pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

the only two King Krule songs I ever subjected myself to sounded like annoying post-punk singer songwriter shit

so I'll defer to others on that point - but of the three Tame Impala songs I own I'd be hard-pressed to point to a "jazz influence"

King krules is p great

lol meant "three Tame Impala ALBUMS" there

xp

4.8 for Madonna.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-madame-x/

If I wanted someone to write a witty pan, I'd hire Rich.

par for the course

4.8 is way too generous. I bet the editor bumped that score up a couple points after the review was turned in.

it is hilarious to me the way they are still trying against all odds to push frankie cosmos

RichJuz madonna review is so well-written damn

I stopped reading at "grotesque wealth"...

that's the second sentence

she's more than halfway to a billion. only like 300 bernies

Their 2001 song “Everybody Got Their Something” sampled a guitar hook from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass while also bringing to mind a then-current Faith Evans hit.

anyone care to point out where this reputed sample (it links to "I Dig Love") is? cuz I sure don't hear it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/business/puja-patel-pitchfork-work-diary.html

3:30 p.m. One of two weekly reviews meetings, where we go over our album review schedule, scoring, Best New Music designations and assignments. This is usually the easiest or knottiest meeting of the week, depending on the releases and how strongly the editors in the room feel about them. We try to have at least four people on staff listen to every album reviewed before landing on a precise score. Today, two editors have differing opinions on the score of a smaller album, and we talk about some existential issues with scoring against the legacy opinions of Pitchfork past.

Next day:

1:30 p.m. My weekly meeting with Anna Wintour, the creative director of Condé Nast. Anna is a sounding board on anything big or small. We talk about everything: new developments on major editorial plans for the site, design updates, artists who are releasing new music, ideas around covers, the staff, navigating every kind of business change or hurdle while being true to the site’s spirit and point of view.

Diary of a Madman

1:30 p.m. Our video lead tells me that Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers are on their way to the office studios to shoot for our “Over/Under” series. Last week we ran into the “Queer Eye” cast in the cafe and taped them for the series, too. It’s one of my favorite franchises because of how genuinely funny and random it tends to be.

Funny and random. Can't wait for that one.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-burial-became-a-meme/

Just funnin' around w/ some Burial memes

http://i63.tinypic.com/5frzna.jpg

The article really neither convinced me of this purported phenomena nor Burial's withstanding legacy (tho I am a fan)

OI MEMBA BURIAL WAS SOME BLOKE INNA HOODIE INNIT

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, October 4, 2016 5:27 PM (two years ago)

Sherburne is a good writer, but this is a good example of my personal Pitchfork bugbear — analysis/praise that focuses almost entirely on lyrical content, with just a few words about music and performance: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/rosalia-fucking-money-man/

Surely the “yin/yang” thematics of this “two-tracker” (theatrically flexing about wealth, then lamenting its evils) aren’t enough, in itself, to make it a Best New Track? But that’s largely what the review rests on.

(Further to my point, I guess, is the fact that you apparently need to understand Catalan — or read a translation — to even appreciate the lyrical content.)

lol as if 'best new' has anything to do with anything except pitchfork exercising its clout to magnify trends in its target markets for its own benefit

Buy: Rough Trade

(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

how long has pitchfork been earning commissions?

Since they’ve been telling you where to buy the albums in the footnotes of their reviews, which is afaik also a fairly recent development?

reminds me of when pfork would link to insound

Impressive Sunday review, beautifully written, well-informed, etc.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koji-kondo-the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time/

Maybe so, but the logic of the opening sentence is suspect.

Sherburne is a good writer, but this is a good example of my personal Pitchfork bugbear — analysis/praise that focuses almost entirely on lyrical content, with just a few words about music and performance: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/rosalia-fucking-money-man/

Oh man, I hate that style of criticism like you wouldn't believe. (and yes, Sherburne is usually well worth reading)

Paul Nelson did an infamous review of a Jackson Browne album in (I think) Rolling Stone in the 1970s which expended about 1000 words on the lyrics and made not a single mention of what the record actually sounded like.

i think writing about the lyrics - most lyrics - is SO much harder than writing about the music. i don't know why anyone would ever do, for example, that ^

really? lyrics are the biggest part of Jackson browne’s songs (besides his voice). The backing is tight and the music is fine, but his records are just like “here i am, Jackson Browne”.it’s not like Joni or something with weird chords and thangs

writing about lyrics isn’t this just literary critical? seems way more valuable then whatever the hell most record reviews are trying to do.

criticism not critical

maybe i shouldn't have written my second sentence ... i don't really know Jackson Browne's music, so maybe it makes perfect sense.

i just find writing about lyrics harder than writing about music.

I gotcha

I don't think it's a pitchfork-specific problem -- I haven't read Rolling Stone in years, but I gave up on it largely because they were always reviewing the lyrics rather than the music. Unless you're David Berman or Bill Callahan or something, I'm just not that focused on the lyrics.

For me it comes off like — you didn’t have anything interesting or insightful to say about this as music, or you weren’t critically equipped to write about it as music*, so you took the easy way out and mostly talked about what’s on the lyric sheet.

*again, not the case for Sherburne

Sherburne is mostly a dance writer!

When I wrote my book about Slint, all my research and interviews screamed that they thought of themselves as an instrumental band and that the words came at the last minute, usually revealed to the rest of the band right there in the studio. And yet on my first pass of trying to analyze the album, I wrote pages and pages dissecting the words--especially because they come off as little short stories. Thankfully my editor told me to cut most of it out. And, while I ultimately didn't ignore the words entirely in the final draft, I tried really hard to give them the appropriate amount of emphasis relative to the music. Anyway, yeah it's hard not to default into that mode.

and a question for you: as a pure listener / consumer of music, how much weight / attention do you give to lyrics?

For me, usually about 15%, except for those artists that are all about sharp lyrics, when the weighting goes way up.

But bad lyrics rarely interfere with my enjoyment of a good tune.