pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

*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

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

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 19 January 2024 13:22 (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Really? Hmm. But how much of that is the writer anticipating what it Should Be Given, lol

I don't lose much sleep over it.

Ive often read reviews on PF where the reviewer is clearly more enthusiastic than the 7.8 or 8 rating thats been given but its not an artist that may fit the hype parameters

"BNM culture" lmao

i'm sad that so many great writers have lost their jobs to pitchfork, and it seems like it was a great training ground for a lot of young writers.

but really agree with the BNM talk and the stupid point system for reviews. Reviews have never been my thing to learn about music, at least not since high school. would much rather read a profile on an artists and then listen to the music on streaming and then buy if i like. this is my own problem for sure--I think record reviews as presented in Pitchfork are largely outdated. That's just my opinion. If you want to know what music sounds like, you have ample ways to listen and then buy if you like it. I'm not blaming anyone who digs reviews. It's like if I didn't like poetry, I wouldn't say poetry sucked, I would just say it's not for me. The fact that Pitchfork can be so bitchy and catty though as evidenced in this thread is a huge problem. And yes I get it they have corrected and moved forward but you can't change what you were.

i totally agree with the tweet yesterday about spotify being a huge problem. this isn't really a pitchfork problem, it's a no one buys music anymore problem. so labels have less money to spend on ads, so Apple and Haagen Dazs buy ads instead on Pitchfork etc.

Would be great to start to see some more blogs popping up talking about music, I miss those days. That's part of the problem too. Pitchfork was the loudest voice in the room for this stuff, and acted like asses toward SY while championing shit like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

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.

it's not, and it's also a problem at Rolling Stone too

there's totally a BNM culture, and if you don't realize that you might want to pull your head out of the sand

I mentioned upthread that the site has maintained a distinct editorial perspective over time. That doesn't happen without editors having conversations about which artists the site wants to get behind, how to communicate that with scores and BNM designations and year-end list placements, etc. But as far as I understand, all of that is worked out among people who love music and want to share what they're passionate about and simply need to be able to present a unified vision bc Pitchfork isn't a network of individual blogs. I doubt that Anna Wintour is sending dictates from on high to ensure that Sufjan gets BNM. I guess maybe you could say that bc Pitchfork is beholden to advertisers, it is forced to maintain an appeal with certain demographic groups (millennial males lol) and that subtly influences its editorial decisions. But I don't think the site would be improved if it were a free-for-all where writers were all just rating stuff independently.

imago and waterface otm

Condolences tho those who’ve lost their jobs

I hope the Sunday Review continues and they continue to hire the excellent writers that they’ve been hiring to write them

Pitchfork, more than any other critical institution, maintained a Draconian reign of terror over the music industry— it did not operate symbiotically with recording artists in any way, it served itself and its own power accumulation. If it is gone, then it is a good thing for recording artists.

Most recording artists these past few days have been feeling like they’ve been waking up from a decades long illness, like Margaret Thatcher just died.

Me, I’m mixed-sad about it. I’m angry that Pitchfork didn’t do any of its “accountability reporting” on Daniel Ek, just let him gut the industry the way he did; but, as I said, Pitchfork never actually gave a shit about recording artists

otm its the one thing non reg p4k readers KNOW about

xposts

"Reviews have never been my thing to learn about music, at least not since high school. would much rather read a profile on an artists and then listen to the music on streaming and then buy if i like."

Sure. Listening to the music is the best way to check something out, but how are you narrowing down what you'll listen to? Typically friends, websites, etc. (gatekeepers). Are you sifting through everything that exists to find 2 records you like. I know I don't have time for that. Who does?

I guess the thing I find/found most valuable about Pitchfork, moreso than the reviews themselves, is what they chose to review. Def helped me find great things, even if typically I'd just look briefly at the review to get a feel for whether I might be interested in the record. When 8 million records come out every minute (or something), a tusted gatekeeper is worse their crust. Without their gatekeeping, not sure I would've found great music by Nourished by Time, Lia Kohl, Bkthertula, Lingua Ignota, etc. so easily (or all in the same place).

The 10-point scale goes alongside Robert Parker creating a 100-point scale for wine and Siskel and Ebert’s two thumbs.