pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

In my defense I don’t think I’ve ever made it through a full episode of Cum Town

I agree with Whiney about the Tyler review.

Mise-en-scène is colonialist

The Tyler isn’t a review it’s a knee jerk release response piece which I think is part of what makes it jarring — it hits this breezy on-first-listen tone but it’s gesturing at unpacking a really complex thing

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

― we don't have to be around all these coffee shops (morrisp), Saturday, June 26, 2021 1:14 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

What do you guys mean by this

I meant I found it difficult to read on a sentence level, e.g.:

Her hyponasal vocal switch-ups—including the deployment of a nonspecific African accent (likely inspired by her own heritage) in “Woman” on Planet Her and “Got to Town” off of Amala aren’t theft, but rather evidence of her chameleonic, limitless flows and intonations.

But Planet Her’s true standouts draw on the same cinematic, life-affirming spirit that propelled Hot Pink’s “Bottom Bitch”: The harpsichord-assisted digicore of “Payday,” ft. Young Thug; the uniquely Black girl celebration of life contained in “Get Into It (Yuh)” as it encapsulates the two seconds that preempt twerking—the pre-leg kick—while Doja rattles off the prerequisites to “get into it.” (“And if she ain’t she got a butt, fuck it, get into it, yuh.”)

Idk, it's not a big deal, I just had to read it twice to feel like I got what was being said and it's not like a super sophisticated analysis

xp -- with the doja cat song I think the criticism is less about the song per se and more about hanging out in a chat with white supremacists

That review opens by saying it is *good* that she is an “edgelord” because it overturns stereotypes. (“Not showing penitence for her audience!”) Really has nothing to do with the music—she is being evaluated as a performance artist, based on how well she teases out the contradictions in the semiotics of race. This kind of review feels really arbitrary. One person’s progressive gesture is another person’s problematic one—you could really spin most things both ways given the lack of agreed upon standards.

It’s a very strange text. She is being spoken of as a kind of heroic figure due to a series of messy controversies last year. But the claims are always couched in kind of passive language so it’s hard to really nail down why the reviewer seems to feel this way.

Whether it’s using of the f-slur in her apology for using the f-slur or her perceived indifference following a “showing feet in racial chatrooms” brouhaha, Doja isn’t ensnared by the predictability of pop stardom.

Cool?

Some artists release albums that function as grand gestures, but Doja Cat doesn’t have to; Planet Her is an enormous shrug, the edgelord hottie pop star telling the world that it’s not her job to care.

If the reviewer flat out said they appreciated doja because she was an anti-pc bomb-thrower, standing up to sanctimony, that would at least be coherent. But the review never quite goes there.

I don’t think you and I read the same review. (I do agree with Rob’s critique though)

That review opens by saying it is *good* that she is an “edgelord” because it overturns stereotypes.

For example. The review does not actually say this at all

Ah, yes, the classic “triple threat” wherein three things described have competing values

“D-40 is a triple threat: He’s a great ILX poster, a knowledgeable rap snob, and he lacks reading comprehension”

Weird that there’s total confusion and disagreement about what this lede is supposed to say

Anyway, D-40 is right that it doesn’t need editing

On the surface, she resembles an e-girl making fart jokes who’d peak at 70,000 Twitter followers more than a masterful, total-package artist. Or the intensely hermetic version of that: a popular, anonymous forum shitposter everyone assumes is a man because the assumption is women—Black women, especially—mobilize against offense instead of causing it.

She communicates like an anonymous 4chan troll, *but* she is a Black woman, which violates our expectations.

It seems like she is being commended for bucking stereotypes, even in this kind of uninspiring way of emulating internet trolls. But you’re right deej, the review doesn’t explicitly say this is praiseworthy. I think that is because it would be hard to directly make the case that her antics are good, or serve her work in any meaningful way. Easier to just create a vague impression of rebelliousness, bucking expectations.

I just think it reads like a college reviewer, who thinks their favorite artist can do no wrong, resorting to hyperbole and “this-is-good-actually.”

What editor doesn’t read “limitless flows and intonations”; circle “limitless” in red pen; and write a question mark next to it.

I think the reviewer likes doja cat’s flirtations with nihilism and internet shock aesthetics but doesn’t want to articulate why they like these things.

i remember reading the first paragraph or two of that doja cat review and thinking "yeah ilx is gonna rip this thing to shreds"

weirdly enough I listened to a few tracks from the record and got bored of it, but I *love* hot pink. one of the defining mainstream pop albums of the past few years imo

“ It seems like she is being commended for bucking stereotypes”

No it doesn’t. It reads as a totally neutral description of these things — you’re projecting

Anyway, D-40 is right that it doesn’t need editing

― bruce spr!ngisH3r3 on broadway (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, June 26, 2021 8:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I said that Rob’s critiques were correct. Don’t put words in my mouth defending indefensible treeship posts