pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i don't think major label pop artists going album oriented in the 00s would have worked anywhere near as well then bc it feels like social media has played a huge part in allowing those to be successful even as radio has increasingly ignored them, though maybe im conflating those issues idk

― ufo,

Also: the events of 2014 and a certain election in 2016

interesting how the themes of the write-ups in the the '00s end of decade list mirror those of the '10s list--technology/social media, the dance between rap, pop and indie, economic distress, racism--yet also seem so quaint given how intensely all those trends have accelerated

For my taste a few of the blurbs found few musical correlatives for the politics, but chacon son goute.

Why the fuck is ilx doing a aughts poll now ... I’m not participating bc I was working on my own list for the 10s I don’t have time for that

ya it's totally stupid

the elimination of shame and defensiveness

surely some combination of shame and defensiveness = the only legitimate impetus to write anything at all

Why the fuck is ilx doing a aughts poll now

a) because it's been ten years b) why on earth not


v disappointed each entry didn't come with its own craft beer pairing suggestion, honestly. how can i properly enjoy my solange without a bottle of floral suds?

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

show us on the bottle where the website touched you

why make a list of "pop" music and leave out the fun stupid stuff? my friends, have we forgotten how to party rock?

sorry for forgetting how to do party rocking

show us on the bottle where the website touched you

in the beard, obvs wtf

also lol sexual abuse jokes are awesome!

it would seem that u are mad

It seems there are some problems even poptimism is powerless to solve

*reads list thoroughly*

tf where is "Yankin"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wre5gHAJxNc

this thread needs some deej

honestly kinda disappointed in how quickly today petered our, been looking fwd to posting abt this shit all decade

wait 4 the albums list

do we have a thread for 2010s GEMS only

https://✧✧✧.il✧✧✧.com/ILX/FullTextSearchControllerServlet?terms=kkeller✧✧✧@earthl✧✧✧.n✧✧&offset=0&searchtype=id&startdate=&enddate=&artefact=messages&idtype=loginid&sortorder=Descending&boardid=0

I barely recognized any of the songs on this list because I’m a grumpy out-of-touch 37-year-old, so I sampled some of it. Dear millennials or gen z or whatever you call yourselves: your music fucking sucks.

had no idea i was a year younger than mr snrub

Shame that none of the smart British guitar rock gets a look in (Wild Beasts, Wolf Alice, Horrors, Foals, etc) but then this is Pitchfork I guess.

we're all kind of missing the main reason this list is terrible. where's the mindblowing stuff like 'akrakabo'? pfft. far too weird (despite being a pop song with a video & universally adored on here). pfork wants it basic af because you can sell basic. as i said, plenty of good songs here but they're p much all tastefully-constructed pop songs of some hue. a list with some stuff like this is good, but it's almost universal, from a decade when SO MUCH happened. this is '10s music on absolute easy mode, curated to be as achingly hip as possible for the vapid trend-aligned extremely online music types we should and do aspire to be better than. we all know and frequently affirm that the best of these year/decade-end lists are compiled by those who've dived deep into their chosen genres and tried to listen to as much as possible that might appeal to them. pitchfork's list comes off as focus-grouped, tidied, pruned of anything interesting or challenging and above all dull. they have the gall to proclaim in a statement that these simply are the best songs of the decade, and that it took then months to decide on them. to which my reaction is 'huh'. they have anointed their kings and queens and who are we to question the tastemaker

something very telling is their year-end 'avant-garde' list, as distinct from their main list rather than integrated into it. one of their deeper-diving contributors flashes up something as obviously amazing as l'rain, they're like 'hmm this is great but a bit weird, bung it on the avant-garde list, nobody can topple our sainted heroes', absolutely sickening

meanwhile *looks at recent threads for inspiration* all fka twigs has to do is release a comeback single and bam in at the 25th best song of the decade. it's not even like ilmers were going crazy for it!

but fka twigs is Royalty you see

i think "cellophane" will do pretty well here too

in our entire-decade poll (whenever that is)?

something very telling is their year-end 'avant-garde' list, as distinct from their main list rather than integrated into it. one of their deeper-diving contributors flashes up something as obviously amazing as l'rain, they're like 'hmm this is great but a bit weird, bung it on the avant-garde list, nobody can topple our sainted heroes', absolutely sickening

Yes but think of the k-pop.

they snubbed k-pop for *this* list! too foreign, too weird

in our entire-decade poll (whenever that is)?

straight after the 2019 one I'm guessing :/

2025 at the earliest

I was being facetious, i.e.

P4k: *posts best-of list that deliberately disregards swathes upon swathes of less immediately popular genres*

ILM: *needs more poptimism*

That depends on which less immediately popular genres you mean.

This list is very predictable.

And the write ups are just as much about events in the decade as the songs themselves. Like the songs had been originally experienced in the flux of news, and that’s what’s being commemorated. Kind of grim. Popular music always was in dialogue with the broader zeitgeist, but now it seems like these two things have been collapsed into one another.

What good is a song if it's just a song? Listening to music is an inherently uninteresting activity, it needs to be augmented with discourse.

Which is fine, and I used to like that kind of writing, but now it feels so gratuitous. We’re drowning in discourse feom the moment we wake up.

i dont think i've ever heard a k-pop song

lol pomenitul you imp

All art aspires towards the condition of discourse iirc.

xpost yeah flopson perhaps any ire/hand-wringing would be better directed not at these lists but at the failure of critics to build the consensus necessary for certain kinds of music to have a chance to make these lists in the first place.

i was more surprised by the lack of country (and no i don’t think one GOLDEN HOUR era kacey song counts)

Why would k pop be on here? It’s only featuring music that made inroads to american audiences

which k-pop has

Why would k pop be on here? It’s only featuring music that made inroads to american audiences

You weren't at the same 2NE1 arena concert I was at, I guess.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8507977/bts-map-of-the-soul-persona-no-1-album-billboard-200-chart

Maybe it just didn’t make any inroads with pitchfork’s new readership, which is a demographic i understand less wel than i did when it was millennial indie fans

i agree pfork should start paying more serious attention to k-pop but a best-of-the-decade list would be a weird place to start. no doubt they'd be accused of bandwagoning or performing revisionist history of themselves.

i mean i wasn't expecting anything more than a token "i am the best" or "gangnam style" but the absence of even those is a bit surprising

anyway albums list is out now and it's more interesting so far