i have gotten emails today saying that i am:

Dude, your review was great. I don't know if I agree with it because I haven't heard the album, but I thought it was hilarious.

(what review?)...I wouldn't worry, at least you are reviewing stuff...

"brent d's mini-me" >> make T-shirt >> wear till old

The boy done good.

Like I said in my NYLPM comment, "very funny". And I meant it. Wrong, yeah, but who isn't?

ETHAN HARDER YOUR FACE TO THE COLD WINDS OF HUMAN INTERFERENCE

I had a Beaming Smile on my face while reading and re-reading yr review, thinking of the fulish fules you would offend with yr wonderfully amusing writing, fag boy.

I did smile at the "so 1997" bit - it is, um, so Ethan. You should write for Vogue, not Pitchfork.

Best concept review ever.

Revenge = use pitchfork letters page to make them look stupid.

Ethan that review is sensational!

It was funny, yes. But I have to agree with Tom's NYLPM comment. Wishing away influx from elsewhere into [pick your form of music] is like ordering back the tide -- ain't happenin'.

Regarding yer hate mail -- this is the joy of pressing the delete button. Just remember that putting your name and info out there with an opinion means others may well respond.

Also to get more serious for a second - yeah every review has gone on about 10 pints of bitter because every reviewer here is a lazy fuck who hasn't got past the single and the press kit. BUT a big part of UK hip-hop's appeal for me at least is the local colour - and because UK hip-hop isn't stuck in a playa/underground dialectic a lot of its rhymes are full of trivial, silly local references, which a kid in Athens, GA is (rightly) not going to care about, but that doesn't mean they're a terrible thing.

The everyday UK-ness of the Skitz album is what I love about it, for instance - especially since the rest of the UK music scene seems dead- set on abstraction. Skitz, Roots, and The Streets seem bent on bringing back a kind of kitchen-sink pop to Britain and I love them for it.

Hate mail = grate mail.

ALWAYS REMEBER, RECORD REVIEWS ARE OPINION, THERE IS NO RIGHT IOR WRONG ANYWAYS

Revenge = use pitchfork letters page to make them look stupid.

Oh, please don't. One of my least favorite thing about Pitchfork is the sort of jocky way they use the letters page to make fun of their hate-mailers, but so rarely use it to actually address a serious comment someone might have about their reviews. If they're not getting worthwhile reader mail, they shouldn't have a page for it. And if they have to have a page for it, they should just let it sit there and look stupid, instead of writing back and pretending they like Fred Durst.

(Points in this post also touched on by Tom above, sorry, that got posted while I was writing it. Maybe we should just give up and think of UK hip-hop as being as separate in style and in target audience from US hip-hop as UK garage is from its big transatlantic brother.)

I don't think I agree, but it is funny and well-written and I don't think you deserve any of those slaggings at all. On the other hand, and I don't know whether this even matters or not, but the letters style made it kind of hard to separate out what you actually found so bad about the record from the KRS-1 persona, if you see what I mean. I get the feeling I'm going to be told that this is completely irrelevant, but basically, Britishisms mean stuff to me, dance music isn't so 1997 to me, and I don't know if you think that nobody should actually care about this stuff or whether the fact that you're not writing as yourself makes it a convenient slagging whether or not you believe it.

Cue rest of ILE: "ah, but all writing is assuming a different persona, stop pulling the uber-rockist move of demanding authenticity from reviewers; oh, and you don't fool us, you don't even like most hip-hop and all the stuff you do like is that tedious undie stuff that Ethan berates Roots Manuva for sounding like anyway." To which all I can say is, "Erm, yes, sorry. Well, it was just a thought."

But anyway, it was funny, it was a good review, nice concept apart from my reservations above, I can't imagine anyone getting that wound up by it, and in my book anyone who thinks that "fag boy" helps their argument or does anything other than make them look like a narrowminded idiot should automatically lose the argument.

I don't know if you'll like what I thought, Ethan, but I'm still glad you wrote it. Despite my criticisms I would find the mail you got amusing rather than taking any of it seriously.

I liked "Run Come Save Me". That said, I liked the review too.. it makes me wish everybody could defy my tastes so engagingly.

Hi Ethan, I promise you that no matter what, you will never get an email like that from me. Hugs.

well, at least they cant call you boring

And those were just quotes from the email I sent him! Wo ho ho! *rimshot*

i liked the review - the album isn't great - Tom makes some good points - keep up the good work Ethan - sod 'em

Haven't heard the album but I really like the review. Quite funny and creative. Responses of any sort mean that people are reading what you wrote i.e. the whole point!

The public perception of Ethan as critic is distorted because no one has seen him exercising his full arsenal of interpretive skills being as how HIS STYX PIECE HAS NEVER BEEN POSTED ON FT!! This would change EVERYONE's impression of E and he'd get love mail in future as opposed to hate mail. Tom! Petition! You MUST publish this piece!

fucking brilliant ethan man! i liked it, i liked the Robin C style bit at the end too

Hey Ethan, which bits of KRS-1 / BDP should I be listening to to hear his 'borrowing from dub's framework'? I lost track of him / them years ago, but don't recall those earlier LPs having much dub about them.

I thought the review was pretty good, really: unlike Josh, I think I understand what it was you hated about the music. That I happen to disagree with you is not terribly relevant. You were way off the mark in saying that the only 'real' MCs are American, though: it seemed such a daft thing to say I tried to find some other way of reading it, but couldn't.

The other thing is that your references to reggae in the review make it sound like you don't have much of a feel for Jamaican music: is that right? I think one of the interesting things about RM's vocal style is that he doesn't sound like a gruff dancehall / ragga MC, but harks back to earlier styles, with radically different 'flows': Prince Far-I (obviously) but also the very first wave of DJs: Machuki and Sir Lord Comic and so on. Oh, you might want to sort the ragga / raga typo out, by the way: I would *love* to hear a two bit raga shouter. Not having too much of a feel for Jamaican music isn't a criticism of you or the review, just an impression I came away with which I thought you might be interested in.

i know we've been here before Tim, but i still don't think there are any great British Hip Hop artists. There are great British MCs have been for many many years, but this is an entirely different thing, as these MCs are not working within Hip Hop

Well, Gareth, as you know I don't agree with you: several of my favourite artists in any genre worldwide currently are UK Hip Hop.

Ethan quite clearly says that you can read 'real MC' for 'American MC'. That seems daft to me. So I said so.

Weirdly enough, I agree with Tim rather than Gareth on this one. The Skitz album is definitely up there as one of this year's best in my estimation and the Manuva album is pretty cool as well (though I haven't heard it for ages, not since the bassist of a certain indie band nicked it a few weeks back).

ethan, you are the very opposite of the descriptions attributed to you in your question - otherwise, what Dan said

just stay away from reviewing any rap français though, if you don't mind

i think ethan probably meant dancehall rather than dub. whether he knew it or not.

shiiiit...saying hiphop started out by london bridge, saying stuff like that man you know you can't live.

i think the review was very entertaining if not incredibly informed or that i agreed with it. i think ethan's a very clever, funny writer who's knowledge and interpretations of music somestimes lag behind his cleverness. i also don't think he realized what a bait this review was going to be, what he let outta the box.

i just hope he goes with my suggestion to make every successive review more offensive to the general pitchfork readership than the last.

Haven't heard the album, but I laughed out loud at work reading the review. Nice style .. I wish I'd get hate mail.

Ethan the guy works in a wholefood shop.

briong briong!

in case it doesn't get published, here's the letter i sent to p-fork about ethans review:

i hate to burst everyone's bubble, but the bile and invective tossed at ethan p's review of roots manuva's "run come save me" is misdirected at best, imbecilic at worst. but fairly typical of the sort of back-slapping clique-niche bullshit which trails independent music (and "independent" criticism) around.

(full disclosure: i know ethan, fairly well. i helped him research the press quotes which bookend the review. i read the review before it was published. i didn't let him off the hook for what i thought were gaps in logic and shoddy reasoning. i also don't agree with some/most of the sentiments in the review. however, i think it was well written. i also think it was hilarious.)

i find most pitchfork reviews to be tedious bores. i find most pitchfork writers to hover somewhere between high school newspaper and technical manual. i find most of the music pitchfork champions to be moribund and hopeless. yet, i still read. mostly to build righteous anger, and sometimes, as with ethan's review, to be massively entertained.

points about the review (conveniently) neglected by yr correspondents:

- the actual music is hardly neglected. a sampling: "It's sad to see the guy who effortlessly floated on the grainy charcoal-sketched Mobb Deep wail of "Movements" driven to the hollow two-note keyboard loops and boring dirgy bass of almost every track here."

- the sort of crass, take-a-chance-to-fall-flat-on-your-face record review is a music press institution, and a sadly missed on at that. i may think brent d is a moron (oh, and i do), but at least he's working that embarrassment highwire. compare that to the college essay sterility of most pitchfork writing and suddenly ethan's review - sloppy or not, misguided or not - seems part of a much greater lineage. calling ethan brent d's "mini-me" merely illustrates a.) lack of history on the part of yr letter writers and b.) how much that history has fallen into disrepair with the upward- mobile professionalism that has seized and strangled all levels of music writing in the late 90s. seek out another writer who i think is an idiot but a great *stylist: richard meltzer. or some 80s issues of conflict. or our old standby, grandpa lester.

to be sure, ethan takes several glaring missteps throughout the piece. he misspells ragga as raga (something also not caught by the oh-so-up-on-non-indie-music pitchfork editoral staff, giving rise to visions of ravi shankar shouting over a sitar solo in a dancehall stylee), he equates america with "real mc's" (although yr letter writers failed to produce any mc's threatening to take away rakim's crown...okay, maybe slick rick), and there is a veneer of xenophobia which is hard to dismiss outta hand. he slams the meeting of dance music and hiphop not as a whole but as the sort of barebacked couplings ninja tune artists specialize in.

the last point is particularly telling. look at the quote which closes the review, which is real by the way, and included in the roots manuva press packet: "One of the sanest offerings to emerge from the British inner city and a healthy antidote to the inanity of US hip hop"

of course you're supposed to read it as: "the inanity of US RADIO hiphop." the underground is where it's at, no? that's why ninja signed quannum, right? why the hell isn't blackalicious as huge as jigga, goddammit? of course for the last 4 to 5 years mainstream hiphop has been sonically lapping the underground to the point of embarrassment. if you wonder why people are abandoning the good ship undie hiphop in droves - even people you think should "know better" - it's this sort of blind-eye elitism, musty post-mo wax fetishizing, beat digging tiredness.

roots manuva's success owes in large part to what critic simon reynold's calls (and i'm paraphrasing) the "good music society." people afraid to slop in the mud of POP music, who surround themselves with symbols of "class" listening the way others cling to pottery barn furniture. people who can only listen to mystikal singles if they can "display the irony." it's a strain of sonic narcissism and anhedonia which runs rampant through all forms of underground music, through pitchfork, and through pitchfork's readers apparently.

i'm not going to be an apologist for the lyrical bile spewed by most post-gangsta hiphop artists. but i'm also not going to deny the delirious aural pleasure to be found in their music. it's *here* that the meeting of dance music - of ten years of british rave culture, itself drawing drawing on hiphop and the jamaican soundsystem culture hiphop drew on as well - and hiphop has been the most fully realized. the hybridization of hiphop that yr readers seem so desperate to arrive is HERE. it's just not going to be found within the temple of the breakbeat wherein ninja tune and all who travel with her reside.

fuck, timbaland has done more to bring dancehall to hiphop in the last half-decade than roots manuva ever could.

hate mail means yr doing something right.

- jess harvell

I heard "Witness" again today and it's a fucking great single. Ethan you are a mentalist. However please compare and contrast EP's review with today's Pulp review. In the latter I can find little to disagree with strictly speaking but it makes me want to bury one of my favourite 2001 albums under concrete for a year. Whereas Ethan made me dig out and enjoy Roots for the first time in months. What's the point of reviews, again?

Oh Jess, favourable Timbaland comparisons are so '98.

'herbal blessings'. oh and thanks jess, although i should point out that i spelled ragga correctly and any problem with that is a fuck-up on ryan's part. but i really don't know much about jamaican music regardless. HERBAL BLESSINGS! that ninja tune thread about me is great all-around really.

oh tom, irony and sarcasm are so '93.

Threads on record label website forums should perhaps not criticise reviewers for not being "objective".

it's funny because in january of 2000 when my school got broadband internet access in the library one of the first things i did was go to ninjatune.net and watch the 'juggle tings proper' video.

And now you have betrayed them. God knows what they'd make of your cronies here Ethan since you like Ninja tune trip-hop tat more than the rest of us put together.

their disgust would surely be nothing a few herbal blessings couldn't cure.

That message board is rather entertaining. And that guy who works in a wholefood shop, do you reckon he has any idea how much of a stereotype he is?

i bet he owns a hoodie with some ridiculous acid jazz slogan on it.

Are you saying you don't?

Oh yes. I reckon he's probably got some sort of 'interesting' facial hair as well.

I just can't wait until KRS-One replies to Pitchfork. Shit is going to be great.

NB I meant the wholefood guy NOT Ethan above.

i bet krs has a hoodie with 'krs-one' written on it.

Anyone have krs-one's email? Someone should tell him.

right on ethan! stick it to that limey bastard! you have my full blessing, as the Teacher and the Original Gangsta.

Large parts of Ethan's review are straight from the arse, but practically everything Jess says is on the money. Hmmm.

But Jess, that Telegraph quote is just upper-middle-class English imperialism and fuck-all to do with hip-hop of any kind, from anywhere. You should know that. Just one point.

Jess, don't know about Manuva representing the good taste brigade - on the album one of the guest rappers sings Craig David's "7 Days" but changes the words to a weed-homage. A distaste for US radio hip hop is so widespread that I think to gain admittance into said brigade you'd need to complement it with a love of tasteful retro-isms, which Manuva avoids wholeheartedly.

On the other hand there are a number of points where I think Manuva deliberately avoids tunefulness or catchiness in favour of weird dirginess to his detriment (it wouldn't be a problem if he didn't usually match his more catchy raps with his best production and leave the oddball numbers sounding a bit murky and unfinished). The album would benefit enormously from more POP HITZ like "Witness (1 Hope)", obviously.

second full disclosure: i have not heard the album, nor do i have any great desire to do so.

so manuva may well be not guilty of the crimes against futurism and popism which j'accuse. BUT, the quote was - english imperialism or no - being used by ninja's marketing dept. to sell the album as an Intelligent Alternative to...whoever. kurupt. busta bust. ludacris. all of whom have probably released better hiphop albums than roots manuva this year, and some of those weren't even all that good. the whole ninja aesthetic is very cloying to me. they're like mo wax but replacing old video games and 70s cartoons for jazz funk and hi-class trainers.

(however, hypocricy alert: if i had remembered, i would have included coldcut's "journeys by dj" cd in my top 50 of the 90s.)

Jess, this is Ninjer-muthafuckin-Toons we're talking about. What else can we really expect?

Ninja's marketing of Roots to the states is plainly arse then. They should be marketing him as an unusual pop artist - what makes UK hip- hop fresh is how much it refuses to fit into the tired old undie/mainstream thing. "Witness" is a pop single - what's made this discussion (here and elsewhere) insteresting is the way neither pro nor anti-Ethan people seem to have much of a handle on what Roots or other UK MCs are doing exactly, or a grasp of the idea that possibly discussion of UK hip-hop needs to move beyond comparisons with the US. The MCs themselves have largely worked this one out - why can't the critics?

"mo wax but replacing old video games and 70s cartoons for jazz funk and hi-class trainers" = BIG step up (full disclosure: i was in a band w.matt black at college)

that was very funny indeed, lovely review.

No Tom, critics should not stop comparing him to US hip hop for if they did they would have NOTHING TO SAY and would have to shut their mouths... Oh, right then.

Interesting that Ethan swipes at the deliberate Englishness of the album when the previous review I'd read (the AMG one) criticises it for being too much like New York hip hop. Ethan's review is fun though - of course he doesn't really explain the music, it's a Pitchfork review duh.

Jess - you are being unfair to Manuva (I'd say he beats Kurupt (who has a fair bunch of awesome tracks actually) if only because Manuva's version of pop = Awesome Nintendo Stomp while Kurupt-Pop = "It's Over" = Jay-Z's "Anything" with Daphne & Celeste guesting, only not even good in the apalling manner that such a monstrosity might actually be if it existed). However, your loyalty to Ethan is touching.

I liked the Mauva album, and I liked Ethan's review, it was very him.

somehow i feel like casting my lot in with ethan is damaging my cred.

also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the fork didn't print my letter.

and the guy who sells the papers on the corner outside my work looks EXACTLY like krs-one. coincidence?

Confession one: I have not heard the album either, though I have heard the singles from it and one or two album tracks and they have all been TOP, though Join The Dots is a bit disappointing after the others. I would probably buy the album if I had more $$$.

The NME may have a point that while the album sounded awesome when it was released the world of hip-hop has moved so fast since then that it already sounds dated; is this why Ethan listed it on an old "best of 2001" thread but hates it now? Is it fair to give something such a bad review when you previously loved it and when presumably a lot of other reviews on the site are of new stuff which hasn't had time to start to sound old? But Witness etc still sounds absolutely great and fresh to me now, as if it's just different enough from US hip-hop not to sound old no matter what twists and turns US stuff has taken during the past year.

Confession two: before this thread I had no idea he was on Ninja Tune. Why not? He just doesn't fit the Ninja Tune stereotype at all to me. I have no time for all that other jazzy breaksy goatee-bearded Gilles-Peterson-championed stuff they seem to specialise in, I don't even like most of Wagon Christ's stuff (moments of genius, eg Power of Love EP, but after much hype I bought Tally Ho and it was just embarrassing), it takes itself far too seriously and tries too hard to be smooth and clever. But Roots Manuva just doesn't seem like that to me. To me it's poppy Brit hip-hop with arcade bleepy noises and huge basslines and other things normally deemed far too FUN for Ninja Tune to bother with.

Currently trying to decide whether the Aspects' "My Genre" is absolutely great or really really annoying. I think, shock move, it may be both. I also think that if Ethan doesn't like Roots Manuva for trying too hard to be quirky and British I dread to think what he'd make of this. What's the album like, anyone heard it?

Subject: Roots Manuva review Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 15:51:54 +0000 (GMT) From: fuck.the.system@anarchist.co.uk To: ethan@pitchforkmedia.com

You xenophobic fuckwit. You won't know decent hip hop if it punched you in your stupid fucking face & screamed "I'M DECENT HIP HOP, YOU IGNORANT MUTHAFUCKA!" right into your ear.

Twat.

Brilliance! Send the hate mailers a form fan club letter modeled on the one from the article!

I really don't see what the deal is here. Anybody who writes criticisms (be it film, music, or television) has gotta expect some hate mail. Because no matter what's being criticized there's going to be a rabid fanatic who disagrees.

Rebecca, I don't think you can call Run Come Save Me dated just yet - hip hop moves fast, but not that fast. Did the NME suggest what had supposedly overtaken it?

In short, no. However, I was quoting from memory, so it wasn't entirely accurate. Here's most of the recent review of the Join The Dots single, which doesn't make it entirely clear whether it thinks the album now sounds dated or just the single:

Whatever happened to Jurassic 5? Well, they produced a great debut, then the world of hip-hop accelerated so fast in the space of about 18 months that they just got left behind. Which is bad news for Roots Manuva - here joined by Jurassic's Chali 2Na - because this sounds really paltry, not only compared to a lot of rap around right now, but to the rest of the stuff off his pretty smart "Run Come Save Me" LP. ...

Paltry?! That track is awesome.

Well, yeah, the hip hop world has accellerated past *Jurassic 5* (who are curiously both overrated and overhated). "Join The Dots" sounds good in context, but it's the most conventional track on Manuva's album. I can see why it was released (strong, menacing groove) but I reckon he should release "Hol' It Up" or "Stone The Crows" as a single.

Rebecca - I've got the Aspects album. It is a bit quirky. Ethan would loathe it. I think as you say it mixes some great ideas with some annoying ones.

Hm, I read that review as saying that Roots Manuva is now in, or is in danger of ending up in, the same position as J5 were in a year or two ago, i.e. it was a good debut but hip-hop is accelerating past them. Rereading it in the light of Tim's reply, perhaps that was not what was intended and it was merely a criticism of Manuva's choice of guests, although I think I'd still read it as aimed at both of them.

This thread has made me even more curious than I previously was to hear the whole album and make up my own mind and stuff. Not that I'm exactly going to know how it compares with the competition.

Hey dont worry about it. I shot down Wide Mouth Mason during a binge drinking session I was having and ended up with over a page of hate mail printed in the next weeks campus paper about me, and thats only what we could print, ie stuff that didnt call me everything under the blue moon or overtly hatefuly. Three years later people still make jokes about it with me and some people are still bitter.

Grrr. I wrote pitchfork a letter clearing up their review of Haymarket Riot where they blamed the anarchists for the bomb and for derailing the eight-hour-day movement, explaining this was not at all the case. And they didn't print it. Can mark or someone agitate them about this? I mean, who do these people think they are, Global Exchange or something?

I can mention this to Ryan. History is important, and anarchists are a misrepresented lot (Spain in the 30's, etc.)

not to shift the attention away from ethan, or turn this into a general PF bitch session, buuuut ... re: the review of the Radiohead EP today, is there really any room for Brent D. anymore? Could he retain any dignity (yes, jokes possible at this point) by continuing to write for the site?