Will Pitchfork go the way of Rolling Stone? I've noticed in the past few years they will intermittently post news items entirely unrelated to music. But now it's gotten more rampant. And we all know RS hasn't been relevant in 20 years.
Pitchfork does have its problems, but holy shit this is egregious.
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They haven't gone the way of RS, they're literally the RS of the internet
This. Pitchfork is as mainstream "normiecore" as it gets, and has been for YEARS.
Same happened with NME, their magazine went to shit years ago but their site was good for news, now they post tv and film news. I'm pretty sure it’s because traffic is low and they have to find some way to make money now the magazine is free, not the case for Pitchfork.
I've never met a normie who listens to anything from Pitchfork except for the top 40 BNMs that happen once in a while. There are some p4k bands that normies are aware of (Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Beach House, Mac DeMarco) But I can assure you it has nothing to do with them reading Pitchfork. I'm still not falling for the meme. Unless you're in NY, Chicago, LA, and Philly people don't know or care about Pitchfork and just listen to whatever trash is on Spotify playlists.
>Unless you're in NY, Chicago, LA, and Philly
Aside from a few you're forgetting those are the only places in the US relevant enough to determine whether p4k is normiecore
It's like saying Starbucks isn't ubiquitous because there isn't one in some flyover state town
Yeah, they should stop that.
How popular is the show Portlandia? I feel like Pitchfork should be about as popular as that show.
>see RSM on magazine rack with a cover story about Kendrick Lamar
>see another issue with a cover story about Fleetwood Mac
Problem with RSM is that they're in the difficult situation of having to appeal both to young hipsters who want to read about current artists and 60 year old dudes who've been reading them for decades.
Oh, and the Fleetwood Mac cover was also shooped to make them not look so old and skeletal.
>news items entirely unrelated to music
I dare you and anyone else to give me one (1) article by Pitchfork that has nothing to do with music. I will prove you wrong, starting with your pic related. The television show Seinfeld holds a very special place in the indie scene and also the hip hop scene. Sure, the article is a stretch but to say it is completely irrelevant to the audience Pitchfork has served since the mid-90s is just a stretch.
did you not know music sites have historically reviewed comedy albums?
Rolling Stone Mag stopped being relevant once the 70s were over.
this
If you've ever read Rolling Stone, they're actually more of a liberal politics magazine than a music magazine.
Has Rolling Stone ever actually been an influential publication, other than maybe artists "getting the Rolling Stone cover"? Pitchfork pretty much brought Arcade Fire and Bon Iver into the mainstream, as well as ruined the careers of Jet and Travis Morrison. Has Rolling Stone ever had actual influence over something?
How many albums did RSM shit on when they came out and then 30 years later put in their top 10 albums of all time lists?
They once got a group of innocent guys tarred and feathered as rapists
>but to say it is completely irrelevant to the audience Pitchfork has served since the mid-90s is just a stretch.
important political events are relevant to pitchforks audience that doesnt mean they should cover them
Art have a very flexible rang element.
For example, singer white male Bob Dylan won the literature nobel prize.
If something insipid as music its art, comedy and movies are too.
Problem is that RSM is rooted in the tired, stupid 1960s idea that music is only worthwhile if it promotes liberal political causes.
What? I'm talking about music, not politics.
I looked at some old covers from the 70s and it was nothing but complaining about Nixon every issue.
>60's
fixed
>music is only worthwhile if it promotes liberal political causes.
but thats true
Pitchfork era is on the verge of being over, in the same way that NME stopped being relevant after 2009.
I mean, I understand what you're saying. But at least some great music critics wrote for them. Then again, many of them also wrote for Creem and NME.
Lester Bangs
Greil Marcus
Ellen Willis
Robert Christgau
Dave Marsh
>including Christgau in the list
Stopped reading there.
Just like RSM stopped being relevant after, oh, about 1970.
Stay mad, progfag.
Yeah. People hate Christgau for good reasons. He'll often dismiss a record and give no reason, but sometimes there is no accounting for simply not having the taste for a specific aesthetic.
But I think his longer essays are great. His Chuck Berry piece is excellent.
The punk movement kill RSM in the US, but in the UK the punk movement actually helped NME return to the top in the UK
>but sometimes there is no accounting for simply not having the taste for a specific aesthetic
Insulting an artist's image/fanbase rather than their music is a pretty cheap form of criticism.
Well yeah, but it would help to actually bother explaining why you don't like an album rather than slapping a bomb symbol or a two sentence insult on it and calling it a day.
Except Portlandia is good
I've never liked country music and it doesn't do anything much for me, but I'm not going to go and insult its fans. That's just childish and should have been left behind after graduating middle school.
You know that this is the man who gave a Backstreet Boys album an A while ITAOTS got a sad face with no further explanation or context.
Better, he gave As to Plastic Ono Band albums when every last one of them deserved a D or a bomb rating.
I understand your feelings. However, great writers like Bangs and Greil Marcus certainly wrote insulting works, too.
Christgau might suck for insulting fan bases. But I think his criticism (except for the bomb reviews of which we speak, and the like) is really good when he does get the chance to expound on something at length. I guess I think that he is a very good critic despite his habit of lazy dismissal.
For example:
>Like her voice, Joni Mitchell's lyrics have always suggested emotional life with startling highs and lows and an attenuated middle. Just because she knows herself, she reveals how dangerous and attractive such a life can be, especially for women. If this is what it's like for James Taylor's (Graham Nash's) (B. Mitchell Reid's) girlfriend, what can it be like for her lowly fans? In a male performer such intense self-concern would be an egotistic cop-out. In a woman it is an act of defiance.
>every last one of them deserved a D
Spotted the pleb
Wow do millennials really believe Rolling Stone wasn't relevant or taste making?
kek
Frankly, the guy is way too fixated with punk rock when it's rarely ever good music or interesting to listen to.
>I'm bored by it so it's not good
Stop
They were relevant for a short period almost 50 years ago.
>Jerry Seinfeld: "I like black people"
What did he mean by this?
kek
Try and make a punk rock thread on Sup Forums. It turns into nothing but Sup Forums vs Tumblr bullshit and arguing over who is and isn't actually "punk".
>on Sup Forums
Not relevant
This was Christgau's top 30 for 1988 (the year I was born). Daydream Nation is the only remotely listenable album on here and do we really need ten different apartheid protest records?
some of y'all need to get a grip regarding pitchfork's reputation and notoriety. my first time hearing about it was as a kid on fucking gaia online, cause people in the music section kept making fun of it. this was in like 2005
Follow the Leader is great though.
desu, that wasn't a good year for mainstream releases anyway unless you like LA fag rock.
>mid-to-late-2000s gaia music forum
historywak here, please go die in a ditch, troll
Well, see, I disagree with you. The albums I love on there are:
It Takes a Nation of Millions
Daydream Nations
Lucinda Williams (nigga this shit is listenable as fuck)
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1
Straight Out the Jungle
People Got the Power
I think this would be a bad example from Xgau. In '88 African music was just hitting the public sphere because of Graceland and I think that Xgau was (and still is) really into African music. And I'm sure most of Sup Forums and especially everyone else doesn't listen to African music with his level of fervor. I think that list really reflects his own preferences more than anything (rather than best of the year).
it's great that they post one randomly selected twin peaks spoiler every week. really keeps me on my toes
You need to go back.
Why do you access their website in the first place? They're garbage.
It always had its problems with plugging irrelevant shit but it got exponentially worse when Conde Nast took over in 2015.
The issue isn't with normies reading pitchfork, its pitchfoirk is clearly trying to appeal to the normies now more then ever, just look at their bnm's this year.
Sup Forums.org/rules
Here's from '77, the Year of Punk (TM). This list is admittedly better. BTW, I tried listening to Dancer With Bruised Knees and almost fell asleep from boredom, I didn't even make it all the way through.
The Bette Midler album belongs in the trash.
Again, it wasn't a great year for mainstream releases. A Farewell To Kings was great but that hack gave it a D.
Say, what mainstream releases were out in 77? I'm too lazy to look it up.
Love Gun, A Farewell To Kings, Bat out of Hell, Rumours. It was pretty bad.
Admittedly Sup Forums doesn't know jack about black music other than Jimi Hendrix and buttrap.
Anyone notice this year that for every white male they give bnm to they give a bnm to a black/female? Or on their best Albums of the 60s there are random albums by black artists that no one listens too, except for when Kanye samples them, mixed in classics?
There is no legitimacy in pitchfork reviews or rankings. It all has an agenda.
Oh and they are ran by Condé Nast which is owned by a filthy rich Jew.
Please stop going to that shithole site.
Live at Last [Atlantic, 1977]
Her fans may find some of the material on this live double-LP repetitious--I could do without five minutes of "Delta Dawn" myself--and her overripe singing will offend those she offends anyway. But she's never recorded fifteen of these twenty-five songs, a few repeats are enhanced by the particulars of this performance, and others gather meaning in theatrical context. A typical stroke: prefacing the glorious tearjerker "Hello in There" with campy, occasionally unkind patter about ladies with fried eggs on their heads, so that the song's romanticized heroine and the weird and depressing fried egg ladies both seem to have something in common with Bette, and therefore with each other. A-
>87 minutes
I'm not listening to this.
Admitting that you think this is not only proof that you've strayed from your containment board, but that you also know absolutely nothing about music journalism.
I gave it a shot. More rocky and not as lounge lizard as I expected from a Bette Midler record. She seems to be high out of her mind on coke (not surprising for the 70s). Her jokes and stage banter aren't that funny though and actually kinda cringy.
It's all a corporate scheme from the major labels to get the "underground" music audience to take their faux-art manufactured releases seriously to further instill a "hip" image to their trash.
He only gave this album an A because he fapped to the cover art.
>It's all a corporate scheme from the major labels to get the "underground" music audience to take their faux-art manufactured releases
For example, Lana Del Ray.
There's maybe five good albums on here.
How an album as insufferable and smarmy as Out of Time was so lauded by the "hip" critics of the day astounds me.
Oh boo hoo, he didn't include Metallica S/T or your other favorite buttrock album from 91. Cry me a river.
Dude I literally live in the brazilian countryside and there are at least half a dozen numales in my social circle that take pitchfork as gospel
p4k is normie as fuck
Rolling Stone was never exclusively about music. It was actually mostly about politics in the 70s and 80s.
>It was actually mostly about politics in the 70s and 80s
>was mostly about politics
>saying this in the past tense
I honestly don't understand why this bothers people. Who gives a fuck?
The other thing about RSM is that their music tastes were 100% totally predictable--they dicksucked all the usual critics' pets back then like John Lennon, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, etc while crapping on Black Sabbath or prog bands or anything like that.
I admit, even Christgau wasn't dumb enough to think that Bon Jovi was a respectable artist.
Another lazy cover where they wanted to appeal to kids and at the same time not lose their old dadrocker readership.
I will go with the Bonnie Raitt album, Cypress Hill, Nevermind, 1916, and Loveless.
Rumours should get a B-. I don't hate it, but it's definitely not worth an A.
Bonnie Raitt isn't terrible but she's one of Christgau's favorite waifus so he does tend to overrate her a bit.
This isn't a bad list but no Overkill/Van Halen ST/Stained Class=no dice.
Fuck you, buttrocker.
Christgau is the ultimate nu male and cuck.