pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

went to vote in the readers poll only for Lambchop to auto-complete to "Lambshop" (with the right album title though)

same w "Carla fal Gorno"

well it had the "dal" right. i'm prob not one to judge quick typos

yeah I'm super anal-retentive about this kind of stuff and I noticed they capitalized the first two letters in Andrew Bird's last name so it appeared as "Andrew BIrd"

Did pitchfork stop doing tracks reviews?
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/

(also, under "Reviews" there's no choice for "Tracks" anymore)

There's one from two days ago at that very link, for the Caribou song.

I know all these things are purely subjective, but . . . a 10 rating for The Chronic? Seriously? It's got about five or six good tracks.

deeeeez nuuuuuuts

Pitchfork cares about importance, not quality.

Everyone here probably knows, but this seems true: Dre helped to reshape the sound of the West using whining Moog synthesizers. The initial wave of West Coast gangsta rap was (naturally) still indebted sonically to hip-hop’s birthplace, New York City. N.W.A songs sampled Big Apple rappers Whodini and Beastie Boys. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was produced by Public Enemy’s team the Bomb Squad, and Cube was “obsessed with” Run-DMC. Many of the West Coast rappers that had come before Dre brought an undeniable California flavor to rap, but there wasn’t yet a distinctive sound separating them from their East Coast predecessors. The Chronic was instrumental in changing all that. The album’s reinterpretation of ’70s P-Funk, dubbed G-Funk, was altogether different. Dr. Dre’s songs moved more leisurely, a tonic for the hustle and bustle of East Coast rap. And I'd think that wold make it a bnm, without getting into anything about the rapping or the lyrics. But the need to reevaluate it as a political album seems off to me.

Also this: His debut album, 1992’s The Chronic is an imaginative crusade with half-truths so vibrant they blurred the lines of what was real. He collapsed the distance between the lawless Los Angeles of the persona he created for himself and the real one right outside Solar studios, giving his songs texture wherever possible: prank calls; Rudy Ray Moore skits; clips from blaxploitation flick The Mack; an earlier Chronic song playing as background music for a sketch in a later one; live commentary from protestors; exasperated TV news anchors announcing a city on fire. It is so meticulously crafted, so magnificently designed. Shit no, all the skits are awful!

Been listening to a lot of g-funk because of Slow Burn season three, and I have to say I think Doggystyle is the better album. More fully realized.

The Chronic [Interscope, 1992]
The crucial innovation of this benchmark album isn't its conscienceless naturalization of casual violence. It's Dre's escape from sampling. Other rappers, as they are called, have promised to create their own musical environments, usually without revealing how much art and how much publishing fuels their creative resolve. But Dre is the first to make the fantasy pay out big-time. The world he hears in his head isn't the up-to-date P-Funk fools say they hear--that would be too hard. Instead he lays bassline readymades under simulations of Bernie Worrell's high keyb sustain, a basically irritating sound that in context always signified fantasy, not reality--stoned self-loss or, at a best Dre never approaches, grandiose jive. This is bell-bottoms-and-Afros music, its spiritual source the blaxploitation soundtrack, and what it promises above all is boom times for third-rate flautists--sociopathic easy-listening. Even if it's "just pop music," as some rationalize, it's bad pop music. C+

This is one hell of a take. There’s samples all over The Chronic! “I Wanta Do Something Freaky to You”, anybody?

the need to reevaluate it as a political album seems off to me.

come on, son

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EJZk7H9-UA

Yes, but there are other songs on the album?

. . . a 10 rating for The Chronic? Seriously? It's got about five or six good tracks.

fp

, and what it promises above all is boom times for third-rate flautists

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41jKXwwCu3L._SX385_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

never knew til just now that Ben Folds regularly covered “Bitches Ain’t Shit” in concert.

Shit no, all the skits are awful!

― Frederik B, Sunday, 15 December 2019 15:55 (two hours ago) link

RONG

he would make the bassist say the part with the n word xp

That xgau review is so l gross. So many white boomer critics then were so invested in the idea of rappers as phony hucksters. “The first to make the fantasy pay out big time”, fuck that

His dealbreaker is the misogyny, which he is at least been consistent about pointing out and obscuring his own.

Hey, Fredrick B, did whatshername done get at you yesterday?

Bernie Worrell's high keyb sustain, a basically irritating sound 

fp's xgau

This is one hell of a take. There’s samples all over The Chronic! “I Wanta Do Something Freaky to You”, anybody?

I remember reading something decades ago in Melody Maker that Dr Dre avoided paying full royalties to the likes of Leon Haywood by getting session musicians to play the original riffs note-for-note instead.

Here's another take on The Chronic, from 2017. I agree with a lot of it, though not all of it.

https://thequietus.com/articles/23741-dr-dre-the-chronic-review-anniversary

Dre barely used samples before The Chronic, nearly everything he ever did was programmed by himself or others, with live players any time he could afford them

That Quietus piece is really bad imo, I recommend anyone stop reading it after the writer admits he only listened to the record once right before writing the piece. Calling it "sub-gutter" music nagl in 2017 (or ever).

lmao my god it's terrible

Not liking music because of hateful attitudes in the lyrics, that are reflected in the performer’s personal behaviour, is a perfectly reasonable position for a critic or human.

sure but that position is not well-written or -argued in that piece

Perhaps it's possible to see these splurges of verbal violence as automatic responses to a life of crack-fuelled gang violence, much in the same way that vomit and diarrhoea are symptoms of gastroenteritis.

ha ha yes, that was obviously a first-draft last-minute part of the piece, whew

perfectly reasonable to not like an album bc of its lyrics, also perfectly reasonable to listen to an album more than once before deciding youre the bright boy to write a 3000 word piece about it.

To excuse their decision to respond to hate and violence with more hate and violence is bad enough: to laud the products of that decision as great art is indefensible.

what is this horseshit

like, fuck this shit:

celebration of a bewildered generation's half-enforced, half-chosen aimlessness

piece sounds like stuff Geraldo would say in 1995 in an episode "taking on" rap music, i cant believe it was written in 2017

The Quietus has not traditionally published...good pieces about music by POC.

I mean, I am in the front seat of the "fuck R. Kelly" bus so it's not like I don't think a performer's personal life should be ignored when deciding whether their work is worth engaging with or not, but there is absolutely no effort to even understand this album's point of view or critique it on the terms it lays out. Dre is, without question, better at executing his vision than R. Kelly, who is fucking stupid and says fucking stupid things in literally every single song he released and became super popular partially because white people liked laughing at him and black people got super defensive over him. Dre is actually saying something on this album if AB bothered to listen to it; I am not even a big fan of the album (I've always been way more into the Native Tongues/Wu-Tang/Dungeon Family releases than the West Coast people, selected tracks from The Pharcyde notwithstanding) but everything about this take except the direct attacks on Dre's personal life are horseshit.

yeah its one thing to engage with problematic lyrics/performers, etc, but this guy is just the 1billionth person who thinks they deserve the big brain award because they figured out that a scary rapper they dont like is also A Bad Person In Real Life.

Saying a rap album is "trash" because its too "bombastic" is like one step away from saying that its not real music bc theyre just talking, jfc even my mom had better antirap lines than that in the 90s.

The notion that all concerned could have done something worthwhile is impossible to avoid, because 'Lil' Ghetto Boy' proves they had it in them - even if it does so as much by its failures as its successes. It relies almost totally on 'Little Ghetto Boy', a track recorded twice in 1972 by Donny Hathaway, once on his storied Live album, but also in a studio version with strings that was included on the soundtrack LP to the film Come Back Charleston Blue. Fair's fair - the precise formulation of the billowing clouds of violins Dre conjures here do not appear in either of Hathaway's readings of the song, and they embellish the new track in a spectacular manner. But the opening, the main riff, and the hook are all copped directly from the late soul man. Snoop raises his game and writes with an air of reflection, though the overall intention of his two verses is to cement the notion of the steel-hearted product of the prison-industrial complex rather than to truly echo the social soul-searching of the original. Dre's verse, though better than anything else he delivers on the record other than parts of 'Let Me Ride', is forgettable: he presents drama in place of emotion, using the format of a cautionary tale to deliver an ultimately empty, nihilist message.

http://images.45worlds.com/f/ab/steely-dan-aja-abc-ab.jpg

also perfectly reasonable to listen to an album more than once before deciding youre the bright boy to write a 3000 word piece about it.

According to the sentence you're referring to, he didn't decide, his ilx0r editor did, and he had listened to it many times before deciding he did not like it and not listening to it for another 24 years

jfc even my mom had better antirap lines than that in the 90s

the fact that he spent the 90s writing pro-rap lines to largely rap-antithetical audiences (*clicks through quickly* and the two previous months' columns were rap paeans) does indicate that his distaste is specifically for this particular work, and he didn't spend 26 years trojan horsing his way into suddenly revealing that Rap Was Actually Bad All Along

dunno what to tell you man, coulda fooled me that the person who wrote this is a big fan of rap music as it is commonly practiced:

why expect consistency from the author of an album titled after a strain of weed, [...] which celebrated the drink-and-drugs lifestyle of the indolent gangbanger, who, a mere four years previously, had rapped: "I don't smoke weed or sess, 'cos it's known to give a brother brain damage"? Perhaps a defender of this doggerel will argue that it's our fault for expecting anything better

like damn, caught this rapper rapping about two different things, aka lying! Next you'll tell me that Lil Wayne isnt actually a martian

to be fair, i'm an old school hiphop head and i have never liked the chronic either.

doggystyle and dogg food tho? yes. those are both good.

kim hill interview addressing many of the same issues (and lots of others) but from inside looking out
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/opinion/black-eyed-peas-kim-hill.html
it's an interesting look back!

haven't watched it yet, but am thrilled to see a kim hill mention.

okay, after having watched it, i can say one thing for sure: kim hill will never receive anything except unending love from me. i wish i still had the sugar hill cd, but it has been lost to several moves.

otherwise, yeah: she addresses some really good points very articulately.

thank you for posting, ulysses.

thumbsup.gif

the chronic rules

linsecurity bear (sic) at 12:22 16 Dec 19

Dre barely used samples before The Chronic, nearly everything he ever did was programmed by himself or others, with live players any time he could afford them


?? Straight Outta Compton has tons of samples!!

american bradass (BradNelson) at 8:33 16 Dec 19

Perhaps it's possible to see these splurges of verbal violence as automatic responses to a life of crack-fuelled gang violence, much in the same way that vomit and diarrhoea are symptoms of gastroenteritis.

I can flow like pee coming out you-know-what
Or some dookie, diarrhea coming out your butt - Shaq Diesel, I Hate 2 Brag

Pitchfork being so psyched that Obama shares some of their musical taste really sums them up about now in a way.