pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

And now we're crying /
It‘a unjuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust!

*guitar soloing*

Big fans of things are still eligible to review them, but probably best if it’s not like this.

Looks like Pitchfork is doing their Peoples' List again with readers submitting their favorite albums from the past 25 years. It will be interesting to see how it will compare with the last time they this: https://pitchfork.com/peopleslist/

I actually really enjoyed some of the breakdowns from that one.

kanye kendrick frank frank kanye kendrick

and radiohead!

I think this might actually be an interesting test to see if Kanye's stock has indeed fallen much (if at all) in the last few years. I suspect not much, but we'll see.

when they did the first peoples list from back in 2012 all the p4k staff members at the time put out all their own individual lists and all those individual lists exposed me to so much good music from those years. like, i could just pull up someone's list, notice there was an album on it i hadn't heard of before, and then bam i have a new favourite record.

but the actual full people's list? boring as hell.

Trying to winnow 25 years worth of albums down to a Top 25 doesn’t seem like a particularly fun or fruitful exercise.

It isn't a bad list

I wish I'd saved my original People's List. At one time, each individual voter's list had its own unique URL, but those got scrubbed a long time ago.

I would like to know how their auto-population works. I just tried Grouper and 6 albums came up but then Paramore and 0.

i think it has to do with reviews in the archive. looks like they've only ever reviewed 'after laughter'

Right, but they reviewed After Laughter, so it must pull from some other source.

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lol how did someone pitch last train to paris as a sunday review without making the case for it as a classic

This review of a STP reissue (which is great – breezy, well-written, with some perfect turns of phrase) makes reference to a “a genuinely deplorable review upon its original release” by “Pitchfork’s then-editor”… I looked it up, and holy sh1t.

yikes that might be the worst thing they ever ran

plus bennies
seriously, what a piece of shit to have written that.

For ease of access, but hidden with a trigger warning for inhumanity to someone with a drug addiction. I feel like such opinions were a lot more common back in the '90s or even a decade ago.

Stone Temple Pilots
Tiny Music:
Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop
Atlantic
Rating: 0.8
Though I admit to being in love with Stone Temple Pilots' last record (and to some extent, the record before that), there's nothing for sale at the Vatican Gift Shop but lousy, repetitive riffs, wimpy lyrics, and a drug-addled sonofabitch that should have OD'ed a long time ago. The only thing even vaguely appealing about this smelly hunk of digital turd, is all the heroin jokes it allows you to make up about Scott Weiland.

I don't know if you noticed this, but parts of the big hit single, "Big Bang Baby" are direct rip-offs of the old Rolling Stones tune, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and they should have even known better than to steal lines from a song that is completely chiseled into every living person's brain. "Big Bang Baby / It's a crash, crash, crash." Fuck you, Weiland. You suck so bad that even your band hates you. And after lousing it up your chances to open for Kiss on their reunion tour, who wouldn't?

Oh, other insightful lyrics on the record include "I Can't Walk / I Can't Talk / Booze / I Can Booze / Steal Your Shoes." He's a poet, and we don't know it. So, Scott, here's what you do: Get out of bed, tie yourself off, and fall directly into space forever. But don't just do it for yourself, do it for me.

-Ryan Schreiber

Neither reviewer manages to suss out that the song Big Bang Baby actually rips off is For Love by Lush.

Oh, ok. the hidden text didn't work? Sorry. I tried.

really awful.

in many ways we live in a more compassionate era than 10, 20 years ago. in other ways we don't, but i think the progress is worth celebrating.

What an edgelord

I am very happy that the "this person made art I dislike and therefore should die" school of criticism is on its way out, yeah. Saw a Kazou Ishiguro doc some time ago that featured a 90's lit show where one critic thought that, because he hadn't liked his most recent novel, Ishiguro should "commit ritual suicide".

had to do a few write ins but coming up with 25 since 96 was pretty fun

I ended up doing it last nite, too... didn't put too much thought into it, just had fun (included a bunch of duplicates). Put a box set at #2, not sure if that's allowed.

(btw - that old STP review was so bad, it broke Zing)

The dropdown list included "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge" but not "The Black Parade". I thought that was really weird.

I encountered several instances where albums they have reviewed did not appear in the dropdown (recent reviews, not old/deleted ones).

yeah its odd. for example i remember reading the burn piano island burn review years ago but in the dropdown and in a google search, it no longer exists.

is pitchfork, like, trying very hard not to give out Best New Tracks these days? the new grouper single is downright stunning and not even it can get a bnt

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peppa-pig-peppas-adventures-the-album/

Did we jointly hallucinate this Peppa review into being or what

i remember when peyton was just an annoying popular tumblr user, which is probably sufficient background

can’t tell how many of the twitter replies comparing this to [shit-but-poplar album with a lower score] are celebrating or complaining or doing irony or what. i don’t object to them reviewing this but the actual review is irritatingly precious about it

I mean I do find it amusing that it has a higher score than the Bleachers album from the day before.

To reply to Josh -

I feel like there are far less track reviews than there once were

all the outraged indie dorks on twitter have made me decide this review is good actually

I wish they would stop reviewing music for children and go back to reviewing, uh, Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Xan

i wish they would just stop.

This is probably my favorite piece of writing on the entire site, at least right now

https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781534470903/daniels-little-songs-for-big-feelings-9781534470903_lg.jpg

Slept on classic

https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781534470903/daniels-little-songs-for-big-feelings-9781534470903_lg.jpg

Slept on classic

Reviewing music for kids (in a legitimate / non-gag way) can actually be done, and a significant % of Pfork’s readers probably do have young kids. So they could do it for real if they wanted.

(It was actually valuable info for me to learn there’s a new Peppa album; we’ve been listening to the last few singles that dropped)

Are there really people who read the Peppa review as something other than a critique of poptimism-or-whatever

I read it as the site checking to see if readers are conscious or out cold

i like that it scores higher than the new one from The Bleachers and is directly above it

Cool idea for a Sunday review - I definitely remember seeing t-shirts etc of this band w/the xian kids in HS

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dc-talk-jesus-freak/

brad shoup is a really good writer and the right person to write about a dc talk album. really looking forward to reading it

Ah, memories of the teen church that was the tour stop MxPx, Five Iron Frenzy and a bunch of Christian death metal.

They weren't big enough for DC Talk but they had a separate room that was either Christian rap or a Christian rave room (lol) depending on the night.

I'm too old for this shit. Plus, Catholic, so all the kids I knew in high school who were real strong believers were just really into U2 and The Alarm.