pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

FANS ARE EXCITED

If I don't get My Dick's latest release in my hands right now, I'll shrivel up and die!

Gonna need two hands

imagine a world where Superdrag makes this list ... it's beautiful

as long as we're piling on indeed-

the final word is that thar was THEE least enthusiastic "anticipation" piece i've seen in a while. very much "things repeat forever and there never is a remedy" energy.

that thar

not a mistake

Rihanna especially pushes the edge in [NAME RELEVANT SONG FROM R9 THAT MATCHES DESCRIPTION], where she sings: [LYRICS]

I do remember a time when all the songs by Rihanna on the radio were just her singing about money, it was a little embarrassing tbh.

BBHMM is a 21st century pop standard

what are the other songs she sings about money

please don't call tabes on their bluff

umbrellas are the original nfts

Love the Way You Lire

bitch better have my monkey

“Pour it Up” came out several years before BBHMM but both played often on the radio in my then-location, more than any of the other singles from the respective albums.

Fwiw I like Rihanna, actually, but neither PiU nor BBHMM are her best work imho

You record one song with the title “Bitch Better Have My Money” and you’re forever tagged as someone that only writes about money.

Moreover, she’s just one of the six credited songwriters of “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

just imagine if even one of them weren't paid what they were owed

Fwiw I like Rihanna, actually, but neither PiU nor BBHMM are her best work imho

"Bitch Better Have My Melody" in her next batch of tunes... because the melody in that one is honestly a bit lacking.

Sounds like Geir’s memoir title

She also sang about the shine of diamonds and the hard values of... working

and otoh, falling in love with a homeless man

9.1 for... Stillmatic??

I know they like to context-set in these Sunday reviews, but asking a general reader to wade through nine introductory paragraphs about a Nas/Jay-Z beef feels like a real stretch.

I was wondering when it was going to turn into a review of the album Stillmatic by Nas (9.1)
But I had no idea about the specifics of the Jay-Nas rivalry so that was interesting to me at least

too few introductory paragraphs imo

Jay-Z / Nas hip-hop throw down? & other throw-downs?
Jay-Z / Nas hip-hop throw down? & other throw-downs? Pt. 2: The Saga Continues.
Jay-Z/Nas and other hip-hop throwdowns? Pt. 3: Still Going . . .
Jay Z/ Nas and other hiphop throwdowns...resurrected. Part 4

Yeah it's led me down a rabbit hole which is always a good (and desirable) thing.

Kind of bummed that no one at ILX mentioned my Sunday review :(

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-monsters-of-rap/

shit i should have, i thought it was great. it's funny how history cuts things down to this handful of iconic albums and artists, but there was so much other stuff, the silly stuff, pop stuff, hip house stuff that. like all the other stuff that filled up an episode of yo! mtv raps that wasn't PE, or Eric B & Rakim, or NWA or Tribe etc...really enjoyed it.

(old yo mtv raps are available through paramount plus btw)

xp That one did the same for me re:Hammer as I'd never heard Don't Hurt 'Em in full before

and yes great review all round. Also I like that you tied it all to a specific compilation. Not living in the US but in the UK where TV advertised mainstream comps have been the norm since the mid-80s the idea of a mail-order retrospective having this amount of gravitas is interesting to me.

Thanks (even though I was fishing)

do the Paramount+ episodes have the music videos?

yeah i was gonna ask the same thing. not seeing them available on the t3rr0ntz

Whiney, I was happy to see it. Good stuff.

They do include some of the music videos. It's compiled kind of strangely, but I connected some dots and I think I figured out why:

The archived tapes of this show only include the talk segments between the videos, which means that while it was being shown live there was a human physically hitting play on a 5 minute tape that included one music video, like an actual DJ but for video tapes (aka a VJ except the people who got credit as being VJs were just the announcers).

I don't see any online lists of music videos aired on this show, and so the Paramount Plus versions of Yo MTV Raps episodes are recreations starting with the talk segments and then including whatever videos were announced by the host or best guesses when the host doesn't announce anything. So when Tribe are the guests, the host doesn't announce anything so they just play lots of Tribe videos. When Geto Boys are the guests (an amazing episode btw), Fab 5 Freddy announces most of the videos, and so it's a longer episode with videos from the guest and other artists. Since many of the music videos were well preserved, the music video quality often surpasses the talk segments (but not always -- there's at least one Wu-Tang video taken from a different channel with a different graphic font). Since they're guessing what videos to show, the recreation episodes are all different lengths too.

Yeah, Whiney's piece was really good. It reminded me that there are a bunch of hilarious interview clips on YouTube from rappers who were around at the time — Redman, Too Short, plenty of others — talking about how Hammer was secretly one of the hardest gangsters in hip-hop. People were scared of Hammer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOHupZPsWD0

Great review Whiney. Having grown up on the earlier tape compilations that pre-date the Monsters stuff (In Canada we had the Rap Traxx tapes, not sure if they wrere international or not) your review really made me nostalgic. Fun stuff.

It’s funny (or something) to read this review of a new Beauty Pill compilation; click over to the album’s page on the label website; and find Chad Clark, the band leader, writing that Pitchfork’s dismissive review of their debut album played a key role in sinking their chances for a decade:

That dumb review affected everything. Copycat reviews ensued. It hit us directly in an economic way: booking agents turned away from booking the band. Some of my friends started saying “You should make more of a rock record next time.” (…)

The band tried to persevere, but we had no money and ultimately morale dissolved. I didn’t know where to go from that point, but I knew I did’t want to make the rock music people told me to make. So I sank into a bleak depression and decided to keep music to myself.

I liked the thing about young jazz artists, but really not sure I get why they call it the "post-internet age" when a good chunk of the article is about how said artists are using the internet to get their music out.

that beauty pill review also reminded me that Pitchfork maybe has taken the names off of a lot of old reviews, or were they not there in the first place for some of them? does that mean it was a schreiber joint?

It was Sam Ubl... you can see the names on this page. There's some glitch where the reviewer names only show up on the only reviews if you access them a specific way (I dove too deeply into this above, a few months back).

*on the OLD reviews

xxxpost i, too, didn't understand the "post-internet" framing/phrasing at all. it seemed to me that half the point of the article was that none of this was even possible *without* the internet??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Internet

"post" can mean "in the wake of" not just "after the end of"

oh. OK. well ... learn something new every day

tbh this is an aspect of the usage of "post" as a prefix that has mildly aggrieved me since the 90s -- which of the two opposite things is being indicated?

I wasn't aware of that usage myself; and I don't think I see it reflected in the post- (prefix) entry at m-w.com (which is normally v descriptive, rather than prescriptive, or however you say that).

I'm sure it's "real," but it is confusing...

To mark's point, I had postmodernism and poststructuralism in mind when I made up my own definition of post, both of which have a vexed and confusing relation to modernism and structuralism. You could also consider the cases of post-bop or post-rock—I agree that these terms are p much always inadequate and a form of procrastinating.

But imo my made-up definition is covered by merriam-webster. This is jazz made after the invention of the internet or, more precisely, after or following the advent of something you could call "internet culture."

I feel like those examples you cited all imply "taking something in a new direction," though; whereas this just seems to mean... using or embodying it?

Like, "Rancid is my favorite post-punk band." "Aren't they just 'punk'?" "Well, you know... they came around after the advent of punk."