TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.
I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music.
If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On").
Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall.
You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.
But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool.
I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog!
110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully and well!
Speaking of video game reviews, that's why I've focused on Rock Paper Shotgun back in the day when they didn't do "reviews" but "Wot I think". Each article was an honest and earnest, detailed description of a human experience and their genuine thoughts. You wouldn't always agree with the reviews but it'd always be an interesting and informative read.
RPS got bought out about five years ago and all of the old guard left. The new RPS is about 70% run-of-the-mill reporting that you can see anywhere, 10% awful promos for hardware sales, and 20% starry-eyed young journalists trying to emulate what RPS used to be.
Despite all that it’s still the best single site for gaming criticism, sadly.
I feel they still have some flavour they used to, but it got diluted. Partially it's the natural author / rehiewer turnover,Partially it's the volume of Deals and Hardware video articles and generic press release news. They don't even call them wot I think anymore :).
It's still the single gaming site I follow the most. But it's not quite as concentrated fun as it used to be.
Cannot speculate how much of that is due to being bought out and integrated a few years back. I think it's correlation as much as causation.
Some of the old gang have started their own things but they tend to be very niche.
Sure, for example Roger Ebert's review of "Shallow Grave" complains that nobody he knows is anything like these characters. I'd watched and greatly enjoyed the movie by the time I read that review, but he's probably right. However all the people I lived with at the time were way too much like those characters.
I still think you might be missing the point of Pitchfork. Pitchfork is more about the cultural conversation around media than the content of that media. Take their 1.9 review of Tool's Lateralus [1], which was very positively reviewed at the time by most people who liked metal and prog rock, and has since become one of the most influential metal/prog albums. Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don't like metal and prog rock, then you probably will hate this album, because it is a tour de force of these relatively unpopular genres. If you like metal and prog rock, then you probably will love it." Because that's pretty much all a reader needs to know.
Pitchfork's "review" does something completely different. It isn't really about Tool's music, it is about Tool's fans. The "review" is in two parts. The first part is some odd self-referential material that regular Pitchfork readers will recognize as signaling that a parody review is coming.
Then the second part is a parody review in the voice of a sixteen year old boy writing a class essay about his summer vacation for his high school English teacher. Except it isn't about his summer vacation, it is about how awesome this album released over the summer is compared to the pop and dance music that stupid girls listen to. It is intentionally parodying the most obnoxious teenage Tool fan you can think of, who thinks he is really smart and is a fan of music only intelligent people can appreciate, when in fact he is just attracted to an aesthetic at a surface level in the exact same way he criticizes of pop and dance music fans.
The review is so utterly positive about the album, but for reasons that have so little to do with the actual music. The positive review is positive for all the wrong reasons. It is not a commentary on the music, but on the fans of the music and the "I'm cool because I listen to something underground that most people would hate" attitude. It obsesses about the drummer's specialized technical equipment. It invents some ridiculous cosmic cycle that Really Good Music only comes once every 16 years, and we have been waiting for this album since Metallica released And Justice For All in 1987.
The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today.
It’s maybe worth mentioning that there have been many phases of Pitchfork over the years. That review would never be published today - the Pitchfork that wrote that review is already quite different from the scrappy 1997 Pitchfork (which probably had more in common with that 16 year old), and it’s miles removed from late-aughts/early 2010s Pitchfork (“peak Pitchfork”, perhaps, in terms of cultural clout), which was less snarky, more thoughtful, a little duller maybe…which itself is several steps away from the Pitchfork of today. Over the years the vibe has gone from “Chicago record store geek” to “Williamsburg hipster” to “Park Slope dad” to “underpaid TA in a first-year seminar on critical theory”, although the transition has always been gradual and vestiges of the past often remain.
This exactly; not a week goes by that the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles Worship" (off an Of Montreal review by Matt LeMay) doesn't go through my head. But Pitchfork stopped being that long before Conde acquired them.
I don't disagree with your first sentence but your last paragraph...uhhh.
1) Do you think there's nothing to say about this (or any other album) than "fans of the genre will like it and others will not"? There's plenty of insightful things to say both to familiar audiences and others.
2) Do you think this Tool review was the first (or even first larger scale) criticism of metal fans?
> Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don't like metal and prog rock, then you probably will hate this album, because it is a tour de force of these relatively unpopular genres. If you like metal and prog rock, then you probably will love it." Because that's pretty much all a reader needs to know.
...
> The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today.
So Pitchfork's review conveys the same thing as other reviews, but in a more obtuse way, and this makes it better?
A more contemporary example might be Rick and Morty.
Now R&M is an immensely popular show, but we all know there is a subsets of its fanbase who are intolerable and who unironically speak about this cartoon as being for people with high IQs. Now imagine if a contemporary publication published a review of the latest season and chose not too focus on the content but rather parody these fans. Fans of the show will watch the new season regardless of the rating and people who hate it won't, but both would get a chuckle out of a parody of that intolerable fan and for R&M they benefit either way by being mentioned. Further, as stated by previous commenter, this type of review opened up a conversation about whether a fanbase becomes a legitimate reason to dislike an artist/creation.
Also, if unfamiliar with Tool, check out any of their songs on YT and read the comments, you will understand the need for the parody.
I hear this relentlessly but I can't say I have ever seen what this is first hand. If R&M comes up on r/television I don't see anything unusual. Where do people run into this fanbase?
It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid
Apologies for the long quote but this goes some way in covering it;
>As fan communities now have endless forums and formats to debate and discuss, there’s been a shift from simply being a fan of something to somehow assuming ownership of it. The combination of Reddit boards and social media means internet die-hards begun viewing their roles not as passive viewers, but as active policers. Some critic doesn’t like the latest Marvel film that you’re pretty sure you’ll love? Get ’em.
>And this curious urge – worse in the sci-fi and superhero genres and infinitely worse in young male fans – has reached its nadir in the young, male sci-fi fandom of Rick And Morty.
>Even mentioning the show my colleagues at GQ provoked a response of mild disgust. They hadn’t seen it, one said, but had always been put off because of the fans. I know exactly what they mean. And it has only gotten worse.
>When, in a joke in the third-series premiere, Rick says his whole motivation isn’t to avenge anyone’s death, but was instead “driven by finding that McNugget sauce. That’s my series arc”, referring to a promotional Szechuan dipping sauce that McDonald’s used to sell in the late 1990s for a promotional tie-in with the movie Mulan, the fans took him at his word and the very next day began online petitions to demand its return. McDonald’s, never one to bypass free PR, announced a few months later the sauce would come back for a limited time. But it didn’t have enough for the demand, so the fans then protested – online and in person – and, in some cases, the police were called. To repeat: McDonald’s dipping sauce.
>If sauce entitlement is one thing, the fans took it to a whole new level by the end of the third series. The Rick And Morty writing room had always been a bro club and so creator Harmon had hired some new female comedy writers to even out the imbalance. The fans, convinced they were the cause of what they saw as a dip in quality in the third series, went after the new female writers online individually, abusing, threatening and slandering them on Twitter and creating Reddit threads just to smear them. They even doxed them, publishing their personal information online.
>And don’t just take my word for it. Even Harmon despises this sector of his own fandom.
>They want, he told Entertainment Weekly, “to protect the content they think they own – and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender… I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fucking sucks.”
When Apple launched iTunes in 2001 it destroyed the value of music reviews. Buying physical albums used to be expensive, and sometimes you would kind of get cheated. You would hear a banging single on the radio and buy the whole album only to realize that the other tracks were just filler. So, a review by a good critic could save you from wasting money on a low-effort album.
With iTunes and similar services, users can buy individual tracks instead of a whole album and listen to previews before they buy. Why waste time reading a review if you can listen yourself and decide whether it's worth buying? And now with the broad availability streaming services like Spotify, written reviews are even less valuable; you pay the same regardless of what you listen to so there's no financial risk of trying new music.
In the mid 2000s I remember following a redditor who worked in the music business and he would predict pitchfork scores for anticipated albums with crazy accuracy.
> I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music.
This was my view of it, I constantly found the reviewers irritating and I rarely paid much attention to the scores, it was just a good source to check out new, interesting music that wouldn't get any exposure anywhere else
Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.
Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.
> Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s.
Is it really so implausible that a notoriously hip indie music blog would have been ahead of the curve on a cultural trend? Certainly some of the people who became big names in 2010s identity politics movements were writing on similar blogs a decade or more before their cultural moment (e.g. I didn't follow Pitchfork, but I remember Laurie Penny writing extensively for Freaky Trigger).
New York digital media was the epicenter so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a factor, at least for the past few years. The Reply-All meltdown comes to mind.
> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative
People are allowed to have their own opinions about what to value in the world. The idea of "irrefutable proof" the world has improved is completely asinine and counter productive... at best, and at worse just straight marketing for the ruling class.
This seems to conflate the idea of a nation (ie a people) with that of a country or state, which I find pretty odd. Many countries are composed of many constituent nations, many of which will cross state borders.
I mean if being politically energizing is all you care about, just court folks scared of immigration.
Of course if you actually want to not make the world worse you need to argue for a better world. Liberals seem literally and generally incapable of this basic task.
The oddness of referring to the "slave trade" is the height of the "Atlantic Slave Trade" far predated the peak of slavery in the US and contributed directly far more to the Caribbean and Brazil than to the rest of the Americas. US chattel slavery, particularly the form that exploded post cotton-gin, was a system of directly controlling the reproductive capacity of enslaved black and native Americans.
> Why in the world would they delete that data vs just putting it on mute/ignore/etc?
If you're serious it's because having a fig leaf is useful to reduce risk in controversial business practices, especially if the vast majority of people don't take advantage of it.
I don't believe any of this is true—it certainly smells a lot like Cold War propaganda from the 50s. I don't believe we currently have anywhere near the nukes produced to have this happen even if we tried to perfectly cover the surface of the earth with nuclear explosions. To block out the sun we'd need something more like the volcanic winter of 536, continually erupting.
Nuclear war is bad, but it's certainly not "end life on earth" bad, or even "end humanity" bad by itself, just "deeply fracture humanity and probably enter a new era of civilization" bad.
The common supposition about video is that convenience makes the price worth it versus piracy. It'll be very interesting to see this unfold. Not only are streaming services in direct competition with a free option, but they'll have actual, real, not-market-inevitable competition for their "exclusively-negotiated" tv.
Piracy has evolved too; You only need to look at how automated piracy can become; whether its the end of the people buying access to plex, or the automation offered by users of the Servarr stacks /Sonarr/Radarr etc
Netflix invgestment in UX has lead to theUX being valued around piracy, rather than just downloading files from some website.
> I find it really challenging to talk with people who have completely separated their work from their emotional being.
Is this not everyone? Who the fuck brings their emotions to work? I thought the whole trope of "you should love what you do" was just capitalist tripe to get people excited about the work most people were required to do to avoid homelessness (notice—society offers no right to shelter or any other meaningful protection from harm).
Ok—you seemed to have missed the main point. If people react to xyz, it doesn't matter if xyz is actually occurring. In fact the only thing that matters is peoples' reactions.
