pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

reviewing *A* Halsey album

she has hits

they'll review any major-label pop album regardless of artist credibility or number of hits (incl. if zero) if they can craft a quippy tweet out of it that'll generate lots of #engagement

for example they reviewed the flop/widely-mocked liam payne album recently, i guess b/c they couldn't resist joining in on the fun

presumably they'll limit that somewhat so as not to completely crowd out coverage of 'credible' releases that are (were?) their bread and butter, but as far as what's fair game to cover in the mainstream, it seems to be just about anything short of the most whitebread of adult contemporary artists

a couple things I should mention as correction:

(a) Pitchfork has writers who grew up with 1D as phenomenon. Why would they pitch a review to generate lots of #engagement?

(b) I pitched a review of Liam Payne's album b/c I wanted to know what the one of the lesser known members might come up with.

fair points -- as someone with zero professional/journalistic experience i have no real idea of what kind of consideration goes into ultimately selecting releases to cover

but it does seem more frequent these days that their tweets linking to reviews of mainstream stars' records are packaged with 'shady' one-liners that are sure to be retweeted far-and-wide (including by those who won't even bother to click the link/read the review)

Speaking as a writer and a onetime editor who managed writers a couple decades younger than me, I can assure you the pay is so shitty and their hopes so beaten already that they're not thinking LOL #pitchfork WILL SURELY QUOTE THIS RAPIER OF A LINE AGAINST LIAM. Every writer at every time hopes to be read and hopes to write memorable prose; it's unfortunate how social media has made reviews marketing weapons.

as the asker, i'm just circling back to say: i did a little poking around and my bad, i knew they had started covering most mainstream pop but i guess i thought they still weren't touching *some* stuff ... i seem to recall a Whiney thread about this? ... anyway, it appears i'm wrong and pretty much anything is fair game. which is fine. now i know.

and I don't deny the financial advantages in the last five years to covering most mainstream pop. I'm just saying: the reviewers aren't cynical.

i don't think it's weird they covered her at all, they reviewed her two previous albums. apart from p4k it's generally been critically received well enough and much better than her previous albums so i'm interested in checking it out

there is still some stuff they don't touch but it's generally un-hip major-label pop rock like imagine dragons-esque stuff (though they did review their latest) and twenty one pilots (which feels like a particularly strange omission, they have enough going on that i'd expect a p4k review to be able to have something interesting enough to say about them)

"guoid" and other diphthongizations in popular music

Five separate news items about Billie Eilish winning a Grammy

News about the death of Kobe, basketball player, but not a peep about Sean Reinert, musician

2017:

Pitchfork’s coverage of the 59th annual Grammy Awards yielded the music site’s highest traffic day ever last Monday. With 1.5 million unique viewers, the music site saw a 275 percent increase over its 400,000 average daily unique views.

so sick of all these Bonnie Raitt articles!

The Florida hip-hop continuum—from Miami bass to Trick Daddy to Rick Ross to Raider Klan—has never really fit neatly into the Southern rap tradition.

Without Uncle Luke, Atlanta rap would sound like Arrested Development

well lord it's obvious we got a relationship

Rap-a-Lot (imo)

Atlanta really didn't develop much until later, MC Shy D wasn't very distinctive just influences from NY and Miami

I agree the statement is weird, given that Miami had an identity before what we think of as "southern rap" even existed

I mean if your definition of Southern rap is limited to the Big KRIT definition of “Country Shit” maybe, but all Atlanta rap from ‘87-‘91 was heavily indebted to Luke (who also put out Shy D’s record) not to mention the direct line to So So Def-era bass and then crunk shortly after. This isn’t exactly splitting hairs!

I agree!

Southern rap started with Bubba Sparxx.

nah, it was Justin Timberlake

"Atlanta really didn't develop much until later, MC Shy D wasn't very distinctive just influences from NY and Miami"

sure but kilo was doing pretty distinctive stuff in terms of both style and content as early as 90, and direct lines of influence can be drawn from him to outkast, gucci, cee-lo, d4l, etc. raheem the dream too, who literally put on fabo and young dro, two of the central style generators of '00s atlanta

the gruffer side of goodie mob -> jeezy -> 2 chainz too can prob be traced back to sammy sam and the hard boys, who draw heavily on ll cool j (basically a miami bass artist by adoption the same the showboys are new orleans bounce) and rap-a-lot , respectively

also it's especially insane to say that raider klan is disconnected from the southern rap tradition they were basically a three 6 mafia cover band when they started

whiney sent me this last night and i did not give a fuck but now i'm mad

kilo / raheem / sammy sam were all innovating while working broadly in the miami bass tradition, i should say

This retrospective “review” spends three paragraphs in the middle actually talking about the album, before drifting off into increasingly fuzzy and box-ticking discourse. It’s kind of a bummer.

...just realized they timed this to coincide with the Super Bowl Halftime show, lol

I dunno, I think of Sunday Reviews as inviting much more of a cultural-criticism approach. Since the albums came out years ago, the reviews function less as a consumer guide and more as a way of putting those albums into context, in the way that a 33 1/3 book on the album would.

I realise this isn't exactly an original point to make, but isn't Pitchfork supposed to be the place we go to get away from the likes of Shakira?

The Super Bowl tie-in makes it even worse.

Why would anyone want to get away from Shakira? What kind of business model is that?

xpost that was my initial thought about the Halsey review, but it turns out I was wrong

isn't Pitchfork supposed to be the place we go to get away from the likes of Shakira?

― does it look like i'm here (jon123), Monday, February 3, 2020 4:38 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it hasn't been that for at least a decade

Yeah, I know they've been at this for a long time, but that still doesn't make it any more palatable. There are a million other websites in the world where you can read about Shakira.

the reason the "pitchfork is dumb" thread will soon reach 16,000 posts is that it took way to long to grasp that a model allowing you to hide away from "the likes of" was a model that kept you dumb

it's still not great at thinking abt all the stuff it spent so long hiding away from

Yeah, I know they've been at this for a long time, but that still doesn't make it any more palatable. There are a million other websites in the world where you can read about Shakira.

― does it look like i'm here (jon123), Monday, February 3, 2020 7:00 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fwiw I agree with you, but luckily there are plenty of other places online to read about niche, non-mainstream music

the reason the "pitchfork is dumb" thread will soon reach 16,000 posts is that it took way to long to grasp that a model allowing you to hide away from "the likes of" was a model that kept you dumb

Believe me, I hear more than enough of Shakira in everyday life situations without wanting to.

nearly 15 years since this ship sailed, christ. not even certain why shakira’s your line in the sand, nor do i believe there are even thousands of websites on the rapidly shrinking internet on which to read critical writing about shakira

yes because if there's one thing we desperately need it's "critical writing" about pop stars

Brad OTM.

FWIW, I began to hang out on this message board 17 years ago because it featured smart people writing critically about pop music. So this seems like a weird place to air that complaint.

I honestly thought the piece on Shakira was good and informative. I didn't really need more paragraphs telling me what Whenever, Wherever sounds like, I kinda remember. But the context was illuminating.

For me it isn't the pivot to critical writing about mainstream pop music (and the corniest of indie rock) I find troubling as much as the exclusion and abandonment (which, if you're thinking in terms of niche genres like free jazz or black metal and taking into account Pfork's enduring influence on tastes, is basically erasure) of almost everything else

that's a bad sentence but you get my drift

afaict they review more jazz than ever

I said free jazz. I also didn't mean the 0.0002% of jazz (mostly coming from the London We Out Here scene and / or Kamasi adjacent) they've deemed worthy of coverage this year. Would be nice to see some coverage of people like Julia Hülsmann (and ECM artists in general), Mary Halvorson, John Zorn, Dave Rempis, Tomeka Reid, etc etc etc. There's a great new Bill Frisell album with Petra Haden they haven't bothered to review.

did those genres receive more coverage in the Golden Age of Pitchfork?

no

They still employ Andy Beta, who reviews stuff like that all the time

xp

Andy Beta and Phil Sherburne are two of the reasons I still occasionally check in.

Perhaps I’ve given the impression I care more than I do. I've long resigned myself to the fact that most of the music I listen to - techno / ambient / drone, some death metal, some jazz - is not really served by Pfork, so I don’t usually make a habit of visiting the site. But I think it's weird to just dismiss jon123's complaints, which to me are valid, even if some of us are tired of flogging this particular horse

Why?

Because once upon a time it provided a refuge from the corporate entertainment it now doggedly promotes?