pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849495 in a series.)

Mods please delete if needed - but in response to lamenting that the Pitchfork thread hasn't split, here's a potential solution.

Maybe should slightly rename to "pitchfork is even dumber" or pitchfork is dumb and dumber or whatever to avoid confusion.

How about "Pitchfork is Dumb: 2023 and Beyond"?

Wonder how many people unfamiliar with the artist read "Oneohtrix Point Never Announces Live Shows in New York, Europe, and Asia" headline thinking it was a complaint?

oneohtrix point never her

come to new york, europe, asia

more like, "oneohtrix point never heard of 'em", amirite?

Seems strange to refer to (Venezuelan-American) singer Devendra Banhart as “Venezuelan”… unless he’s stated a preference for that(?)

Not really? In South Florida there's slippage. I identify as Cuban, Cuban-American, or American depending on the context.

Yeah obviously people can refer to themselves that way, but I wouldn’t refer to someone else that way (especially in a “journalistic” context).

He was born in the U.S. to a Venezuelan mother and American father, spent his early years in Venezuela, and then moved back to the U.S. as a teenager. I can't tell whether he has dual citizenship.

If I'm editing that dek, I would probably change to Venezuelan American, but he has also said in interviews that he considers himself Venezuelan.

2013: "Do I consider myself Venezuelan? I do. I am."

2019: "I spent most of my life feeling like a Venezuelan in America and then like an American in Venezuela, and then things got so bad in Venezuela that I just felt really like a Venezuelan."

Oh ok, that seems fair

and the Worst Headline of 2023 award goes to

https://pitchfork.com/features/podcast/taylor-swift-eras-tour-concert-movie/

"On Duster’s 2023 album Remote Echoes—their third since regrouping in 2018—they leaned hard into the muted guitars and muttered vocals that give their music the feeling of a shared secret."

Philip you silly goose that's a compilation of cassette only material from the 90s

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-shoegaze-revival-hit-its-stride-in-2023/

Evan do you ride for any of those new bands listed? I’m way behind on the “show me a new Shoegaze band” tbh

Also kind of feels like he forgot that "space rock" is a term...

He gets close when he calls Windy & Carl "spacey post-rock", and then goes on to try to fit Duster into the shoegaze ecosystem without mentioning "space rock" at all, so that evidence points me to think he isn't aware of the genre tag? IDK

brimstead I like the Hotline TNT album for sure, but one not mentioned I really like is They Are Gutting A Body Of Water.

However these may not be the style of shoegaze you're looking for... what are some favorites?

yeah I’m open to everything really, I was just wondering because there’s so many of them out there and I trust your taste

I appreciate that! Ultimately I'm not perfectly on top of everything shiny and new, but here's another really fun new band I've been listening to:

https://jjuliee.bandcamp.com/album/pushing-daisies

TAGABOW rules ... one of the best examples of the genre getting reshaped by youngsters.

probably just left them out because their last release was 2022, and this is, presumably, a "year-end" kind of thing.

Fair!

Latest Flyying Colours seemed a little slept on too

https://cdn.vor.us/event/582695/b8d2d6dcf8874e3da32f35fea9c95b88.image!png.538902.png.PMF24_Lineup_1-1_FINAL.png

De La isn't a headliner?

they headlined it back in 2007. was amazing.

https://x.com/misterminsoo/status/1767930571869622453

https://x.com/misterminsoo/status/1767930571869622453?s=20

trying again

Every single person knows this is true.

Quite a statement to make about a band I've never heard of.

They must be feds.

In January 2021, then President-elect Joe Biden invited the Black Pumas to perform during his Celebrating America primetime special during the President's Inauguration activities.

not sure who else from that july 19 lineup would be a better headliner

ML Buch, obviously

I guess Pitchfork didn't even review last year's Black Pumas album. Does seem a little odd.

Wow, except for the Gen X bait and one or two newer others (Wednesday) I think I'm almost at a total loss.

I'm in for Day 2 with those top 4 acts. Rest is a bonus for me, and it's nice to know I can show up at 7 if it's hot.

I'd like to see Kara Jackson live.

Sweeping Promises are great

This really brings us full circle to the beginning of the first p is dumb thread:

Donald
Oh my God, what just happened at P-Fork
Mon Apr 1 07:08:25 2002
63.167.209.146

I'm not going to spew any elitist bullshit, but Alanis Morrissette, Kylie Minogue? Oh my fucking God. I'll stay for a little while to see if P-Fork still serves my needs, but with today's front page, I'm not counting on it. I understand the career move, but I just don't think it's going to serve me any more.

I don't think I've ever heard Black Pumas, but it does seem off-brand. My impression has been that they're a band that exists to get Grammy nominations.

a harbinger of terrible things to come after the GQ merger announcement

are the ppl who book the festival beholden to gq/condé

a friend was musing that that spot was prob originally for r**** m*****

red hot chili meppers?

i mean it’s just speculation, the world may never know

Robert Mugabe

My impression has been that they're a band that exists to get Grammy nominations.

They were nominated for three years in a row for the material from their first album - 2019 as Best New Artist, 2020 Album of the Year for the deluxe version of the same album, 2021 for a "Live from Studio A" performance of the songs from the first album.

They also appear to exist to keep pressing plants in business, not counting represses or just ones pressed at different plants, I counted over 28 different pressings of the debut record in different colors and formats (45" versions). It's kind of insane.

"more than a love song" from last year was cute (re: black pumas) but yes very much a grammybait noncommercial radio kind of act

rivers muomo

my black pumas opinion: i like the song "colors," but not enough for me to seek out any of their other songs

I was going to guess Roisin Murphy but the letters don't match the the ***

i counted wrong

rivers muomo

― the defenestration of prog (voodoo chili), Wednesday, March 13, 2024 1:52 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

Black Pumas headlines festivals literally around the world. They are in a similar zone to Mumford of being super popular but people don't actually register them as popular. This is kind of the most desirable zone to be in, everybody makes a ton of money and the Internet routinely does the "Who???" thing with you and you just cash checks and do half the promo work at most.

thought this was one of the most perceptive/true things written about the lack of comments:

Further evidence of snobbery was seen in Pitchfork’s refusal to allow comments—which really was unusual, given that Spin, Rolling Stone, and other magazines were rushing to let readers append their own record reviews to the professional ones. Perhaps Schreiber sensed that because Pitchfork’s reviewers were themselves amateurs—in another context, commenters—a commenting feature would have threatened the fragile suspension of disbelief that powered the Pitchfork machine.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-12/reviews/pitchfork/

getting rid of comments makes sense now that social media shattered the illusion anyways

pitchfork comment section - the perfect time for Carles to make his long awaited return to the Lana discourse

We probably have the lack of a Pitchfork comment section or thank for this thread existing

To thank

You laugh but I've still got PTSD from the Anticon vs. Def Jux war

Not to mention those of us still recovering from the Jeff Tweedy-Jay Farrar Primary

Think of the poor Wikipedia editors who are going have to add the Reader Score to 30,000 album pages.

Alphonse Pierre's piece on 6 7 is really good, captures the bizarreness of the whole trend while emphasizing the humanity of the artist and his community

Yes, that was interesting. I didn't even know 6-7 came from a Kensington artist.

The actual song sounds like what I imagined the legendary "Grim Reapah" song sounded like.

An early breakout single, “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, united their love of kitsch and acid house

Nope.

My 70 year old mother texted me yesterday to ask what time her and my dad should be at my place today. I said 5:40 or so and she replied “6 7”

The woman is a menace and must be stopped.

Pitchfork could give every album a 6.7 to be down with the kids.

I went though most of my life guarding against any incipient impulse to be threatened by the music associated with younger people than me (I'm 54). I hated it when boomers, or my own cohort which often included deadheads or hardcore/indie dead enders, dismissed anything made after their own hormonal/cultural prime. I was never going to be like that. And yet…

Surely every pitchfork staffer, freelancer or dedicated reader is familiar with the following theorem: "The reason this thing is as popular as it is, is because it fuckin' sucks shit." While those described above would associate "this thing" = Mariah Carey, Beyonce, seemingly all popular black music 1999-2011, or whenever Pfork quit being quite so cretinous re: anything that ain't indie rock, I associate "this thing" = dumbfucks who worked for Pitchfork and many people i've known in the 90s and 00s who staked their intellectual capital and self image as someone superior to normal, basic people on a notion of indie rock supremacy.

And to this day I've never gotten over the experience of reading the site in the early/mid 00s: those kind of people I describe above not only were blinkered about indie rock and other adjacent shit, but the people who wrote for the site were truly atrocious as prose stylists. It's really hard for me to accept that Ryan Schreiber could ever be considered to have any substance at all after those two examples of his understanding of Jazz music: maybe he does have merit as a whiz at marketing to shithead indie rock people, but that's not a quality I admire. Every review I read was truly, hideously incompetent. I accept the idea that the site has improved, but I was so offended by it 20 years ago that I just can't bear to click on it. The reason Pitchfork has been as popular as it has been is because it fuckin' sucks shit.

But 20 years ago, I had been a staffer in legacy media since 1993, and I was invested in how magazines and newspapers were where real-ass writers and editors were doing real ass shit. And it turns out that Pitchfork, whether or not I approved of it, made Spin, RS, Blender, the Voice etc etc look old and stupid, ate their lunch. And Pitchfork made me and others that were too concerned with their own prestige, and indeed were threatened by an emerging movement, look old and stupid. And so what I had tried to guard against occurred anyway, as it often if not inevitably will do.

One would have hoped that, 30 years after it appeared, Pitchfork could be eclipsed by something new and exciting, but perhaps all we get is Fantano and AI Youtube vids.

I like that post, veronica moser

I wonder how much of Pitchfork's success had to with SEO. I don't exactly remember how I first found it back in the early 2000s, but I vaguely recall it being at the top of the Google search results when I searched something like "Built to Spill" or "Modest Mouse" or even just "indie rock"

pretty sure I found pitchfork in 1998 via a google hotbot(?) search for edith frost.

Scaruffi always rained high in early Google searches

Ranked

I think the initial success of Pitchfork, which I was at the exact right time in my life to live through, owed a lot less to straightforward music reviewing than it did the site's role as a tastemaker.

It's interesting because that's been a transparent goal of music and culture writing as long as it's been a thing. It was almost more honest or transparent in the first few years before it was professionalized, just really catty young indie rock people being little shits and wearing their ignorance on their sleeves. It's more insidious when the writing is more straightforward and professional but it's editorial crafting a direction. How many people did Jann Wenner and company throw under the bus over the years?

I think that the tastemaker bit is pretty much past, and that role's moved on to other venues and people

nd to this day I've never gotten over the experience of reading the site in the early/mid 00s: those kind of people I describe above not only were blinkered about indie rock and other adjacent shit, but the people who wrote for the site were truly atrocious as prose stylists.

Well, it's this, and the homophobia -- implied and not so implied -- when they dismissed gay dance pop or any dance pop that embraced its own insouciance. This stuff, whether Pet Shop Boys or Saint Etienne or whatever, confounded them. I think I discovered the site in 2000 or 2001 and didn't read it for years, only doing so after Stylus Magazine collapsed and several of our best writers got PFork bylines.

completely agree on that, Alfred

I came from a space where I was listening to more of the electronic music / dj set stuff in the late 90s and raiding that cd section at the mall music store to college in '99 where everyone's tastes were starting to get mixed up and word of mouth spread pretty quickly about pitchforkmedia. I was never a huge 90s indie rock guy so at first I was only reading reviews on the fringe of what the site was covering but as new bands were breaking through and I shifted out of college into a new group of friends in the city where I moved, going to many shows at a beloved venue and barhopping with friends, I was pretty much in the middle of things because having some shared interests in our social circle pulled me in

it's funny how the initial launch of the website eschewed popular, consensus musical acts because their most successful period was when they were anointing a consensus of musical acts

A few things I will never get over

1) a one hundred point scale rating. how can this severe granularity be meaningful? And why is it like 9.6 out of 10 and not 96 out of 100? Are the numbers between 0 and 100 more musically descriptive or something?

2) they pushed a band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and bunch of people bought it

3) the basement jaxx rooty review where the dude talks about how Radiohead and Amon Tobin are way better DJs

lol

I will once again never get over the infamous Brent D Steely Dan, nor the creepy misogynistic Brian Howe review of Edith Frost that helped to bum her out so much she quit releasing music. And of course shit, cat.

let it be clear that I never said their tastes as tastemakers were any good

That maniac who reviews pizzas (“one bite”) uses a pitchfork number system and it’s kind of wacky seeing his sports-betting bro fanbase argue over whether a pizza is a 7.8 or an 8.1 or whatever

I'm a fan of the two star review theory:
no stars: skippable
one star: if you're into this sort of thing, you'll probably like this
two stars: you might become a fan of this type of thing by listening to this

I like that plus it makes me wish that Siskel and Ebert had a “no thumbs” rating reserved for the worst movies

but two thumbs down is clearly worse than no thumbs

for the worst movies they should’ve weaponized their other thumbs. four thumbs down

The real success of P4k came from posting new content every day, which was still something new

In the early years, S&E had a “Dog of the Week” segment where they quickly dismissed films that didn’t even warrant thumbs. Mostly schlock horror, grade-Z sex comedies, Bruce Lee ripoffs, and occasionally something actually good like The Brood.

whiney otm. i cant remember how i found out about it but i know that by 2001 i was checking it daily for the news updates, i didn't pay any mind to the reviews until many years later. it was exciting to have a one-stop-shop for announcements of tour dates & releases.

i remember once they posted a news item about Calvin Johnson breaking his finger, iirc it didnt cause any cancelled shows or anything, it was just that he broke his finger and was expected to recover, and that was when i realized "oh theyre just going to post 4 news items a day no matter what huh"

I mean it's not a complaint in any way unique to Pfork but earlier trying to read the Thom Yorke thing on Safari (I know I know) and the ads kept shifting the paragraph, it was completely unusable. Whats the end game here?

I mean, it's been the case for the last 10+ years but I really don't understand how anyone thinks most commercial web sites are in any way usable without an adblocker

new content every day was definitely huge at a time when you couldn't open up an app and just infinitely scroll. google reader was a big deal for the period where smaller blogs would sporadically post and you could get updates aggregated, but it wasn't really monetizable for the aggregator or for a large site like p4k where you want to drive people to open the webpage to serve up those ads, and people would continue visiting regardless of notifications because they gave you _something_ even if was meager

it hasn't been THIS bad for 10 years.

I do find it interesting that people don't seem to acknowledge how much Pitchfork has changed, like these opinions from 2006 preserved in amber, the site is faaar from dominated by white male indie rock now just browse the reviews

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/

They've definitely taken a different direction

Well, yeah. People still associate the site with Schreiber, who hasn't worked there in 6 years.

I mean, it's impressive how they've managed to build from infuriating 16 dudes checking the site in their dorm's computer lab to infuriating stan armies for mega pop stars.

did you look at the reviews page?

Not sure if that was aimed at me, I'm well aware of the wider net. Just a snarky note about how the site's always had an element of pissing people off, intentionally at the start and not so much now.

jon otm. my initial hate-reads of pfork back then always had an element of awareness. i wasn't familiar with the phrase "obvious troll is obvious", but the concept certainly isn't new and seemed like part of their schtick. i was mad because i couldn't believe people were falling for it...

...as i read it daily to see what they were dropping the ball on this time. sigh. in the end, successful troll was successful.

I think we have collectively acknowledged it’s changed, with a lot of axe grinding on top

I’m not sure where things are at now. Spin circa 2004 maybe? Less culturally relevant, kind of rote in a way. I honestly just go to what a couple writers are covering and scroll through and most of my music news is via instagram and a cursory listen on streaming. and ilm, obvs

I like kieren reynolds-press’ column

Did the comments section already kill Pitchfork? lol

angry Lily Allen fans attack!

Angry stan mob, armed with (you guessed it) pitchforks

Angry mob can actually attack the Pitchfork office since they can't work from home anymore.

https://pitchfork.com/news/bon-iver-fable-salmon-is-now-an-official-pantone-color/