pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Thanks for the kindness J0rdan :)

I disagree w both my acquaintance and Rilke; well, not really disagree, but have a divergent approach. I think it is a productive approach for an artist to be immersed in arts criticism, aware of how it functions, and grow accustomed to the responses, and, most importantly, allow their work to be shifted in response to what is written.

To claim that one’s artistic impulses operate in a vacuum is myopic; to be able to limn one’s impulse from audience response and, well, “create more effective work”, that’s is an ideal endeavour.

The prevailing barometer for audience’s access to criticism isn’t Pitchfork or Fantano imo, but aggregators: Rate Your Music and Metacritic.

Lastly, I’ve long-argued that falling to “lyrical evaluation” in a review is somewhat of a crutch. Lyrics aren’t meant to be printed, they’re meant to be sung; I can provide you with countless examples of “a lyric that is good in the page but kinda sucks in context” (Prefab Sprout’s “The King Of Rock And Roll” springs to mind), or “a lyric that sucks on the page but rules in the context of the song” (Le Tigre is my go-to best-example for this). When a reviewer spends their word count engaging in lyrical evaluation, I find myself thinking that the problem isn’t the lyric but the song, and the reviewer is oftentimes leaning on saying “this lyric is bad” rather then engaging with why the words don’t work, in a larger context

I’ve been listening to a lot of War lately and it’s like, imagine if this band was evaluated solely on their lyrics? Wow that’d be a shitshow. What an amazing band

YES!! it's about the performance of those lyrics

i can listen to smokey robinson sing about gasms all day because i both know that he's having fun but also he plays around with the form wonderfully

the benefit of a review that describes the sound of a song is to make me want to click on that song instead of millions of others

This is so OTM (for me). I’m just not gonna click & listen if the blurb doesn’t give me a reason to, and non-musical “context” likely isn’t gonna cut it for me

(and I’m not referring to lyrics, by the way, but more the cultural and industry stuff that such blurbs tend to focus on)

the goop on ya grinch factor

Btw – this week's "7 New Albums You Should Listen To" feature includes the Barbie score album; and while the blurb is not outright negative like last week's treatment of the soundtrack, it's still somewhat catty. Why bother including it??

I’ve been reading a lot of fragrance crit recently, it’s been interesting to see the spectrum of critical responses to an artistic medium that essentially has many of the same features as music— there’s even the equivalent of rockism/poptimism in the discourse. The best fragrance writing is just “good writing”, describing the composition accurately with a mix of chemical explanation, emotional response, personal anecdote, history of the perfumer/house, antecedents, commercial context, and (most importantly) juicy analogies to really communicate to the reader what it ~actually~ smells like.

Dior’s Dune smells like “frowning”, Beyond Paradise for Men smells like “what one would imagine the inside of a Concorde to smell like”, Bulgari Black smells like “hockey practice”, and so on

The true critical heroes are the wordsmiths who can produce something like this (while presumably slightly toasted):

A: Pours a clear medium golden yellow in color with moderate amounts of active visible carbonation rising quickly from the bottom of the glass and moderate bright yellow + pale copper + brassy colored highlights. The beer has a three finger tall dense sudsy foamy white head that slowly reduces to a large patch of medium thick film covering approximately 75% of the surface of the beer surrounded by a large patch of very thin film covering the remainder of the surface of the beer and a medium thick ring at the edges of the glass. Slightly heavier than moderate amounts of lacing are observed.

S: Slightly stronger than moderate aromas of citrus/grapefruit + citrus/orange rind + citrus/grapefruit pith + pineapple + pine hops over the top of light to moderate aromas of biscuit + lightly toasted + caramel malts with minimal amounts of caramel sweetness.

T: Upfront there are light to moderate flavors of biscuit + lightly toasted + caramel malts with minimal amounts of caramel sweetness. That is followed by moderate to strong flavors of citrus/grapefruit + citrus/orange rind + citrus/grapefruit pith + pineapple + pine hops which impart a moderate amount of aggressive lingering bitterness.

Thank God Bernard Sumner doesn't read this thread

fragrance crit

this is also the only place where "fecal notes" would not be an immediate disqualification

I do like how “animalic” basically means “it smells like shit”

Hold on I’ll post my favourite Tania Sanchez thing

There is a passionate minority of perfume fans who agitate for genuinely raunchy, animalic perfumery, griping that castoreum (how beavers mark their territory), hyraceum (the petrified excrement of a South African badger), civet (scrapings off the rear end of a member of the weasel family), ambergris (fatty, sea-marinated sperm-whale feces), and musks (poor deer) have gone out of the world, leaving us with sexless, sterile, scrubbed, and bleached sports deodorants masquerading as fine fragrance. All shinola, no shit! Well, today is your lucky day, fetid friends. No more the oud-trend fragrance that smuggles a synthetic “oud” base into a fruity or floral context (sometimes all right but other times like trying to hide porcini mushrooms in a strawberry cake). Dusita’s “Oudh Infini” holds nothing back in this unmistakably poopy composition of musks and civet, along with the always initially funky titular material, which altogether is not so much even like oud but instead the port-a-potty-by-the-sea that is natural ambergris, only more so. It makes me think of the fact that naked mole rats roll around in their communal toilet so as to distinguish members of their colony by the smell. Am I going to wear this? I confess I didn’t try it on skin due to social obligations. I’m sticking with my Ubar. You who are now already eagerly Googling know that €395 a bottle may sting, but for once you’d be getting the real deal. (FOUR STARS)

Civet, from the anal gland of the civet cat, is intensely disagreeable as soon as it is recognizable, but amazingly sexy in subliminal doses (it features in Guerlain's Jicky, probably the oldest extant perfume, and one whose market has changed over the hundred years of its existence - it now has a following among gay men).

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/detail92.html

Why the fuck is Jeff tweedy giving advice on lyrics

― Heez, Friday, August 4, 2023 9:05 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I assume it's because he's been a professional musician for decades that has written and recorded hundreds of songs that a lot of people like?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, August 4, 2023 9:08 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

<3

Fantano if you're a bit alt

lol this is bait

Chanel Antaeus is a better then-example of "the gays love their civet", but yeah Eno otm.

Also big thanks to gyac and felicity for turning me on to fragrance writing!

thank u j0rd, prob the most reliably great post-writer on this web site, for saying nice things about my descriptive music writing, which involves such effort it's hard for me to feel gifted in the least, but still, thank you

this discussion makes me feel fortunate to have grown up in the blogging era, where i felt like i was pretty consistently encountering magazine-quality pieces for free that were exploding with creativity and formal innovation. like, music writing would be so fucking boring to me if i had not been immersed in that, and i would've given up ages ago. also grateful to have had very brief intense obsessions over the classic rockcrit writers so that i could take what i needed from them and throw the rest away. idk maybe the kids are still doing this. cultural writing at its best is so deliriously good that i can't imagine a strict diet of not it. but also i very vividly recall an old lex post where he expressly discouraged music writers from reading any other music writing, which, when i read music writing, i'm always like, "damn... i get it girl"

I love people writing about music, but I've grown increasingly wary of music criticism, as such. Even when well intentioned it often still feels so mean and unnecessary, especially since it doesn't exactly move the needle any more, it just adds to the negativity and noise, which is in no short supply (and which went up proportionally, and unfortunately, with the rise of downloading and decline of income from actually making - and maybe coincidentally, writing about - music).

Cant agree with this. I love criticism, when its good. I cant imagine throwing out the form.

dont you guys all feel like, inundated with shit all the time? like the amount of stuff you're expected to be conversant in. and that if you treat it as 'new to you' even though it is there are a hundred ppl there to tell you your take doesnt count because theyve been in it longer? the saturation of info makes it really challenging to write from an authoritative perspective even personally. So rather than lamenting the mediocre critical writing there is & throwing away the baby w the bathwater I salute the people who figure out how to navigate an increasingly complex, overwhelming (amount of stuff to consume) yet boring (amount of stuff not worth consuming) commercial landscape to help *others* navigate a sea of garbage

I bring up the 'authority' of being 'new to something' specifically because I think curiosity tends to lead ppl's insights, yet 'mastering' knowledge tends to lead to fewer insights but more self awareness ... the balance is a tough thing to strike ... and we are so inundated with STUFF.

I still feel enthusiastic about writing; evoking the texture and posture of the albums I review, in addition to putting both in context, is the most exciting thing about it. I make an effort to avoid citing lyrics unless I'm making a musical point.

few weeks ago there was a 'songs of the summer 2023' feature on p4k that was like "songs to get our ass eaten to" which was p revolting to me

and it was all Pimp C songs

weeks ago there was a 'songs of the summer 2023' feature on p4k that was like "songs to get our ass eaten to" which was p revolting to me

― flopson, Saturday, August 5, 2023 6:53 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglin

Be more flexible

"the benefit of a review that describes the sound of a song is to make me want to click on that song instead of millions of others"

"This is so OTM (for me). I’m just not gonna click & listen if the blurb doesn’t give me a reason to, and non-musical “context” likely isn’t gonna cut it for me"

this is my problem with movie reviews now. nobody describes the look of a movie or visuals in a way that makes me want to see it. its all plot or it focuses on a specific actor or actors often without ever describing what they even look like! and i know i can go watch the trailer but man i would kill to read someone who makes me excited about movies by actually giving riveting descriptions of a scene or a look someone gives or the way the music or sound fits in with the picture...i don't know why i can't find this anywhere. i was really happy to see that ao scott was retiring at the nyt because he must be the worst at describing the look of a film if he even bothered to do it at all. you might get two sentences in the entire review. so fucking boring to read. AO turned me off of a lot films by being so flat and tedious.
i don't really read music reviews anymore. i read interviews with musicians. thats my music crit.
i do love reviews that get obsessed with certain sounds on a song or album. something that goes beyond the standard info of an album/artist/etc. i never see those. they are probably out there somewhere.

(man if i read a movie review and they mentioned the SOUND of the movie (and this can mean SO MANY THINGS) i would flip my friggin' lid...)

I dunno – I thought Scott was a pretty great movie reviewer, but it sounds like you’re looking for something v specific.

i like movies cuz they move. and sound cool. you would never know this reading ao.

i hate any review of anything that reads like a book report. there are so many ways to give info in a review without regurgitating plot or the tortured history of director A or actor B. i dunno. it doesn't really matter. i manage to find all kinds of cool movies to watch. and music to listen to. but there are ways to get creativity into the nyt. its been done.

glenn kenny tipped me off to that guy...........he's in a literary mag. brooklyn. has a book. i bought the book online! during the plague. then i made fun of steven spielberg and glenn kenny unfriended me on facebook. in any case, hat tip to glenn because that guy is really funny and the only modern film writer i have enjoyed since i enjoyed my kael chips or whatever.

i apologize for not remembering the name of the magazine or the writer! you guys are quick though. you know who i mean.

I personally don’t, but would be interested to know. Does he do these kind of impressionistic film reviews that you describe?

A.S. Hamrah. N+1 Magazine.

took me a minute...

i've never read the magazine. just his columns and then the book.

I've been enjoying Tarantino's book. Even though his chapters mostly focus on individual movies which had a formative influence on him, he digs into other works as well. He's pretty astute! I find myself agreeing with him a lot. He's pretty sharp on the reasons why a lot of the films work and why they don't.

I didn't doubt his book would be interesting, but I actually find it kind of shockingly good.

reading tarantino would have to be better than watching him talk about something.

He writes better than he talks!

Sometimes after seeing a recent movie that I have Opinions on, I use Metacritic to check out reviews (particularly the negative or mixed ones, as those tend to be more interesting). There are always a few that are really good, and make me think… “yeah, some ppl sure do this well.”

i'm sure there is good stuff out there. i don't really look very hard for it anymore.

Sounds like newspaper-type reviews aren’t really your jam anyway.

so, this is fun, i think the only slightly negative review i ever wrote in pfork was for the band sioux falls, who were doing kind of an emo-inflected modest mouse thing at the time (and i think i just have to accept that even though i enjoy many of their songs, i don’t *get* modest mouse at all and never have), and now they’ve made one of my favorite records this year, strange ranger’s pure music. sorry guys! you’re doing great

Saw DSOTM and called the rating before I clicked it. I feel like 9.3 is their standard Sunday rating for super canon albums whose super canon status has perhaps diminished a wee little bit in recent years, idk.

It really only talks about the actual songs on the album for three paragraphs in the middle, huh? Guess they figure everyone's heard it...

i haven't read it yet but wtf, DSOTM is a 10.10 out of 10

it rules

this is my problem with movie reviews now. nobody describes the look of a movie or visuals in a way that makes me want to see it. its all plot or it focuses on a specific actor or actors often without ever describing what they even look like! and i know i can go watch the trailer but man i would kill to read someone who makes me excited about movies by actually giving riveting descriptions of a scene or a look someone gives or the way the music or sound fits in with the picture...i don't know why i can't find this anywhere. i was really happy to see that ao scott was retiring at the nyt because he must be the worst at describing the look of a film if he even bothered to do it at all. you might get two sentences in the entire review. so fucking boring to read. AO turned me off of a lot films by being so flat and tedious.

Even worse in this regard is comics criticism, which outside of the Comics Journal is often either 100% just talking about the plot or the old AV Club model of 90% talking about the plot and then a little paragraph about how the art supports the plot.

The Floyd fandom on here is truly weird.