348,294,718. This critic’s take: Chief Keef is a thick-tongued, mush-mouthed rapper with little grace and stilted flow who stumbles through generic, unimaginative, frequently plodding and numbingly repetitive backing tracks bragging with little imagination and forced conviction about his bad-ass self and utter disregard for anyone else in the universe. The cynicism is bottomless; in his view, one either exploits his own community or is one of the exploited. “I’m laughing to the bank/Ha, ha, ha/I’m laughing at the slave’s life/Ha, ha, ha,” he raps. His attempts to shock with exaggerated tales of senseless violence were old decades ago, as noted earlier, already transparent by the time N.W.A lost Ice Cube and its political edge and gave us nothing but empty gangsta porn on Niggaz4Life in 1991. Forced to rate it on this blog’s own scale, it ranks at exactly zero stars.
― Detective Picacho (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, 3 June 2019 19:38 (four years ago) link
Good New Yorker excerpt.
― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 3 June 2019 19:42 (four years ago) link
in short he's a terrible critic, a not-bad journalist and a good wire tribute act
― mark s, Monday, 3 June 2019 19:44 (four years ago) link
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/soulless-r-kelly-jim-derogatis-interview-838478/
― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 5 June 2019 21:20 (four years ago) link
Another New Yorker piece, now that R. Kelly's been convicted.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 28 September 2021 00:25 (two years ago) link
I'd like to make a memorial of bad takes:
It’s not that R. Kelly was playing Pitchfork because everyone thought it would be funny—far from it. He was playing because his music matters to people, and if Jim DeRogatis wasn’t paying attention to that, that’s his problem, not Pitchfork’s, and it’s certainly not ours.
Drew Millard is an Assistant Editor at Noisey. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard
― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, 28 September 2021 18:20 (two years ago) link
Yeah, R. Kelly playing Pitchfork was one of the all-time shit moves.
Even Albini knows a good guy (and a bad guy) when he sees it:
I tip my hat to Jim DeRogatis. For years, less serious music journalists looked the other way on terrifying allegations about R Kelly so as to maintain access; DeRogatis was relentless in telling the stories of Kelly's victims. Model ethical journalism. https://t.co/ZOavukwW4b— steve albini (@electricalWSOP) September 28, 2021
― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 28 September 2021 18:37 (two years ago) link
Say what you will about Jim's music criticism, but he was always a top-notch journalist. His reporting in the Sun-Times was always great.
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 28 September 2021 20:41 (two years ago) link
I forgot, Albini actually majored in journalism at Northwestern!
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 28 September 2021 20:42 (two years ago) link
I wonder if he ever tried to pursue that path, but I digress...
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 28 September 2021 20:43 (two years ago) link