pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

anyone else get prompted to sign in/create an account while trying to read a review?

if almost all music writing and curation is going the way of algorithmic recommendations and small snippets between clickbait, then how do you figure out how to populate music festivals? is it all a matter of who figures out how to do media stunts and juice their play counts? labels paying for playlist inclusion and we’re stuck with a combination of recycling existing acts and whoever’s popular on the “indie showgaze beats to study to” spotify micro genre?

it’s always been a battle to get past gatekeepers or get your music to tastemakers who can book shows or promote your album, but the lack of curation and writing just depresses me

Casey Newton on algorithms vs. criticism:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too.

sorry to everyone here impacted by this. i'm in the 20+ year reader club too and as naive as it is to think these things will always be around, it felt like pitchfork was always going to be around

I sent a note to our writers today about how we are going to keep publishing reviews on Pitchfork like we’ve been doing. Don’t expect everyone to believe that right away, but so far it’s true and I will try to hold up my end of the deal. Cruel times, I’m sorry, thanks for reading

— Jeremy D. Larson (@jeremydlarson) January 19, 2024

xp - while I’d like to hope it was the backlash or clarity that caused Thurston to delete that tweet, I’m afraid it was because he realized he’s referring to the wrong album (he was surely thinking of the notorious NYC Ghosts & Flowers pan)

was gonna say- pfork were just a daydream in young ryan's most impure thoughts in 95.

The fact that Thurston still remembers/ cares enuff for a catty tweet speaks volumes…

thought experiment: how much did pfork cement+perpetuate sonic youth's legacy?

(in other words: jfc show some respect, thurston. i know he deleted it, but what a pab.)

what was the tweet?

The fact that Thurston still remembers/ cares enuff for a catty tweet speaks volumes…

I mean, David Berman talked about the Lookout Mountain Pitchfork review contributed to his losing faith in Silver Jews being worth the effort, and Edith F. blogged about the It's A Game review basically being hurtful as well (ridiculing the person who made the music vs. critiquing it).

*contibuting

he was surely thinking of the notorious NYC Ghosts & Flowers pan

Did Pitchfork pan that album? Because as far as I remember, the most infamous review (in which the writer advised the band to break up) was in the Village Voice. But of course, it was by Amy Phillips, who eventually spent two decades at Pitchfork.

i think pitchfork gave nyc ghosts and flowers a rare zero point zero

Correct: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7342-nyc-ghosts-flowers/

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

New board description

lol

seems a little harsh!

I have always liked that album more than most

Travis Morrison: https://www.instagram.com/p/C2Q-32dtcSF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

I'm sure everyone who was laid off is glad to be part of his journey

I’ve seen Thurston talk about that review before, that it was harsh but he could understand it as the kids telling the oldsters to fuck off.

i don't really blame musicians for still being bitter about particularly harsh/cruel reviews, especially wrt reviews that had rather negative effects on their careers

Yeah and as I've mentioned a couple times Edith F. said the pitchfork review was a contributing factor to her ceasing making music. It was at the time Pitchfork was still at peak influence and that type of review could be and I guess was career destroying. Not so much the fact that they were not into it but the cruelty of it.

To say that Pitchfork has improved greatly from that era would be a vast understatement

Especially cruel given that this was the time that Pfork was practically a hype machine for Arcade Fire, whose lead singer many in the industry knew even then to be a total fucking asshole.

But yes, they definitely did improve.

DiCrescenzo later reevaluated his opinion of the album and, in 2013, remarked on the higher esteem with which he now held it: "I now love the record. It's unlike anything else; eerie and beautiful. [...] No, the lesson here is: beware the opinions of a kid right out of college."

Apparently they're still doing reporting, as "Pitchork (sic) has reached out to Del Rey’s representatives for comment."

Arcade Fire, whose lead singer many in the industry knew even then to be a total fucking asshole.

there are many many bands with asshole singers but that isn't the same as being a serial creep/predator

Oh no how DARE Thurston Moore take a pop at fucking Pitchfork

Frankly, it was the championing of bands like Arcade Fire and the Fiery Furnaces and etc that made me stop looking at the site every day. I never totally returned— a lot of what they championed in the mid to late aughts still seems like utter dreck to me.

oh no, threatened by Big Fiery Furnaces

equating those two bands as even close to being remotely similar. 'it's all just indie nonsense'. musical literacy ILM style

they both suck, go fuck yourself you neon cumstain

great website, would recommend

fwiw i lumped them together because Funeral and The Blueberry Boat came out the same year, which happened to be the year I was searching for things beyond what Pfork covered. sorry to be a shit but there was no reason for your snide tone.

lol fine fine. yes that was a bit mean of me, would call that about evens

thumbs up

don't give up on @pitchfork. fucking number crunchers at @CondeNast need to get a fucking grip. Fire Anna Wintour and pay your writers and editors. She's old news. How much do you pay that old slag? wtf is wrong with you people? you're gonna bring down the whole house.

— william basinski (@WilliamBasinski) January 19, 2024

the disintegration tweets

just realised i could have made an imcomprehensible "devil wears prada" crack in the wake of the crappy before-after photo-illustration for gioa's essay

(which tbf to gioa -- u hate to see etc -- is largely a pedestrian navigation of specific examples of the harms that accelerated social technology is raining down on "culture": our own jordan s analysed these tendencies a great deal more usefully in the thread) (go us!)

Wasn't there a plan back in '19 to put Pitchfork behind a subscription paywall? I thought I read that at least. I'm surprised they didn't try that route first to see if it could work before setting fire to everything.

it's wild bc Pitchfork felt like one of the few sites which was in a process of continuous improvement in most respects, vs something like idk AV Club, which is absolutely meritless now.

― omar little, Thursday, 18 January 2024 17:45 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i disagree about this 'continuous improvement' but it would require quite a lot of sensitive explication to defend this (it does NOT boil down to chuntering about poptimism and the wokes) and idk if i can be bothered, but let's give it a little go, bearing in mind loads of you write/wrote for it and are genuinely sad at this turn of events (which to me feels like inevitability in action, albeit yes, sad)

right so, yes, pitchfork did (does?) review a broad swathe of music (mostly if you happen to be American, and largely omitting quite a lot of admittedly quite obscure genres and artists I personally happen to really enjoy), and I have no problem with this range or the writers who often wrote lovely reviews and articles on the website - it hosted (hosts?) loads of good music writing, albeit writing where certain entertainingly (or horrifyingly, Brent) rough edges have been sanded away over the years. still massively in credit on that front obv.

but my problems with what pitchfork have become revolve largely around its editorial process, the BNM machine, the endless optimisation culture endemic to all corners of a generally worsening internet. it is no longer acceptable to give a Mansun album 9.3 on a whim, or a Fiery Furnaces album 9.6, or do a ridiculously misguided pan of Frances The Mute (you're not forgiven!) - everything has been carefully controlled to fit an acceptable editorial brand, to the extent where scores, BNMs and even EOY lists can be extremely accurately predicted. and the BNM thing has created another interesting phenomenon: when one of pitchfork's writers wants to review something obscure and musically off-brand, and really likes it - if the editors can't be convinced it's worthy of greater hype, it gets flung into the 7.8-8.3 pocket of No BNM For You. i've seen SO MANY albums i absolutely adore get this treatment, and i've heard numerous musicians i like roll metaphorical eyes at it all. throw in the fact that most other major music writing sites have fallen by the wayside and you're faced with a monolith which on one level features a broad and well-written catalogue of content, and on the other level controls with a tiresome sense of the fashionable what it really foregrounds, armed with a decimal-point scale that has given false credence to a process that was at least once upon a time not pretending to be objective. and so you have these great writers toiling away within a giant sorting mechanism. well guess what. eventually it was always going to sort its employees too. that's optimisation baby

so you're mad the site had editors?

how are the politics of BNM any different than Rolling Stone or whatever in the pre-internet days giving this or that album front page treatment? You can argue that this practice marginalizes a lot of fine music, sure, and if you also wanna argue that we should eliminate it, that's cool with me too; but none of this happens exclusively at Pitchfork.

well this particular editing style has obviously been accentuated by an ownership that is now wreaking havoc on its employees, everything's connected, as has been stated

i suppose the most interesting aspect of BNM culture has been when a writer is faced with the challenge of selling an 8.0 that they personally think is a 9.8 without the words clashing too much with the score

'this fucking album is amazing, transportative and true. but um, it's an acquired taste!'

point taken re music crit history though, some things aren't better now obvs, there has always been fashionable editorialising. it's just now there's so much music

That's not how it works. Usually the editor and writer agree with a narrow range on the score. xpost

*aren't worse now xp