pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Maybe I'm being picky (and nothing at all against the particular artists being discussed), but I was a little irritated by the discussion of "bespoke R&B"(??) in this podcast excerpt.

The point being made is that R&B is "evolving" because "therapy and mental health and identity have all bled into this new class of R&B singers"; whereas "a lot of women in R&B have been relegated to either being sexpots or lovelorn or grieving." I think that's reductive (even with the acknowledgement that "there’s incredible R&B made to that end"), and I'm not sure that "owning every part of your identity" is really "a new era" for R&B...

so that this feature would come as a complete surprise to listeners, who might on a subsequent listening hear material they had never heard before, creating genuine confusion.

On a Simpsons DVD commentary showrunner David Mirkin (I think) talks about this album, and how he thought he was losing his shit due to suddenly hearing completely different material. He later learned that the inspiration for it came from British horse racing records, which were apparently a thing, and where the outcome of a race would be different depending on which groove the needle hit.

He later learned that the inspiration for it came from British horse racing records, which were apparently a thing, and where the outcome of a race would be different depending on which groove the needle hit.

Me and my love for the puzzle plate tradition to thread

Locked Grooves: Classic or Dud

Maybe I'm being picky (and nothing at all against the particular artists being discussed), but I was a little irritated by the discussion of "bespoke R&B"(??) in this podcast excerpt.

The point being made is that R&B is "evolving" because "therapy and mental health and identity have all bled into this new class of R&B singers"; whereas "a lot of women in R&B have been relegated to either being sexpots or lovelorn or grieving." I think that's reductive (even with the acknowledgement that "there’s incredible R&B made to that end"), and I'm not sure that "owning every part of your identity" is really "a new era" for R&B...

― Wet Legume (morrisp), Thursday, December 8, 2022 1:10 PM (two hours ago)

Yeah, if nothing else, it's insultingly ahistorical.

And personally, the idea that therapy & mental health diagnoses are the best vehicle for self-understanding is becoming extremely ripe for unpacking/pushback/some kind of questioning, though obvs this would be a terrible thread (maybe board) for that discussion.

It's like Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Erykah Badu, among others, didn't exist.

This Sinatra review by Sodomsky is soooo darn good. I hope someone does a retrospective copy edit and catches a few missing words that trip up the reader (one is in the paragraph just before the “III”, and the other is in the next paragraph… if any Conde Nasties are reading this).

xxp holy fucking shit. not big into their podcast but I'll delete it out of my list now thank you for the heads up!

xp For the record - these omitted words have now been added :)

I keep saying it: Sodomsky's their best staff writer.

Yeah, he's great

I read many of Sodomsky's reviews even if the artists don't particularly interest me.

“Progressive” pop? Yeah, I don’t care for that

"Carrying on in the tradition of ELO and Supertramp, these new bands..."

ugh "progressive" is gross & smug

Amusing too that the second entry mentions a range of old music as references. So we're progressing toward "the downy sound of early-2000s radio pop"? Can't wait

Comedian and writer Jon Blair’s strong understanding of the ’90s sitcom Frasier’s characters, cadence, and reliable narrative beats is why “Grunge Frasier” is such exhilarating fanfiction.

oh dear god

christ they are such frauds

sure, Charli pushed pop in a progressive direction: the 1980s!!!

so does this mean they're going to publish a "best pop" list?

if so, this seems like just a way to make a list they believe in *and* keep stans/publicists/superstars/advertisers happy.

best reactionary pop

Ready for accelerationist pop.

it took a few years, but in 2022 we actually managed to find a healthy medium between my prog rock leanings and ufo's sophisti-pop ones and everyone else's various shades of the above in order to synthesise an actually fantastic, bona fide progressive pop thread. very little on there has ended up in that pitchfork list lol

I'm not mad at "progressive pop" because it is very helpful to have some kind of demarcator between actually popular music and this stuff. I wish people could have landed on something for "rap music but its actually mostly singing" when Drake came out so I don't have to pay attention to like Rod Wave

nia archives is good, i'm glad she made one of their lists, whatever the title

Rod wave has great songs why would you not want that

Some of these artists are very popular, they’re just not the highest level of superstar.

Meanwhile Pfork isn’t including other pop that may be less popular, but isn’t “cool” enough to qualify as “progressive”

Anyway I find the randomness (43 best rap songs? Why 43 if you’re going to include both munch *and* bikini bottom?) and unrankedness (just rank them!) frustrating more than anything

i dunno, the made up genre stuff is dumb but ultimately i look at that list and see some things i'm curious to listen to that i didn't know about before, which is the only actual useful quality of any list

i mean, "pop underground" was the 90s version of this, right?

(you guys remember ro sham bo by the grays??!?! that album rules!)

pretty sure it was called Liberal Pop back then

those were the very best years, verily

i'm just joshin, of course. the whole thing is kind of cool i think and i always enjoy the new ways media tries to sell new things. who knows if these are acts that have extra push money behind them or maybe they're just favorites of sone staff. i've certainly not heard all of those albums, so i was happy to hear the word.

although yes: "progressive pop" is a silly term. anything with an alliterative of P's is bad imo.

Anyway I find the randomness (43 best rap songs? Why 43 if you’re going to include both munch *and* bikini bottom?) and unrankedness (just rank them!) frustrating more than anything

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 11:08 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

should've made it 44 and also added the on the radar freestyle

Anyway I find the randomness (43 best rap songs? Why 43 if you’re going to include both munch *and* bikini bottom?) and unrankedness (just rank them!) frustrating more than anything

Not random - when your list of the 100 best songs of 2022 has 43 rap songs on it, you've got yourself a 43 best rap songs of 2022 list ready to publish for more clicks.

Or maybe it is random! A lot of the content is recycled but there are some songs that are unique to the 43 rap songs list.

'progressive pop' is an awkward term but i get it as a catchall for left-of-centre pop-adjacent stuff + some global stuff + charli who was just doing regular pop this time (but quite well!)

i mean, i've always thought of people like joni mitchell, kate bush, fiona apple, etc. as makers of kinda proggy pop music. more by coincidence/accident than actual intent. i remember thinking that "prog pop" was a better descriptor for the idler wheel than anything else. and that's not to diminish the uniqueness of my specific examples either - i just say "prog" because that's the rockist term that i'm used to when music that is otherwise accessible pop music starts to incorporate other non-pop/rock forms or gets deep into studio crafting and creating large productions. idk. it's stupid. i'm stupid. music is stupid, but somehow keeps getting away with it.

"leftfield pop" would have been fine, "hipster pop" would have been accurate (I'm including myself here), "pop for rockists" would be lol. I firmly believe the idea that music "progresses" should be forcefully rejected though, especially if you are then going to highlight music that is retro

xpost, yeah "prog pop" could be a real thing, but that list isn't making that argument (I don't think?)

kate bush has pretty direct connections and was influenced by prog rock. obviously, david gilmour helped her create a better demo tape and shopped her around to labels, and is producer on a couple of the first album songs, but she was a fan of king crimson and especially genesis, she talks about side 2 of hounds of love as being inspired by "supper's ready" off foxtrot. obv that's not all she was influenced by - elton john, bowie, roxy etc, but still i'd say if anyone was prog pop it was her.

rob otm (imo)

(I mean I guess pop music can "progress," in a purely descriptive sense, in terms of incorporating new styles, production elements etc. – but that shouldn't be a value judgment thing, and would make some of the most "progressive" recent artists people like Taylor Swift, whom they certainly would exclude from their definition.)

(They're using it aspirationally, like - "artists whom we hope are influencing the next direction of pop...")

Which I guess it fine actually - I don't even know what I'm complaining about now. It just sounds kinda snobbish, lol

what is new about taylor swift? i could see like an artist like sophie fitting that, just in terms of ok this doesn't sound like it could have been created in the past, swift is pretty traditional

Just in that she's influenced other artists to write songs like her, and so the direction of pop styles has "progressed" as a result of her popularity – in the sense that change is "forward movement" (but I get that's not what "progress" is supposed to mean)

all songs progress toward silence

Not fast enough, in many cases.

Any particular reason why it took them forever to review Ground Groove?

this is an objective discrepancy-

if i'm listening to music on my smartphone (android+spotify) and i navigate to pfork on my browser (brave), something on the site commandeers the volume on my phone and knocks it down significantly (both via headphones or bluetooth, whatever i'm using at the time).

it's a minor annoyance, but also very wtf-ey. leave my shit alone, damn.

what is new about taylor swift? i could see like an artist like sophie fitting that, just in terms of ok this doesn't sound like it could have been created in the past, swift is pretty traditional

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 3:59 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just in that she's influenced other artists to write songs like her, and so the direction of pop styles has "progressed" as a result of her popularity – in the sense that change is "forward movement" (but I get that's not what "progress" is supposed to mean)

― Wet Legume (morrisp), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 4:01 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think tim f made a good case that compositionally/formally she is 'progressing'

xp oh yes, pitchfork site famous for commandeering audio. because when would you ever possibly be wanting to read about music while listening to music?