He uses ridiculous hyperbole and melodramatic personal anecdotes in his album reviews

>he uses ridiculous hyperbole and melodramatic personal anecdotes in his album reviews

It's almost like music is subjective or something.

Your taste in music has nothing to do with you being a shit writer.

>I was in a relationship with an emotionally manipulative woman who was slowly dying from various medical and illnesses. One of many long term effects this experience has had on me is that it is impossible for me to fairly judge this album on it's emotional content. It manages to speak to me in a way that no other art piece ever has, but is that because of the qualities of the album itself or it's relation to my own life experiences? The truth is that I just don't know. All I can say is that it represents this experience incredibly well, all backed by some truly excellent and catchy music.

Actual review of Hospice On rym

BEST 2017 POST POP ALBUM OF ALL TIME

Yeah, it's shit like that completely undermines your contribution to the dialogue. I get that it's impossible to be totally objective and all, but does that mean that there are no rules and we should just devolve into this mawkish shit?

You clearly didn't understand what I meant so I'll expand alittle.
Music is subjective, therefore the only possible way to review music without sounding like a pretentious dickhead is to use hyperbolic language and personal anecdotes. With the goal of instead of complicately explaining factors that have no meaning to an individual (A melody might sound gorgeous to my ears and horrible to yours) and to instead arm the new listener with the concepts of the album through your own personal experience with the album. With that they can get a rough ideas of what their experience will be when tailored to their own taste.

I understood what you meant perfectly well. Terms like "pretentious dickhead" are used to undermine folks who decide they don't want music discussion to degenerate into a sentimental shitshow and want some semblance of an unbiased dialogue and exchange of ideas. When your reviews are an extension of your blog you miss the point. You can retrofit your personal experiences into a good review, in fact that's pretty much how all reviewers operate. Music reviewing doesn't exist in the extremes of "subjective" and "objective", so insinuating that the pursuit of "total objectivity" is impossible is bullshit. It exists on a gradient and, ideally, you should lean more towards the other end. But most people take the unattainability of an absolute, complete, 100 percent objectivity as license to just do whatever they want. As long as they're taking that prerogative, I exercise the right to think they're inarticulate losers who like the idea of music more than they like music.

So the typical pitchfork writer?

Way to narrow it down OP.

I actually had RYM in mind when I made this thread

>I actually had RYM in mind when I made this thread
I don't care, it's a common trait of even professional music writers.

Too right. Not just Pitchfork, almost all of them. Say what you want about Fantano, he may be prosaic but he doesn't muddy his message up.

But even then when you use "objective" factors like complexity it's completely subjective whether you think it works or not. One man's intricate prog masterpiece is another man's pretentious prog wankfest and there's no objective measure to decide whether elements of an album are good/bad. The best thing you can do is describe the music and have the reader decide if that type of thing interests them or not, because otherwise what you think sounds good holds no objective value.

Right, but you should be able to communicate which side of the prog fence you're on using impartial terms and examining only the traits of the music, as opposed to some irrelevant nonsense about how it helped you through high school. It helped you through high school because the music possessed a set of qualities that appealed to you. Discuss that, that's where the meat is.

>he reviews albums

My least favorite thing is when people will praise a band for having testosterone,or shit on them for lacking it

>he may be prosaic but he doesn't muddy his message up.
He's just as vain as the rest of them, but the extent of his vanity goes more towards talking in front of a camera than into reading some grossly self-indulgent prose.

t. low test cuck

You know what? I'll take it. It's a more tolerable strain of vanity. Gun to my head, I'll take Fantano's reviews over Pitchfork's any day

Don't you think it's a bland way to look at art,to shut off a feminine,or even just a softer style of music as a whole? and testosterone does not really even describe a sound.

Melon actually says something that makes sense. Reading the typical pitchfork writer's review is reading a nonsensical personal blog post unrelated to the album, or a time wasting serpentine backstory that doesn't actually describe the album.

Their sentences lack clarity and concision. It's what happens when English major dropouts write journalism.

Hey, I'm regrettably an English major and I'm the most vocal advocate for more clarity and concision in reviews in this thread.

Don't hate on us all because of a few drips.

don’t you think it’s bland to have malfunctioning testicles?

>MUST PROTECT MASCULINITY AT ALL COSTS
That AC/DC shirt is cutting off the circulation to your brain.

I prefer it,actually.

I took English along with STEM courses, though I write better in my spare time than these people do for a living.

Writing about music is largely a waste of time, but it's not a waste of money. You could be writing something you like, like fiction, but no one is going to buy that unless you write horse shit for exposure first. Trouble is, music writing is saturated with unimaginative types that don't do much else other than write about music or dry "journalism" pieces.

I definitely agree that personal anecdotes are worthless and annoying when it comes to reviews, as you said it's just blog posting. I'm saying that you can't evaluate music as good/bad based on objective terms, the only thing you can do is describe the music and the reader will decide for themselves if it's worthwhile or not. The only value in reviews is if you find that you have similar tastes to the reviewer and they can point you in the direction of more music you may like, which is why I like Fantanos reviews more than random faggots on RYM

>he does album reviews
literally why?

the absolute STATE of these cucks