pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Best single this decade is Countdown by a wide margin though

"Countdown" showing up on the Singles list made me smile a little. Still love that song.

What is interesting to me: that apparently indie rockism is alive and well— preference toward authenticity and all— but it’s been kidnapped by a crew of young (mostly) women.

― i could chug a keg of you (flamboyant goon tie included), Wednesday, 9 October 2019 00:06 (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In my head i tend to frame this phenomenon as less about authenticity and more about identification.

Early pitchfork stressed authenticity but arguably this was just a function of bookish young white male music writers being (mostly) drawn to artists they identified with.

As the site grew it drifted away from this in part because the cohort of writers grew more diverse, and in part because many of the writers added tended, as a function of their taste and as a stylistic device, to downplay identification as a critical frame, or to use it perversely or counter-intuitively (in both cases a matter of presentation more than anything else).

What we now see across the board (not just pitchfork) is a strong reemphasis on identification, but it's certainly not a return to the original pitchfork model - e.g. much of the critical framing around pop artists like beyonce, taylor and rihanna becomes about identification and relatability and, concomitantly, their social and artistic intentions, however, the collapse of music criticism, ideology, gossip culture and social media into one another means that identification and relatability mean something quite different to what they would have meant circa 2000.

Yes. I've seen a gradual shift from, "Let's see what X has to say about [this album]" to "Let's find the right critic to say the right things about [this album]." The first approach resulted in often grotesque takes, the second in lauding intentions and a general complacency.

Yes. I've seen a gradual shift from, "Let's see what X has to say about [this album]" to "Let's find the right critic to say the right things about [this album]." The first approach resulted in often grotesque takes, the second in lauding intentions and a general complacency.

brad nelson

Good point, and just got me thinking; besides Fantano (who has basically 0 to do with Pitchfork), is there any music journalist who got their start in this decade who people read every piece of criticism by just because it's by them?
― triggercut, Tuesday, October 8, 2019

It still happens. Many of us who still write fall on both sides.

Good point, and just got me thinking; besides Fantano (who has basically 0 to do with Pitchfork), is there any music journalist who got their start in this decade who people read every piece of criticism by just because it's by them?

I'm not sure when Seth Colter Walls got his start but he's definitely a lot younger than me, and I read everything by him that I come across.

xps maybe meaghan garvey? i did not have lots of interest in future but when he was rising she always made him seem really interesting

our own katherine must have gotten started at the tail end of the previous decade too, right? i remember taking an interest in her criticism when reading her on j newsom's HOOM

@ Tim F: great response, and I hope my original post wasn't taken snarkily. I've always valued "authenticity" when I listen to music-- though I tend to be more specific, "single-origin authorship" for example-- and try to examine "concerns of authenticity" seriously without privileging them over other qualities of a piece of music

yeah I didn't take your comment as snark, fgti.

for the most part the issue with privileging "authenticity" (at least for me) is that too many writers don't really understand what they're privileging or why. Normally "authenticity" as a concept is a stand-in for something more complicated, but whether that something is a worthwhile or silly thing to care about all depends on the nature of, respectively, the artist, the writer and the something in question.

xp like to read your reviews unperson, will look for Seth Colter Walls

i think one of the things that is common to all or almost all of the writers I really click with is that they treat the aura of authenticity/identification/relatability as a product or aspect of the music, and consequently ask "how does the artist create it?" rather than "does the artist have it?".

Agree with that, Tim. Zadie Smith's recent (really good) essay had several moments where it prompted me to think about how authenticity is received and written about in pop music.

“I don’t believe it,” the reader is always free to say, when confronted with this emotion or that, one action or another. Novels are machines for falsely generating belief and they succeed or fail on that basis. I know I can read the first sentence of a novel and find my reaction is I don’t believe you. And many a reader must surely have turned from White Teeth in exactly the same spirit.

Yet the belief we’re talking about is not empirical. In the writing of that book, I could not be “wrong,” exactly, but I could be—and often was—totally unconvincing. I could fail to make my reader believe, but with the understanding that the belief for which fiction aims is of a very strange kind when we recall that everything in a novel is, by definition, not true. What, then, do we mean by it? In my capacity as a writing teacher, I’ve noticed, in the classroom, the emergence of a belief that fiction can or should be the product of an absolute form of “correctness.” The student explains that I should believe in her character because this is exactly how X type of person would behave. How does she know? Because, as it happens, she herself is X type of person. Or she knows because she has spent a great deal of time researching X type of person, and this novel is the consequence of her careful research. (Similar arguments can be found in the interviews of professional writers.)

Wu Lyf made the album list? The ghost of Schribes still clearly haunts the site.

Why are you all tying yourselves in knots over this list when there’s a perfectly good thread on uk streetsoul like 15 down from here right now

. I could fail to make my reader believe, but with the understanding that the belief for which fiction aims is of a very strange kind when we recall that everything in a novel is, by definition, not true. What, then, do we mean by it? In my capacity as a writing teacher, I’ve noticed, in the classroom, the emergence of a belief that fiction can or should be the product of an absolute form of “correctness.” The student explains that I should believe in her character because this is exactly how X type of person would behave. How does she know? Because, as it happens, she herself is X type of person.

As I get older, I resist assuming that this is going on in literature classes, in part b/c in my own course I see more diversity. What I see happening more often is a response to the end of history: reviews that consist of regurgitations of Wiki biographies for the purpose of context, often without ironic counterpoint from the reviewer. Maybe that's how grad school education is these days idk, or a product of the Tyranny of Word Count.

I think that one of the better things Pitchfork has done is to recognise the lack of diversity of their contributors in the past, and I can see a concreted effort to have more women, POC and queer writers. This is great. And in theory diversity in writers should lead to more diverse coverage of, and exposure to different kinds of great music. But there's still an obvious level of homogeneity in this list and in Pitchfork's coverage, which now just skews just as heavily to mainstream pop, hip hop + r&b as it once did to indie rock. Their voice is essentially extremely online, young mainstream liberal urban America (or, mainly even just Brooklyn). Which, granted, is their target audience. But I think it would be a more interesting place to read about and discover music if they started to layer in more writers from other countries (and outside the Anglosphere), indigenous perspectives, older people, people in rural America, writers with different political viewpoints, writers who don't spend all day on the internet and social media. One of the best things about Pitchfork used to be that you would go there and discover incredible music that it felt no one else was talking or writing about first. But for the last 4 or 5 years it's begun to feel more like a Who's Hot and Who's Not pop culture content aggregator with a few social media inspired hot takes thrown in. From that point of view, this list sums up their decade perfectly.
― triggercut, Tuesday, October 8, 2019 8:29 PM (one hour ago)

it's important to remember that pitchfork sold out, literally. it's owned by conde nast.

to state the obvious, the lack of diddy-dirty money on this list is invalidating

I was thinking a similar thing about Ten Love Songs.

xps yeah i don't think they get enough discredit for selling out

Blonde is kind of a surprising choice

Is MBDTF still their most recent 10.0?

pitchfork isn't a "they."
-J0rdan S.

that's true but they did used to be a publication with a distinctive editorial voice.

here is mark richardson writing about kid a in the best of the 2000s list, where it took the number one spot:

Kid A– with its gorgeously crafted electronics, sparkling production, and uneasy stance toward the technology it embraces completely– feels like the Big Album of the online age.

But you know what? I almost never think about that stuff. It all feels true, of course, but when I slide Kid A into the CD player (how’s that for a retro image?), something else happens. Once that drawer closes and the first chords of “Everything in Its Right Place” start– those haunting, clicking keyboard textures and Thom Yorke’s warped voice– all these other ideas feel secondary. Instead, I get lost in the dissonant horn blasts of “The National Anthem” and hypnotized between the play of the drones and the hissy beats in “Idioteque”; I feel the deep pang of yearning and sadness with the title track, and I rest during the gorgeous Brian Eno-like interlude of “Treefingers”. I’m listening to a brilliant album by an especially creative rock band functioning at its peak.

and here is doreen st. felix writing about blond.

The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. “Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,” Ocean sings on “Solo,” capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Blonde is one synonym for American.

the voice has this kind of easy authority that would be more at home in the new york times. the writing might even be better but it's less personal.

and this connects a little bit to their shift toward pop and r and b, away from indie. the fanzine roots are gone. it's less idiosyncratic. and ilx always hated pitchfork to begin with so i don't think it can even really be seen as a loss. but it's a different publication now.

the last paragraph is a little over the top, but I liked that write-up of Blonde

There's some massive overstatement of the "shift toward pop and r and b, away from indie" going on ITT.

Indie was objectively less of a big deal in the 2010s than in the preceding decade - what seemed like a breakthrough into popular consciousness in 2008 (the year of GAPDYX) was perhaps really a final victory lap, with diminishing returns setting in shortly thereafter. So it's not surprising that a "best of the 2010s" has stuff like Frank Ocean and Beyonce and Robyn in its upper reaches.

But if you look at the recent reviews posted on the website, a more accurate picture of the site's current remit emerges:

- Nick Cave (BNM)
- Summer Walker
- RObert Glasper
- Automatic
- Wilco
- DIIV
- Carla da Forno
- Kris Davis
- Danny Brown
- Glenn Branca
- Kaputt
- WIVES

Based on P4K's own categorisations that breaks down as:

- 6 rock albums
- 1 experimental / rock album
- 2 jazz albums
- 1 pop / R&B album
- 1 rap album
- 1 electronic album

Compared to "old" P4K the most startling aspect of the above is the presence of 2 jazz album reviews, but it certainly doesn't imply that P4K has moved away from being a rock-oriented publication.

Obviously it's less fanzine-ish than it was in the late 90s and early 00s, but that transition had largely occurred even before the site officially became a big thing circa the mid 00s.

I’m happy that they reviewed the Summer Walker album. As a fan, I wish the review gave a little more perspective on her background, and uniqueness as an artist... but you can’t have everything. (Plus, I note the irony inherent in wanting a Pitchfork review to have more essay-like details.)

Not that it invalidates the point but GAPDYX was 2009

I think I've found the stupidest faux-influential line, from Davido - Fall: In the back half of the 2010s, Afropop exploded in popularity, with countless artists attempting to hop on the trend. “Fall” was instrumental in continuing to widen the influence of Nigeria’s music on Western culture, becoming an international anthem along the way. 'Continuing to widen?' Also, Oliver Twist is from 2012, five years before that, if they wanted to include an actual breakthrough for Nigerian music.

And that is the only inclusion from the whole continent on both lists, no? One more than Asia, I guess. Anything from South America?

Nicolas Jaar!

"fall" started to get a bunch of US radio play earlier this year which is presumably why it managed to crossover to p4k writers enough to make the list. it seems to have had the most success of any nigerian pop in the US so far so i think it does count as a minor breakthrough. "oliver twist" was obviously a much bigger breakthrough but the blurb is typical of p4k's america-centrism

Hailu Mergia is on the albums list xpost

there's a few others: J Balvin is the sole South American representation, Fatima Al Qadiri is Kuwaiti, though very much operating within the western experimental scene, and Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican so not South America but still very much from the latin pop world

What happened to the art-rock that's what i wonder. Wild Beasts, Foals, Wolf Alice, New Puritans, Idles etc etc? Great records, loved by all the British critics, loved by The People, worshipped by the Mercury-prize-giving type bods.. totally and completely absent from Pitch4k.

It's also weird to my mind that a band like The 1975 can be named Band Of The Decade on the front of Q (a mag with some of the same writers as Pitch4k), and yet in their top albums list there's only a cursory coupla nods down the arse end. The consensus has gone haywire.

'Murica über alles.

the voice has this kind of easy authority that would be more at home in the new york times. the writing might even be better but it's less personal.

― treeship., Tuesday, October 8, 2019 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Tbf, St Felix's regular outlet is the New Yorker.

That Blonde blurb, my antipathy for the album aside, is what I don't want to read in album reviews.

This album is still important because we told you it was important three years ago because the hype for the album was very important and game changing and social media and memes and remember what happened in 2016?

first person plural is a curse

Yeah, I thought Adam Neumann killed We

the "Blonde" blurb (esp the end) made me wonder if any non-American writers participated in this

Insofar as the US is the most diverse country in the world, there is no need to look beyond its borders for cultural commentary of any kind.

(Sorry, I'll stop.)

despite the shoeless grifter's efforts 'we' as a critical fallback remains more popular than ever. blame facebook

aside from very specific, relevant exceptions, music writing that invokes the Trump Era is going to age exactly as badly as all the writing (some of which I did myself) that invoked the Bush Era in the early to mid aughts.

i don’t think I’ve heard blonde yet 🙊 regardless we can all agree jord’s channel orange blurb pwns dst’s (whom i like)

aside from very specific, relevant exceptions, music writing that invokes the Trump Era is going to age exactly as badly as all the writing (some of which I did myself) that invoked the Bush Era in the early to mid aughts.

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Wednesday, October 9, 2019 10:26 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fixed

never forget:
Sometimes we pick the music; sometimes the music picks us. On September 11, Toxicity was the biggest album in America, an accident of fate that somehow seemed perfectly timed. Just as confused as we were, this was punk metal doing what it does best: using noise to navigate the gray area of our screwed-up minds and emotions. This is the sound of now.