Fun Stuff > BAND
Although this place hates being like Pitchfork...
Be My Head:
I get most of my music recommendations from these two blogs...
http://closetcurios2.blogspot.com/
http://cosmichearse.blogspot.com/
There's tons of shit you're guaranteed to not find anywhere else, with the added bonus of actual reviews/write-ups on the albums.
Yes, I've returned the discussion to where you can get good music recommendations.
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: Johnny C on 16 Oct 2009, 14:22 ---Plus an entire magazine of this would be intensely bland. Cultural discourse is reliant on discourse, and the parts of culture that you don't like aren't going to go away just because you don't talk about it. And it's interesting to talk about.
--- End quote ---
Exactly. For an example of just how dull it can be, look at the now-defunct Plan B. Every time I picked up that magazine it seemed to be gushing over numerous artists with hardly any discussion of what they disliked. The end result was almost meaningless, since the lack of negative criticism resulted in a lack of critical engagement. Empty praise because you had nothing to compare it with. What I want from a review is a critical discourse with the piece of art in question, liking or disliking it can be a part of that but it isn't even necessary to bring that up. Much more interesting is what the reviewer thinks the piece is doing and what they see as being the ramifications of that.
AanAllein:
I think part of why people get so upset at Pitchfork (maybe upset is the wrong word...) is that they do try and present the reviews as coming from one uniform entity. Reviewers seem to need to toe the line, and like the same albums that all the other reviews do, hate the same etc. This comes across very strongly in their best-of lists: they're not presented as based on voting, or whatever, but rather one distinct opinion from "Mr Pitchfork." I think that's why they attract a lot of vitriol - it becomes "Pitchfork hates this band/album" rather than "Joe Blow hates this band/album."
KvP:
I don't think that's accurate, actually. The end-of-year lists are supposed to look definitive, but there's not much editorial control at Pitchfork (or most tastemaker sites, for that matter). A good example is the tepid review of Daft Punk's Discovery, which has been alluded to in this thread before. It got a pretty dismal 6.4, yet here it is, #3 on the best albums of the decade. If you look at their news stories on Daft Punk you see more evidence that the reviewer of the album didn't like it but a lot of other p4kers really did.
E. Spaceman:
Not certain if they did it with this one, but typically they publish the writers' individual lists.
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