pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

lover getting 7.1 seemed really high for how bad half of it is

Yeah, i take back my previous comment, 8.7 seems about right

Surprised that the new Bad Brains piece doesn’t even allude to the controversy involving the band and homophobia (despite spending several paragraphs on their 1989 album which has that infamous song). Just seems like something a retrospective like this would typically attempt to wrestle with a bit.

While you wait for our review of @TaylorSwift13's new album, revisit our writing on her entire discography → https://t.co/wLNJhkPLzb pic.twitter.com/TQzzrARfro

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) July 25, 2020

Yes, we await so anxiously, lol. This can only mean it's 8.5 or up I fear.

Different subject but their twitter game is just god awful.

Hi @pitchfork im diagnosed with stage 1 cancer if folklore gets a bad review, it'll affect my body and results with coma, please be kind and rate it 10/10 🙏😭

— betty • 𝒇𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆 (@FolkloreBop) July 26, 2020

jesus christ

if folklore doesn't get a 10 i'll kill myself on live tv

First things first - they need to circle back and review the Nelly Furtado album of the same title

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8b/Folklore_cover.png

Should've been today's Sunday Review.

smh at all of this

Dear pitchfork, my cousin is very sick and said it would bring him great joy if you'd give folklore 0/10. Have a great day!

i hate that gay teenage stans have started caring so much about critic scores (not the reviews, just the scores) ever since critical consensus got metacritified, + legacy outlets get to rub their titties 'withholding' their 'anticipated' reviews as hordes of netizens wait with bated breath, harassment emails at the ready

they get to what now

i hate that gay teenage stans have started caring so much about critic scores (not the reviews, just the scores) ever since critical consensus got metacritified, + legacy outlets get to rub their titties 'withholding' their 'anticipated' reviews as hordes of netizens wait with bated breath, harassment emails at the ready

― dyl, Sunday, 26 July 2020 19:32 (fifty seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

whose fault is this though, the stans' or the critics'

the biggest problem with professional music criticism is that it has been reduced to a few key voices, whose scores 'matter' increasingly given the ever-decreasing wealth of debate or competition. we end up with monopolies and coronations. queen taytay awaits her 9.something, and we the flagwaving public line pall mall in slavering anticipation

meanwhile hundreds of good albums come out every week, more than ever before, and the old critic models, not least pitchfork, are just so hopeless at keeping up with them all

I love you Pitchfork I'm sorry for laughing at you in this thread, you're not dumb, please give Folklore a 5.2

queen taytay awaits her 9.something, and we the flagwaving public line pall mall in slavering anticipation

― imago, Sunday, July 26, 2020 3:43 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

what planet would queen taytay care about her pitchfork score or her Fantano review. P4k didn't even deign to review Taylor until nearly a decade after her debut

i hate that gay teenage stans have started caring so much about critic scores (not the reviews, just the scores) ever since critical consensus got metacritified, + legacy outlets get to rub their titties 'withholding' their 'anticipated' reviews as hordes of netizens wait with bated breath, harassment emails at the ready

― dyl, Sunday, July 26, 2020 3:32 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they get to what now

― the quar on drugs (Simon H.), Sunday, July 26, 2020 3:33 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck it, he said it, rub on their titties

for once Simon did NOT say this

get the folklore review up

judge_judy_tapping_watch.gif

the biggest problem with professional music criticism is that it has been reduced to a few key voices

whose fault is this though, the critics' or capitalism's

point taken! and yet. you wonder why we don't have more critics pivoting to video. fantano may have frequently-bad opinions and a creepy cult but he's making something work for himself, and the spectrumpulses of the world are following suit with varying degrees of success

i know video involves delivery as well as writing, which some critics probably hate the idea of, but critic is now a vocal, bardic tradition, deal with it idk. the next big step is critics who deal with much more than one release in each 5-minute video, get on it brad, i wd subscribe 2 u

i would've vlogged already if i had any patience for video editing

you know that shit is going to get easier and easier

remember how taylor swift stans tried to make a point about how reviewing her documentary was anti-feminist by digging up a blog post harassing the writer by noted serial harasser of writersq ed ch*mp**n? because I do

if folklore doesn't get a 10 i'll kill myself on live tv

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

i feel like half the records i hear lately are not even thinly veiled cries for help, they're just flat out fucking suicide notes. (the other half are overt calls for the immediate end of capitalism.)

Jessie Ware kills herself or cries for help after reading this thread

it's just fucking beyond depressing that anyone would give a single fuck what kind of score Pitchfork gave a Taylor Swift album

i mean i entirely agree but here we are

point taken! and yet. you wonder why we don't have more critics pivoting to video.

if folklore doesn't get a 10 i'll kill myself on live tv

haven't seen the review but apparently the stans are already harassing/doxxing jon caramanica + begging metacritic not to 'count' what he's written (despite any quibbles about the content this is all they actually care about)

i strongly believe there will be extremely simple, easy-to-use video editing apps very very soon, and it will behoove all you fine critics to get on that shit and say approving things about taytay that are nonetheless insufficiently ecstatic to dissuade her stan army from cancelling you

and yeah i know creepo men exist and are a serious barrier to a lot of people making criticism (often just the people you'd want to see criticism by too) but...well you don't necessarily have to appear as-is. there are methods of obscuring. animations, outfits, or even videos made from image collages pertaining to the music or lyrical content. idk. yes it is a horrible world of stans and creeps but there are ways to shield yourself from the worst of it maybe?

i think you’re discounting the amount of labor it takes to WRITE well, which is what i want to put my energy into. cartoons? jesus. also i find “video versions of writing” extremely laborious to sit through. there’s only a finite amount of time in a day; youtube’s monetization policies mean that videos take at least 10 minutes to watch; please read up on the “pivot to video” that a lot of more well funded outlets couldn’t pull off.

serious qn: would there need to be much difference between a well-written review such as you'd normally do, and a well-written review script for a video? you could literally read out your review (or get an AI to) over algorithmically-chosen stock photos and music fans would absolutely take note; gain some notoriety for the quality of your content (which really does boil down to the writing) and idk things could be looking up not just for you but the music you like to talk about

this is obviously screamingly idealistic and naive but worth thinking about imo

happy to read any links about failed pivots to video obv but i wouldn't have thought funding so much as lack of execution or the right approach would be the issue

video has low information density and high bandwidth, which translates to “it’s a pain in the ass to make and consume, and not as skimmable as a record review.” to bring it back to the thread topic, check pitchfork for their last video album review. it came out in 2018; their video section now is driven by celebrities and live performances, because “here are thoughts on an a album” was not justifying the human and monetary cost it required to be executed well.

fantano jumped on the train early and was savvy about how people seek out albums on youtube, and he appealed to a particular type of always-online obsessive. but his success was very lightning in a bottle and anyway everyone’s moved on to newsletters.

also your suggestion is pretty much what every media company tried to do with “pivoting to video” and all it did was piss off readers and make web sites more impossible to read.

peering past fantano + the small number of successful semi-serious cultural critics(/'video essayists') on youtube, most of the successful 'criticism' on that platform, if you can call it that, comes in the form of shallow but dramatic 'reaction videos' that perform well with too-online fandoms + scoop up plenty of curiosity clicks if released asap following the records they're responding to... by and large it is tremendously difficult for someone whose specialty is thoughtful criticism to make that work in the video medium

I'd also submit that there's a certain charisma needed to be a compelling video reviewer that a lot of excellent but introverted or self-conscious writers (music or not), simply don't have. Their words might be compelling on the page, but their self-conscious camera shy-ness might not be. It'll probably come more naturally to a younger generation who are more natural in front of cameras due to their increasing prominence in everyday life, but honestly, I can't bear to watch myself back on video. I know that probably says more about my own insecurities than anything else, but I wouldn't be surprised if others felt the same way.

youtubing is a very vapid medium. it's not conducive to the concept of arts criticism. could you imagine ppl clamoring for literary criticism to move to youtube? "has the london review of books thought about trying youtube?" -- nobody. fantanto is sui generis bcuz he tapped into the rap nerd contingency among reddit and 4chan posters... it's a large group of ppl online (eminem fans) who weren't being catered to by pitchfork, rolling stone, fader, xxl, etc. good for them, they can have each other. there is no fantano model w/o the fantano demographic, and to suggest that ppl should want to sign up to engage w/ that audience is not a position i would agree w/ at all.

there's actually a good deal of fairly successful music podcasts... it's a far more conducive medium to discussion of art. still, most of the popular ones -- song exploder, mogul etc -- are either ideas that wouldn't be best on a web page or threats to narrative features/storytelling moreso than criticism per se. and in places where there is a popular discussion podcast -- i.e. nyt popcast, rolling stone pod -- i don't think you'd hear anyone say that the success of the podcast is damaging the worth or reputation of the accompanying written journalism.

As an occasional consumer of music criticism, I can affirm that I have zero interest in watching a YouTube music review (of course, I’m just one, Gen X aged guy).

imago at 7:10 26 Jul 20

happy to read any links about failed pivots to video obv but i wouldn't have thought funding so much as lack of execution or the right approach would be the issue

or you could do it yourself and not just assume your zero info gut reaction needs to be disproven

8.0

rip bradNelson

We reviewed @TaylorSwift13's new album https://t.co/w6hqBCUUIq

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) July 27, 2020

The stans are already out in full force

What are they mad about? It's an extremely positive, generous review. The only real negative criticism it has is the (accurate) claim it's maybe a couple of songs too long.

here's me

ከጨለማው ንግሥት በኋላ ፣ ቴይለር ስዊፍት በኋላ የሚመጣ ማንኛውም ሰው ብቻውን ይሞታል እና ለዘላለም ይቃጠላል። በጨለማ ፍርሃቶችዎ እና በአጋንንትዎ ይሞላሉ ፡፡ በጭራሽ ደስተኛ አትሆኑም እና እንደገና በደንብ pic.twitter.com/3cPy3K1sZz

— s h o e b¹³ (@hauntedghostss) July 27, 2020