pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

oh my god it's true

In summary, Megan Thee Stallion is a woman of contrasts

That tweet is gold

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I obvs get why everyone's making fun of that track review (the "Cardi kicks off “WAP” with force" part especially reads like a high school English paper) but what I'm wondering is: what *exactly* is the right way to review a song like this? It feels like no matter how you review a raunchy rap song and engage it seriously, it's gonna sound at least a little bit like the goop on ya grinch tweet.. or am I wrong? are there better examples?

I think all you need to do avoid the "Goop on Ya Grinch" effect is just not try to make it sound politically progressive

I used to laugh at how short and matter-of-fact a lot of record reviews in old punk zines were, but now I think I'd prefer it if reviews were just like "Atlanta-style hip-hop with dueling female vox. For fans of NICKI MINAJ and RICO NASTY. Lyric sheet in English and Finnish."

what *exactly* is the right way to review a song like this?

Craig Jenkins did all right.

I mean it *is* politically progressive in its own way, but that’s like the fifth most interesting thing about it and it’s possible to write about that without sounding like a somber lecture about microaggressions or whatever

lol JRN love that style of review: "Brutal Belgian raw d-beat, B+"

^This is OTM, though — in most cases, I think “track reviews” that exceed a sentence or two (i.e., fanzine or trade mag style) are hard to pull off, because... it’s a track, it’s a few minutes long, you can go listen to it, it speaks for itself. Any attempt at elaborate exegesis is bound to feel rickety and beside-the-point. (There are exceptions, I’m sure, like for very weighty or culturally relevant singles in the vein of “This Is America,” etc.)

hardwax house style

I don’t know if I agree with that take? Like, as executed by Pitchfork with their current approach and under their current mandates, sure, a track review that’s being done for perfunctory reasons stands the risk of feeling perfunctory. But I don’t think a song needs to be some sort of multifaceted diamond of obvious talking points to reward detailed examination. Former ilxor and person-whose music-opinions-I-tend-to-respect Marcello Carlin said around 2015 that he could write an entire book about Desiigner’s “Panda” if anyone were inclined to pay him for it, and I 1) believe him and 2) think it’d be pretty good.
(Hoping this doesn’t become some kind of rabbit hole for the thread but I just wanted to put my thoughts down while the above post was still recent)

xp, obvs, no objections to Hardwax house style

I could be wrong! I imagine a good writer could find a lot to say about a very good and/or significant new single... but maybe those stars just don’t align too often?

rather read a book about Tiimmy Turner

I mean that style is gone forever either way, it was a product of print, trying to cram as many reviews as possible in, but it definitely had a certain spartan poetry

I remember the 7” reviews that Douglas Wolk, another former(?) ilxor, wrote in CMJ back in the ‘90s... he had a way of expressing the “you gotta hear this” essence of a new single via a deceptively casual sentence or two. His reviews left you with an appetite to track down each 7”, not feeling like you just digested a mini essay.

(but yes, I concede that the conditions which produced reviews like that are long behind us.)

my understanding is that Douglas' "All the Marvels" book is in the editing stage now.
https://www.instagram.com/allofthemarvels/

I used to write track reviews for a particular electronic publication's online presence, and always found it quite easy-- but I'd grown up with a combo of the Hardwax style and MRR/punk zine style. Three to four short sentences is all a track needs, much of the time.

The Rage Against the Machine review isn't that bad, but a few things made me wince, especially coming from one of the site's editors, someone who's supposed to fix other people's writing:

Here they cast their gaze back through history to reel in half a millennia of theft, enslavement, and slaughter at the hands of the colonial state in the Americas. - the singular form of "millennia" is "millennium"

The gravity of hip-hop and the thick brow of metal - fuuuuuck you, dude

a steroid injection to the carceral state that put thousands of disproportionately Black men into newly constructed prisons - how can a person be "disproportionately Black"?

good catches there

I think all you need to do avoid the "Goop on Ya Grinch" effect is just not try to make it sound politically progressive

― JRN, Saturday, August 8, 2020 10:16 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

bingo

His reviews left you with an appetite to track down each 7”, not feeling like you just digested a mini essay

I like Douglas Wolk and MRR style but I also like and maybe prefer essays, mini or otherwise, when they're smart and interesting

the gravity of hip-hop and the thick brow of metal

yes this is some ignorant bullshit

that put thousands of disproportionately Black men into newly constructed prisons

Heh, I tripped over this one as well. Can't believe this has been proofread because surely you'll catch this.

there's a lot of shit you can say about christgau, but i always appreciated a 2 or 3 sentencer. even if it didn't quite make sense without hearing the record, it at least stoked some curiosity on what he was going on about

I think all you need to do avoid the "Goop on Ya Grinch" effect is just not try to make it sound politically progressive

― JRN, Saturday, August 8, 2020 10:16 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

bingo

― Paul Ponzi, Sunday, August 9, 2020 7:49 AM (one hour ago)

what's politically progressive in the Goop tweet?

I read it as trying in vain to suggest via academic jargon some profundity and / or wokeness in music that clearly does not merit such examination

xpost Christgau often doesn't make sense after you've heard the record either

Pitchfork, 1981: “By fantastizing about driving his truck through a racist bar in his new single “Rapp Dirty”, Blowfly perfectly encapsulates the frustrations of the Black community of today (10.0)”

Wow I thought I was the only one who read Hardwax reviews. TIP!

wait what’s offensive about the thick brown thing? do metal bros all pluck now?

thick brow*

Go beyond the low and the high brow, embrace the thick brow or, better yet, the unibrow.

The album was released in the last gasp of the monoculture

I have no idea what this means.

When I hear 'thick brow' I think skull shape, not eyebrows. Did he mean eyebrows?

Battle revealed the extent—chronologically and geographically—to which none of us live with dignity.

lol I was 14 when it came out and had no inkling as to its political touchstones aside from a vague sense that they were telling figures of authority off via sick raps and bad-ass riffs. That Twitter rando who bitched about how Tom Morello 'spoiled' RATM's music with his verbal agitprop was no anomaly.

wait what’s offensive about the thick brown thing? do metal bros all pluck now?

He is implying that they are, er, Neanderthals.

anti-racist phrenology

I mean, I was 12 or so when it came out and I totally got the political message of the music. They were the only band that me and my skater friends could agree on for many years.

But I also had been listening to them since their first record— one thing that the Crow OST was good for, in my case at least, was making me seek out records by the groups that I liked.

That said, none of my skater friends appear to be radical leftists, and here I am still.

I got lost somewhere in the third paragraph. I mean, at least I could tell Sam1r's old review was about music.

i've bitched about this before, and it's a tiny thing, but the fact the 'here's what ... is listening to know' interviews are never with musicians baffles me. speaking for myself that seems like a group of people who might actually have interesting answers to that question!

to now* obviously

They do run those features where musicians talk about the music they were into at different stages of their life (5-15-25... or whatever).

and the quietus's baker's dozen is the gold standard there, anyway

Terrible flashback memory to a Mustang convertible filled with (white) (polo shirt-clad) bros yelling along to "Killing In The Name Of" driving in front of my high school.

i know, and i enjoy them, but i guess i'm interested to hear what new music people are listening to; in that it is quite possibly quite different from what is being covered usually i.e. from the depths of bandcamp / soundcloud

i also am not a child and so don't care about netflix actors, so maybe i'm just no longer a target demographic

Didn't realize Netflix is only for children, thanks for warning me!