pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i don't get the agenda thing, it seems very much in line with a lot of other essays published in tandem w/best-of lists or decade summations, simply taking an aspect of music of the past decade and ruminating about what it all meant and continues to mean.

Which can’t be said of the third track, titled by a lousy joke that feels, well, profane. How about we not appropriate the sacrament of an African American spiritual promising biblical deliverance from slavery in the service of a hardware pun? How about we not “Swing Low, Sweet LFO,” with its plinky Pianet and sugary Prophet 6 sweeps, less offensive than Moby’s appropriation of spirituals for car commercials but also, unfortunately, very much not as memorable?

this writer doesn't understand religion or music

warning: cornball post comin up, but here goes

way upthread someone posted about the explicit editorial directive to focus on the music's impact on the larger culture, how it changed things, etc. that I just found pretty depressing, to be honest. It's not that context isn't important for music (it definitely is), but it strikes me as deeply misguided to privilege context over actual content. It skips over what makes music important and impactful in the first place: the way it emotionally/intellectually/physically engages the listener. Like, what makes music "matter" in the broader context, first and foremost, is that it strikes a chord with the listener - and what strikes a chord with a listener isn't a checklist of "this music was made by artist X and their backstory is Y and their political positions are Z" it's always something deeper and more mysterious and more basic than that.

By way of a recent example, on the Neil Young thread yesterday I brought up the second verse of "Rockin' in the Free World" as a verse that always really hits me, no matter how many times I've heard it. And what gets me about that song and that verse in particular isn't the Reagan/Bush context or the album's "comeback" role in his catalog, it's that specific lyrical image of lost youth, of squandered opportunity, of tragic failure, delivered by a quavery, keening voice over a minor key chord change - that is then immediately followed by that kick into the defiant, major key refrain of the chorus. It's *that sound* and *those words* and the way they're knotted together that is more interesting, more deeply affecting than knowing that it was Neil Young doing it and when and why etc etc. Even if that stuff is interesting (and it is!) it isn't what makes the music affect me in the first place.

A fascinating conflation's happening in your post, Shakey. Your reaction to "Rockin'..." -- a valid one -- is not any different than the listener in 1989 exhausted by eight years of Reagan and bracing himself for four years of Poppy. The difference, though, is how you explained your reaction in musical terms. You could argue that the near absence of any attempt to explain what song arrangements do in many of these blurbs is the disappointment.

well yeah

I guess the specificity of couching things strictly in their original socio-political context annoys me. It can help you understand where the music comes from, sure. But to stick with this particular example, the images and the emotions in the song map onto a whole bunch of other contexts as well - everyone has personal experiences with failure and loss and just trying to keep on going in the middle of regret and sadness, it's not like that's unique to Americans in the 80s.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

(NB: I don't believe Eliot)

hamlet piece is completely boneheaded imo, shoulda stuck to cats

his favorite Shakespeare was Cymbeline!

In a similarly universalising mode, I wonder if it's an expression of the flattening and weightlessness of things that, I think, Frederic Jameson gabbed about: every capsule review is a frantic attempt to anchor things as they hurtle past. There's also been a tip towards an ecstatic register in *all* contemporary criticism from what I can make out. Which does chime with Eliot's whole 'indisciplined squads of emotion' schtick.

there's definitely a tone of desperation - "this MATTERS! because it's tied to other things that MATTER!"

but I think the simple fact is that for large swathes of the population, music *doesn't* matter, not like it did for a few decades anyway. People don't invest it with the level of emotional, financial, or psychological commitment that they used to. I mean, you used to be able to make a reasonable guess at what music people liked by the way they dressed, that's how deeply people incorporated music into their identities. That's just one minor example, but that level of engagement for the most part just isn't common anymore. People construct their identities out of different tools now, and music has a diminished role in that, which means they pay less attention to it which means it doesn't have the dramatic impact it used to be capable of.

On the contrary: music is as or more central than ever in identity construction among high schoolers and college kids.

really? maybe I'm just in the wrong world of young people...

but I think the simple fact is that for large swathes of the population, music *doesn't* matter, not like it did for a few decades anyway. People don't invest it with the level of emotional, financial, or psychological commitment that they used to.

ah yes this is provable

have you been to a billie eilish concert

I know you interact with way more of that age group than I currently do

xp

using anecdotal evidence to make this claim is bullshit and you know it

I do know a couple teenage billie eilish fans! my daughter otoh had never heard of her.

xp

using anecdotal evidence to make this claim is bullshit and you know it

I do, I'm happy to concede the latter point and entertain other explanations for why critical discourse has, as Chinaski said, seemed to devolve into a "frantic attempt to anchor things as they hurtle past"

I’m glad we finally get to the Poptimism Classic argument of who knows the most children

I thought it was you!

young's voice on that verse also echoes (intentionally or accidentally) his plaints on "ohio," which i think underscores the hopelessness—"we should have known better," etc

it's not like that's unique to Americans in the 80s

Thank you.

xp (maura -- your That Dog review was great!)

I'm not loading all 14k messages, so did I miss the discussion of the Reynolds piece?

He sure loves coining new genre names!

there's definitely a tone of desperation - "this MATTERS! because it's tied to other things that MATTER!"

otm

also the total lack of talking about what aspects of the actual music make it so profound.

basically Οὖτις on top. and it bugs me that you even felt like you had to add on the "cornball post" aspect to your words up there; especially when your words are more than competent and not anything except an honest evaluation. nothing cornball whatsoever about genuine and honest insights.

the blm essay is all over the place, but i'm glad it mentions people singing Alright. there's a video i saw in a tweet from when a bunch of high school kids were marching thru the streets of baton rouge, and they're in some suburban cul de sac and its dark out, maybe 10pm, and the main protest is long over and the cops are just chasing them through the street, herding them around, and they're too angry to be as scared as they should be, or maybe angry because they're scared, and they've been dispersed and keep being dispersed and then knots of them collecting together again, and you can barely see anything -- not even really streetlights. and a group of them find themselves being surrounded by cops. and they all start singing Alright together, the whole damn thing. The video cuts off and I know there were a lot of arrests that night, and I don't know who was arrested from the video, or what happened to them.

(a few years after that video, i met one of the kids from those protests, who was in college now. he told me that his mother had grounded him after that night, or maybe the next one, and a lot of other parents had grounded their kids too, because they were afraid something terrible would happen otherwise [and who is to say they were wrong to do so]).

Anyway that's the musical moment from the decade that is the most indelible to me.

For me it’s prob Lady Gaga doing “not this way” at the super bowl

“Born this way”, autocorrect

The night of the ‘16 election there were spontaneous and large protests in my neighborhood and I remember hearing, before seeing, a huge crowd of teens coming down the 18th St by Dolores Park street singing Alright together

FWIW, Rolling Stone’s blurb on Freedom in their 100 Best Albums of the Eighties list (published in November 1989 — they held out over a month longer than Pitchfork did, lol) doesn’t mention Reagan. Here’s what it says about “RITFW”:

The album is bookended by contrasting versions of the bitter, ironic "Rockin' in the Free World." The opener is live and acoustic, with the audience singing the chorus, while the finale is an angry, electric rendition with an additional verse.

KORITFW

(thanks morrisp!!)

The opener is live and acoustic, with the audience singing the chorus,

Good but with some room for improvement

i don't really get shakey's point upthread; you stopped being able to identify what kind of music ppl listened to by how they dressed last decade (and the decades when you could most reliably make that prediction were the 80s and 90s, not the 60s and 70s when music was incredibly important to culture). imo the '00s freakout over 'hipsters' within music was about the replacement of identity-specific musical subcultures with a new genre-agnostic subculture that grew out of indie and was made possible by the internet; then in the '10s people stopped talking about 'hipsters' because everyone ('normies') adopted the genre-agnostic attitude (this is why most tranches of cool-kid twitter are anti-poptimist now btw) and non-genre markers of identify (race, gender) became more salient within music

i like the way pitchfork writing includes lots of context and background, and i think the best writing weaves in the more subjective and ~ineffable qualities throughout a piece without foregrounding it. the main function of pitchfork, for me in 2019, is when i discover something new to have a smart and well-written article lay out the context, or otherwise make it intelligible. (not that i *need* music to be intelligible to enjoy it, but when you are fascinated by a piece of music you often want to flesh it out into extra dimensions). a big problem with the parts of the site that are still quite bad, such as its writing about dance music, is an overly impressionistic style ('drum loops that sounds like two grinding gears being splattered with paint', 'the four-on-the-floor beat and clicking hi-hats evoke walking briskly on a spring day') that misses the mark. if u read (the GOAT) Tim F on my roni size thread the other day, yes there are evocative descriptions of the music, but also its context within dnb and the artists' careers (marking the 'end' of a jazzy era, the first time the producers introduced live drums rather than samples, its stylistic unity compared to other dnb albums' tendency to do 2 tracks in each then-currently popular style)--i mean, i basically started the thread to get him and others to post that kind of info for me, to give depth to what was otherwise a catchy breaks album a friend told me to check out

obviously i roll my eyes at lots of the strained efforts of current-day p4k to find a woke peg or political angle for essentially apolitical indie music (i become a total cynical dad reading the umpteenth '[24 year old in a cis relationship who self-ids as queer and has one south-asian grandparent] is part of a new wave of queer POC Portland grunge artists'), and rolled my eyes at a lot of the blurbs in this list. i even said "sorry but 'alright' is a terrible number 1" upthread, and stand by that (i honestly don't believe that it is anyone's favourite kendrick song)

fav kendrick song is tricky. I went with "hiiiPOWER" bc i think that captured a lot of the hope for his potential that he'd deliver at album length later on, this kind of write your own destiny thing centered in the black experience, but also i like "Loyalty" as a kind of more underrated "poptimist" choice ... that said it felt too detached thematically from the kendrick project ... a friend tho says "how much a dollar cost" is his best time capsule song bc its the most effectively realized "modern rap and modern jazz together at last" song

my favorite kendrick song is when he rereleases to pimp a butterfly as one long track, like prince's lovesexy on cd.

King Kunta and Alright are probably my two favorite Kendrick songs. I'm a bad Kendrick fan...

those are both very good.

flopson, paragraph 1, otm

thx treesh

imo kendrick is not really a 'tracks' artist per se ('bish dont kill my vibe' is the one that felt the most like, of a moment, to me, but is DQd for obvious reasons) and TPAB aotd would have made a lot more sense than blonde, and then swap out #1 track for uh idk, all my fav songs came in at like spot 150

“swimming pools”, I’m a worse Kendrick fan

yep I agree with flopson too.

also I disagree with the idea that music matters less to young people now. What I think has changed is that music is so extremely accessible, effectively for free, that the economic structure of young people's relationship to music has changed.

For me and I guess most ILXors, my adolescent engagement with music was in a context of relative scarcity: I had to consciously prioritise certain music acquisitions based on my available free cash, which in turn has a whole bunch of consequences:

1. Structures of taste which limit your exposure can actually be useful in that they make it easier to work out how to spend your available money: in particular, tribal/genre affiliations (i'm a metalhead; i'm a raver) provide a basis on which to turn the economic reality of limited music acquisition capacity into a virtue;

2. Against (1), the economic (and/or time-based) pain associated with locating and acquiring a large swathe of music, whether on a depth basis ("I have every consecutive Halo-numbered Nine Inch Nails release") or on a breadth basis (being genre-agnostic), confers on that pursuit a different kind of virtue ("you're a real fan" / "you know a lot about music") which loses its force in an era when the vast majority of music is readily and immediately available at effectively no cost.

3. More simply, if you can only afford to buy, say, one album a month, then you're pretty much going to be forced to invest in that album much more than if you can stream a different album each day. Moreover, the more music you hear, the less the idea of massive investment in a single album or piece of music or artist makes sense as a way to structure your taste.

4. Finally and further to (3), if music is expensive to consume and you have limited funds, then the use of gatekeeper authorities (such as music critics, magazines, trend-setting friends) to assist you to order and prioritise your music consumption activities becomes much more important.

What strikes me about young people's listening habits today is that they are consuming more and a greater variety of music, and often quite obscure music, than I did or would have been able to at their age. This tends to propel people toward being genre-agnostic as a kind of default but not in the way that would necessarily make sense during the 90s - the "eclectic" tastes of younger listeners often strike me as pretty random, and lacking the kind of editorial meta-narrative applied by a listener who made a conscious effort to, say, hear each of Spin's top 20 albums of 199x (I also agree with flopson that the cool kid riposte to this is to rebel against or resist the semi-conscious poptimist/genre-agnostic consensus).

All of which means that the narrative structures for why music is important are becoming less and less persuasive - young people listen to just as much (more) music, and connect to it on an individual, emotional level just as much, but the economic incentives to tell ourselves stories about the music (and in particular why this music is more important as that music) aren't as strong as they used to be.

Which is one reason why p4k's insistence on "importance" feels a bit perverse when applied to contemporary music: the last decade feels like a time when viewing music through that lens makes less sense than it would have previously.

you say all that but then i'm less clear what makes you think they connect to the music as much since you've just undercut lots of things that go into connection

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "connect".

One analogy would be whether someone who boasts endlessly about their child being a successful surgeon loves their child more than another parent who doesn't really care about their child's career.

That is, the stories we tell ourselves and others about how/why we love something/someone do not exhaust the experience of that love (although it would be naive to believe they don't shape that experience).

What strikes me about young people's listening habits today is that they are consuming more and a greater variety of music, and often quite obscure music, than I did or would have been able to at their age. This tends to propel people toward being genre-agnostic as a kind of default but not in the way that would necessarily make sense during the 90s - the "eclectic" tastes of younger listeners often strike me as pretty random, and lacking the kind of editorial meta-narrative applied by a listener who made a conscious effort to, say, hear each of Spin's top 20 albums of 199x (I also agree with flopson that the cool kid riposte to this is to rebel against or resist the semi-conscious poptimist/genre-agnostic consensus).

I know I'm countering your anecdotal data vs mine, but I have no evidence that my POC cohort at a large public university consumes a variety of music: if anything, I see the Mitskis, Parquet Courts, Big Thiefs, and so on that Pitchfork still pushes. Yet here's the thing: few read Pitchfork for reviews anymore. I realize they didn't read SPIN, RS, whatever in 2009 or 1999 either, but these young men and women are pretty isolated, reliant on second- and thirdhand sources for recommendations.

I've become friends with a 22-year-old self-aware student reporter who told me last week "I know songs, not artists." At the newsroom today the editor blasted Angel Olsen, CCR, Cream, Method Man, and George Benson. This miscellany would, of course, defeat anyone. When I asked him about it, he said, "This shit just comes up" on Spotify recommendations.

(NB: the collapse of CMJ has hurt college radio but released them from what Tim calls genre-agonsticism).

I would say that spotify playlists/recommendations and equivalents are massively important