pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Is that because there isn't a wanking emoji?

the charts it could have climbed

yes, the imaginary ones

the charts it could have climbed

my memoir title

When Paul arrived at the start of the decade, he found himself among a vanguard of innovative and ambitious musicians who were opening up a dialog with the major pop establishment. James Blake was stretching Destiny’s Child songs into alien new shapes; Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon was wailing on Kanye records; Rostam Batmanglij was toying with Auto-Tune in Vampire Weekend and Discovery; Frank Ocean was covering Coldplay with startling sincerity.

The innovation, the ambition, it is truly staggering to behold.

All of it hinted at a keen understanding of the forever-tweaking online realm years before Kanye deemed his morphing The Life of Pablo a “living, breathing, changing creative expression” in 2016.

When was the last time anything about The Life of Pablo was changed?

Reading that last paragraph, I'm just glad Dombal has (I'm guessing) never heard an A.R. Rahman movie soundtrack. His head would pop right off his neck.

as i said elsewhere, the Jai Paul release is RYM's clear #1 for the year. i listened through it twice and it was...nothing special at all. what is the appeal? is it a young person thing?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/Orientalism%2C_first_edition.jpg/220px-Orientalism%2C_first_edition.jpg

ha, I had never heard or heard of Jai Paul so I looked up that track and it was ... fine, so much so that I figured I found the wrong version or something, so I googled it again and it was the right version and it was still ... fine.

i didn't realize Jai Paul and Jai Wolf were two different people

as i said elsewhere, the Jai Paul release is RYM's clear #1 for the year.

how do we get imago to stop telling us about RYM

I lurk there too dogg, but come on

yep

Without imago I would have no idea RYM existed at all.

do i care about the aggregate rankings of random users who prob overlap significantly with /mu/ and constantly talk about what score fantano gave a record? absolutely not. do i like to troll the album shoutboxes? yes

i listened through it twice and it was...nothing special at all. what is the appeal? is it a young person thing?

― imago, Thursday, June 6, 2019 11:15 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

more of a people who were young people ten years ago thing

am now wondering who Brad is on RYM haha

i'll bite, what is RYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkUxFB6jbDc

those quotes that unperson pulled do the opposite of making the music sound cool and worthy of my time.

rym is a site where white people make themselves feel better by giving black musicians free promotion. it's alright.

hmmm, rethink that take

Sounds like RYM has changed. I was on there a lot in like 2004 and it was pretty quaint -- Mull Historical Society CD-R swaps, "does anyone else like Around the Sun?" etc. A user I admired was really into Kitchens of Distinction...

It's a good place to discover new metal and prog, and enjoy some psychotic writing, and that's about it

You’re thinking of ILM

That's not fair. I never find out about cool new prog via ILM.

lol spock's beard

It depends where you’re looking
There are some users who do hugely deep dives into genres
Reminiscent of the mp3 blog days

it is an excellent place to keep track of one's own listening and discover new things, and generally stay on top of being a music nerd. all the unsavoury window-dressing is kind of beside the point and avoidable

IOW, it's reddit for music nerds

It's like ILM if we still listened to music instead of podcasts

yea I think the reddit analogy works, it's a huge place with a lot of cool niche stuff and it's quite easy to ignore the community at large

one thing it certainly does have is the worst music forum of all time

I use it just for figuring out which album to start with for an artist, does a pretty good job for that

clearly you've never been to /mu/ xp

it basically is /mu/ fwict

Yeah I find RYM v. useful for keeping track of things I've heard and browsing other peoples' lists can be a lot of fun but I avoid the forums/comment boxes like the plague.

pic.twitter.com/FzrhVoNiFn

— Best of RateYourMusic (@Rateyrmusic) June 7, 2019

proud of you imago

lolllllll

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/taylor-swift-you-need-to-calm-down/

This track review deserves a shoutout for focusing entirely on lyrical content (save for a reference to "a hook that’s mostly vowels"); and ending with this thought:

“You Need to Calm Down” is like one of those fancy unicorn cupcakes, an impossibly cute confection designed to distract you from the fact that it’s a mediocre dessert. I cannot think of something I would rather buy into less.

Really -- you can't think of anything worse to "buy into" than a "mediocre," "well-intentioned" "confection" of a track? And is music really for "buying into" in the first place? (Hey -- what about the music, anyway?)

And is music really for "buying into" in the first place?

This is a strange question. Of course music is for buying into, otherwise no one would try to share it with anyone else.

AND no one would try to make a living as a professional musician if they weren't trying to get people to buy into the music they are creating/performing.

I think of an ideology or idea as something you "buy into"; and music as something you listen to / enjoy.

(or, literally, "buy" -- if you purchase it)

I cannot think of something I would rather buy into less.

I can think some music website that should rather buy into a copy editor more.

“Sure I like it, but I don’t, like, buy into it or anything!”

omg i didn't see, i'm famous now lol

This track review deserves a shoutout for focusing entirely on lyrical content

(Hey -- what about the music, anyway?)

Can’t imagine why Pitchfork isn’t parsing the chord changes on a song where Taylor thematically links her social-media haters to the Westboro Baptist Church

(Also the point of the “buy into” line - however awkwardly-phrased - is clearly that this song reads to the author more as an act of lateral career positioning than a piece of music, and they regard it as a failure both in terms of that being an aspiration to begin with and in its ability to succeed at that aspiration)

Pitchfork | The Most Trusted Voice in “Career Positioning”

I’m rolling my eyes but also you’re not wrong

Crumb and 2017 follow-up Locket, both misty and meandering, cast the four-part group as the new kid on today’s jazz-influenced psych block, among bands like Tame Impala and King Krule.

did Tame Impala cover a Kamasi Washington song or something

haha "jazzy" and "jazz influenced" are two classic overused rock crit phrases