pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

every editorial CMS is janky and has a 1,000 dumb little decisions that were made when it was rolled out that end up having unintended consequences that no one anticipated at the beginning

yeah that was definitely true at XLR8R way back when— lots of weird quirks on the back end that seemed easily fixable but weren’t

I recently offered my services to improve/optimize an editorial CMS with my new ReactJS skills and was basically told the whole thing is outsourced to a tech company

yeah and there's no appetite to fix it because it's really only making it more annoying to do work for the people who actually have to do it, but it's not preventing the work from being done, so the powers that be aren't going to say okay let's create a project to do this because some beyonce fans are upset about something for two weeks

the whole shebang:

because it is LITERALLY NOT SOMETHING I HAVE CONTROL OVER as i have said many times. the coding of the website assigns genres to ARTISTS, not to releases. if they changed it to country it would change every beyonce relese to country. please put this energy toward a real problem https://t.co/AHNCljpkzf

— nadine type beat (@FakeNadine) February 19, 2024

Never, Nadine will not know peace until my last breath

— Beyhive Central (@Beyhive_Central) February 19, 2024

cool, normal fans.

Ugh

She should ... ignore it/them?

In general, probably yes, but maybe stans should also stop being so fucking weird.

she got harassed by a lot of them when the review was first published, then when it got featured again a week later, they came back. this was just the last in a line of people

Agree 100%! (xpost) But she has zero control over that.

Also, that fan account has 225 followers. Do not give it any air.

Yeah I do not know why someone with a job/role like that would be (public) on Twitter, let alone engaging with such an acct...

Aren't most music journalists on Twitter?

By "job/role" do you mean Pop Music Writer? Seems like social media is almost required for that.

yeah, I'm not following you, morrisp; but, no, I wouldn't engage with a stan account.

If you say so... I suppose there must be more upside than downside (tho I've never followed music journalists there). I mean Twitter is a very bad place, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

I don't think I could do my job if I had randos online yelling at me about it, so kudos to those who can (and/or feel they must)

I was once doxxed by an artist's stans once but otherwise it's been okay. Depends how you set up your account.

that was the night Soto sent the tanks

You know what, I take it back – I do follow St3phen Th0mas 3rlewine on Threads; I ran into his acct. and he posts links to stuff he writes (which sometimes I check out, if not behind a paywall). So I see the value there (with the caveat that Threads ain't Twitter, which cuts both ways; maybe he's there too)

that was the night Soto sent the tanks

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal),

the tankies shut those stans down!

I don't think you could get hired at many places as as staff writer without a Twitter account.

(maybe now? not sure but certainly not at its peak. Posting links was part of the job.)

At the college newspaper we advise our reporters are required to create some sort of work/public social media account; otherwise the reluctance to promote their work gets the better of them.

From what I’ve heard, non-male music writers tend to get hassled more intensely on social media over their reviews.

xp I'm thankful that my college newspaper days were juuuust before that material starting being permanently archived online (not that there's likely anything too incriminating, but y'know... I was totally off the mark on what "post-rock" was, stuff like that)

I wonder if that European "right to be forgotten" law extends to cringy stuff written in one's past

But sorry, I'm getting off-topic. Yeah, being a non-male writer (or any kind of public figure, really) with a public social account must be particularly rough

It's just really bad database design to tie artists to genres 1:1. I could see maybe not wanting to go down the rathole of tracking musicians separately from their bands or instruments or whatever, but it should've been obvious that an artist might record in more than one genre throughout their career and it would've been simple to set it up that way if they had thought about it.

some of y'all sound like you've never worked with these kinds of softwares/platforms - not just in music website-ing but in any corporate environment ... they are *all* designed by someone who is not really thinking about the end use/product and therefore causes little problems that end up driving the back-end users (especially) and consumers crazy.

this is what happens when you try to automate the organization of humans and human activities. it's never quite as clean as the coders would like it to be.

like i don't blame P4k for this situation, really, because (a) they are probably annoyed by it too but can't fix it, and also (b) who cares! it's a little category thingy on a website. it doesn't matter.

it doesn't matter.

truth bomb, lock thread.

We need to get to 25,000

90% of creating a website or software or w/e is flushing out the actual requirements while leaving enough flexibility without breaking things. someone asked the client “hey, you want to be able to search by genre. should it be tied to the album or the artist?” and the answer made sense in the moment. it’s just that no taxonomy is static (or real)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/molly-lewis-on-the-lips/

I get that this is not a novelty record, and I enjoy her whistling, but can't help but feel that this is... very generous

I really like the album but I like this kind of exotica soundtrack stuff like this. Her whistling is much less silly than Andre 3000's flute playing.

That being said I did a double take at the line in the review that refers to it as an "inviting ambient record". In what universe is this ambient? Have been really annoyed lately at ppl's tendency the last few years to throw that word around to basically mean "kinda chill vibes".  Was talking to a friend recently abt Light in the Attic's reissue of Pete Jolly's Seasons which they are billing as "ambient jazz" in the press release - my friend was surprised when he listened to it and found it was just a nice mellow jazz album. I know that there's a huge postpandemic surge of interest in ambient & new age, but every non-rock instrumental album can't be "ambient".

haha wow yeah that's super silly

maybe they meant Ambien, that it put them to sleep

I think people are using Ambient to mean Atmospheric.

Im a super duper ambient snob but basically

any music can be used as ambient music in the right context

there is also a style of music known as ambient music that is more about creating an atmosphere. a lot of that music sucks because it tries to do too much and be foreground music.

feel like the genre and the idea of coffee shop non-verbal music are different

cue 1000 people saying aphid’s selected ambient works vol 1 is NOT but vol 2 is, only for someone to say it’s not

aphid? Aphex

ambient for a rave vs ambient for a bank vault

no that’s not quite right, back to unpacking

no new reviews today, is this a us holiday?

or an ominous sign...

This is not a U.S. holiday!

There are new reviews

^reporters CUmmings and Keyes doing the lord's work

Something weird is going on because they removed a bunch of recent reviews. there was a schoolboy q review this week but its gone now. Some others too - very odd.

Huh