Freddie, the second paragraph you wrote here is a banger. It's one of the best observations I've ever seen on this phenomenon, and the way you noted it was exceptional.
"I can’t find where now, but Rich Juzwiak once derided people who prefer music made by actual musicians playing actual instruments to music made entirely by computers. He called this a rockist attitude."
I remember being similarly harangued about this in the early 2000s. Virtuosity with instruments was seen as self-indulgent and a result of privilege and only DJing was legitimate in comparison. Actually playing guitars was seen as a phallic, galumphing imposition, really an aggression. I was utterly shocked to hear this, having never even thought in those terms before, and while it's obviously horseshit it did stick with me through to today.
It's not even that music *can't* be more than the sounds in themselves. Going to an ICP show is going to be a very different environment to a classical recital, and the subculture that surrounds the former simply cannot be divorced from the recordings, at least not easily. I never got into Phish or The Grateful Dead in any serious way, beyond a vague, nodding appreciation, but presumably having been present for their live shows is a prerequisite for really loving them. But there are limits to this, and eventually you have to reckon with the sounds themselves, divorced from context - and this is really where music criticism should step in, but largely fails to do so.
I don't think it divides as neatly as that. There are a lot of people who consider the guitar an instrument that grows in the forest and is played by an artist, whereas like a synth or a drum machine is made by laboratory boffins and makes music when anyone presses a button.
The fact that synths and drum machines versus digital technology replicates that same discourse, that one is an instrument and the other is not, only proves how little these debates are about the music being made or the musicians making it.
"Going to an ICP show is going to be a very different environment to a classical recital..."
Absolutely! And the classical recital is not some sort of neutral benchmark, either--it's a subculture of its own, with all kinds of interestingly encoded social implications. But it's not *just* that, and neither is the ICP show.
"And this is wild, to me, because Pitchfork is not a site about music at all, but rather about the constant delicate servicing of these unconscious needs. Pitchfork stopped being a music site long ago and became instead a series of instructions for how to carefully position yourself in contrast or complement to the people around you in a way that maximizes your personal brand and demonstrates that you’re the most specialist boy or girl of all. It just so happens that, for reasons of inertia and convenience, talking about music is the ostensible subject matter through which this careful arrangement takes place. "
Was it not ever always thus, only now amplified by internet and social media?
There's a reason that the typical icebreaker humans used at parties when I was younger was "What kind of music do you like?" The answer usually told the questioner a good deal about the speaker, what sort of human she was likely to be and whether it would be worth pursuing her further.
>The answer usually told the questioner a good deal about the speaker, what sort of human she was likely to be and whether it would be worth pursuing her further.
"If he reads Infinite Jest 🚩🚩🚩"
I think this worldview was juvenile back when it was satirised by Nick Hornby in 1995, and still is.
If somebody really likes music or spends time and money on it, I think what they like can absolutely say something about them.
I always thought Hornby's take was incredibly presumptive of a world without subcultures, or in which subcultures don't mean anything. Lots of people are in some ways defined by the music they like. People live entire lives based on this. Or spend their weekends or every waking minute based on it.
And that isn't surprising with Hornby because his musical worldview was basically a completely middlebrow 'I own an Outkast album cumbaya all genres are wonderful' with no depth or exploration in his tastes whatsoever.
I also don't get the obsession with Maneskin dressing vampy as meaningful. They're a rock band, rock has been theatric and deliberately ridiculous since at least hair metal 40 years ago.
That's really a lot of the fun of rock/metal as an aesthetic, it's over the top stupid camp for boring normal straight people. You know, like me.
Not sure Pitchfork ever really did the new very well either, though maybe you're not saying otherwise.
As a European, my memory of the old Pitchfork, before electronic music became something indie people in America have to like to be cool, was a lot of incredibly dumb reviews. For example reviewing house or techno music and making fun of the fact the "lyrics" were "move your body" or something rather than the 'deeply meaningful' faux-poetry of whatever indie rock band.
In recent years I've sometimes found interesting articles on there in a sort of older person broadsheet way, the long lists of something like ambient music albums, the classic album articles, for instance. Or Phil Sherburne's work. But I completely agree a lot of poptimist writing is terrible and it has plenty of that too.
In general, and it's not just on massive sites like Pitchfork, I tend to think a lot of today's bad music writers pad out their inability to talk about sound or subcultures and their lack of budget/energy to really find out about scenes or leave their desk with the kind of barely political academic bromides about bodies and spaces that everyone who reads this blog is probably sick of by now, regardless of our respective politics.
This is particularly rife in electronic music where at the best of times it's hard to say why this person turned the dials in a way that sounds amazing and this person didn't, but I see it in most arts journalism and it is dispiriting.
No surprise really, since the arts degrees which prepared these writers for the unenviable life of freelance music journalism also pad out their lack of substance with shitty academic cliches masquerading as meaningful analysis.
Was Pitchfork ever anti-electronic? I mean, electroclash was the shit in Brooklyn circa 2000 or so, meaning embracing electronics was pretty fundamental to modern indie-rock.
Now, I do remember circa the mid 2000s when Pitchfork decided all of the sudden they had to uncritically love mainstream rap and R&B. That was really, really weird, even in retrospect.
It was for a bit, it seems weird now I know but it definitely was. I could probably dig out some reviews, I'm talking about 2001/2002. There was a time when their reviews had the vibe of one person having a laugh or riffing on stuff - I hated it as an earnest 19-year-old techno fan but it seems less bad than the current shitty thesis approach.
I don't think electroclash was ever that big on Pitchfork really? I was writing a lot about music myself back then and it didn't really permeate too much as far as I recall, and I was really into a lot of that stuff.
Then for a long time they kind of ignored club music until a pivot which prob came whenever faster broadband was rife and with the ease of access to a lot more underground electronic stuff. At least that's my theory.
No longer any need to go to a nightclub to be into nightclub music. Kinda sad given the death of nightlife in many cities.
I dunno. I sort of feel like Kid A was what broke down the electronic barrier within Indie. Not that Radiohead was ever really that indie, but I had been active within the IDM "scene" for a few years (even as a musician, on a local level), and it was notable the kind of people going to shows/making music with laptops suddenly shifted from nerds/former goths/industrial folks to indie-rock kids basically overnight.
I guess that was a big thing. I probably speak more for stuff that sells (or sold) on 12-inch and was made to be DJ'ed. I think that took a longer time to merge into indie in the ways it did, probably again significant when Thom Yorke DJ'ed on Boiler Room playing whatever shit he liked, haha.
Yeah, that could be different. I was never really into that section of electronic music in a big way aside from a handful of D&B and psytrance artists.
"...that the music is utter dogshit that causes the listener to question their existing affection for her earlier work..."
I don't doubt that this is a genuine component of human psychology but it is a regrettable one. There are plenty of artists who till the same soil over and over again for the entirety of their careers but there are also those who constantly seek to experiment and evolve. The inevitable result of radical experimentation is that sometimes you fail. Those failures shouldn't tarnish the rest of an artist's body of work.
Also, the flip side of enforced taste is mind numbing conformity. I can't think of many things that are more predictable and boring.
When I was a lonely teenager, I used to read music review publications and track their end of year lists religiously. I grew comfortable with the fact that Rolling Stone embodied some sort of "establishment" canonical view, where their #1 song of all time was Like a Rolling Stone and their #1 album was Sgt. Pepper. Meanwhile, I got used to Pitchfork being the slightly more "alt" option, putting something like Daydream Nation atop their 80s list (the first time they did one). Basically, I had a very fixed view on these publications and what their preferences were, and even if I disagreed, I tended to respect them and take them at face value.
Now, years later, Rolling Stone's number 1 song of all time is What's Goin' On by Marvin Gaye, and Pitchfork demoted Sonic Youth from the perch of their 80s list in favor of Purple Rain. There is obviously a part of me that leaps to the conclusion that this is more motivated by culture war considerations than an actual assessment of the music (although Purple Rain is a better choice for #1 album of the 80s than What's Goin' On is a better choice for best song of all time). But, that said, I do begin to wonder. Did the old Pitchfork/Rolling Stone really reflect a more sincere aesthetic judgment based on the music itself, or has it always just been status-seeking and differentiation and culture war politics, since the beginning of time? Maybe it just took until the cultural winds shifted for me to appreciate that it's basically always been bullshit. I don't know. Just throwing it out there.
"Did the old Pitchfork/Rolling Stone really reflect a more sincere aesthetic judgment based on the music itself, or has it always just been status-seeking and differentiation and culture war politics, since the beginning of time?"
this is precisely the issue a lot of anti-poptimists botch. it's not that they're wrong about the outsized role of not strictly musical considerations in modern music writing. it's that they often revert to these weirdly virginal assumptions about what was motivating fans and critics in the 1960s, as if music and its subcultures were pure reason and dispassionate wonkery until all these woke millennials showed up with their hatred of virtuosos and guitars.
I think the primary issue isn't really that musical criticism is more "pure," it's that the internet has forever ruined any cache that media snobbery of any sort (be it music, cinema, TV, etc.) has, since it's associated with trolls and bad online behavior. Guilt by association really.
To get super nitpicky for a second, "What's Going On" was #6 on RS's most recent "best songs" list. The *album*, however, was #1 on the corresponding albums list. (Great song, but not even the best song on the album. And great album, but I'm not sure it's even Marvin Gaye's best, and I'm even less certain Stevie Wonder didn't put out at least two better albums within the following couple years.)
Like you, I grew up poring over these types of lists (and album guides!) because I was deeply into music, we didn't have the internet until I was halfway through high school (and even then, '90s internet, ugh), and I was rapidly realizing that the local classic rock station and my parents' record collection were not the extent of what might be out there. So the RS lists from 20 years ago or whatever would've been very much up my alley.
I think it's great to see black and women artists getting reevaluated and recognized, rather than ghettoized or included as mere tokens. But RS's efforts at modifying its brand and attempting to remain relevant -- as it slowly dawns on boomers that they might actually die one day -- are just so desperate and so clumsy that it's really not worth it to me to engage with these lists. I can understand and even admire the acknowledgment that they need more of a "big tent" approach, but the results are just too random. To toss in yet another metaphor, RS is not "staying in its lane," in the parlance of our times. Instead, they're swerving all over the damn place.
That said, it's almost impressive how much worse the "best singers" list they put out on New Year's Day is. Jesus Christ.
"(Great song, but not even the best song on the album. And great album, but I'm not sure it's even Marvin Gaye's best, and I'm even less certain Stevie Wonder didn't put out at least two better albums within the following couple years.)"
I appreciate a good example of pedantry :). Thank you for the correction.
Looks like the number one song on the 2021 list was "Respect" and number two was "Fight the Power." So the same point applies - my instinct is to say "culture war posturing" but my secondary instinct is to say "Like a Rolling Stone" at #1 was probably the same kind of thing too.
Ha! Honestly, I likely wouldn't have even noticed except the #1 album selection struck me at the time as such a transparent pander to the zeitgeist. I think it was the moment where I realized I'd definitely aged out of being the audience for these lists.
The songs list is weird. "Respect" is at least a very reasonable pick, and I think "Like a Rolling Stone" would be too, but a list of best songs is not the same as a list of best singles, and I'm not sure RS is making a clear-enough distinction. The list doesn't know what it wants to be. By trying to be very inclusive it winds up being weirdly conservative. I'll concede it would probably make for a pretty decent playlist, though.
One of my very favorite books is Dave Marsh's 30-year-old THE HEART OF ROCK AND SOUL: THE 1001 GREATEST SINGLES EVER MADE. Obviously given its publication date and its writer's biases, I don't always "agree" with it, but at least he's honest enough to acknowledge that it's impossible to "rank" records in a way that means anything. (His #1 is on the RS list, but not in their top hundred.) Instead, he tells stories, makes connections, and digs up some real gems.
When I first picked it up around 2000 or so, I was in college and pretty deep in an "albums matter" phase, and the book snapped me out of that mindset while also introducing me to hundreds of records from the '50s-'80s that I'd never heard (or even heard OF), reminding me of many I'd forgotten, and making me consider in new ways many I'd loved or dismissed in the past. Discovering this book during the heyday of Napster couldn't have been more ideally timed for me.
Anyway, it's a great book to just explore at random, or to read cover to cover. And clearly one I could go on and on about. :)
I have a feeling we would have been good friends had we been lucky enough to attend the same high school at the same time. I definitely used napster back in the day, but by the time I really embraced being a pop music nerd, it had been replaced by bittorrent. I wonder if thats a not small factor behind why I cared so much about albums/full-length releases versus individual songs/singles.
My opinion is that all music ranking is bullshit to some degree... it's impossible to fully quantify a song down to a number, let alone rank songs head to head. Songs with wildly different structures, lyrics, feelings, etc. can't be boiled down to just #34 vs #38 on a year end list. Ranking can be a bit of harmless fun though, and I've used it as a thought experiment to compare radically different pieces of music. So long as it's recognized not as an objective list but rather as a conversation starter, I see no issue with it.
That said, yes, many of the big publications are not focused on the music itself, but rather on social signaling, on being viewed as on the right side of history. I referenced it in my other comment, but in 2017 there was a big celebration of the fact that in Pitchfork's top 10 songs of that year, there were no white male artists. White women, black men, and in the case of the #1 song a black woman, but no white men. Is it possible that no white man made a song worthy of the top 10 that year? Of course! Do you trust Pitchfork to make that determination? Knowing their writing, hell no I don't!
i don't know, i thought it was pretty clear in the full piece that Larson isn't taking issue with people wearing music as a badge per se but rather with the badge in this particular case being, in his estimation, so exceptionally tacky and vapid and goofy as such.
sure, someone else might come along and say, well, Lizzo is also tacky and vapid and goofy, and Pitchfork gave her a 6.4! and that's fair, but i still think that's a different conversation: publications assign different reviewers with different biases and different taste to different things, and faulting one reviewer for another reviewer's writing about Lizzo or Beyonce or whoever is a lost cause in one sense, if also a sensible question, in another sense, about the state of the larger brand employing both those writers.
My favourite Pitchfork pearl-clutch was the review of St Vincent's Daddy's Home which reacted with horror to two mentions of 'call the cops' and 'call 911' – how could she?! In 2021!?
I'll never not laugh at the phrase "pearl-clutch(ing)". It's so spot-on. A very close second is the slightly obscure "gathered back the hems of their dresses."
When I read Pitchfork reviews (and music reviews from other progressive-leaning outlets), I often interpret them as critics struggling mightily to resolve the cognitive dissonance borne of the weird presumption that good art must be morally good. In the case of Pitchfork critics, this means that good music must be woke music. So if a critic enjoys an album, they will find themselves straining with every fibre to find some angle by which the album REALLY advances a progressive worldview (even if it's a determinedly apolitical album, or even conservative) - hence the mental gymnastics on display here (https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-chemical-romance-three-cheers-for-sweet-revenge/), in which My Chemical Romance are retroactively claimed to promote gender nonconformance. Whereas if they DIDN'T enjoy an album, they instead have to contrive some angle by which the album is crypto-conservative (hence the absurd claims from multiple music critics that the bland, anodyne, inoffensive silly love songs made by the Chainsmokers are somehow the sonic equivalent of the divisive, incendiary, hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump).
If they can't find such an angle, they will just scoff that it's another album made by a bunch of White Dudes (the horror!). They will conspicuously avoid commenting upon the ethnicities and sexes of the musicians who made the album they DID enjoy.
Such a bizarre and childlike view of the world. It's also historically illiterate. Any cursory examination of the arts should reveal that there have been plenty of great artists who were also terrible people.
Man, as an instrumental wind player I’ve always been inclined to fixate on the melodic and harmonic material of pitch itself. My greatest joys in music derive from finding the right way I want to express an emotion or idea exclusively through sound, by having music be the medium of communication itself, especially through genres that prioritize improvisation like jazz or folkstyle.
Not saying lyrical or otherwise subject-oriented music is bad! I love lyrical analysis and proper political study of music (there’s some good books out there like Acting in Concert that propose frameworks for how people use politics in music to communicate and interact with each other), just that pitch-first listening is my tendency.
I fall in love with most songs I like before I even know what the lyrics are. I've always struggled to figure out what singers are saying in their songs (the literal words). It's led me to a few uncomfortable surprises when I suss out the lyric.
I've seen the same tendency in video game reviews. The new Doom games have to be some kind of clever commentary about capitalism and/or their old-school white dude protagonists. Bayonetta can't just be a sexy witch who murders angels by the thousands in an incredibly enjoyable spectacle fighter, she has to somehow be a queer icon. And so on.
I think there are a great many video games journalists who really have no passion for the medium at all, and are only working in that field to pad out their CV until such time that they can transition into real journalism. They didn't grow up playing video games, and as such are bad at playing them and lack many of the basic critical referents one would expect a critic to have (imagine a professional film critic who doesn't know who Alfred Hitchcock is). They don't really know how to talk about game mechanics, competitive balance or any of the other things that go into making a video game enjoyable to play, so instead they use the game review as an opportunity to advance their political hobby horses.
This is probably the main reason environmental narrative games (Gone Home, Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture etc.) are so popular among modern video game journalists, as they tick several boxes that make them uniquely attractive to people who are bad at playing video games, don't find them interesting in and of themselves, and who are writing on a tight deadline:
1) They pose no meaningful gameplay challenges, so can be easily completed by someone who's bad at playing video games
2) They're mechanically light, so the critic need not even dedicate a token paragraph to discussing the nuts and bolts of the game's design, and can instead devote more attention to its narrative, visual design and themes (including political themes)
3) They're almost always short enough to be completed in under a day regardless of skill
To clarify, I'm not saying ENGs are bad (I loved Gone Home and The Stanley Parable), just that there are reasons other than quality that make them uniquely appealing to modern games journalists.
The elephant in the room is games as art. If you want to write serious criticism it's reasonable to consider questions of artistic merit just as with film, literature, music, etc. And for whatever reason the development of video games in that respect has been glacial.
What KT said. Plus I would add that, in my opinion, the closest comparison to video games as an artistic medium would be film. Both are relatively new creatures of the 20th century and both are technological in nature (no camera and no film stock means no movies).
That said the development of movies as an artistic medium was explosive. "Birth of a Nation" came out in 1915 and Luis Bunuel was slicing open a woman's eyeball by 1929. There really hasn't been anything comparable in gaming even now 50 years after Pong.
All I can say is that Metal Gear Solid 2 is a paranoid postmodern mindfuck on a par with Thomas Pynchon which uses the unique qualities of the medium to its full advantage, and I will never be persuaded otherwise.
1. The rise of Video Games as a popular medium corresponds to the poptimism movement, which already is derides comparisons to high art as "elitist".
2. There are many non-gamers and I think quite a few gamers, who would be embarrassed by a comparison between games and other artforms. Disco Elysium is not Hamlet and the Last of Us is not Citizen Kane.
3. I think among gamers those are two general camps: Those who view games as art, and those who view games more like a sport. Those who view it as art are more interested in playing as an aesthetic experience similar to reading a book or watching a movie. They might play a variety of games from different genres, but generally something with a narrative. The other camp which views games as sport generally stick to one genre or even one game. They play to improve their skills either so they are better than their friends or because they want to be a real competitive player. These sorts of players value difficulty more than those in the previous camp. While many people may fall to some degree or another in both camps, the majority of gaming is centered on the later camp. While there are many people who play Night in the Woods, there are far more people who play Fortnite and thus do not care if games are "art".
Yeah, a big part of What Remains of Edith Finch’s hype came from casual gamers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but its popularity was buoyed by people who rarely played games. I’ve heard people I know IRL who never play games before suddenly race about it.
truly incredible to me that the big enduring copypasta complaint here is "some walking simulators got some good reviews ten years ago" and the complaint even includes the concession that the games were good! so what are we even talking about?
even if one concedes that Edith Finch necessarily appealed to more casual gamers, okay, but what is supposed significance of that fact? casual gamers are gamers! it's right there in the name! and also, re earlier points, what does being "good" at video games have to do with anything? criticism isn't esports! being a gamer in general isn't esports! plenty of people who play a lot of video games are bad at video games! either in general or maybe bad a certain kinds of games despite being good at other kinds of games. we can log into the ranked mode of countless online multiplayer games and quickly witness this reality for ourselves.
I personally think that games journalism was better at engaging with game mechanics in a time when the only people who became games journalists were people who loved video games, but maybe I'm being a big romantic, who knows.
maybe the way i'd put it is that the prioritization of storytelling over gameplay took several forms in the past decade or so, some in games themselves and some in games criticism.
i don't love this trend in games themselves, and i don't always love games criticism that meets this trend too eagerly or seems to be capitulating to it. that said, some of the trends in games writing are definitely responding to trends in the games themselves. what else are critics supposed to do? pretend BioShock and The Last of Us and Gone Home never happened? just bang on about the frame rate and call it a day?
people don't want constant sermonizing and moralizing in every other review, okay, I can work with that, but I don't know what to do with the sort of person who seems to think writing about modern video games, with all their artistic advancements and aspirations, should just be tech blurbs.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the fact that ENGs appeal to casual gamers. I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with modern games critics liking them. I'm saying that their popularity among modern games critics is indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays: they have no interest in games in their own right, they think video games and the people who play them are stupid and contemptible, they aren't good at playing them (which I DO consider a deficiency in a professional critic, in the same way that poor literacy would serve as an impediment to being an effective literary critic), and they are ignorant of many of the basic concepts and critical referents unique to the medium.
No one is obliged to like video games, understand them, be good at playing them, or think the people who play them are deserving of respect. But if you are none of these things, it's pretty weird to pursue a career in video game criticism. I would feel the same way about a film critic who hates movies and thinks cinemagoers are stupid degenerates.
i think it is notable that your examples of games "indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays" were released 7-10 years ago and are being made out of be "indicative" because . . . what exactly? because they got good reviews? what kind of reviews were they supposed to get? you said you loved Gone Home, so I guess what I'm asking you is: what was ideally supposed to happen instead of what actually happened? what is the logical bridge here?
the film criticism comparison is precisely what I don't get about your reasoning. you're not describing video game critics hating anything; you're describing video game critics liking games that you also liked but then weirdly extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that they liked a handful of games, including one that, again, you loved!
> They didn't grow up playing video games, and as such are bad at playing them and lack many of the basic critical referents one would expect a critic to have (imagine a professional film critic who doesn't know who Alfred Hitchcock is).
This is no longer true. People in their 40s would have grown up knowing the NES, SNES, all the games in the 90s, college LAN parties in the 2000s... Like, I'm in my thirties now, and I remember cousins over ten years my senior playing the hell out of Blood back in the late 90s. (Perhaps I should not have been allowed to watch over their shoulders, but c'est la vie.) To say nothing of generations younger than us, for whom Minecraft and Roblox are social phenomena!
The average video game journalist in the 2020s did, in fact, grow up playing video games to some extent. Whether or not they were especially good at them, they probably have a fundamental grasp of most genre conventions and the major touchstones of video game culture.
It feels like you're generalizing from your own experience. I'm in my thirties and know plenty about video games. I've met plenty of people my age who know nothing about video games. Lots of people have never owned a games console or attended a LAN party.
You would THINK that the kinds of people who write about video games for a living would be knowledgeable about them before taking on the job, but I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that that isn't always the case.
this has always been the weird signature overreach of the anti-SJW contingent in the hyperpolarization of gaming.
it's not enough to simply say that progressive writing about video games is bad and misguided. that would be a fine argument! but no! the argument has to be: these people don't actually play video games and/or secretly hate video games, because anyone who truly enjoyed video games would share my opinions and preferences about them. as if gaming isn't a massive hobby with a lot of different entry points for a lot of different people with a lot of different biases, priorities, etc.
I don't think that everyone who enjoys video games must share my opinions and preferences about them. I know plenty of people who enjoy video games who have different opinions from me, or enjoy different kinds of games from me. I know professional game designers who have different opinions and preferences from me, and that's fine.
But when a games journalist sneers at the idea that she might play games in her own time for her own amusement, or when a games journalist writes an article arguing that violent video games are breeding a generation of school shooters, or when a games journalist writes an opinion piece arguing that gamers are entitled manbaby misogynistic alt-right losers and game developers don't need to target their games at them anymore - I mean, is it wrong to take such people at their word? Such people don't really seem to be hiding their contempt for video games and the people who play them.
It largely correlates with the sudden popular of Twine, which I suspect much of the contingent only discovered through hate playing Depression Quest. The flurry of negative Steam reviews posted on interactive fiction and visual novels in the decade since has been weird from the vantage point of someone who spent much of the decade //previous to that// playing IF because back then there was a completely different contingent of gamers within the IF community who would get angry about puzzle-less IF!
I think there are a great many people in virtually every elite profession who hate their field and are only there because they had nowhere else to go. TBH this is my default assumption about the vast majority of people in academia. They don't want to do what they were hired to do so they make their field about what they want instead.
I think there is some truth to your argument, but it's notable all of those are originally PC not console games though... I had played the likes of Alter-Ego, The Neverhood, The Dark Eye, Bad Day on the Midway, etc. as well as loads of abandonware and shareware experiments and Adventure Game Studio projects and abstract RPG maker things and lots of the indie interactive fiction boom of the late '90s and early '00s (by the likes of Adam Cadre and Emily Short, among many others) before I came to Dear Esther and Gone Home. Many of the people writing for Rock Paper Shotgun and many of the other PC gaming websites that praised those games may well have had similar gaming histories. That is to say, there is (as you probably know) a long history of narrative and/or art games that don't really require much in the way of gaming ability to play (or even complete). That might be said to be even more true for Mac gamers of the '90s and early '00s.
I've also completed Paperboy 2 so I have some actual gaming abilities also! ;)
Fair point. And in case it wasn't clear I wasn't trying to say that anyone who likes mechanically unchallenging games needs to "git gud" or whatever, sorry if it came off that way.
No, that's fine! As above, I actually think you're right for a fair amount of game journalists in the mainstream press who have praised many walking simulators and "art games" with limited or non-challenging gameplay... but I've also seen such games (or interactive experiences if you prefer tbh) praised by reviewers on the likes of Rock Paper Shotgun who clearly know their stuff.
I also just think that the phenomenon of such media is far from new (to a large degree the more one thinks about it really). Some of the cassettes on my grandad's BBC Micro were definitely not games... a basic "life" cell division simulator; a cassette that just played a synthesized version of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'... while others were more interactive, edging into games, but without an obvious competitive element or skill necessarily required.
The gender nonconformist claim reminds me of how the sexy bimbo look/identity has been reframed as some sort of ironic challenge to Gender. Because We Like It, so.
"I genuinely think some of you need to ask yourself about your obsession with gender as a matter of mental health. Seriously. It’s not healthy to be so primed to go on endless diatribes about gender issues the way you are. There are lots of hot-button issues I talk about here. Nothing else provokes anything like this behavior. I could post about laws that regulate space debris and some of you’d say 'THIS MAKES ME ANGRY ABOUT GENDER!'"
Edited: Ok, probably not memorized. Probably went out and looked up from a post about gender you're interested in. Doesn't speak well for your alleged desire to escape the topic of gender.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that every member of My Chemical Romance (past or present) is a cisgender man. That's kind of my point: I think the critic in question was feeling a mite of cognitive dissonance about enjoying what is, at the end of the day, a straightforward pop-punk album made by cishet white men intended for consumption by angsty teenagers, so dressed it up by claiming (on, to my eyes, very thin evidence) that the band were REALLY doing something radical and subversive with regards to gender performance or whatever.
There's nothing wrong with straightforward pop-punk albums recorded by cishet white men intended for consumption by angsty teenagers (two of my favourite albums of all time meet that description exactly), and I don't know why critics have to tie themselves in knots pretending there's something deeper and more subversive going on rather than just admitting they enjoy the album for exactly what it is.
"I'm pretty sure that every member of My Chemical Romance (past or present) is a cisgender man"
This is totally irrelevant in regards to someone's ability to "promote gender nonconformance". What's more germane is that, in 2004, a guy with dyed hair and eyeliner walking in the city would get about a block before somebody yelled "faggot!" out of a pickup truck window.
If a rock band whose singer dyes his hair and wears eyeliner counts as radical subversive gender nonconformity, then My Chemical Romance were walking on well-trodden ground. Kiss, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Green Day, every hair metal band, every black metal band, innumerable punk bands, Manic Street Preachers, The Cure. I'm sorry, but I don't think a dude wearing eyeliner and his hair long in 2004 is the shocking countercultural statement you think it is. I'm no big fan of Nirvana but at least Kurt Cobain wore a dress the odd time.
Well this is my point: why are My Chemical Romance being given special brownie points for something which rock bands had been doing for decades prior?
I know that 2004 was a less enlightened era, but it was not the Dark Ages, and I don't believe that the average person would have been as shocked by the sight of a rock singer with long hair and eyeliner as you seem to think. And in 2007 I routinely walked around a Western city (in a country much less progressive than the US by any metric) wearing black clothes, long hair, eyeliner and nail polish, and have no recollection of ever having "faggot!" yelled at me (and yes, I'm a cis male, before you ask). So maybe your experience isn't quite as universal as you think.
To be fair to the "MCR totes promoted gender nonconformance crowd," the band itself kinda leans into this. I remember reading a interview with Gerard Way where he was talking about, like, understanding women better because his role models were Bowie and various other gender nonconforming/feminine men. Which is, I think, something you can say when you're in a very masculine social setting. I'm sure some people were mean about him being insufficiently masculine. I'm also pretty sure those people were other boys/men who were mean, but not particularly scandalized by a guy in eyeliner.
Part of me thinks it's a little silly to look at emo bands as being or encouraging gender nonconformance, since (as you said) dudes in bands had been wearing eyeliner for decades. Another part of me that wants easy radical points feels bad that it gets harder and harder to do the gender nonconforming thing as time goes on. I wear a tie on occasion; give me cool points, even though Marlene Diedrich wore a full suit a hundred years ago!
My understanding of art is that all the best art is from people who in some ways are outside of society and so are better able to see that society and the trends and stories within it. Being a fringe identity can help with this, but so can being a degenerate piece of shit who exists on the margins for good reason. And conversely, once the fringe is incorporated fully, their ability to produce good art slowly atrophies.
Not sure what being outside of society means here, and that’s not strictly how any valuation of art works.
A culture industry commodifies artistic processes for profit, it doesn’t restrict any given artist’s ability to generate good art. There’s a difference between artistry and being a working artist. Artistry atrophies when it becomes an oversaturated commodity production that is derived from financialization.
The issue of fringe normalization in popular social taste is separate, and still not deterministic of artistic quality. It merely renders fringe aesthetics as desirable cultural products within popular society, wherein identity fixation based around aesthetic taste may arise as detailed in this post.
I feel like you're looking at the past with some *extremely* rose-colored glasses here. Hasn't music nearly always been far more about culture than the music itself? Wearing a Korn shirt in the late '90s would have communicated far more about you than a love for chugging guitars and funky bass lines. Professing a love for Bob Dylan in the '60s would have implied far more than an appreciation for acoustic guitar and nasally vocals. When was this magical time that people listened to music only for its sonic uniqueness?
American cinema peaked in the 1970's and it's been downhill ever since then. The contrast between mainstream, major studio movies then ("The Deer Hunter", "Deliverance") with everything afterwards is insane.
Sometimes movies were simultaneously cocaine fueled orgiastic nightmares and great artistic triumphs, like "Apocalypse Now'. But I suspect that the fact that the decade produced both artistic triumphs and incredible professional and artistic disasters is highly correlated.
I think huge amounts of cocaine (among other drugs) was the rule rather than the exception for a lot of film productions at one point in American history.
No, I'm pointing out that in terms of the number of good movies produced per year the 1970's have outperformed any other subsequent era in American cinema.
I love "Joker" and am eagerly awaiting the sequel. But how many movies like "Joker" are produced for every crap Wakanda/MCU piece of plastic garbage?
I could list a number of movies that came out in the 80s, 90s and 00s that are great. There were plenty of 70s movies that were utter crap. In fact the bulk of the major studio movies in the 70s were bad which is why certain movies by auteurs stand out from that era.
My point is that some people, whether its movies or music, let themselves get stuck in a particular timeframe much to the detriment of seeking out the new. And I readily admit there is a certain comfort factor to doing that.
I'm not denying that there are plenty of great movies made after the '70's. Hell, Remo Williams was made in the 1980's!
But the critical consensus is that the '70's were a golden age because of the number of significant films produced and their impact on the field of cinema as a whole. That's not to say there weren't crappy movies being made or that those crappy movies didn't represent the majority of films produced during that time. That's true of any period.
And of course just because the 1970's were America's golden age that doesn't mean that holds true for every country on the planet. South Korea, which is hugely influential in terms of world cinema, had an explosion of creativity in the 1990's and is experiencing another boom today.
I mean, maybe? There’s a strong case to be made that listening to classical still says a *lot* about you, especially if you’re vocal (no pun intended) about it. Maybe not that you’re *cool* per se, but a lot.
It may say a lot about you but nobody professes a love for Bach out of a desire to be cool/hip/trendy/whatever. If you want enthusiasts who are primarily interested in musical qualities rather than advertising their identity through their t-shirt collection the latter quality is pretty much non-existent among classical music fans.
I'm 180 from you. I think almost everyone professes love for Bach to be cool. It's just to seem smart or sophisticated even if you are just fooling yourself.
Here's another area where people are not honest with themselves; if you don't agree with me here we are probably on different sides on everything. Working out is solely to look good. People fool themselves and give some argument otherwise.
Brazilian JiuJitsu and the martial arts are about physical dominance and fighting on some physical status dimension. We have come up with contrite excuses disguising this, self-defense, beauty, but it's all bullshit.
It doesn't matter that you never actually use the jiujitsu in the real world; it's mostly that you know and other people know. In game theory of animals, you don't actually want to fight that much as it is net negative to both. As long as other animals know you are stronger that's whats important. Do a bunch of stuff to not fight: yell, make yourself taller, take off shirt, push around, let people know you are a black belt.
"I think almost everyone professes love for Bach to be cool."
There certainly are such people, who covet the veneer of sophistication that they think it gives them. In other words, they want to be seen as the sort of person who loves Bach.
But there are also people who, though not musically sophisticated, enjoy the euphonious sound of 17th-century music, and who find enjoyment in instinctively tracking its harmonic motion from tonic outward and back again. And there are people who are fully musically literate who find an immense joy in the ingenious way Bach solves contrapuntal problems, and in his resourcefulness in developing a full movement from a scrap of motif.
And for what it's worth, I think there are also a lot of people who work out because it makes them *feel* good, though you are also correct that for many it's a function of their sexual marketability.
1) Maybe everybody says that they like Bach, but how many actually listen to the music? I think an essential part of the definition of "fan" is that you don't just give lip service to the thing that you're a fan of, you actually read the books, listen to the music, watch the movies, etc.
I don't have as much time these days but when I was younger if I heard 30 seconds of a piece I could often nail down who the conductor was, regardless of whether I had heard that particular performance/recording before. The only way to get there is to listen to a lot of music, thousands of hours worth, and somebody who's not genuinely enthusiastic about the stuff just isn't going to put that amount of time in.
2) All sports/physical activity is half about the other guy and half about beating your own brain. A personal anecdote: I have fenced for years and years. In fencing the primary mode of practice is sparring with other people, so it's not fighting per se but it is a contest against another human being that you engage in every time that you go to the gym. If you are full of shit that is going to become instantly apparent to everyone there.
When I was younger and just starting out I was sparring with somebody. We were both at the neutral position, at that stage where you are probing and trying to gain some advantage. but not in a position to actually score a point. There is a maneuver where you pull your sword back over your shoulder so the tip is pointing behind you and the hilt is pointed at your opponent. For some reason the thought just suddenly popped into my head that if I did that I would beat him. As soon as the thought entered into my brain I just did it, without further reflection, he froze, and I thumped him on top of the head. All of the years since then have been me trying to do that again.
1) At root, you can never disentangle your true distal v. proximate motives. I don't believe people are that in control of themselves. I can claim that at root, you just want people to know you are "sophisticated" or "smart". It's really self-flattering to be like, I only do this thing cause I'm a super MORAL. Look at all those plebs who love Taylor Swift. Harumph.
Most of our lives are battling in some status dimension: smarts, physical, other.
I mean you see how much people care with top 10 lists, Star Wars v. Star Trek, S-tier, A-tier shit. In comic books, regular people really care who can beat up who. This hero is omega level. It's why Thanos and Thor have a fistfight at the end of a Marvel movie.
There are structural/factor analysis models of music that show consistency among almost all people as they age. They tend to like Sophisticated (Classical/Jazz) more as they age and like Pop or Intense(Metal, Soundcloud Rap) less as they age. It's heavily correlated to how peoples' 5-factor personality changes over the lifecycle.
Keep in mind that classical covers everything from Mozart to Alban Berg or Bartok and jazz from Kenny G to Bitches Brew.
Plus I seem to recall research that indicates that people basically stop listening to new music after a certain age and lock in to what was playing when they were young. I still listen to the Pixies and Mission of Burma today just because of the positive associations that music has in my brain with being young.
The Limitations and Future Directions section of that paper makes me wonder (I read the whole thing on my phone and have doubts about the meaningfulness of the study, but would have to re-read it on my computer to see if the conclusions are as tortured as they seem to be). I would be really curious if anyone else has had similar studies with similar results, especially longitudinal studies. (Says the person pushing 50 and currently wearing her Einstürzende Neubauten shirt. My personal anecdotal sample set, like anyone’s, is skewed, but I don’t know anyone in my cohort whose musical tastes have dramatically changed in the decades we’ve known each other.)
I'm biased, I like most of the factor analysis work on music and like Rentfrow in particular. I think his methodology is pretty good and is at least better than the lexical hypothesis that undergirds personality psychology. If you believe in Big 5 personality, I think his factor analysis method is less burdensome than lexical hypothesis. From memory, I think he just plays unpopular clips for people and asks if they like it.
I haven't read this literature in awhile, but Rentfrow is one of main people.
I still remember going to see Kronos Quartet, getting blown away by the performance, and having the old dude next to me, dressed in a fine suit, get up and boo.
I have to say that all jazz fans I have ever known are the most insufferable twats ever. When you say you don't care for jazz that much, they're always like "no way man, you just haven't heard the right jazz!" and proceed to try and "educate" you on the subject.
I am far more of a classical music fan than jazz but I would say that not "liking" jazz is akin to not liking anime, or comic books, or movies. Jazz as a genre covers everything from Kenny G to Miles Davis. Anime is Miyazaki and Shigurui. And comic books cover the Marvel stuff as well as Maus and Chris Ware. There is probably something out there for every individual in any genre. Of course the constraints of work, chores and chance makes finding that thing that you love problematic.
I see your jazz fans and raise you the Beyoncé fans. (I have tried to like both and failed. The jazz fans, in my experience, are far less aggro in their efforts to get you to see the light.)
Beyoncé fans are a different breed--so many of them are all about their parasocial relationship with the artist. Jazz fans tend to be more like trainspotters: "I prefer the six-bar version of 'Criss Cross,' ideally in the 1958 New York recording where Diz sat in with Monk's band, which you can hear on this Italian bootleg. You really have to listen to it on a system like mine, with an old-school McIntosh tube amp..." etc., etc, etc.
I don't know if it's explicitly because of the "poptimism" trend that Freddie highlights here, but having a teenage daughter now, I can report its...weird...how utterly unimportant music seems to be for teens now compared to the 1990s. People used to construct their entire identifies around the genre of music they listened to. Hell, I did it too - I went through several phases from my teens to early 20s, where I liked different obscure musical genres, which over time grew more and more niche and underground before I mellowed out with age. Maybe my 8th grader is just friends with more "normies" than I ever was, but she has like...friends who like Disney soundtracks and shit. But for the most part, music isn't as important to them as movies, or books, or viral videos. It's just not a big thing any more.
Which really suggests that the self-important posturing of Pitchfork codes it as being for old people. Because of course that's who reads Pitchfork now...who else would?
100%. My best guess is that, now that piracy and streaming have made music ubiquitous and cheap, the perceived value has collapsed (and it’s hard to imagine that changing). In the heydays of CDs, dropping twenty bucks on every hour or music felt like a real commitment, so it was easy to imagine it was important somehow. Now that everything is everywhere...eh.
Yes, and now the focus has shifted from albums (which most of us in the 70s, when I was growing up, were concerned with) to individual tracks. The idea of the album as a coherent stand-alone statement (in artistic terms) has absolutely no currency with young listeners today.
It didn’t in 1960 either though. Singles were the main way people digested music for a long time and eventually the LP format took over for economic as well as artistic reasons. I think long form musical output will gain currency with “the kids” again at some point, although the cycle will probably never fully repeat thanks to music having basically zero monetary value anymore...
there are a lot of technological/commercial factors that are transforming the consumption of music, and Pitchfork is downstream of all of them. that's what makes it a bit frustrating to me when people rag on Modern Pitchfork or poptimism as if they're the final boss in all this rather than the customer service desk, figuratively speaking
Maybe they don't live for music because the music they know how to access is objectively pretty bad? And Pitchfork is guilty of helping construct the world where that's the case.
I mean, my wife and I play music in the car all the time, and my kids either have no reaction at all or actively loathe it (my daughter explicitly asked my wife to stop playing The Postal Service - she has said what I play is "better" but left it at that).
Of course, kids typically hate their parents music, because they want to show they're different people, but most go through a phase where are at least open to it before forming their own musical identities.
The kids I know, having a teen, all know how to access pretty much anything available on streaming. They like music, but it’s all more of a grab bag than a coherent statement of taste, and they’re chill with each other’s differences. On the other hand, they are deadly serious when it comes to their tastes in television, sometimes downright nasty about it.
Sure, there's always been that aspect. And you can draw a through-line from critics like Dave Marsh right through to the Pitchfork brigade. But there were also critics who wrote about the music itself rather than focusing on the people who made it or who listen to it. Christgau, for one (though I don't much care for his taste or point of view).
It's probably impossible to say for certain, given that you'd have be fully immersed in the different time periods you cite, while also being basically the same person, development-wise, to judge how different it is. But there's lots of good writing on music out there, and I think it is different today, or has been for some time. Sure, plenty of people like Dylan because of what they thought he signified. But plenty of others - and many of those same people - loved Dylan because his music deeply moved them, or they considered him, with all sincerity, a prophet of sorts, and there was a deeply felt connection between the music, the politics, and cultural shifts, etc.
Again, this is hard to precisely quantify, but: the biggest single indicator is the quality of the most popular music. The biggest acts today are range from bad to mediocre, with a few exceptions, whereas say, a few decades ago, that wasn't the case. The 1960s are a special case, but they are also the most stark example: year after year of adventurous, compelling, artistically excellent music that was also enormously popular.
I don't think the issue is the role of culture; as you say, that has always been part of the mix. For me, it is much more about the basic problem that the music getting heard today is emptier, and decisions about what gets played more automated. In this sense the machinations around image and social positioning, from Pitchfork or anyone else, are beside the point. None of this would seem quite as terrible if it weren't for the fact that music as a shared aesthetic, cultural and emotional experience has died in the last 10-15 years. Of course *music* hasn't really died: there is always great music if you look in the right places and keep up with your struggling independent artist of choice, or the local music scene. But it feels like no one cares anymore. Even as recently as 2010, you could go into a public place or coffee shop and hear someone playing the latest release by some decent indie artist, or deep cuts from an album they actually knew (not curated by Spotify). You would still hear conversations and debates about X's latest, where many people had been following X. I literally cannot remember the last time I was in a public place and heard a song that really grabbed me, made me ask "Who's that?!" Something which someone had chosen deliberately to share with others, that people were specifically paying attention to, together. In fact, aside from oldies randomly circulating on automated playlists, it's rare that I hear anything distinctive at all.
I'm not saying anything new or revelatory, obviously. But there is something profoundly sad about the loss, and what blows my mind is how little I see this being openly discussed. Quite simply, the music the majority of us hear in the presence of other people, the vast majority of the time, is significantly more impoverished, and less reflective of real preference, than it was even 15 years ago. How could that not eventually affect us in some other way, whether it's psychologically, sociologically or spiritually?
Right on. Like a lot of things, poptimism overshot its original (defensible) target. Which, I think, is the correct view to have - pop music (and pop culture more generally) is worthy of being taken seriously and shouldn't be dismissed out of pocket. I was one of those kids that thought I was cooler than everyone else simply because I didn't like or listen to pop music. I wish I could go back and smack some sense into 14 year old me. That's what the original form of poptimism meant to me, to broaden my horizons and listen to stuff I ordinarily wouldn't touch.
Problem is, we've gotten there, and then several miles beyond the target. Now, it's pop culture is high art which deserves to be placed on a pedestal. Pop music needs to be important and about more than just the music, Pitchfork being a chief offender here. It's how a song which should have just been a club anthem is actually the song of the year, and an important statement in the raging culture war:
Not all music is high art. Not all music needs to be important. Not all pop music is good just because a lot of people listen to it. Find music you love, listen to that, keep an open mind, and you'll be good to go
If people took a truly poptimist attitude to music writing, as in to the writing itself, then we'd have to throw about 95% of the current stuff in the bin.
Sadly, most people are not educated on what should be indicative of “high” art or culture. I’m sure you know any genre can be cultivated in a way that it achieves sublime aesthetic properties and virtuosity, but I think the persistently malignant and myopic understanding of aesthetic appreciation we tend to see comes from a deeply entrenched notion of class status tied to culture.
I don't love the move of saddling a journalist with the whole brand of the venue that's published their piece. It's Larson saying these things, not Pitchfork itself.
Freddie, the second paragraph you wrote here is a banger. It's one of the best observations I've ever seen on this phenomenon, and the way you noted it was exceptional.
More of this, please.
"I can’t find where now, but Rich Juzwiak once derided people who prefer music made by actual musicians playing actual instruments to music made entirely by computers. He called this a rockist attitude."
I remember being similarly harangued about this in the early 2000s. Virtuosity with instruments was seen as self-indulgent and a result of privilege and only DJing was legitimate in comparison. Actually playing guitars was seen as a phallic, galumphing imposition, really an aggression. I was utterly shocked to hear this, having never even thought in those terms before, and while it's obviously horseshit it did stick with me through to today.
It's not even that music *can't* be more than the sounds in themselves. Going to an ICP show is going to be a very different environment to a classical recital, and the subculture that surrounds the former simply cannot be divorced from the recordings, at least not easily. I never got into Phish or The Grateful Dead in any serious way, beyond a vague, nodding appreciation, but presumably having been present for their live shows is a prerequisite for really loving them. But there are limits to this, and eventually you have to reckon with the sounds themselves, divorced from context - and this is really where music criticism should step in, but largely fails to do so.
I don't think it divides as neatly as that. There are a lot of people who consider the guitar an instrument that grows in the forest and is played by an artist, whereas like a synth or a drum machine is made by laboratory boffins and makes music when anyone presses a button.
The fact that synths and drum machines versus digital technology replicates that same discourse, that one is an instrument and the other is not, only proves how little these debates are about the music being made or the musicians making it.
Sure, I go along with that.
"Going to an ICP show is going to be a very different environment to a classical recital..."
Absolutely! And the classical recital is not some sort of neutral benchmark, either--it's a subculture of its own, with all kinds of interestingly encoded social implications. But it's not *just* that, and neither is the ICP show.
Absolutely.
I've been WAITING for this piece! Thank you <3
"And this is wild, to me, because Pitchfork is not a site about music at all, but rather about the constant delicate servicing of these unconscious needs. Pitchfork stopped being a music site long ago and became instead a series of instructions for how to carefully position yourself in contrast or complement to the people around you in a way that maximizes your personal brand and demonstrates that you’re the most specialist boy or girl of all. It just so happens that, for reasons of inertia and convenience, talking about music is the ostensible subject matter through which this careful arrangement takes place. "
Was it not ever always thus, only now amplified by internet and social media?
There's a reason that the typical icebreaker humans used at parties when I was younger was "What kind of music do you like?" The answer usually told the questioner a good deal about the speaker, what sort of human she was likely to be and whether it would be worth pursuing her further.
>The answer usually told the questioner a good deal about the speaker, what sort of human she was likely to be and whether it would be worth pursuing her further.
"If he reads Infinite Jest 🚩🚩🚩"
I think this worldview was juvenile back when it was satirised by Nick Hornby in 1995, and still is.
If somebody really likes music or spends time and money on it, I think what they like can absolutely say something about them.
I always thought Hornby's take was incredibly presumptive of a world without subcultures, or in which subcultures don't mean anything. Lots of people are in some ways defined by the music they like. People live entire lives based on this. Or spend their weekends or every waking minute based on it.
And that isn't surprising with Hornby because his musical worldview was basically a completely middlebrow 'I own an Outkast album cumbaya all genres are wonderful' with no depth or exploration in his tastes whatsoever.
Fair enough, but I don't think liking the Beatles or Infinte Jest makes you a bad person.
Absolutely not. Judging people morally for their music tastes is dumb, I completely agree with you.
I also don't get the obsession with Maneskin dressing vampy as meaningful. They're a rock band, rock has been theatric and deliberately ridiculous since at least hair metal 40 years ago.
That's really a lot of the fun of rock/metal as an aesthetic, it's over the top stupid camp for boring normal straight people. You know, like me.
Not sure Pitchfork ever really did the new very well either, though maybe you're not saying otherwise.
As a European, my memory of the old Pitchfork, before electronic music became something indie people in America have to like to be cool, was a lot of incredibly dumb reviews. For example reviewing house or techno music and making fun of the fact the "lyrics" were "move your body" or something rather than the 'deeply meaningful' faux-poetry of whatever indie rock band.
In recent years I've sometimes found interesting articles on there in a sort of older person broadsheet way, the long lists of something like ambient music albums, the classic album articles, for instance. Or Phil Sherburne's work. But I completely agree a lot of poptimist writing is terrible and it has plenty of that too.
In general, and it's not just on massive sites like Pitchfork, I tend to think a lot of today's bad music writers pad out their inability to talk about sound or subcultures and their lack of budget/energy to really find out about scenes or leave their desk with the kind of barely political academic bromides about bodies and spaces that everyone who reads this blog is probably sick of by now, regardless of our respective politics.
This is particularly rife in electronic music where at the best of times it's hard to say why this person turned the dials in a way that sounds amazing and this person didn't, but I see it in most arts journalism and it is dispiriting.
No surprise really, since the arts degrees which prepared these writers for the unenviable life of freelance music journalism also pad out their lack of substance with shitty academic cliches masquerading as meaningful analysis.
Was Pitchfork ever anti-electronic? I mean, electroclash was the shit in Brooklyn circa 2000 or so, meaning embracing electronics was pretty fundamental to modern indie-rock.
Now, I do remember circa the mid 2000s when Pitchfork decided all of the sudden they had to uncritically love mainstream rap and R&B. That was really, really weird, even in retrospect.
It was for a bit, it seems weird now I know but it definitely was. I could probably dig out some reviews, I'm talking about 2001/2002. There was a time when their reviews had the vibe of one person having a laugh or riffing on stuff - I hated it as an earnest 19-year-old techno fan but it seems less bad than the current shitty thesis approach.
I don't think electroclash was ever that big on Pitchfork really? I was writing a lot about music myself back then and it didn't really permeate too much as far as I recall, and I was really into a lot of that stuff.
Then for a long time they kind of ignored club music until a pivot which prob came whenever faster broadband was rife and with the ease of access to a lot more underground electronic stuff. At least that's my theory.
No longer any need to go to a nightclub to be into nightclub music. Kinda sad given the death of nightlife in many cities.
I dunno. I sort of feel like Kid A was what broke down the electronic barrier within Indie. Not that Radiohead was ever really that indie, but I had been active within the IDM "scene" for a few years (even as a musician, on a local level), and it was notable the kind of people going to shows/making music with laptops suddenly shifted from nerds/former goths/industrial folks to indie-rock kids basically overnight.
I guess that was a big thing. I probably speak more for stuff that sells (or sold) on 12-inch and was made to be DJ'ed. I think that took a longer time to merge into indie in the ways it did, probably again significant when Thom Yorke DJ'ed on Boiler Room playing whatever shit he liked, haha.
Yeah, that could be different. I was never really into that section of electronic music in a big way aside from a handful of D&B and psytrance artists.
"...that the music is utter dogshit that causes the listener to question their existing affection for her earlier work..."
I don't doubt that this is a genuine component of human psychology but it is a regrettable one. There are plenty of artists who till the same soil over and over again for the entirety of their careers but there are also those who constantly seek to experiment and evolve. The inevitable result of radical experimentation is that sometimes you fail. Those failures shouldn't tarnish the rest of an artist's body of work.
Also, the flip side of enforced taste is mind numbing conformity. I can't think of many things that are more predictable and boring.
When I was a lonely teenager, I used to read music review publications and track their end of year lists religiously. I grew comfortable with the fact that Rolling Stone embodied some sort of "establishment" canonical view, where their #1 song of all time was Like a Rolling Stone and their #1 album was Sgt. Pepper. Meanwhile, I got used to Pitchfork being the slightly more "alt" option, putting something like Daydream Nation atop their 80s list (the first time they did one). Basically, I had a very fixed view on these publications and what their preferences were, and even if I disagreed, I tended to respect them and take them at face value.
Now, years later, Rolling Stone's number 1 song of all time is What's Goin' On by Marvin Gaye, and Pitchfork demoted Sonic Youth from the perch of their 80s list in favor of Purple Rain. There is obviously a part of me that leaps to the conclusion that this is more motivated by culture war considerations than an actual assessment of the music (although Purple Rain is a better choice for #1 album of the 80s than What's Goin' On is a better choice for best song of all time). But, that said, I do begin to wonder. Did the old Pitchfork/Rolling Stone really reflect a more sincere aesthetic judgment based on the music itself, or has it always just been status-seeking and differentiation and culture war politics, since the beginning of time? Maybe it just took until the cultural winds shifted for me to appreciate that it's basically always been bullshit. I don't know. Just throwing it out there.
Better to be narrow but deep than broad but shallow. It's difficult enough to be knowledgeable about one genre of music, never mind ten.
"Did the old Pitchfork/Rolling Stone really reflect a more sincere aesthetic judgment based on the music itself, or has it always just been status-seeking and differentiation and culture war politics, since the beginning of time?"
this is precisely the issue a lot of anti-poptimists botch. it's not that they're wrong about the outsized role of not strictly musical considerations in modern music writing. it's that they often revert to these weirdly virginal assumptions about what was motivating fans and critics in the 1960s, as if music and its subcultures were pure reason and dispassionate wonkery until all these woke millennials showed up with their hatred of virtuosos and guitars.
I think the primary issue isn't really that musical criticism is more "pure," it's that the internet has forever ruined any cache that media snobbery of any sort (be it music, cinema, TV, etc.) has, since it's associated with trolls and bad online behavior. Guilt by association really.
To get super nitpicky for a second, "What's Going On" was #6 on RS's most recent "best songs" list. The *album*, however, was #1 on the corresponding albums list. (Great song, but not even the best song on the album. And great album, but I'm not sure it's even Marvin Gaye's best, and I'm even less certain Stevie Wonder didn't put out at least two better albums within the following couple years.)
Like you, I grew up poring over these types of lists (and album guides!) because I was deeply into music, we didn't have the internet until I was halfway through high school (and even then, '90s internet, ugh), and I was rapidly realizing that the local classic rock station and my parents' record collection were not the extent of what might be out there. So the RS lists from 20 years ago or whatever would've been very much up my alley.
I think it's great to see black and women artists getting reevaluated and recognized, rather than ghettoized or included as mere tokens. But RS's efforts at modifying its brand and attempting to remain relevant -- as it slowly dawns on boomers that they might actually die one day -- are just so desperate and so clumsy that it's really not worth it to me to engage with these lists. I can understand and even admire the acknowledgment that they need more of a "big tent" approach, but the results are just too random. To toss in yet another metaphor, RS is not "staying in its lane," in the parlance of our times. Instead, they're swerving all over the damn place.
That said, it's almost impressive how much worse the "best singers" list they put out on New Year's Day is. Jesus Christ.
"(Great song, but not even the best song on the album. And great album, but I'm not sure it's even Marvin Gaye's best, and I'm even less certain Stevie Wonder didn't put out at least two better albums within the following couple years.)"
preach, Tom, preach!
I appreciate a good example of pedantry :). Thank you for the correction.
Looks like the number one song on the 2021 list was "Respect" and number two was "Fight the Power." So the same point applies - my instinct is to say "culture war posturing" but my secondary instinct is to say "Like a Rolling Stone" at #1 was probably the same kind of thing too.
Ha! Honestly, I likely wouldn't have even noticed except the #1 album selection struck me at the time as such a transparent pander to the zeitgeist. I think it was the moment where I realized I'd definitely aged out of being the audience for these lists.
The songs list is weird. "Respect" is at least a very reasonable pick, and I think "Like a Rolling Stone" would be too, but a list of best songs is not the same as a list of best singles, and I'm not sure RS is making a clear-enough distinction. The list doesn't know what it wants to be. By trying to be very inclusive it winds up being weirdly conservative. I'll concede it would probably make for a pretty decent playlist, though.
One of my very favorite books is Dave Marsh's 30-year-old THE HEART OF ROCK AND SOUL: THE 1001 GREATEST SINGLES EVER MADE. Obviously given its publication date and its writer's biases, I don't always "agree" with it, but at least he's honest enough to acknowledge that it's impossible to "rank" records in a way that means anything. (His #1 is on the RS list, but not in their top hundred.) Instead, he tells stories, makes connections, and digs up some real gems.
When I first picked it up around 2000 or so, I was in college and pretty deep in an "albums matter" phase, and the book snapped me out of that mindset while also introducing me to hundreds of records from the '50s-'80s that I'd never heard (or even heard OF), reminding me of many I'd forgotten, and making me consider in new ways many I'd loved or dismissed in the past. Discovering this book during the heyday of Napster couldn't have been more ideally timed for me.
Anyway, it's a great book to just explore at random, or to read cover to cover. And clearly one I could go on and on about. :)
I have a feeling we would have been good friends had we been lucky enough to attend the same high school at the same time. I definitely used napster back in the day, but by the time I really embraced being a pop music nerd, it had been replaced by bittorrent. I wonder if thats a not small factor behind why I cared so much about albums/full-length releases versus individual songs/singles.
As someone who really didn't have friends in high school, I'm a little surprised at how happy your comment made me. Thank you! :)
Isn't it crazy how the file sharing programs of choice changed so much so quickly? What a wild time. The youth will never understand.
My opinion is that all music ranking is bullshit to some degree... it's impossible to fully quantify a song down to a number, let alone rank songs head to head. Songs with wildly different structures, lyrics, feelings, etc. can't be boiled down to just #34 vs #38 on a year end list. Ranking can be a bit of harmless fun though, and I've used it as a thought experiment to compare radically different pieces of music. So long as it's recognized not as an objective list but rather as a conversation starter, I see no issue with it.
That said, yes, many of the big publications are not focused on the music itself, but rather on social signaling, on being viewed as on the right side of history. I referenced it in my other comment, but in 2017 there was a big celebration of the fact that in Pitchfork's top 10 songs of that year, there were no white male artists. White women, black men, and in the case of the #1 song a black woman, but no white men. Is it possible that no white man made a song worthy of the top 10 that year? Of course! Do you trust Pitchfork to make that determination? Knowing their writing, hell no I don't!
https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-100-best-songs-of-2017/?page=10
i don't know, i thought it was pretty clear in the full piece that Larson isn't taking issue with people wearing music as a badge per se but rather with the badge in this particular case being, in his estimation, so exceptionally tacky and vapid and goofy as such.
sure, someone else might come along and say, well, Lizzo is also tacky and vapid and goofy, and Pitchfork gave her a 6.4! and that's fair, but i still think that's a different conversation: publications assign different reviewers with different biases and different taste to different things, and faulting one reviewer for another reviewer's writing about Lizzo or Beyonce or whoever is a lost cause in one sense, if also a sensible question, in another sense, about the state of the larger brand employing both those writers.
My favourite Pitchfork pearl-clutch was the review of St Vincent's Daddy's Home which reacted with horror to two mentions of 'call the cops' and 'call 911' – how could she?! In 2021!?
I'll never not laugh at the phrase "pearl-clutch(ing)". It's so spot-on. A very close second is the slightly obscure "gathered back the hems of their dresses."
The entire album revolves around her father literally coming home from prison and that’s what they choose to focus on.
A white white-collar criminal was exactly who the anti-carceral Defund The Police movement was based on.
When I read Pitchfork reviews (and music reviews from other progressive-leaning outlets), I often interpret them as critics struggling mightily to resolve the cognitive dissonance borne of the weird presumption that good art must be morally good. In the case of Pitchfork critics, this means that good music must be woke music. So if a critic enjoys an album, they will find themselves straining with every fibre to find some angle by which the album REALLY advances a progressive worldview (even if it's a determinedly apolitical album, or even conservative) - hence the mental gymnastics on display here (https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-chemical-romance-three-cheers-for-sweet-revenge/), in which My Chemical Romance are retroactively claimed to promote gender nonconformance. Whereas if they DIDN'T enjoy an album, they instead have to contrive some angle by which the album is crypto-conservative (hence the absurd claims from multiple music critics that the bland, anodyne, inoffensive silly love songs made by the Chainsmokers are somehow the sonic equivalent of the divisive, incendiary, hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump).
See here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/09/chainsmokers-memories-do-not-open-cd-pop-review-columbia; https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23148-memoriesdo-not-open/
If they can't find such an angle, they will just scoff that it's another album made by a bunch of White Dudes (the horror!). They will conspicuously avoid commenting upon the ethnicities and sexes of the musicians who made the album they DID enjoy.
Such a bizarre and childlike view of the world. It's also historically illiterate. Any cursory examination of the arts should reveal that there have been plenty of great artists who were also terrible people.
It is truly weird. Also, with music, it pretty much by definition means you ignore instrumental music.
Man, as an instrumental wind player I’ve always been inclined to fixate on the melodic and harmonic material of pitch itself. My greatest joys in music derive from finding the right way I want to express an emotion or idea exclusively through sound, by having music be the medium of communication itself, especially through genres that prioritize improvisation like jazz or folkstyle.
Not saying lyrical or otherwise subject-oriented music is bad! I love lyrical analysis and proper political study of music (there’s some good books out there like Acting in Concert that propose frameworks for how people use politics in music to communicate and interact with each other), just that pitch-first listening is my tendency.
I fall in love with most songs I like before I even know what the lyrics are. I've always struggled to figure out what singers are saying in their songs (the literal words). It's led me to a few uncomfortable surprises when I suss out the lyric.
I've seen the same tendency in video game reviews. The new Doom games have to be some kind of clever commentary about capitalism and/or their old-school white dude protagonists. Bayonetta can't just be a sexy witch who murders angels by the thousands in an incredibly enjoyable spectacle fighter, she has to somehow be a queer icon. And so on.
I think there are a great many video games journalists who really have no passion for the medium at all, and are only working in that field to pad out their CV until such time that they can transition into real journalism. They didn't grow up playing video games, and as such are bad at playing them and lack many of the basic critical referents one would expect a critic to have (imagine a professional film critic who doesn't know who Alfred Hitchcock is). They don't really know how to talk about game mechanics, competitive balance or any of the other things that go into making a video game enjoyable to play, so instead they use the game review as an opportunity to advance their political hobby horses.
This is probably the main reason environmental narrative games (Gone Home, Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture etc.) are so popular among modern video game journalists, as they tick several boxes that make them uniquely attractive to people who are bad at playing video games, don't find them interesting in and of themselves, and who are writing on a tight deadline:
1) They pose no meaningful gameplay challenges, so can be easily completed by someone who's bad at playing video games
2) They're mechanically light, so the critic need not even dedicate a token paragraph to discussing the nuts and bolts of the game's design, and can instead devote more attention to its narrative, visual design and themes (including political themes)
3) They're almost always short enough to be completed in under a day regardless of skill
To clarify, I'm not saying ENGs are bad (I loved Gone Home and The Stanley Parable), just that there are reasons other than quality that make them uniquely appealing to modern games journalists.
The elephant in the room is games as art. If you want to write serious criticism it's reasonable to consider questions of artistic merit just as with film, literature, music, etc. And for whatever reason the development of video games in that respect has been glacial.
I think that G. Golden has got it right. There are a ton of games that are just Monopoly.
But there are also a ton of games where the makers have artistic ambitions.
I have a lot of thoughts about the artistic merits of tabletop games, actually.
I'm not quite sure what you mean, to be honest. Some of the most striking and powerful aesthetic experiences I've had have been in video games.
Yeah.
What KT said. Plus I would add that, in my opinion, the closest comparison to video games as an artistic medium would be film. Both are relatively new creatures of the 20th century and both are technological in nature (no camera and no film stock means no movies).
That said the development of movies as an artistic medium was explosive. "Birth of a Nation" came out in 1915 and Luis Bunuel was slicing open a woman's eyeball by 1929. There really hasn't been anything comparable in gaming even now 50 years after Pong.
All I can say is that Metal Gear Solid 2 is a paranoid postmodern mindfuck on a par with Thomas Pynchon which uses the unique qualities of the medium to its full advantage, and I will never be persuaded otherwise.
1. The rise of Video Games as a popular medium corresponds to the poptimism movement, which already is derides comparisons to high art as "elitist".
2. There are many non-gamers and I think quite a few gamers, who would be embarrassed by a comparison between games and other artforms. Disco Elysium is not Hamlet and the Last of Us is not Citizen Kane.
3. I think among gamers those are two general camps: Those who view games as art, and those who view games more like a sport. Those who view it as art are more interested in playing as an aesthetic experience similar to reading a book or watching a movie. They might play a variety of games from different genres, but generally something with a narrative. The other camp which views games as sport generally stick to one genre or even one game. They play to improve their skills either so they are better than their friends or because they want to be a real competitive player. These sorts of players value difficulty more than those in the previous camp. While many people may fall to some degree or another in both camps, the majority of gaming is centered on the later camp. While there are many people who play Night in the Woods, there are far more people who play Fortnite and thus do not care if games are "art".
True, but my point is that games as glorified pinball machines is fine for players but bad for critics.
Also a very based observation
Yeah, a big part of What Remains of Edith Finch’s hype came from casual gamers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but its popularity was buoyed by people who rarely played games. I’ve heard people I know IRL who never play games before suddenly race about it.
truly incredible to me that the big enduring copypasta complaint here is "some walking simulators got some good reviews ten years ago" and the complaint even includes the concession that the games were good! so what are we even talking about?
even if one concedes that Edith Finch necessarily appealed to more casual gamers, okay, but what is supposed significance of that fact? casual gamers are gamers! it's right there in the name! and also, re earlier points, what does being "good" at video games have to do with anything? criticism isn't esports! being a gamer in general isn't esports! plenty of people who play a lot of video games are bad at video games! either in general or maybe bad a certain kinds of games despite being good at other kinds of games. we can log into the ranked mode of countless online multiplayer games and quickly witness this reality for ourselves.
I personally think that games journalism was better at engaging with game mechanics in a time when the only people who became games journalists were people who loved video games, but maybe I'm being a big romantic, who knows.
maybe the way i'd put it is that the prioritization of storytelling over gameplay took several forms in the past decade or so, some in games themselves and some in games criticism.
i don't love this trend in games themselves, and i don't always love games criticism that meets this trend too eagerly or seems to be capitulating to it. that said, some of the trends in games writing are definitely responding to trends in the games themselves. what else are critics supposed to do? pretend BioShock and The Last of Us and Gone Home never happened? just bang on about the frame rate and call it a day?
people don't want constant sermonizing and moralizing in every other review, okay, I can work with that, but I don't know what to do with the sort of person who seems to think writing about modern video games, with all their artistic advancements and aspirations, should just be tech blurbs.
That sure is a lot of exclamation marks.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the fact that ENGs appeal to casual gamers. I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with modern games critics liking them. I'm saying that their popularity among modern games critics is indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays: they have no interest in games in their own right, they think video games and the people who play them are stupid and contemptible, they aren't good at playing them (which I DO consider a deficiency in a professional critic, in the same way that poor literacy would serve as an impediment to being an effective literary critic), and they are ignorant of many of the basic concepts and critical referents unique to the medium.
No one is obliged to like video games, understand them, be good at playing them, or think the people who play them are deserving of respect. But if you are none of these things, it's pretty weird to pursue a career in video game criticism. I would feel the same way about a film critic who hates movies and thinks cinemagoers are stupid degenerates.
i think it is notable that your examples of games "indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays" were released 7-10 years ago and are being made out of be "indicative" because . . . what exactly? because they got good reviews? what kind of reviews were they supposed to get? you said you loved Gone Home, so I guess what I'm asking you is: what was ideally supposed to happen instead of what actually happened? what is the logical bridge here?
the film criticism comparison is precisely what I don't get about your reasoning. you're not describing video game critics hating anything; you're describing video game critics liking games that you also liked but then weirdly extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that they liked a handful of games, including one that, again, you loved!
There's one claim here I think is deeply wrong:
> They didn't grow up playing video games, and as such are bad at playing them and lack many of the basic critical referents one would expect a critic to have (imagine a professional film critic who doesn't know who Alfred Hitchcock is).
This is no longer true. People in their 40s would have grown up knowing the NES, SNES, all the games in the 90s, college LAN parties in the 2000s... Like, I'm in my thirties now, and I remember cousins over ten years my senior playing the hell out of Blood back in the late 90s. (Perhaps I should not have been allowed to watch over their shoulders, but c'est la vie.) To say nothing of generations younger than us, for whom Minecraft and Roblox are social phenomena!
The average video game journalist in the 2020s did, in fact, grow up playing video games to some extent. Whether or not they were especially good at them, they probably have a fundamental grasp of most genre conventions and the major touchstones of video game culture.
It feels like you're generalizing from your own experience. I'm in my thirties and know plenty about video games. I've met plenty of people my age who know nothing about video games. Lots of people have never owned a games console or attended a LAN party.
You would THINK that the kinds of people who write about video games for a living would be knowledgeable about them before taking on the job, but I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that that isn't always the case.
this has always been the weird signature overreach of the anti-SJW contingent in the hyperpolarization of gaming.
it's not enough to simply say that progressive writing about video games is bad and misguided. that would be a fine argument! but no! the argument has to be: these people don't actually play video games and/or secretly hate video games, because anyone who truly enjoyed video games would share my opinions and preferences about them. as if gaming isn't a massive hobby with a lot of different entry points for a lot of different people with a lot of different biases, priorities, etc.
I don't think that everyone who enjoys video games must share my opinions and preferences about them. I know plenty of people who enjoy video games who have different opinions from me, or enjoy different kinds of games from me. I know professional game designers who have different opinions and preferences from me, and that's fine.
But when a games journalist sneers at the idea that she might play games in her own time for her own amusement, or when a games journalist writes an article arguing that violent video games are breeding a generation of school shooters, or when a games journalist writes an opinion piece arguing that gamers are entitled manbaby misogynistic alt-right losers and game developers don't need to target their games at them anymore - I mean, is it wrong to take such people at their word? Such people don't really seem to be hiding their contempt for video games and the people who play them.
It largely correlates with the sudden popular of Twine, which I suspect much of the contingent only discovered through hate playing Depression Quest. The flurry of negative Steam reviews posted on interactive fiction and visual novels in the decade since has been weird from the vantage point of someone who spent much of the decade //previous to that// playing IF because back then there was a completely different contingent of gamers within the IF community who would get angry about puzzle-less IF!
I think there are a great many people in virtually every elite profession who hate their field and are only there because they had nowhere else to go. TBH this is my default assumption about the vast majority of people in academia. They don't want to do what they were hired to do so they make their field about what they want instead.
I think there is some truth to your argument, but it's notable all of those are originally PC not console games though... I had played the likes of Alter-Ego, The Neverhood, The Dark Eye, Bad Day on the Midway, etc. as well as loads of abandonware and shareware experiments and Adventure Game Studio projects and abstract RPG maker things and lots of the indie interactive fiction boom of the late '90s and early '00s (by the likes of Adam Cadre and Emily Short, among many others) before I came to Dear Esther and Gone Home. Many of the people writing for Rock Paper Shotgun and many of the other PC gaming websites that praised those games may well have had similar gaming histories. That is to say, there is (as you probably know) a long history of narrative and/or art games that don't really require much in the way of gaming ability to play (or even complete). That might be said to be even more true for Mac gamers of the '90s and early '00s.
I've also completed Paperboy 2 so I have some actual gaming abilities also! ;)
Fair point. And in case it wasn't clear I wasn't trying to say that anyone who likes mechanically unchallenging games needs to "git gud" or whatever, sorry if it came off that way.
No, that's fine! As above, I actually think you're right for a fair amount of game journalists in the mainstream press who have praised many walking simulators and "art games" with limited or non-challenging gameplay... but I've also seen such games (or interactive experiences if you prefer tbh) praised by reviewers on the likes of Rock Paper Shotgun who clearly know their stuff.
I also just think that the phenomenon of such media is far from new (to a large degree the more one thinks about it really). Some of the cassettes on my grandad's BBC Micro were definitely not games... a basic "life" cell division simulator; a cassette that just played a synthesized version of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'... while others were more interactive, edging into games, but without an obvious competitive element or skill necessarily required.
The gender nonconformist claim reminds me of how the sexy bimbo look/identity has been reframed as some sort of ironic challenge to Gender. Because We Like It, so.
Very based observation
"My Chemical Romance are retroactively claimed to promote gender nonconformance"
Which they absolutely did, of course.
Also this whole thread has a whiff of the obsession with gender FdB mentioned previously.
Freddie has mentioned transgender, not gender.
"I genuinely think some of you need to ask yourself about your obsession with gender as a matter of mental health. Seriously. It’s not healthy to be so primed to go on endless diatribes about gender issues the way you are. There are lots of hot-button issues I talk about here. Nothing else provokes anything like this behavior. I could post about laws that regulate space debris and some of you’d say 'THIS MAKES ME ANGRY ABOUT GENDER!'"
To be fair, you're the one who seems upset.
You're projecting that emotion in response to me highlighting your lack of basic reading comprehension.
And because now I'm not sure you picked up on it, my previous comment was a quote[0] and not my own words.
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/once-again-i-will-have-to-take-a
You've memorized lines from a post about gender.
Edited: Ok, probably not memorized. Probably went out and looked up from a post about gender you're interested in. Doesn't speak well for your alleged desire to escape the topic of gender.
It's just a comment on a music review.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that every member of My Chemical Romance (past or present) is a cisgender man. That's kind of my point: I think the critic in question was feeling a mite of cognitive dissonance about enjoying what is, at the end of the day, a straightforward pop-punk album made by cishet white men intended for consumption by angsty teenagers, so dressed it up by claiming (on, to my eyes, very thin evidence) that the band were REALLY doing something radical and subversive with regards to gender performance or whatever.
There's nothing wrong with straightforward pop-punk albums recorded by cishet white men intended for consumption by angsty teenagers (two of my favourite albums of all time meet that description exactly), and I don't know why critics have to tie themselves in knots pretending there's something deeper and more subversive going on rather than just admitting they enjoy the album for exactly what it is.
"I'm pretty sure that every member of My Chemical Romance (past or present) is a cisgender man"
This is totally irrelevant in regards to someone's ability to "promote gender nonconformance". What's more germane is that, in 2004, a guy with dyed hair and eyeliner walking in the city would get about a block before somebody yelled "faggot!" out of a pickup truck window.
If a rock band whose singer dyes his hair and wears eyeliner counts as radical subversive gender nonconformity, then My Chemical Romance were walking on well-trodden ground. Kiss, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Green Day, every hair metal band, every black metal band, innumerable punk bands, Manic Street Preachers, The Cure. I'm sorry, but I don't think a dude wearing eyeliner and his hair long in 2004 is the shocking countercultural statement you think it is. I'm no big fan of Nirvana but at least Kurt Cobain wore a dress the odd time.
> Kiss, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, The Cure
Dress like them and people would yell "faggot!" at you as well. Source: I was there, people yelled "faggot!" at me.
Well this is my point: why are My Chemical Romance being given special brownie points for something which rock bands had been doing for decades prior?
I know that 2004 was a less enlightened era, but it was not the Dark Ages, and I don't believe that the average person would have been as shocked by the sight of a rock singer with long hair and eyeliner as you seem to think. And in 2007 I routinely walked around a Western city (in a country much less progressive than the US by any metric) wearing black clothes, long hair, eyeliner and nail polish, and have no recollection of ever having "faggot!" yelled at me (and yes, I'm a cis male, before you ask). So maybe your experience isn't quite as universal as you think.
>This is totally irrelevant
It absolutely is if you're trying to invoke Freddie's ban on commenters discussing trans issues, which I clearly and emphatically wasn't doing.
And yet you managed to bring up trans issues anyway! You really can't help yourself!
Please show me where I brought up trans issues. This is news to me.
To be fair to the "MCR totes promoted gender nonconformance crowd," the band itself kinda leans into this. I remember reading a interview with Gerard Way where he was talking about, like, understanding women better because his role models were Bowie and various other gender nonconforming/feminine men. Which is, I think, something you can say when you're in a very masculine social setting. I'm sure some people were mean about him being insufficiently masculine. I'm also pretty sure those people were other boys/men who were mean, but not particularly scandalized by a guy in eyeliner.
Part of me thinks it's a little silly to look at emo bands as being or encouraging gender nonconformance, since (as you said) dudes in bands had been wearing eyeliner for decades. Another part of me that wants easy radical points feels bad that it gets harder and harder to do the gender nonconforming thing as time goes on. I wear a tie on occasion; give me cool points, even though Marlene Diedrich wore a full suit a hundred years ago!
My understanding of art is that all the best art is from people who in some ways are outside of society and so are better able to see that society and the trends and stories within it. Being a fringe identity can help with this, but so can being a degenerate piece of shit who exists on the margins for good reason. And conversely, once the fringe is incorporated fully, their ability to produce good art slowly atrophies.
Not sure what being outside of society means here, and that’s not strictly how any valuation of art works.
A culture industry commodifies artistic processes for profit, it doesn’t restrict any given artist’s ability to generate good art. There’s a difference between artistry and being a working artist. Artistry atrophies when it becomes an oversaturated commodity production that is derived from financialization.
The issue of fringe normalization in popular social taste is separate, and still not deterministic of artistic quality. It merely renders fringe aesthetics as desirable cultural products within popular society, wherein identity fixation based around aesthetic taste may arise as detailed in this post.
Freddie if you want a three-day posturing nightmare come to Chicago for their yearly music festival.
We must retvrn to RYM
I feel like you're looking at the past with some *extremely* rose-colored glasses here. Hasn't music nearly always been far more about culture than the music itself? Wearing a Korn shirt in the late '90s would have communicated far more about you than a love for chugging guitars and funky bass lines. Professing a love for Bob Dylan in the '60s would have implied far more than an appreciation for acoustic guitar and nasally vocals. When was this magical time that people listened to music only for its sonic uniqueness?
>a bit politically conservative
I agree with your argument but yelling "Enoch was right! Keep Britain white!" was a LONG way from "a bit conservative" even in 1976.
American cinema peaked in the 1970's and it's been downhill ever since then. The contrast between mainstream, major studio movies then ("The Deer Hunter", "Deliverance") with everything afterwards is insane.
Sometimes movies were simultaneously cocaine fueled orgiastic nightmares and great artistic triumphs, like "Apocalypse Now'. But I suspect that the fact that the decade produced both artistic triumphs and incredible professional and artistic disasters is highly correlated.
I think huge amounts of cocaine (among other drugs) was the rule rather than the exception for a lot of film productions at one point in American history.
This is the equivalent of saying the only good music to have existed came out between 68 and 75.
No, I'm pointing out that in terms of the number of good movies produced per year the 1970's have outperformed any other subsequent era in American cinema.
I love "Joker" and am eagerly awaiting the sequel. But how many movies like "Joker" are produced for every crap Wakanda/MCU piece of plastic garbage?
I could list a number of movies that came out in the 80s, 90s and 00s that are great. There were plenty of 70s movies that were utter crap. In fact the bulk of the major studio movies in the 70s were bad which is why certain movies by auteurs stand out from that era.
My point is that some people, whether its movies or music, let themselves get stuck in a particular timeframe much to the detriment of seeking out the new. And I readily admit there is a certain comfort factor to doing that.
I'm not denying that there are plenty of great movies made after the '70's. Hell, Remo Williams was made in the 1980's!
But the critical consensus is that the '70's were a golden age because of the number of significant films produced and their impact on the field of cinema as a whole. That's not to say there weren't crappy movies being made or that those crappy movies didn't represent the majority of films produced during that time. That's true of any period.
And of course just because the 1970's were America's golden age that doesn't mean that holds true for every country on the planet. South Korea, which is hugely influential in terms of world cinema, had an explosion of creativity in the 1990's and is experiencing another boom today.
Anybody who is primarily a classical/opera fan now listens primarily for the music, not to be cool.
I mean, maybe? There’s a strong case to be made that listening to classical still says a *lot* about you, especially if you’re vocal (no pun intended) about it. Maybe not that you’re *cool* per se, but a lot.
It may say a lot about you but nobody professes a love for Bach out of a desire to be cool/hip/trendy/whatever. If you want enthusiasts who are primarily interested in musical qualities rather than advertising their identity through their t-shirt collection the latter quality is pretty much non-existent among classical music fans.
I'm 180 from you. I think almost everyone professes love for Bach to be cool. It's just to seem smart or sophisticated even if you are just fooling yourself.
Here's another area where people are not honest with themselves; if you don't agree with me here we are probably on different sides on everything. Working out is solely to look good. People fool themselves and give some argument otherwise.
Brazilian JiuJitsu and the martial arts are about physical dominance and fighting on some physical status dimension. We have come up with contrite excuses disguising this, self-defense, beauty, but it's all bullshit.
It doesn't matter that you never actually use the jiujitsu in the real world; it's mostly that you know and other people know. In game theory of animals, you don't actually want to fight that much as it is net negative to both. As long as other animals know you are stronger that's whats important. Do a bunch of stuff to not fight: yell, make yourself taller, take off shirt, push around, let people know you are a black belt.
"I think almost everyone professes love for Bach to be cool."
There certainly are such people, who covet the veneer of sophistication that they think it gives them. In other words, they want to be seen as the sort of person who loves Bach.
But there are also people who, though not musically sophisticated, enjoy the euphonious sound of 17th-century music, and who find enjoyment in instinctively tracking its harmonic motion from tonic outward and back again. And there are people who are fully musically literate who find an immense joy in the ingenious way Bach solves contrapuntal problems, and in his resourcefulness in developing a full movement from a scrap of motif.
And for what it's worth, I think there are also a lot of people who work out because it makes them *feel* good, though you are also correct that for many it's a function of their sexual marketability.
1) Maybe everybody says that they like Bach, but how many actually listen to the music? I think an essential part of the definition of "fan" is that you don't just give lip service to the thing that you're a fan of, you actually read the books, listen to the music, watch the movies, etc.
I don't have as much time these days but when I was younger if I heard 30 seconds of a piece I could often nail down who the conductor was, regardless of whether I had heard that particular performance/recording before. The only way to get there is to listen to a lot of music, thousands of hours worth, and somebody who's not genuinely enthusiastic about the stuff just isn't going to put that amount of time in.
2) All sports/physical activity is half about the other guy and half about beating your own brain. A personal anecdote: I have fenced for years and years. In fencing the primary mode of practice is sparring with other people, so it's not fighting per se but it is a contest against another human being that you engage in every time that you go to the gym. If you are full of shit that is going to become instantly apparent to everyone there.
When I was younger and just starting out I was sparring with somebody. We were both at the neutral position, at that stage where you are probing and trying to gain some advantage. but not in a position to actually score a point. There is a maneuver where you pull your sword back over your shoulder so the tip is pointing behind you and the hilt is pointed at your opponent. For some reason the thought just suddenly popped into my head that if I did that I would beat him. As soon as the thought entered into my brain I just did it, without further reflection, he froze, and I thumped him on top of the head. All of the years since then have been me trying to do that again.
1) At root, you can never disentangle your true distal v. proximate motives. I don't believe people are that in control of themselves. I can claim that at root, you just want people to know you are "sophisticated" or "smart". It's really self-flattering to be like, I only do this thing cause I'm a super MORAL. Look at all those plebs who love Taylor Swift. Harumph.
2)https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/pride-comes-between-lions-in-fight-for-dominance-at-zoo-miami/
Most of our lives are battling in some status dimension: smarts, physical, other.
I mean you see how much people care with top 10 lists, Star Wars v. Star Trek, S-tier, A-tier shit. In comic books, regular people really care who can beat up who. This hero is omega level. It's why Thanos and Thor have a fistfight at the end of a Marvel movie.
This is certainly correct regarding animals. More posturing than anything else.
We are animals
There are structural/factor analysis models of music that show consistency among almost all people as they age. They tend to like Sophisticated (Classical/Jazz) more as they age and like Pop or Intense(Metal, Soundcloud Rap) less as they age. It's heavily correlated to how peoples' 5-factor personality changes over the lifecycle.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253337104_Music_Through_the_Ages_Trends_in_Musical_Engagement_and_Preferences_From_Adolescence_Through_Middle_Adulthood
Keep in mind that classical covers everything from Mozart to Alban Berg or Bartok and jazz from Kenny G to Bitches Brew.
Plus I seem to recall research that indicates that people basically stop listening to new music after a certain age and lock in to what was playing when they were young. I still listen to the Pixies and Mission of Burma today just because of the positive associations that music has in my brain with being young.
Generally true, though I've been listening to classical music since I was 9 years old. And I'm a 59-year-old dude who enjoys listening to Prurient.
Anecdotal, I know.
The Limitations and Future Directions section of that paper makes me wonder (I read the whole thing on my phone and have doubts about the meaningfulness of the study, but would have to re-read it on my computer to see if the conclusions are as tortured as they seem to be). I would be really curious if anyone else has had similar studies with similar results, especially longitudinal studies. (Says the person pushing 50 and currently wearing her Einstürzende Neubauten shirt. My personal anecdotal sample set, like anyone’s, is skewed, but I don’t know anyone in my cohort whose musical tastes have dramatically changed in the decades we’ve known each other.)
I'm biased, I like most of the factor analysis work on music and like Rentfrow in particular. I think his methodology is pretty good and is at least better than the lexical hypothesis that undergirds personality psychology. If you believe in Big 5 personality, I think his factor analysis method is less burdensome than lexical hypothesis. From memory, I think he just plays unpopular clips for people and asks if they like it.
I haven't read this literature in awhile, but Rentfrow is one of main people.
https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/JPSP03musicdimensions.pdf
I still remember going to see Kronos Quartet, getting blown away by the performance, and having the old dude next to me, dressed in a fine suit, get up and boo.
Well obviously there is still a considerable amount of passion for the genre among the fans.
I have to say that all jazz fans I have ever known are the most insufferable twats ever. When you say you don't care for jazz that much, they're always like "no way man, you just haven't heard the right jazz!" and proceed to try and "educate" you on the subject.
I am far more of a classical music fan than jazz but I would say that not "liking" jazz is akin to not liking anime, or comic books, or movies. Jazz as a genre covers everything from Kenny G to Miles Davis. Anime is Miyazaki and Shigurui. And comic books cover the Marvel stuff as well as Maus and Chris Ware. There is probably something out there for every individual in any genre. Of course the constraints of work, chores and chance makes finding that thing that you love problematic.
I see your jazz fans and raise you the Beyoncé fans. (I have tried to like both and failed. The jazz fans, in my experience, are far less aggro in their efforts to get you to see the light.)
Beyoncé fans are a different breed--so many of them are all about their parasocial relationship with the artist. Jazz fans tend to be more like trainspotters: "I prefer the six-bar version of 'Criss Cross,' ideally in the 1958 New York recording where Diz sat in with Monk's band, which you can hear on this Italian bootleg. You really have to listen to it on a system like mine, with an old-school McIntosh tube amp..." etc., etc, etc.
I don't know if it's explicitly because of the "poptimism" trend that Freddie highlights here, but having a teenage daughter now, I can report its...weird...how utterly unimportant music seems to be for teens now compared to the 1990s. People used to construct their entire identifies around the genre of music they listened to. Hell, I did it too - I went through several phases from my teens to early 20s, where I liked different obscure musical genres, which over time grew more and more niche and underground before I mellowed out with age. Maybe my 8th grader is just friends with more "normies" than I ever was, but she has like...friends who like Disney soundtracks and shit. But for the most part, music isn't as important to them as movies, or books, or viral videos. It's just not a big thing any more.
Which really suggests that the self-important posturing of Pitchfork codes it as being for old people. Because of course that's who reads Pitchfork now...who else would?
100%. My best guess is that, now that piracy and streaming have made music ubiquitous and cheap, the perceived value has collapsed (and it’s hard to imagine that changing). In the heydays of CDs, dropping twenty bucks on every hour or music felt like a real commitment, so it was easy to imagine it was important somehow. Now that everything is everywhere...eh.
Yes, and now the focus has shifted from albums (which most of us in the 70s, when I was growing up, were concerned with) to individual tracks. The idea of the album as a coherent stand-alone statement (in artistic terms) has absolutely no currency with young listeners today.
It didn’t in 1960 either though. Singles were the main way people digested music for a long time and eventually the LP format took over for economic as well as artistic reasons. I think long form musical output will gain currency with “the kids” again at some point, although the cycle will probably never fully repeat thanks to music having basically zero monetary value anymore...
Well, yes--that's why I referenced the 70s specifically. :)
there are a lot of technological/commercial factors that are transforming the consumption of music, and Pitchfork is downstream of all of them. that's what makes it a bit frustrating to me when people rag on Modern Pitchfork or poptimism as if they're the final boss in all this rather than the customer service desk, figuratively speaking
Maybe they don't live for music because the music they know how to access is objectively pretty bad? And Pitchfork is guilty of helping construct the world where that's the case.
I mean, my wife and I play music in the car all the time, and my kids either have no reaction at all or actively loathe it (my daughter explicitly asked my wife to stop playing The Postal Service - she has said what I play is "better" but left it at that).
Of course, kids typically hate their parents music, because they want to show they're different people, but most go through a phase where are at least open to it before forming their own musical identities.
Interesting. What do you think is the cause, then?
The kids I know, having a teen, all know how to access pretty much anything available on streaming. They like music, but it’s all more of a grab bag than a coherent statement of taste, and they’re chill with each other’s differences. On the other hand, they are deadly serious when it comes to their tastes in television, sometimes downright nasty about it.
Sure, there's always been that aspect. And you can draw a through-line from critics like Dave Marsh right through to the Pitchfork brigade. But there were also critics who wrote about the music itself rather than focusing on the people who made it or who listen to it. Christgau, for one (though I don't much care for his taste or point of view).
It's probably impossible to say for certain, given that you'd have be fully immersed in the different time periods you cite, while also being basically the same person, development-wise, to judge how different it is. But there's lots of good writing on music out there, and I think it is different today, or has been for some time. Sure, plenty of people like Dylan because of what they thought he signified. But plenty of others - and many of those same people - loved Dylan because his music deeply moved them, or they considered him, with all sincerity, a prophet of sorts, and there was a deeply felt connection between the music, the politics, and cultural shifts, etc.
Again, this is hard to precisely quantify, but: the biggest single indicator is the quality of the most popular music. The biggest acts today are range from bad to mediocre, with a few exceptions, whereas say, a few decades ago, that wasn't the case. The 1960s are a special case, but they are also the most stark example: year after year of adventurous, compelling, artistically excellent music that was also enormously popular.
I don't think the issue is the role of culture; as you say, that has always been part of the mix. For me, it is much more about the basic problem that the music getting heard today is emptier, and decisions about what gets played more automated. In this sense the machinations around image and social positioning, from Pitchfork or anyone else, are beside the point. None of this would seem quite as terrible if it weren't for the fact that music as a shared aesthetic, cultural and emotional experience has died in the last 10-15 years. Of course *music* hasn't really died: there is always great music if you look in the right places and keep up with your struggling independent artist of choice, or the local music scene. But it feels like no one cares anymore. Even as recently as 2010, you could go into a public place or coffee shop and hear someone playing the latest release by some decent indie artist, or deep cuts from an album they actually knew (not curated by Spotify). You would still hear conversations and debates about X's latest, where many people had been following X. I literally cannot remember the last time I was in a public place and heard a song that really grabbed me, made me ask "Who's that?!" Something which someone had chosen deliberately to share with others, that people were specifically paying attention to, together. In fact, aside from oldies randomly circulating on automated playlists, it's rare that I hear anything distinctive at all.
I'm not saying anything new or revelatory, obviously. But there is something profoundly sad about the loss, and what blows my mind is how little I see this being openly discussed. Quite simply, the music the majority of us hear in the presence of other people, the vast majority of the time, is significantly more impoverished, and less reflective of real preference, than it was even 15 years ago. How could that not eventually affect us in some other way, whether it's psychologically, sociologically or spiritually?
Right on. Like a lot of things, poptimism overshot its original (defensible) target. Which, I think, is the correct view to have - pop music (and pop culture more generally) is worthy of being taken seriously and shouldn't be dismissed out of pocket. I was one of those kids that thought I was cooler than everyone else simply because I didn't like or listen to pop music. I wish I could go back and smack some sense into 14 year old me. That's what the original form of poptimism meant to me, to broaden my horizons and listen to stuff I ordinarily wouldn't touch.
Problem is, we've gotten there, and then several miles beyond the target. Now, it's pop culture is high art which deserves to be placed on a pedestal. Pop music needs to be important and about more than just the music, Pitchfork being a chief offender here. It's how a song which should have just been a club anthem is actually the song of the year, and an important statement in the raging culture war:
https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-100-best-songs-of-2017/?page=10
Not all music is high art. Not all music needs to be important. Not all pop music is good just because a lot of people listen to it. Find music you love, listen to that, keep an open mind, and you'll be good to go
If people took a truly poptimist attitude to music writing, as in to the writing itself, then we'd have to throw about 95% of the current stuff in the bin.
We’ll said, and the Wikipedia article on Poptimism has some links to good essays expressing the same!
Thanks culture industry!
Sadly, most people are not educated on what should be indicative of “high” art or culture. I’m sure you know any genre can be cultivated in a way that it achieves sublime aesthetic properties and virtuosity, but I think the persistently malignant and myopic understanding of aesthetic appreciation we tend to see comes from a deeply entrenched notion of class status tied to culture.
I don't love the move of saddling a journalist with the whole brand of the venue that's published their piece. It's Larson saying these things, not Pitchfork itself.