pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Ah so <3 it was such a good magazine!!

thank you!! i miss it!!

it was indeed v unsustainable

i tried to make an archival website for maura mag two years ago but the web designer ghosted me about halfway through the process. if anyone here wants to help i have a very difficult to parse xml file and some money to offer

portugal. the man fans. over thanksgiving.

portugal, the man vs maura, the mag

I think every writer can get haters. I've had the drunk director posting a tirade on facebook about how I'm a psycho rapist, and the leader of the association of Danish cinemas sending me twitter messages late at night saying I should be put in a mental institution. Oh yeah, and a photographer talking about gathering a group of strong guys and getting me into a truck and making me see things a different way. I think the key is to write about feminism. politics, on ILX

― Frederik B, Thursday, April 25, 2019 12:47 AM (four hours ago)

the big difference is that musicians, at least at the level we are talking here, are generally paid way more than writers are, or at least have more gross if not net revenue

for instance, with the ariana grande thing just now, I am fairly certain she can make more in one day than I have in my entire life to date, and probably my entire upcoming life

actually, there are two major differences, the second being counterbalances. musicians in general get far more counterbalancing positive feedback than writers do (often, they get none)

This longish thread is worth reading.

I prefer criticism to fiction if only because I like to see the blueprints of things.

— in-house antiquarian (@apotrafied) April 24, 2019

...we’ve gotten to a point in mass art/ mass culture where three quarters of the things we’re being subjected to DON’T stand up on their own WITHOUT criticism.

It’s a point I keep returning to, but a number of works only become compelling because they’re given the intellectual veneer of importance by critics (some of whom were actually good) who were high on Barthes and poptimism.

Criticism became an extension of PR, and there was a period where we split the difference between craft, social implications, and “how the sausage was made”. A number of acts coasted by on people putting acts into a socio-political context that they *really* did not deserve.

Acts like Ariana Grande benefitted from a kind of “girls and queer kids love this stuff & it is oppressive to criticize their tastes”, and people mistook *brands* for the fans they represented, and we forgot that a lot of mass art & entertainment only works as a way to sell people a way OUT of the alienation, however temporarily.

It became more fun to *think* about these kinds of entities than it was to experience them. And the more *types* you can attract to a product, the more likely producers, execs, etc. are to invest.

this is a very strange thread to apply to ariana grande, whose music is generally well-crafted mariah carey pastiche and even at its worst ("7 Rings") cannot be described as "the compulsive repetition of one word over and over again" (as if that's even a bad thing by definition)

like, this is basically just the old "pop music sucks" argument dressed up a bit ,and you can tell because the entire argument falls apart if you do not take "this music has no value" as a given

don't worry we've already collectively as a culture determined that music has no value

I’m very interested in the ways that Feeling Things About Media has in some respects supplanted media in the digital age & what this means for the people who make a living doing both but that thread is a... suboptimal exploration of the topic

stick to jazz & metal, phil

ah, "socio-political context" again

Chris Brown Attacks Chvrches: “These Are the Type of People I Wish Walked In Front of a Speeding Bus”

was this really necessary

i generally assume Chris Brown hopes everyone he knows that isn't in his immediate entourage gets hit by a bus

I was intrigued by the specificity of the speeding bus being "full of mental patients"

Woodstock 50 Is Canceled, Unless It’s Not—Here’s Why

I thought you were writing a joke clickhole parody title based on something on the site but turns out it does say that exactly

that's a good headline

Woodstock 50 Is Canceled, Unless It’s Not—Here’s Why (or Why Not, and That's Okay)

fixed

Pitchfork is finally covering the law of excluded middle.

The Libertines’ Peter Doherty Hospitalized After Being Injured by a Hedgehog

^now, that’s a good headline!

Quite the news cycle for hedgehogs

There's a pretty hilarious piece of sponcon up today:

The Glorious Past and Promising Future of the RV

SPONSOR CONTENT GO RVING

This has probably already been done, but why are the Isley Brothers headlining the P4K festival?

gotta get those R. Kelly songs in there somehow

lol

the thing about pfork fest compared to other festivals is that it's remained pretty small and accessible (hasn't moved off it's small-ish site on the west side in years) & as such legitimately serves a local audience. you'd be surprised by the number of ppl who live in chicago and show up to pfork fest w/o knowing that there's a music review site of the same name, or with only the vaguest idea, or have heard of the site but don't ever read it. further -- and this is just a hypothesis based on having attended the festival a few times incl the year r kelly played -- is that part of the legacy of pfork booking r kelly is that it opened the festival to an audience of local black residents, esp older black ppl who, again, broadly speaking likely have no idea what pitchfork.com is all about. i think you can see this reflected in recent bookings incl isely bros, chaka kahn, raphael saddiq etc.

cuz funktimism!

Whether they're lip-syncing at this point is irrelevant— the Isley Brothers will be a good party. That's what matters at these outdoor festivals.

Chaka Khan was fucking great last year. No signs of slack. The Sunday-in-the-park crowd loved it and even the white people were, holy shit.

cosign on Chaka Khan absolutely *destroying* the Oakland Pride crowd almost ten years ago. never seen a more diverse, happy crowd just feeling ecstatic.

Looks like the Fork got all Sonic Youthed out overnight. I still don't understand the point of dishing out 9.8s.

I skimmed the EJST&NS piece — it’s all “historical context,” and says very little about the music.

Writing about music is hard.

there are all manner of guitars doing things that seemingly only Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo knew how to make them do. Buzz Bin-worthy single “Bull in the Heather” and “Skink” are Kim Gordon at her Kim Gordon-est

Lee and Thurston were doing Lee and Thurston stuff. Kim was being Kim. What more do you want? A sentence about Steve Shelley?

uh I thought "Bull in the Heather" did make Buzz Bin

"Lee and Thurston were doing Lee and Thurston stuff. Kim was being Kim. What more do you want? A sentence about Steve Shelley?"

Ha ha ha ha

steve shelley pounded his drums in trademark Steve Shelley-style

Kinda weird to me that in the review of Washing Machine there’s no mention of the title track, while “Junkie’s Promise” and a song from Dirty each get heir own paragraph.

Also - The song is sung by bass player Kim Gordon, who actually really speaks more than sings

Washing Machine review is painful. The album’s middle section is hit and miss, though the same could likely be said for all alternative rock records made in the mid-’90s

...On the other hand, reading a review of a guitar album written in this tone of clueless faux-professorial unearned authority on pitchfork dot com in 2019 makes me kind of nostalgic tbh

well i recognize some of the bylines from way back but how many of these reviewers are writing about records older than themselves

On the sequel to last year’s Eat My Pussy, the Chicago rapper’s songwriting is at times more brazen and at others more introspective.

this reads like satire

lol straight outta Fear of a Black Hat

The first thing I thought of when I saw that review was that "King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with his hit single "Goop on Ya Grinch" [7.6]" tweet.

I still don't understand the point of dishing out 9.8s.

Mathematical precision obv. Need more significant digits, though.

There is something kind of admirable about sincerely believing that the different in quality between Sister and Daydream Nation can be rendered as '0.2'. (Tbf it should be the other way around.)

*the difference