pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I sometimes still wonder if those Buddyhead bros ever saved up enough trade-in credit to get that Velvet Underground box set.

I will never understand a world where Buddyhead so thoroughly and meticulously destroyed the idea of "emo" as anything but the lamest, most poser-est loser shit around, and now we have to pretend this didn't happen as modern critics tell us we need to get serious about its return

whiney, have you met my friend MISTER DISCOURSE?

i said whiney don'tchu know that things go in cycles?

p4k, as good as the writing could be, didn't often publish writing that overwhelmed the institutional voice, if that makes sense.

yeah i think this was a relative weakness of the approach, especially as the institutional voice is what everyone got particularly weird about

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF inducion...

ehhh i don't think there is a good super bowl analogy at all because there just isn't anything so central to music, and even by awards show standards the grammys are a weird perpetually out of touch joke that no one really takes seriously as meaning very much.

Mister discourse
Oh the time has come

Pitchfork maybe overcorrected in moderating wilder impulses, but I thought there were plenty of distinct voices there. Maybe not promoted as such, exactly, but still quite clear. (Some writing was better than others, as everywhere.)

she thought it was a literal festival for pitchforks

https://i0.wp.com/www.onesnladay.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/12-5-2009_0.30.17.01.jpg?w=624&quality=89&ssl=1

Tbf the kid was just there to see R. Kelly

am i remembering that there used to be another pitchfork.com that was a family website or something? in the early years? or am i confusing it with something else?

It was a livestock website

yeah the music site was pitchforkmedia.com until they bought the pitchfork.com domain in the late 2000s

have i really been reading pfork for half of my life? my goodness.

(i still fucking type "pitchforkmedia.com" sometimes)

i'm confused by this. has the url been sans "media" for this long and my browser/phone really are just super smart and nake up for my stubbornness?!

*make

my superior typing can always be relied on.

Wayback Machine suggests that pitchforkmedia.com was redirecting to pitchfork.com until sometime in 2020.

Having a weird site name, or one that you didn’t even really own the URL for, was sort of a tradition among music sites in those days of the Internet.

full disclosure (sorry, this might be kinda harsh): the name tainted them as questionably (but no, yeah pretty much) racist typical self-consciously ironic whiteguy schitt from the start. idk, just the fact that i didn't even get the name made me hate them even more.

and yet, i kept reading it. l.

thank you for the link jaymc, I enjoyed reading that long post by Mark Richardson

― Dan S, Thursday, January 25, 2024 5:58 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

You're welcome, Dan. His recollection of Amy P.'s hiring amused me because I've long wondered whether I had some small part in it. Back in 2005, I'd made the acquaintance of Scott P., and while hanging out one night at a bar (maybe with deej?), he asked if I had any suggestions for who he should hire as Pitchfork's news editor. Amy's name was the first one that came to mind, probably just because I'd read her Village Voice reviews and knew she was into indie rock. Not long after, I found out that she got the gig.

Of course, I'm not delusional enough to believe she wouldn't have otherwise been considered, it's just kind of funny to think about given that she ended up staying there for almost 20 years and is now being praised as the heart and soul of the site, etc.

With her name in the news about the layoffs, I remembered I randomly met Amy P. once years ago, pre-Pitchfork. She was a friend of a friend and we all went to see Dizzee Rascal together in Brooklyn lol. There's an early 2000s moment for you.

On the comparison with sports journalism, isn't that the tendency though ? Reaction videos, point-by-point analysis, a bigger focus on performance and competence, the artist as superhuman, ratings, fans of this VS fans of that. I'm sure you can trace it the vocabulary too: return to form, beating the odds / expectations, hit or miss, tackling, handling, delivering, doing a good job... I still agree with your broader point Jordan, but at the same time feel we're not so far from "post-game break down" and that there's definitely a parallel there.

Nick Sylvester on his time at P4K:
https://smartdumb.substack.com/p/24-years-of-pitchfork

lol great subhead

The grinch you hoped would never get gooped on. Alas. An ode to the early days.

how much of that is made up

xxxp plus stan culture's obsession w/streaming stats, chart positions and "new records," gaming the album charts as a sort of "Deflate-gate," etc.

If only this was the remaining staff playing a prank:

News
Ice Spice Shares New Song “Think U the Shit (Fart)”

By Nina Corcoran
January 26, 2024

Ice Spice reimagines our perception of shit and farts

I kind of want to hear Ice Spice cover “Lift Yourself” now

You think you're a shit, but you're only a fart
You think you're a shit, you are only a ...

Where's neanderthal

I kind of want to hear Ice Spice cover “Lift Yourself” now

― the new drip king (DJP), Friday, January 26, 2024 12:44 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is actually the last good kanye song

He had more to say on that than he has on any song since, at least

Where's neanderthal

― Toshirō Nofune (The Seventh ILXorai), Friday, January 26, 2024 2:06 PM bookmarkflaglink

the signal was slow to reach me but I'm here. *fart*

I play "Lift Yourself" on public jukeboxes all the time. Very fun.

xpost to Josh

.. clart ?

Walmart

https://defector.com/a-notorious-pitchfork-reviewer-was-my-biggest-musical-influence

she was the first of several girlfriends to inform me that Hole’s Pretty on the Inside outsold Nirvana’s Bleach until Nevermind came out.

You mean in the one week between when Pretty on the Inside and Nevermind came out?

Girlfriend Always Gets Little Rush Out Of Telling People 'Pretty on the Inside' Beat 'Bleach'

xpost I think she's saying "prior to the arrival of Nevermind, Pretty on the Inside outsold Bleach, but after Nevermind, a bunch of new fans bought Bleach en masse and now Bleach outsold Pretty on the Inside as well"

so wait Pretty on the Inside sold more in the week between September 17 - September 24, 1991 than Bleach had sold in total since June 15, 1989?

it doesn't actually pass the quick fact-check I did (i.e. Wikipedia, lol). Bleach had sold about 40,000 copies by the time Nevermind came out, whereas Pretty on the Inside had only sold 27,000 by 1994 (three years after it was released).

MAMA'S WRONG AGAIN!

Swift Boat Veterans for Bleach ✊🇺🇸

Girlfriends wrong again

lol

This 'fact' seems to come from Courtney Love. It is probably correct that in Sept. 91 the new Hole album was selling more than a two year old Nirvana album--until Nevermind blew up anyway.

That's the one sentence you guys got stuck on, huh

beats working I guess