pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I posited last week that Pitchfork could have a perfume reviewing offshoot called “Cat Shit”

Dan, I agree with pretty much all of that - I just think that when you're talking about a mission statement for criticism, which is what I took ftgi bf's summation to be, well, you're kind of talking about the critic's intentions, no?

Rather than a straight "I want to help art find its best audience", I think I'd go with wanting to give every piece of art the respect of engaging with it and hopefully finding something to say about it that enrichens the reader's perspective on it...and that can be positive or negative. Readers can then def find that my negative thoughts make them want to check something out - or indeed that my positive thoughts make them want to stay away!

(Dual reference to “shit, cat” and civet)

I have some thoughts.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-weekly-100-96774752

xps

example of a negative review that made me want to hear an album: Brent D's notorious Steely Dan review:

"Jamming" sax solos glide over neutered, bassless funk. Glass guitar and percussion clink along steadily like a chorus of jangling Tag Heuers, automatic Lexus locks, popping Le Croix cans, clicking laptop covers, crystal Cristal toasts, and smacking Hollywood cheek-kisses. The same slow-bop pace is rigorously maintained. Vocals exhale so innocuously you have to hold a mirror up under the speaker to make sure it's alive.

it made me think, "my god, they're back and they've still got it."

haha totally

i actually like that writing...also i mean if anyone who can dish it out like steely dan can take a little smarmy negativity

“Clicking laptop covers”?

the ultimate in obsessing over scores, to the point of mostly ignoring the reviews attached, can be found in video game discourse imo

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, January 19, 2024 10:47 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

(I also have a pet theory about how a tradition of "objective" factors in video game reviewing - bugs, do the controls work, that kinda thing - have been ported over to other art for a generation, thus the hyper fixation with scores as "objective" measures and the immense anger at something being given the "wrong" score in music/cinema/etc)

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, January 19, 2024 10:52 AM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

to your first point, you have no idea the level of abuse you would get for giving something like a 8.5 instead of 9 or whatever

I mean I'm sure some Pitchfork writers or YouTubers get harsh criticism but Anita Sarkeesian, was getting bomb threats and had to go into hiding in the Bay Area because of death threats. There was an entire outlet that got doxxed (with their close family members as well)

Anything in music media was child's play compared to Gamergate.

to your second point, that's the hard part about reviewing games, because there are controls, systems, user interfaces, etc that can objectively just be broken or not designed correctly...but at the same time there's a level of artistry* there too that's not able to be objectively quantified...but I think that's a great observation that it's leaked into other forms of art...hell, you see all this shit about "Easter Eggs" in movies now, a term straight from games

*my own personal answer to the "art games art?" question is "it depends", some definitely are but I don't consider, say, Tetris or Madden Football or FIFA art.

counterpoint: tetris is art, none of the others are

Also jumping on the “Tetris is art, fuiud” bandwagon

Great read, Ned. Gotta be weird knowing someone pretended to be you lol

Dan, I agree with pretty much all of that - I just think that when you're talking about a mission statement for criticism, which is what I took ftgi bf's summation to be, well, you're kind of talking about the critic's intentions, no?

Sure, but my point is that a well-written pan can put an album in front of the people who would enjoy it in the same manner as an enthusiastic rave, even if the critic is saying “no one should buy this”. It’s the act of processing the criticism that leads to deciding whether to check the music out or not rather than a specific “buy this/skip this” recommendation, and that still fits the central thesis posited for the point of criticism.

I interviewed Alexi Patijnov, I don't think he considers it art, probably doesn't consider game to be art at all. There was a game in Russia using "tetriminos" (the shapes you see in the game) where kids would have to fit them in a box. He was just trying to figure out a cool puzzle game and hit upon the idea of animating/automoting that childhood game.

In general, most of the early game developers (arcade/Atari/etc), didn't really think of games as art, they were in the amusement industry/pinball/etc mindset, plus being early hacker just getting the thrill of "look what I made this machine do"...I know Howard Scott Warshaw (Yar's Revenge) felt the same way.

Also all those puzzle/games magazines (like Games etc)....but they were just trying to get people to play longer

I don't consider "art" a designation of quality in games. Tetris is perfect. I just don't think there was an artistic/expressive impulse behind it, it was just a guy trying to get something to work.

i'm always interested in very thoughtful, negative reviews, but i think when they get personal or nasty or ill-informed, they are simply just without merit. i think that's why it's kinda impossible for me to take Greil Marcus on Lucinda Williams seriously at all, because it's not that he's not into her music, it's that he clearly hates her as a person. Brian Howe's Edith F review on Pitchfork assailed her songs of loneliness and melancholy by saying, god well you're a whiner, of course you're alone (or something to that effect.) So many reviewers look at an artist putting themselves out there as an excuse for some real abhorrent thoughts, which reveal more about themselves than their targets.

however while i think the Brent D Two Against Nature review is absolutely dunderheaded it's also hilariously off-target and doesn't really at this point offend me, but i also think Steely Dan was used to people missing the point two decades before and their reaction was maybe more along the lines of, "really, people are still thinking that about us?"

that new Steely Dan book Quantum Criminals does a nice job of talking about the Pitchfork review of two against nature and also points out the fact that Steely Dan were not considered "cool" when the album was reviewed

https://x.com/ryandombal/status/1748390857051443645?s=20

let's try that again

after 15 years, this is my last day at pitchfork. i am among the essential staffers who are being cut. it's awful, a stupendous blunder. but i want to use it as an opportunity to celebrate some of the pieces i've edited and written, and the people that changed my life...

— Ryan Dombal (@ryandombal) January 19, 2024

Carnage out there

BREAKING: The Arena Group has given notice that it intends to lay off Sports Illustrated’s entire staff, according to an email obtained by FOS. pic.twitter.com/BIIrFyY6x9

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) January 19, 2024

can’t wait for the ai swimsuit issue

jesus, what a week

man...SI...that's really sad

Wow.

Related to all of this (especially with the Condé Nast angle) is this 2023 story on private equity killing science journalism.

70 years, to be destroyed by the Authentic Brand Group.

Great read, Ned. Gotta be weird knowing someone pretended to be you lol

Still wonder about whoever that was.

William Wilson, no doubt.

i don't know what to say today but i keep thinking about this one night in 2012 i stayed at the p4k office so late writing a review that i literally got locked in overnight and couldn't leave til the morning. so many ppl have been so devoted to this place

— jenn pelly (@jennpelly) January 18, 2024

It seems like CN is trying to sweeten its sheets and lighten its load for possible sale. They put their London HQ up for sale last fall. They've sold off some magazines.

My old alt-weekly got killed that way, we were owned by a newspaper company that owned the local daily, and they were given a headcount to come back with. They didn't care about the alt-weekly anyway, it ran at more or less break-even, so it was an easy call to be like "There's 14 people" and just shut it down. Never mind that thousands of people loved it and relied on it, that didn't enter into the equation.

Just saw this obit for a newspaper sports writer. That rise through the locals, learning the craft, building a life around it. Then towards the end it's redundancy and moves from paper to paper till 2008.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/19/ronald-atkin-obituary

re: decimal scores - i agree the 'nuance' they provide isn't really helpful and they probably added to the occasional disconnect between editorial-imposed-score and review which always felt weird whenever i noticed it.

Consider this: do we evaluate films or books in the same way that Pitchfork has taught us/inured us to evaluate albums? Do you ever hear anyone talking about the new Scorcese as being an 8.1 or whatever?

film nerds kinda, but usually just a 5-point or 10-point scale. video game nerds (and the developers and publishers!) really obsess over metacritic scores but video game criticism is a disastrous field that far too rarely digs too much beyond 'does this work' and has more extreme versions of most of music criticism's issues.

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 do agree about this as an issue and it probably could have been managed by being less obsessive about the p4k 'brand' and just allowing things to be given 8.3+ scores without BNM? let BNM serve as the broad recommendation label it currently does but be less precious about scores beyond that - that sort of brand management is always what rubbed people the wrong way about p4k. i think weird misguided pans are something we are better off without, though that doesn't mean negative reviews are bad - if anything having more would be ideal (use the full scale!) but it's better when a negative review is coming from a place of serious engagement and understanding instead of just lazy or cruel dunks. that all comes back to the general score inflation problem where the worst score anything can get these days is like ~4.5 on pretty rare occasion

9.6 was a little high for Blueberry Boat, but Pfork "compensated" it with misguided pans of two latter FF albums...

I used to know a film obsessive that kept a database of movies watched rated down to the decimal, which he would often revise. Like, he'd revisit a 6.8 and change it to a 6.3. That seems pretty nuts and really underscores (ha) how arbitrary these ratings are. Back when I worked at the AV Club there were no ratings, no grades, no stars, nothing like that, and I recall everyone on staff was pretty on board with the ethics or whatever of that, letting the words speak for themselves. But of course ratings became inevitable, because as much as people push back against criticism as consumer guide (XGau aside), that's probably how most people read it. Just tell me if it's good, you know? And as reading became shorter and writing less read, that number or grade became more important than the words. Especially as the site evolved and matured, not too many people griped about what a Pitchfork writer wrote, but they never stopped griping about those numbers.

The Blueberry Boat 9.6 next to NME's 1/10 on Wikipedia is classic and the original incentive for me to hear it

9.6 was a little high for Blueberry Boat, but Pfork "compensated" it with misguided pans of two latter FF albums...

never really listened to Fiery Furnaces but I really enjoy Eleanor Friedburger's solo albums a lot

Bitter Tea deserved 9.6

I always felt like people complaining about the focus on number score or BNM outcomes were kind of feeding the beast they complained about? I published lots of pieces with say a 7.9 score which in my head felt a bit higher, but it would be pretty dispiriting if that was the main takeaway from the reasonable chunk of time I spent writing those pieces.

The best way to tackle this thing has always been to promote good (or call out bad) writing (at P4K and elsewhere) without reference to the score or label, IMO.

9.6 was a little high for Blueberry Boat

disagree, their best and a highlight of the decade for me

i wrote monthly reviews for Decibel Magazine for 6 years and never gave an album a score. Decibel has number scores. my editor had to choose his own number after reading my review. i didn't always make it easy for him.

i would have given blueberry boat a 9.9 though.

i never think about pitchfork anymore but whenever it comes up i just mourn my dollar bin column in their short-lived print magazine. my most favorite thing to write! thanks j-hop! that kinda did it for me and the writing thing when conde nast pulled the plug on that magazine.

(having said that, i don't actually think things need to last forever. businesses. pitchfork. sports illustrated. restaurants. anything. more things should come and go actually. institutions are overrated.)

I like BB a lot but think it peters out a bit in its final third or so

a great tribute/retrospective/whatever you want to call this from Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up, a band that definitely got the Pitchfork bump: http://lookingforgold.blogspot.com/2024/01/p-fork.html

xps Quantification (usually a star rating) was expected for most mainstream newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times, but not in the NY Times and many others - once I shifted to the Village Voice and later periodicals like Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, the New Yorker, I virtually never saw scores or ratings. Aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes were ridiculous, their "scores" are based on severely misguided methodology and mean nothing.

Just read about this bullshit of GQ absorbing pitchfork. I wasn’t the most avid pitchfork reader but they deserved better than this. RIP

I don’t know the numbers but theoretically wouldn’t expanding pitchfork into an event promoter - such as the Pitchfork Music Festival or even single artist/dj concerts/parties - had kept the lights on? Never had the chance to go to one - and I guess the upcoming one planned for March 2024 in Mexico City will be cancelled - but I felt the lineups were fairly unique and forward thinking compared to other ones.

I worked in one of the first Corona Capitals in Mexico City and they made a lot of money - not sure how hard or expensive it is in the US specially post-2020, but I mean Conde Nast shouldn’t have too much trouble promoting this concerts and finding a team focused on the live aspect of the Pitchfork brand.

Post from Joe Shanahan, owner of the legendary Metro here:

just reading up and on the Pitchfork roll up into GQ via Conde Nast. i use "pfork" for weekly or daily updates on bands / tours. i find the reviews valuable to gauge interest or even sometime to listen to something new. i am not fan of the rating system...never have been, but again a tool for the trade. i read this one today (the Guardian piece) and yes, lets see how it plays out but honestly this changes the playing field that "pfork" leveled back in the day as the festival and "magazine" flourished right here in chicago.

He added later, responding to a comment:

not sure it really effects the festival, mike reed and his team have good grasp on the booking with or with out pfork, in my opinion.

As far as I understand it, the Mexico City fest is continuing as planned, and the annual Chicago fest is returning this summer.

Can't remember where I read about Mexico City, but the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the Chicago fest:

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2024/1/17/24042468/pitchfork-music-festival-chicago-gq-merge-conde-nast-anna-wintour

it seems to be more union busting and dumb corporate meddling to try to squeeze out a little more profit than p4k being unsustainable or anything

i doubt the mexico festival gets cancelled given they've already sold tickets for it, and i haven't seen anything about the festivals team getting laid off (though they might have anyway, or might after mexico is done, idk)