pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I disagree strongly with those premises. "The era’s glorification of wealth and greed"? More so than hip-hop in the go-go '90s? And what makes this (solid) album an example of innovation in the Suzanne Vega era?

Yeah, one could make the same statements about, say, Graceland, a big hit album released a year prior to Tracy Chapman, and which lands at #49 on the 1980s list (Pitchfork hasn’t given that LP the retrospective treatment, tho its expanded reissue got a 9.2 in 2012: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16843-graceland-25th-anniversary-edition/).

(The only reason I’m playing Pitchfork Police here is that the Chapman album felt like one of the more notable omissions on the 1980s list, and the 9.4 rating shows they rate it highly, so...?)

Tracy Chapman gets a 9.4 in today’s retrospective review, yet it was not among Pfork’s “Best 200 Albums of the 1980s”: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracy-chapman-tracy-chapman/

Meanwhile — to pull a semi-random example of an album that is on the Top 200 list, and which has also been retroactively reviewed by Pfork in the past year — Raw Like Sushi only received an 8.0: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-raw-like-sushi/

Two great albums, one rated higher than the other... yet only the lower-rated one made the Top 200 list. Is it b/c Tracy Chapman doesn’t meet the criteria of being “influential”?:

But Tracy Chapman didn’t change the course of a Top 40 ecosystem in tune with the era’s glorification of wealth and greed. Rather, the album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it.
― i stan corrected (morrisp), Sunday, January 20, 2019 4:55 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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make it so

?

oh man did you guys know that if you type ‘what does’ into google one of the first autocompletes is ‘what does sb mean’?

man wow that Tracy Chapman review is ridiculous

We didn't talk much about Saturday's Kate Bush reviews (outside of Carr's problematic characterization of Bush as "queer"), but I found this bit, from her review of The Dreaming striking:

Then there’s “The Dreaming,” a parable of a real, historical, and contemporary group of Aboriginal people as timeless, noble savages in a tragically ruined Eden that lectures the center of empire about their (our) political and environmental violence. Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent over a thicket of exotic animal sounds, both holdovers from music hall and vaudeville’s racist “ethnic humor” tradition, a kind of distancing that suggests that settler Australians are somehow less civilized and thus more responsible for their white supremacist beliefs than the Empire that shipped them there in the first place. In telling this story in this way—without accurate depictions of people, and without credit, understanding, monetary remuneration, proper cultural context, or employment of indigenous musicians—she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. As a rich text to meditate on colonial, racial, and sexual violence, it is actually quite useful—but not in the way Bush intended.

My favourite song on the album (and one of my top 3 or so Bush tunes overall), I'm curious as to how I'll hear it from now on.

like it's weird how it promotes the "out of nowhere" narrative, ignoring, say, the context of Joan Armatrading as a precedent or Michelle Shocked and K.D. Lang as contemporaries

xps

also it's just... not a good album? The most memorable thing about Fast Car is the lick that's lifted from John Cougar Mellencamp, and lots of the record is suuuuuuper-clunky lyrically

the joan armatrading revival cant come soon enough though i guess it’s just as likely to never come lol

walk under ladders is at least a 9.4

Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent

literally just learnt that this is what she's supposedly doing here

the joan armatrading revival cant come soon enough though i guess it’s just as likely to never come lol

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Monday, January 21, 2019

check her out her very-1986 album!

Is that the one with all the Peter Gabriel folks on it?

I guess a lot of them have Peter Gabriel folks on them. Jerry Marotta, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Manu Katche ...

walk under ladders is at least a 9.4

agree

wait which JCM song does Fast Car rip

"Suckin' on a Chili Dog (Slight Return)"

the "Fast Car" guitar lick/chord progression has always sounded to me like it was lifted from the acoustic line in the verse of "Jack and Diane"

eh there's some similarity to say lifted is a bit much

also fast car is like 10X better of a song

^agreed

ok yeah I hear that, but it's only half of the riff and it's an insert that only occurs a couple times

THIS is the version of Fast Car to worry about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJWxkYu8WgU

always glad to see that video surface again

eh there's some similarity to say lifted is a bit much

also fast car is like 10X better of a song

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:56 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg that jim o'rourke thing is great

lol I love how he doesn't even play the riff himself, he just loops the intro to the song and sings over it before going bananas in MaxMSP or something for 20 minutes.

If Pitchfork goes behind a paywall I will scream a scream that cracks heaven and pass through all the known realms to fight God himself https://t.co/80uMMelnim

— Jeremy Gordon (@jeremypgordon) January 23, 2019

Oh boy

lmao no one will read it

So as someone who still relies on Pitchfork as my primary daily source of reviews and recommendations, what alternative would folks suggest if this comes to pass?

Why not pay for something that is your "primary daily source of reviews and recommendations"?

I dunno, paywalls are psychologically hard to accept. The internet's all about paths of least resistance.

The link about putting content behind paywalls is behind a paywall for me.

maybe it won’t apply to pfrok since it’s not in print?

lmao no one will read it

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, January 23, 2019 10:19 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah otm lol. won’t take em long to figure this out

what kinda geniuses they got working up in there anyway

This article says each product will feature a different type of paywall: https://fashionista.com/2019/01/conde-nast-paywall-vogue-gq
I have a hard time believing the review section of Pitchfork can work with a paywall, but hey, perhaps now we know why seemingly all of editorial has resigned recently?

They resigned becuz they had buyout deals, this is not a mystery

xps the criticism of "The Dreaming" in that review seemed otm to me though i'd never thought about it before or realised that's what was with the bizarre voice she used on that song and i'm australian. i can appreciate Bush's intentions in criticising destruction of indigenous lands etc. but the execution seems naive and clumsy at best and isn't really defensible.

i don't really hear "aural Orientalism" in "Pull Out the Pin"'s sound effects though, the crickets combined with the helicopter sounds just seem to emphasise the vietnam war setting?

lol at the paywall - i can't really see it being successful for them when there's so many other sites offering functionally identical content

Like, the terms of conde nast’s buyout probably included a provision requiring senior staff to stay on board for a certain amount of time before they would get all their money. Thats how these things usually work ime

Xps

i can appreciate Bush's intentions in criticising destruction of indigenous lands etc. but the execution seems naive and clumsy at best and isn't really defensible.

I agree with this, however I can't get with this line from the review: she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. Exactly the same thing!

yeah it's not like they get nothing—they get to be in a song

tbf Bush songs have rendered thousands of acres of land unusable

seemingly all of editorial has resigned recently

if this is true then i'm unaware of it? what tea leaves are you reading fred

I was just referring to Richardson and Schreiber, who I assume got money from the buyout

yeah that's p common