pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Just a reminder that today (Nov. 15) is the last day to vote in the Pitchfork 2023 Readers' Poll.

What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums?

making a very gutsy call with RAM being the 3rd best Daft Punk album

Particularly as its their 4th best (still very strong)

Remembering when they lamented the album's impact earlier in this year just weeks after giving Jessie Ware BNM

(yehyeh all the usual responses/clarifications/explanations to go here)

jessie ware isn't a couple of helmeted french dorks?

lol

doubt much of the "throwback vibe" music presumably in mind was either

seriously p4k (and I disapprove of this less than some might) has always judged music more on its perceived cultural connotations than on the literal sound of it. its criteria have always changed with the times. I think music criticism (especially rock criticism) has done this more often than not, exaggerating or downplaying differences or similarities between music based on the critics' associations and assumptions about the artists and their audiences

*maybe* the chainsmokers listen to jessie ware but you *know* they listen to daft punk. that's the problem

no doubt. it's an intricate business and i'm inconsistent. but it puzzles me that the recent disco/funk favourites (in the UK stuff like this occupies much ground on commercial radio and Radio 2's saps to the present and feels like it has for years) would be seen as a separate development. i remember the demand arriving many years ago and then never leaving. though i guess many (if not me) would say - as silently avoided in the ram review - that the amount of quality revival music has increased.

This site has had the most insane relationship with Daft Punk

“What are we doing here? Honestly, what are we doing with this “drumless” edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories? What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums?”

“...brief moments of drumless enlightenment and acoustic revelation are just about enough to rescue it from the vast cosmic bin of pointlessness.”

vs.

“At times the transformation is revelatory.”

The cat’s cradle cobweb of acoustic guitar and increasingly elastic one-note bassline that briefly surface in “Motherboard (Drumless Version)” are enough to make this the definitive version of the song, even if it took a decade to get there.

I haven’t read this Daft Punk review, but as much as I think “why put out this version of this record,” my next knee jerk is “why *review* this version of this record?”

trust your knee

Like, think of all the other reviews that could’ve occupied that slot, maybe even a new record

But which would get more clicks?

Kevin Shields and Jimmy Page are outspoken fans, and it’s been claimed that Nirvana borrowed the melody of “Come As You Are” from “Eighties.”

none of our reliable journalistic avenues could pin down this "Eighties" rumor.

also, maybe pedantic, but it wasn't a melody they borrowed, it was a chord progression

in other pitchfork-is-dumb news, it's a shame that the otherwise quite good Motian / Bailey review today is marred by the "jazz is like a conversation, man" chestnut

actually, it's a guitar riff. the chord progression is pretty simple and wouldn't be noticeably similar without the riff on top.

It was actually a rip off of Life Goes On by the Damned, anyway

and the damned was just a ripoff of my mate's old band that played on the same bill once before they ever made any records. `course m'mate's band was just rippin off bowie, who was just rippin off lou reed, who was just rippin off random r+b records. go figure.

Actually a YouTube comment on the Damned song led me last night to this tune, which I had never heard (and totally rips!):

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

Yo, that’s Eddy Grant of “Electric Avenue” fame :O

The Equals, Baby Come Back LP Sunday Review needed

and in the 90s Pato Banton covered Baby Come Back and took to no. 1 (which CAYA never managed) and brought it full circle (!!)

Dunno if anyone else listens to the Pitchfork podcast, but I thought you sickos would be interested to know Pitchfork's process for its year-end lists, as articulated on a recent episode featuring editor-in-chief Puja Patel and editors Ryan Dombal and Jeremy Larson:

PUJA PATEL: So, we basically start this late September, early October. And honestly, bless everyone at Pitchfork -- shout out our fellows, shout out our associate editor, shout out our executive assistant -- because they spend so much time literally pulling from the reviews archive and from Forktracks, which is our internal kind of tracks uploads and message board, everything of note that has happened, year to date, which ends up being thousands of albums and songs collectively.

Then we send out what we call the long-list ballot to the entire staff and I would say, 40 or 50 contributors. They do a round of voting. Internally, meanwhile, on the inside of Pitchfork, we have litstening rooms by genre, we have listening rooms of underrated staff faves, lots of listneing, lots of talking. Then a select group of people, I would say the people in this room right now, in conversation with other editors and staffers, cut that down by two-thirds. That's when the knives come out, that's when we really take the shears to the hedge.

Then the short-list ballot goes out, to the same group of people. More listening, more internal staff conversations. That's when the whole thing gets fun, not to say that this whole thing isn't fun. But this is where we start, like, needling at the music, which is the thing that we all came here to do. ... Second ballots go out, they come back in, and then it's a couple of editors in the weeds, looking at spreadsheets, talking to staff, and doing what we call a "this or that" Slack battle.

RYAN DOMBAL: Yeah, so it's basically if there's an artist who has a bunch of songs that everyone likes, or if their album is so good that there's three or four songs that people all voted for, we will go into our listening rooms, which is either listening IRL or over Zoom and talking back and forth on Slack, and people will fight for their favorite song on the SZA album, let's say.

JEREMY LARSON: And another point that we should note is that, like the Grammys, we have a window of eligibility, so it's not January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023. So the eligibility for this list starts, what, December 9, 2022?

PUJA PATEL: I would say once our lists are locked and loaded, it's very rare that they change. So let's say like the 1st of December.

(I think Larson said December 9 because that's when the SZA album came out last year. Their 2022 list was published on Dec. 6 and omitted it, so I assume it will show up this year.)

And honestly, bless everyone at Pitchfork

https://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/default/poster/5.375/8.000/break/images/artworkimages/medium/1/tiny-tim-from-a-christmas-carol-garland-johnson.jpg

another year, another reader's poll where i complain about their calculation of bpms!

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/2023-readers-poll-results/

that king krule song is not 200 bpm! same thing with that sufjan song, only way you get a bpm so high is if you count the eighth notes as quarter notes. the legitimately high bpm songs like the jpeg/danny song and kendrick/keem song should stand out among the midtempo indie, but nooo.

i'm sure they've just run everything through an automated tool that often gets the tempos wrong and don't bother to check the results

oh i'm sure, but still. i remember when they did a poll of 90s songs and listed heart-shaped box's bpm as 201 or something

definitely embarrassing that they're still doing it list after list

heart shaped box gabber mix

lol @ the bpm thing, but ultimately it doesn't surprise me that the people at this publication are musically illiterate

becoming musically literate is a gateway drug to Yngwie Malmsteen fandom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxY5tivTr-I

becoming musically literate is a gateway drug to Yngwie Malmsteen fandom

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Friday, December 8, 2023 12:19 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pitchfork adding a dedicated column to super fast shredder guitar mag metal guys would be awesome

"paul gilbert revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces"

god, i hate to ask, but wtf is that Nirvana cover. is that indicative of some larger trend or is Nightcore huge and i don't know it or ... ?

is it even a cover or did they just take the track and speed it up in a DAW? i don't notice anything new?

when you accidentally type "pitchforj.com" into your browser

https://i.imgur.com/TOONxlA.png

even that sped-up version doesn't touch 203 bpm!

it's not a cover, it's just sped up yeah. nightcore is this weird youtube phenomenon that dates back over a decade where teens post sped up songs with anime pics (usually) and credit them to 'nightcore'. nightcore was originally some norwegian dj duo who made sped up remixes of trance tracks (i think actually doing some remixing), but then kids decided to imitate them by just speeding up anything while calling the result nightcore. there are nightcore videos with hundreds of millions of views

should be called anti-Screw

In 1971, at 26, Rod Stewart thought he was an old man.

haha tell me about it ;_;

This way this sentence is written made me laugh for some reason:

For her performance of “All-American Bitch,” Rodrigo transformed the stage into a tea party and destroyed it, hopping on the table and stomping all over all the cakes.

outrageous! what will the duchess say.

sry xpost tangent-
i remember hearing about nightcore for the first time about a decade ago when i encountered a youtube of "this charming man" basically being played on 45rpm.

it reminded me of how i had this cassette player in my childhood (late 80s/early 90s) with a broken pause button. if you pressed it, instead of pausing, it sped up the tape. i loved it. that was my preferred way of listening to janet jackson rhythm nation, actually. it would be a shot straight into a wormhole of nostalgia if any "(sped up)" janet jackson versions hit streaming.

(idiot time: did 8 year old austin accidentally invent nightcore????)

(also the inverse: the syr records series is mostly pressed for 45rpm playback, but all of them sound way better at 33⅓)

(also one more thing: there's been an influx of "slowed and reverb" versions hitting streaming over the past couple years. i'm a fan.)

It's always been a bit of a thing on the Balearic scene, playing records at the wrong speed: Jolene, Payola$, Deniece Williams, TC 1992 etc