pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I think I stopped reading in 2007 or so; I now only surf over there when someone I know has published something, or it's the end of the year.

doing it this way is such a weird self-serious exercise instead of just publishing a new sunday review or whatever

i think the exact opposite of this!!

they published a small thing at the top of their page that will disappear tomorrow, and no one cares except for nerds (i'm here for it, that's for fucken sure). and at the top of the thing, it's like "here's some reviews that may or may not have been wrong, according to these 19 people. what if we could assign a different score now? ponder this as you scroll through your phone during your incredibly busy tuesday, because you're right in the conde naste audience core demographic and we want you to be slightly engaged (read: slightly irritated) during your lunch break!!

whereas with a sunday review it would be like "there's only one review today, and it is designed to be a rebuke to the past. read it with great seriousness, and do not comment below, because we don't do comments any more due to the immense volume of crazy-ass music fans"

We’ve got some big news: we’ve signed up Ryan Schreiber’s Weird Era! Ryan is the founder of Pitchfork, and served alternately as the site’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief from 1996 to 2019. Weird Era, which is scheduled for summer 2023, chronicles the rise of Pitchfork from basement blog to the world’s most trusted and influential music authority. Along the way, Ryan charts the artists–Arcade Fire! Radiohead! Grimes! Frank Ocean!–that Pitchfork championed, as well as the generation of listeners the site helped shape. We can’t wait to publish this book, which we know will be a defining account of music, media, and growing up in the 2000s

It's OK everyone, there's a book coming out that will definitely address everyone getting paid like shit and checks bouncing all over the place.

i understand that the primary thing pitchfork seems to sell these days is the concept of itself and its rating system and its history but golly they are really overdoing the "we're the main characters here" thing. shit, cat

i know it's hard out there for a music crit publication but

Just wait until you see the Pitchfork 25th Anniversary television spectacular! A parade of dancing strawberries gets mashed up in a tribute to Animal Collective.

i don't know, irl people seem to celebrate their own anniversaries every year. it gets really tiresome but everyone does it

Yeah, this seems like a weird criticism. Lots of magazines/publications do self-congratulatory anniversary issues.

I thought the 25th passed a year ago. I don't begrudge them anything, they have mostly been really solid, can't think of another music publication ever that I have been interested in over so long a period

it's corny when anyone does it i think

it makes more money

"follow the money"

"eyes in the sky"

*looking at fools*

tim heidecker's "eyes in the sky" : comedy :: pitchfork's 25th anniversary special : music criticism

it's a celebration of what is possible

200 25th anniversaries that changed anniversary celebration forever:

1. Dr. Dre Presents The Aftermath (25th anniversary deluxe edition)

2. World War II

Weird Era Discont

it's sooo bad

3. Pokemon cards

I was kidding about justice for Travistan earlier, but really wish that Sonic Youth NYC Ghosts & Flowers one made this list, if only to nuke this part of the review from orbit:

In a way, Sonic Youth's offenses are no different than, say, the Bloodhound Gang's. Where the Bloodhound Gang push recycled Beastie Boys and "South Park" jokes on will-less consumers, Sonic Youth scrap together Yoko Ono, Glenn Branca, and Allen Ginsberg into major label product. But just like living in the Big Apple, you're merely paying more for it. These are not new ideas. These are ideas that were arrogant and unlistenable upon birth 30 years ago. Sonic Youth are even old enough to know that! Thurston Moore stuck the sleeves of John Cage albums into his spokes and Kim Gordon played house with her Kathy Acker action figures.

That review really should be “deprecated.”

These 40+ year olds continue to operate under the perception that they matter.

(I admit the final line is kinda funny)

I never got the hate for NYC Ghosts & Flowers

revisionism is for the birds, just write new reviews and post them side by side with the originals and do that ad infinitum. then have the new writer pick points with the old one. After you get through four cycles, we can just start reviewing reviews and remove the middleman entirely.

whose review will receive the first 9.7 is more interesting to me than what decimal point kanye achieves

We’ve got some big news: we’ve signed up Ryan Schreiber’s Weird Era! Ryan is the founder of Pitchfork, and served alternately as the site’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief from 1996 to 2019. Weird Era, which is scheduled for summer 2023, chronicles the rise of Pitchfork from basement blog to the world’s most trusted and influential music authority. Along the way, Ryan charts the artists–Arcade Fire! Radiohead! Grimes! Frank Ocean!–that Pitchfork championed, as well as the generation of listeners the site helped shape. We can’t wait to publish this book, which we know will be a defining account of music, media, and growing up in the 2000s

Hope this includes his Village Vanguard Coltrane essay, for which the dude should be laughed off the face of the planet.

I read lotsa dumb zines back in the day and nothing --nothing-- I read in a zine, no matter how dumb or trivial, compares to how horrible this is. This is like Trump making fun of the physically disabled reporter.

Shit cat

Yes awful but really, cat, as bad as Trump? That’s bordering on Godwin’s law. You went straight to thermonuclear warfare.

As someone who stepped away from ILM for a while, is ILM going through a similar identity crisis as Pitchfork?

Clearly much of this revisionism is rooted in idpol, which no doubt deserves a thread of its own. (And just to be clear about my position: I’m all for the decline and fall of indie.)

The outright revisionism isn’t so apparent around here although there are some perspectives on older threads that I’d guess would warrant a ban now. But generally I feel like there is a similar sociopolitical dynamic playing out here.

Or maybe I’m just struggling to cope with the death of old ILM.

a message board's tastes changing with both time & turnover in users is a little different to the same happening at a website which attempts to represent itself as more of an institution but neither is necessarily a bad thing at all. what's goofy is just the way p4k has gone about things this week so far, like the 'most influential' list was just "here are a lot of popular critical favourites" while attempting to present it as "the most important to pitchfork's history" when that was often blatant revisionism. a more interesting list could have dug into innovators who were influential but not as popular to some extent perhaps? i always found fact's retrospective decade lists to be interesting by directly taking that sort of approach. and then the "we were wrong" list was a fine concept just things like "the chairlift album deserved 1 point higher" and "room on fire was actually great rather than good" felt like navel-gazing even by the standards of such an exercise.

ilx was the first space i encountered online where being a huge music fan didn't necessarily mean "liking indie rock a lot," which is why comparing it to pfork breaks down immediately for me

albeit i started posting in 2010, old ilx might've been dead already

Given the results of the Best of the 00s Poll from a couple of years ago, I would say there is not nearly as big of an identity crisis.

ilx was the first space i encountered online where being a huge music fan didn't necessarily mean "liking indie rock a lot,"

even when i've gone back through early threads far predating me this has seemed like it was largely the case from the beginning? obv the exact nature of that has changed over time but

definitely parts of old ilx i'm glad i was not around for though

Right I’m probably conflating a few different issues here. I feel like both ILM and Pfork are struggling through this rockist to poptimist metamorphosis.

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 that was neither rockist nor poptimist. But it’s quite possible I have an unrealistically rosy view of that era, and since I haven’t been that active lately maybe I’m pretty wrong about what’s going on now.

Should probably just stfu and lurk more.

The secret is capitalism: pitchfork is run to gin up ad sales and ilx is only about spurning hat washing

a message board's tastes changing with both time & turnover in users is a little different to the same happening at a website which attempts to represent itself as more of an institution but neither is necessarily a bad thing at all. what's goofy is just the way p4k has gone about things this week so far…

Point taken and it’s valid for sure.

I should clarify what I’m referring to though. There have been some bigger issues raised about the general direction Pfork is turning towards, and exactly what niche they’re now trying to fill. This is where I feel like the similarity with ILM lies. Yes of course message boards evolve over time. But is the evolution of ILM sustainable? Does being a mainly mainstream poptimist message board with some nods to other interests appeal to new users? Personally I feel like if it’s actually sustainable then a significant part of new adds should be younger people too. Is there much appeal to them here?

Does being a mainly mainstream poptimist message board with some nods to other interests

idk that it's really that - we're not say, popjustice

Young people have multiple social apps and probably think message boarding is like hand-cranking a letterpress

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 that was neither rockist nor poptimist.

see I feel like it's much more that way now tbh

What I’m waxing nostalgic for is the niche of ILM circa 2005 where Dom posted

I think the prevailing attitude on ILM in 2005 was poptimist in its original sense of being antirockist: that is, skeptical of rockist orthodoxy, which elevated certain values closely associated with rock music, and reluctant to dismiss *any* genre out of hand. This often meant championing mainstream pop music, by pointing out how it was more interesting and exciting that it was often given credit for, but that didn't necessarily mean that pop music was by de facto better than rock music (notwithstanding some posts by The Lex, maybe) because the point was to break down those kinds of hierarchies. This is different from a more recent critical mode that Whiney has called Poptimism 2.0, which praises pop through a new set of values that can be as limiting as old-school rockism.

but i think ilm is still more in line with the original poptimism than that newer one?

still think "anti-rockism" makes more sense, as in, actually encompasses how I think and work as a writer, than "poptimist."

xp Yeah, I'd agree with that; I don't think it's changed that much, especially since there aren't a lot of new people around.

jaymc, thanks for linking to that thread. I'd forgotten about it.

As someone who stepped away from ILM for a while, is ILM going through a similar identity crisis as Pitchfork?

Feel like this would be more applicable to ILM if ILMers were going back en masse and removing/editing early posts to change the opinions expressed therein.