and it's all the better for it

there's nothing wrong with sounding '97

this otoh was a great reissue review
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21096-theres-nothing-wrong-with-love/

have to say i'm sick to death of writers discussing radiohead in reviews about unrelated albums by unrelated bands. do you really need to write a whole paragraph comparing perfect from now on to ok computer just cause they came out in the same year? there was a stereogum retrospective on portishead's third last week that did the same thing.

radiohead is a great band, but not the goddamn ur-text to which all music should be compared.

Well it is Pitchfork so....

Perfect from Now On is a great record that sounds very much of its time. Not that it is easy but that review really doesn't do a good job capturing its attributes. Keep It Like a Secret is/was easier to review, because you could always put it in the context of its predecessors, but Perfect? It's a tough nut to crack. Definitely nothing to do with Radiohead, though, so wtf.

people's obsession with this weird idea that some records are magically "timeless" or that for some unexplained reason not sounding of a certain time period is a designation of quality is mystifying to me.

i would argue the opposite, i like the fact that a son house or robert johnson record or sgt. peppers or run-dmc or whatever records are very much of a certain world and time and place

Yeah that paragraph of the review was kind of an "unforced error."

really confused by the dirty computer review which makes basically no judgement of the record's quality in any way but gives it a lower than expected score

Well, it uses the word 'we' too much.

Captain Ahab pic.twitter.com/iitgrp6cWs

— popular comedy account “the pixelated boat” (@pixelatedboat) April 28, 2018

I was actually glad it didn't get the instant-classic coronation I was expecting tbh (though it's happened to plenty of worse or less interesting records)

lmao @ that comic

x-post: Yeah, too few songs about the working class. And not a single one on M4A! 7,7.

Adam, does that mean that you haven't heard Perfect from Now On? It's just really good post-Neil Young guitar jams

i will give them a shot again one of these days. this does sound like a good time. mostly i was mad at the guy for a different review he did.

didn't mean to crap so much on BTS, it's just tiring reading what-does-this-mean-for-the-narrative based rock crit. its like the Weekend at Bernies of rockism.

just tell me what the record is like. what it sounds like. yeah provide some context in the intro but don't make the entire thing context. does anyone seriously go back and read articles written in the 90s about the Beach Boys and their place in rock history? no because it is irrelevant to us now. time marches on. in 10 years nobody will care and the entirety of the review will be irrelevant.

really confused by the dirty computer review which makes basically no judgement of the record's quality in any way but gives it a lower than expected score

― ufo, Tuesday, May 1, 2018 12:25 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Of course I wrote about Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer. Fun fact: Writers don't get to choose the album score or Best New Music, so please keep those grievances out of my mentions. I loved the album and admire Monáe tremendously. https://t.co/DmFbxbtb0f

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) May 1, 2018

damn, shout out to rahawa breaking kayfabe

If I were hired to write about an album I loved I would be pretty fucking annoyed if they slapped their own score on top of it, is this a standard practice?

it's always been the practice at pitchfork afaik

which explains all the time the review seems more enthusiastic than the score

I always thought that was the case! Always bothered me when P4k came out with an unambiguously positive review of an album I liked but would then slap a "5.9" on it

wow, that's pretty crazy. I kinda want them to address that, because as an album that specifically deals with being a black queer woman, it seems quite disturbing that it was downgraded by the very white and male p4k editorial staff.

That is hilariously, wtf bonkers as an editorial practice.

Is that how it works at RS, Spin, etc?

not the biggest surprise, people are always saying "p4k gave it a 9.3" not "Jayson Greene gave it a 9.3" anyway

I disapprove of rating albums on a scale from 0 to 100 but I would probably defend the editors' right to choose the rating

xp they have addressed it, in a reddit ama iirc, but didn't exactly specify how many people weigh in on a score. it's bs

I can understand editors wanting to “consult” – so they can balance out the writer’s preferred rating against all other ratings in the mag’s history, or whatever – but not just assign a rating without the writer’s input (if that is in fact how it works).