pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

well, pitchfork covers pop stars heavily when it comes to news bcuz news is what drives traffic on a daily basis and you can't employ 50+ ppl at living wages by posting updates on indie rock music. simply put, it's not feasible. the incentive structure as it pertains to that part of the site is pretty clear and unavoidable. but is that what bothers ppl? the news coverage? maybe it is idk. bcuz as many ppl have pointed out on a critical level what the site gets behind has, if anything, retreated further back towards indie rock, outsider type music and away from poptimism

variables:

a) as mentioned there is an impending conde nast strike
b) there just was a global pandemic that shut down the global economy
c) stan backlash has gotten a lot worse than it was in 2015 so writers may be more hesitant to jump on big pop albums, many writers (who aren't me) have explicitly said this was a factor in declining to write about certain pop albums
d) pop music has kind of diffused into 50 million tiktok kids who may not have "albums" to review
e) did I mention there was a global pandemic

I really, really would not draw very many conclusions about editorial strategy from 2020-21

xp as you already basically pointed out it's people who aren't really paying attention at all to any of this stuff & as katherine suggested it's probably mostly in reaction to the year end lists etc. mostly because they're what seems to get the most wider traction and has the most people quoting goofy blurbs etc. to mock on twitter

c) stan backlash has gotten a lot worse than it was in 2015 so writers may be more hesitant to jump on big pop albums, many writers (who aren't me) have explicitly said this was a factor in declining to write about certain pop albums

oof this didn't occur to me but of course, not worth the hassle

some kneejerk p4k criticisms also basically boil down to "people shouldn't use fancy words to talk about music"

like so: https://www.tiktok.com/@therealzebos/video/6939212645169908997

several house legends on that Dua Lipa remix project (Mr Fingers, Masters at Work, Moodymann) but Parrish wasn’t among them

xps

yea philistinism getting traction on twitter is no big surprise, i just think its important to observe there are communities where its been -- to be funny -- manufactured a bit

several house legends on that Dua Lipa remix project (Mr Fingers, Masters at Work, Moodymann) but Parrish wasn’t among them

xps

― ten man poland chasing this means hamsik feasts (breastcrawl), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 4:51 PM (forty-one seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

xp my bad yea ... i think i was probably remembering wishing he was lol

xps Fisher is a extremely popular among the edgelord podcast crowd for other work so it wouldn't surprise me if they've inherited his boring views on music as well

i'm sure it's a half-assed regurgitation of his views as well instead of having any thought put into it at all

well obviously

deej otm

it’s not just ppl who listen to podcasts either, i remember a tweet a while back by OP of this thread saying like ‘poptimism was a mistake other than for the 18 months where timbaland wikki-wikki beats and neptunes were on the charts and that was only good bc it was referencing experimental music’.

poptimism 1.0 won the battle but lost the war

Also the six weeks when "My Sharona" was #1

would love to meet a guy who's a poptimist but only for the one week period where def lep's "love bites!" was number one

isn't that just diamond joe biden

i missed this article from March but I think the cultural nu-Vice hipster zeitgeist around podcast left / anti-poptimism / et al cultural moment https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/business/media/the-drunken-canal-media-nyc.html

combine this w the mark fisher thing we talked about upthread ... poptimism was for many ppl a trend after the nerds took over being into cool underground music. .. now it goes the other way etc

wish i hadn't read that article and learned that one of the red scare hosts is going to be in season 3 of succession :(

wau and lol @ that Drunken Canal story.

great news!

pitchfork is unionized (#1 in a series.)

.@p4kunion, @newyorkerunion, and @ars_union are thrilled to announce that after 2-and-a-half years of negotiations with @CondeNast, we have reached an agreement in principle on our first contracts and averted a strike.🎇Here are some of our wins: (1/9)

— Pitchfork Union (@p4kunion) June 16, 2021

starting to think the pitchfork is poptimist tweet was an anti-union psyop...

oh hey the wolf alice review finally arrived and it mostly sucks lol

been a while since I've seen a review tie itself in knots explaining its critical position quite this much

Ian Cohen shitty review shocka

the Sinead O'Connor review today is fantastic. I'm not normally a big fan of reviews steeped in biographical detail but I think Sodomsky's done a great job of tying her origins and story to how her music sounds and why it's so excellent.

Yeah it’s so good – and he does it right! He weaves those key details throughout a piece that’s squarely focused on the album. (These Sunday reviews often feel like exhaustive biographical essays with a few paragraphs on the album being “reviewed.”)

dammit he's good

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sinead-oconnor-the-lion-and-the-cobra/

Yeah, that was great

yeah good piece. that album is fire.

Beeple and the founder of Pitchfork are launching an NFT site where you can buy moments in time https://t.co/czc6SlLIpH pic.twitter.com/mGLQoaJ4OT

— The Verge (@verge) June 24, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L9EMe-7Z4w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L9EMe-7Z4w

here, have two

Wes Anderson’s influence looms large here, with wide-angle shots on diorama sets, and vintage luxury suitcases shot with a low-contrast, brown-and-pastel color palette. It’s hard to separate Anderson’s manicured aesthetic from whiteness, and how Tyler’s proximity to and relationship with whiteness throughout his career has proven to be awkward and, at times, problematic.

Yeah wth. Is “awkward” just his epithet now? The interview from 2011 they link goes to lengths to establish his awkward cred too.

It also has some tasty bits regarding a Pitchfork review from the time:

Those kids relate to me because I’m just like them. He doesn’t relate to me because he’s not like us. So it’s a whole different mindset. He doesn’t have the audacity to call anything stupid because I mean something to someone. Like the kid that got OF tatted on him, from the SF show. Some people might call him stupid as fuck, but to him, that shit actually means something to him. You never know, he might have listened to my music and his fucking mom died and shit, and he got that just to remind him that my music got him fucking through. So it weirds me out when there’s people like that, who can’t relate under any circumstances, writing. But then again, some (writers) just like it, so I’m kinda 50/50 on shit like that.

Meanwhile, Doja Cat’s various controversies simply demonstrate that she “isn’t ensnared by the predictability of pop stardom.”

(that review’s pretty funny to me… it tries so hard to turn every potential weakness into a strength, and isn’t afraid to take down her peers in comparison!)

What “weaknesses” are you talking about

the implication every time is that she works with dr. luke and showed her feet to white supremacists iirc

xp Her artistic weaknesses, IMO… she’s “perfunctory and unpretentious,” etc.

(not a tryhard like Megan; she just “entertains and enthralls with minimal effort”!)

I love that the Doja review treats doing 4chan racism memes as but one part of a "triple threat"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlYmBkkkkPg

Tyler liking the Fantastic Mr. Fox makes him a problematic race traitor

Doja doing the type of /pol/ posting that helped fuel the capitol insurrection makes her a radical defying the male gaze

Mystified by why you guys think that making the difficult appear easy would be some sort of desperate critical maneuver to cover up weakness instead of the literal definition of style & swag

I don’t get the Tyler wes thing either but don’t punish the doja review for not succumbing to the same weird sociopolitical logics

Like it's obviously a net good that P4k is attempting to spotlight inequality in all its forms, but ffs get your politics straight

the Doja review is really poorly served by not having been edited at all

i think the subtext of the thing about tyler the creator and whiteness is various instances both in music and in interviews where he‘s said or implied that he’s only sexually interested in white men, as far as men go. the pitchfork blog doesn’t do a good job of connecting the dots back to tyler’s aesthetic POV but there is some tension there to be teased out & i did understand what the writer was gesturing at, it’s just a bit clumsy

also re doja cat and her 4 chan song, the obvious reading of the song is that she’s flipping the slur back around onto the ppl who use, it really doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. there’s plenty of criticisms to make of her — tho tbh her politics have always seemed to be in the right place publicly, she just has some edgelord-y tendencies, so i find this hysteria coming from whiney who listens to every cum town episode to be a bit funny — but i don’t find that song to be an indictment of her on a political level

I just thought it was funny for this to be the one time a Pfork review dutifully runs thru an artist’s controversies, only this time to spin it into a positive (“She marches to the beat of her own drum!”).

And it’s in keeping with the review in general, which indeed could have used some editing.