I like music reviews - Freddie's music tastes are unusual (a lot of noise something or other that I don't like), and it's fun to hear different perspectives.
I don't think those two examples are similar. If the Velvet Underground followed up their studio albums with an unironic album of soft, crooning ballads about the joys of Christmas and kissing the Pope's ring and kitten-hugging it would somewhat negate the experimental, rebellious hedonistic lifestyle promised in their original albums. You can't be both a nihilistic lover of the avant-garde and S&M and unapologetic heroin user who believes in whatever the hell they were doing with Andy Warhol plus John Cale's viola AND be a great admirer of solid middle-American values, Frank Sinatra and the papacy. Either you were lying then or you're lying now.
But you can have a good meal at a restaurant one day and a lousy one the next.
there's a NYT Popcast episode circa Blonde where you can hear me clown the whole notion of Frank Ocean's music for a solid 30 minutes, if you're into that kind of thing.
i'm a born-and-bred hater so there's lots of stuff in this cruel world that i roll my eyes at, though i do try to be a gracious critic, i really do; but Frank Ocean has always lived in that "oh, come on" territory for me
I do (an incredibly dorky) thing with some friends where we all listen to one full album from each of the last six decades then discuss them. It's been a really fun way to expand my musical knowledge and I've heard a lot of great pop, rap, and country albums I never heard before (and much rock).
A couple weeks go I picked Blonde because I remember hearing so much about how great it was and how amazing Frank Ocean was. I listened to the entire thing. It may have been the least enjoyable album of this entire project. Normally I can at least appreciate if I'm just not getting it. I got it. There was nothing to get. An occasional moment of "oh, that was nice" followed by dreck.
This wasn't "oh, that's a well crafted version of something I don't like." It was just a lot of "wtf is that and why do people claim this is brilliant?" Truly baffling stuff.
blonde is this frivolous curator's typhoon of bookmarked sensibilities w no central personality, ideas, or proficiency. this explains why it's bad but also why it's acclaimed.
I remember being crestfallen when that album came out about how bad it was. I loved her prior work, including whitechocolatespaceegg, which many of my friends were lukewarm to but which I thought was a signal of an evolving sound. Then this album, I listened to it over and over in the hope that there was something buried in there that I missed, but no. The key part to selling out is trading artistic value for popularity, but this album was never popular.
I know nothing about Liz Phair and the context she exists in other than what i’ve just read here and my memories of her being on the cover of all those issues of SPIN that I used to hate read as a teenager. But that first song linked here about being a psycho or whatever, the first song by her that i’m aware of hearing, definitely just earwormed me so maybe I’ll go listen to the Guyville album or whichever one is supposed to be better.
It is great to hear someone proudly do a vocal eyeroll about Promising Young Woman though. Knew I could count on ya, Freddie.
I hear what you're saying about Promising Young Woman as it does occasionally get preachy, but I still liked it for the most part. Yes, it was tailor made for the MeToo movement, but I was still entertained by its twisty plot. Oh well.
Great piece. It seems to me like you like these days can almost predict the critical reaction to a piece of music by who makes it.
White Highbrow:Carly Rae Jepsen, Lana Del Rey type artists
White Lowbrow:Imagine Dragons, Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Modern Country
Black Highbrow:Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, Frank Ocean, Cardi B
Black Lowbrow:Trap rappers, especially if they say offensive stuff like DaBaby
If an album fits well into what critics typically consider highbrow than it gets a good review, almost never a really scathing one. If it fits better into the lowbrow category it will probably get a middling or bad review .
"If it fits better into the lowbrow category it will probably get a middling or bad review ."
And man do they hate it when they have to give a low brow artist a middling review!
I remember years ago, Dave Matthews Band released an album, and I listened to a very well-known music critic review it. He 1) thought it was a good album and 2) was clearly angry that he couldn't trash it and had to admit he thought it was okay through gritted teeth.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but it's fascinating. A look at a culture war I totally ignored because I was too young/didn't care enough at the time.
I was in college when Exile in Guyville came out. It was a revelation, particularly to a guy like me whose album collection was stuck firmly in the 60s and 70s (kids, listen to whatever you want, but if you think you're being cool by listening only to music from decades ago, I promise you you don't come off like that and you're missing a lot).
I loved it; still do, one of my favorite albums ever. I was a big Stones fan, so I dug the vibe immediately. But that wasn't the meat - I had never in my life heard such personal songwriting. Dylan was always armored with irony and politics and poetry, layers of stuff that kept the listener far away from the man himself. And since he was my blueprint for great songwriting, finding someone who did exactly the opposite was like discovering a new color. It really was something, and Juvenilia was great too and Whitechocolatespaceegg had its moments. We saw her play a bunch and she's charming live and had fun fans. Really one of my favorites. The Girly Sounds recordings is the only music I've ever downloaded illegally. That's a tribute of sorts, right? I did it on NAPSTER. Get off my lawn!
And yeah, the self-titled album is unlistenable. It's a shame when a voice as unique and compelling as hers gets lost in an attempt at selling out, but my feeling has always been that miraculous output over decades just isn't really a thing. Most people don't have that much in them. Maybe she'll pull another great album out someday - who knows? In the meantime I'll listen to the old stuff.
And Pitchfork is just preening. That it's (woke, I guess?) preening now instead of cooler-than-thou preening ("what do you mean you don't "get" Interpol?-lol... how can you say that In the Aeroplane Under the Sea isn't the most important album ever released when you only listened to it once?") feels like a lateral move.
Regarding Phair's "personal songwriting", yes, she did it very well and with a very GenX sense of self-awareness and irony (this was before irony became a sad joke), but there certainly had been very personal songwriters before: Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, and Tori Amos (whose "Little Earthquakes" came out a couple of years before "Guyville") to name just a few that come to mind offhand.
I was going to mention Joni - the only artist that I was listening to at the time that did the same thing ("Blue" will never stop being in my top three favorite albums). But I didn't want to ruin the really amazing "Dylan/Phair" dichotomy thing I blurted out. :)
i'd love to hear what you think about stan culture and how these sieges of 14 year olds posting fancams push pitchfork/stereogum/whatever to publish favourable pieces about forgettable music. i wouldn't be surprised if any of these publications just let themselves get bullied into publishing puff pieces about dogshit music just because jiminluvr663 called them bigots for Not Stanning K-pop.
with rolling stone's new top 500 songs list, it's patently obvious that including stuff like bts is literally just done to placate angry 15 year olds, and they've given up on following any sort of real criteria on what makes art worth recognizing. like robyn makes fine music i guess but you need to make a STRONG case for dancing on my own being the 20th best song ever written. honestly that list as a whole would be fascinating to hear you opine on, it's absolutely brutal. i swear that list, and its associated non-criticism type of criticism is the late-stage capitalism equivalent of art analysis. total anomie. total loss of meaning. a complete cultural vacuum that invalidates itself and runs itself aground. jesus.
I refuse to click the link both because that sounds terrible and "Pitchfork changes their ratings of old albums to more closely align with contemporary thought" is a premise that exists in a perfect equilibrium between "this is so ridiculous it didn't happen and Freddie is making it up" and "this is the most Pitchfork thing ever." I don't want to upset that.
I didn’t even hear this was happening until Freddie’s article. Are people in general buying into this?
It’s not unprecedented, though. Rolling Stone did it ten, fifteen years ago. They went back and re-reviewed all the albums that the initially hated but sold a billion copies and whoa! You’re not going to believe this, but they discovered, twenty years later, that Led Zeppelin is actually like the greatest band ever and boy did they fart in church originally oh mea culpa.
Once-relevant institutions gotta do something. Sneer at em and move on I think.
Rolling Stone also recently redid their 500 greatest songs list so that they could make the top three woke. It's one of the most cynical things I've ever seen.
What, after their previous #1 had literally shared the name with the magazine? This level of cynicism is nothing new. I remember watching MTV count down their all time best videos as a youngin, with Thriller #1. Less than a year later, after Kurt Cobain's death, Smells Like a Teen Spirit had jumped something like 15 spots to #1. A few years later, after the grunge moment had passed it was something else. From a young age it's just been clear that the whole industry is a complete joke.
I mean, isn't that the issue with all art criticism?
To begin with, the overwhelming majority of people do not approach art with their minds but with their hearts. They want to know why the thing they love is Actually Good and the thing they hate is Actually Bad; they don't want to have to put in the work to learn an entire new language and frame for how to 'properly' appreciate art (and that's before you get into the art accessibility debate).
And on to that the constant changing trends and fashions, and that previously panned art can, by its very popularity, change the definition of what 'good art' is...and you've got an impossible situation where you're either an out-of-touch snob that nobody wants to listen to, or you're a vacillating windsock that just amplifies whatever is popular.
yeah this is the main counterargument i'd co-sign. there's music as music, and then there's "music" as understood to mean something broader as youth culture. and so of course music critics are often accounting for culture, not just music. and either way we're often just accounting for feelings.
which isn't to say that our accounting can't be off or our pitches ill-advised. it helps when we're more considerate and forthright about the distinctions.
But 'critics' should say when they are doing the one (or trying to) and when they are doing the other. How the culture develops can change how you hear a piece, but one can still distinguish influence from 'merit' (or whatever you want to call it). Hearing a lot of classical music can help me appreciate stuff that *was always there* in Bach and that I failed to notice before. You can trust that the later revisions of a critic like Robert Christgau (he's done a few) are more like that than the RollingStonePitchforkMTVblob because, even when you disagree with him, he's clearly consistent and not influenced by trends for their own sake.
Well, musically it's pleasant. The lyrics are kind of horrifying once you realize that they basically boil down to, "Gosh, wouldn't the world be so much nicer if everyone thought like me?"
These polls are ultimately just a reflection of the voter composition - picking the pickers in this case is effectively the editorial decision, and just as you might end up with a curiously high amount of Bollywood movies if you polled 250 random people in India on the best movies of all time, Aretha Franklin is gonna bubble to the top if you have more black and female voters. I don't think it's grossly cynical of them to diversify the voters. But the result does feel incoherent - if you polled 125 people in France + 125 in India on the best movies of all time, you'd have a pretty strange looking list too.
"Fuck tha Police" is #190, but "Fight the Power" is #2. OK.... "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is #5. "Alive" by Pearl Jam is #416. I get that it's a compilation, but the choices seem really weird. Similarly successful songs from the same genre and time period have wildly different rankings. I do not believe it was the natural result of many independent voters. I'm supposed to believe that "Fight the Power" was almost the top choice of over 250 people in the music industry today, 33 years since the song's release, who collectively submitted over 4000 songs. I'm skeptical this happened. It would be weirdly cool if true, but I'm old enough to remember when these songs came out and this list makes no sense.
No disrespect to Aretha Franklin (ahem) but I'd be fine with her song being in the top slot if it wasn't obviously a demographic checkbox they had to fill. "Oh, we have to have a woman POC in #1! Who is plausible?" The cynicism is pretty obvious when you can't find Diana Ross or the Supremes anywhere in the top 100. Just the top act in Motown, 12 #1 singles, 4 in 1965 alone.
I made the mistake of trying, in a fit of curiosity, to scroll through sufficient ads to load up the top three of those 500 songs. What was I thinking?
I've noticed AllMusicGuide sometimes revising reviews too. I'm dead certain that their original review of Coldplay's first album gave it only two stars, but once they became superstars with their second album, it was replaced by a completely new four-star review. Hmm, I wonder if the Wayback Machine still has the old one...
all of them are so funny in different ways. digging up foxygen just to bury them. bumping up chief keef and regina spektor ten years later by exactly one point. upgrading daft punk from a 6.5 to a literal perfect 10.
This is so funny/ fun for me to read. I just recently pulled out Exile in Guyville on a road trip to introduce her to my partner, who had never listened to her before. I bought it when it came out in the 90s and just loved it. It was so disappointing to listen to again, although I definitely understand why I liked it at the time. Fuck and Run was a perfect garage band sounding/ bedroom produced sardonic sort of anthem to suburban girls who were pissed off and wanting to embrace a sort of feminism and still hang out with their friends. It was an inside to a teenage girl's inner world before Tic Toc and Instagram made this all ubiquitous. IMO Liz Phair is not a great musician and I find most of her lyrics not that interesting aside from a few songs that you mention. I bought Whip Smart when it came out, listened to it a few times but thought it a rather boring follow up to Exile in Guyville . I remember reading an interview with her when Whip Smart came out and she talked about her song about wanting a baby. Does anyone know what that song is? I remember her describing herself as an ordinary suburban girl wanting ordinary things like the house and a baby. IMO she got really lucky to have a long career due to Fuck and Run, which I still do love. I just don't find her that interesting or talented otherwise!
I was one of the only people who liked that self-titled album then, and I still am now, and you claim to saying 'selling out is OK' (I agree!) but then that the album 'uniquely negates' what was good about her before. Just like you say your childhood is in the past and nothing can ruin it in retrospect, similarly for an artist's earlier discography. And it's not a great album! It's a 5-6. Why Can't I is a good pop song. Little Digger is really good. Several of these songs I still find myself humming many years later. The hooks work.
I feel like this post, and the reviewers then, just don't like that an artist that made deep music you respected switched to making shallow music you don't in a genre that isn't cool. And maybe you think every pop album is a 0.0 with no value to music, and that's fine, though I don't think this is as soulless or ridiculous as, say, Jewel's 0304 (though Jewel was terrible as a singer-songwriter as well). But this type of album can't be judged by picking out shallow lyrics – the best pop albums marry lyrical depth and amazing tunes, I want to say Robyn's Body Talk here, and this isn't that kind of album, but that makes it mediocre, not terrible.
Meet the Fockers doesn't 'negate' Raging Bull or any of De Niro's early career. But more importantly, Meet the Fockers isn't worse because Raging Bull exists. If it's a 3, it's a 3, it doesn't become a 0 just because you're mad at De Niro cashing a cheque. Liz Phair is a mediocre album, a 6 even feels a bit high, but putting it at a 0 says a lot more about the critic than the album itself.
You do, admittedly that was hyperbolic – I think it's inconsistent to rate this an 0.0 without rating all other pop albums, or at least the vast majority of them, as 0.0s.
I think some pop is better and some worse. I think your album is very bad. It's just taste; it's fine if you disagree. But there's plenty of pop I think is, like Carly Rae Jepsen's first album.
Idk, I'd give this album a low score, but I'd give lots of pop albums 10s. For example, any Kelly Clarkson album is 10x better, in my opinion. I also love Body Talk.
The self-titled album tries so hard to mimic the style of mid-00s girl pop that was everywhere for a few years (Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, Michelle Branch, Hilary Duff, soundtracks to teen rom coms). But you can tell that Phair’s heart wasn’t in it, and that’s why it’s weak even by the standards of that era. I’d never seen the video; she looks dead inside.
Out of curiosity, I checked out how it’s doing on Spotify. “Why Can’t I” is Liz Phair’s most popular song by far with 24.3 million plays, followed by “Fuck and Run” with 5.2 million. But the rest of the self-titled album has very low numbers. So it seems like her biggest commercial success for whatever reason.
However, “Why Can’t I” is not doing well by the standards of similar singles from that era. Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” (the one she lip-synced on SNL) has 45.5 million plays for example. There is some justice because Michelle Branch is twice as popular (“Everywhere” = 90 million plays).
As a person who likes her romcoms & Mark Ruffalo, I can tell you (with i only the faintest whisper of embarrassment) that "Why Can't I" was the signature track (or whatever you call it) in 13 Going On 30. My guess is that 99% of those streaming it have no idea who Liz Phair is. I remember being shocked it was her when I found out later. I never would have recognized her just from listening.
The only thing really new about this is how open they are about it, the way the elites no longer conceal the contempt they hold for the rest of us, but swan around in designer dresses before masked serfs while openly looting the country. So in such a milieu, why not transparently spout hip bullshit?
It's never really been only about the music. For example, how many ugly successful female singer-songwriters have their been? Joni Mitchell of course was the greatest, and lucky for her (and for us) she was also a transcendent beauty. The musical world would have been much poorer had she simply been a plain-looking girl from Saskatoon, playing her guitar at market fairs and hoe-downs. And Judy Collins and Crosby Stills & Nash wouldn't have reordered two of their biggest hits.
BTW, the opposite of selling out, Joni Mitchell walked away from superstardom after recording Hejira, and spent the next thirty odd years recording jazz music she enjoyed, but relatively few others did.
I like music reviews - Freddie's music tastes are unusual (a lot of noise something or other that I don't like), and it's fun to hear different perspectives.
I don't think those two examples are similar. If the Velvet Underground followed up their studio albums with an unironic album of soft, crooning ballads about the joys of Christmas and kissing the Pope's ring and kitten-hugging it would somewhat negate the experimental, rebellious hedonistic lifestyle promised in their original albums. You can't be both a nihilistic lover of the avant-garde and S&M and unapologetic heroin user who believes in whatever the hell they were doing with Andy Warhol plus John Cale's viola AND be a great admirer of solid middle-American values, Frank Sinatra and the papacy. Either you were lying then or you're lying now.
But you can have a good meal at a restaurant one day and a lousy one the next.
there's a NYT Popcast episode circa Blonde where you can hear me clown the whole notion of Frank Ocean's music for a solid 30 minutes, if you're into that kind of thing.
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/400x/53456172.jpg
i'm a born-and-bred hater so there's lots of stuff in this cruel world that i roll my eyes at, though i do try to be a gracious critic, i really do; but Frank Ocean has always lived in that "oh, come on" territory for me
also a lot of Frank Ocean's biggest boosters really poisoned the well early on by incessantly comparing him to Prince
ughhhhh
I think we would all like to hear this.
I do (an incredibly dorky) thing with some friends where we all listen to one full album from each of the last six decades then discuss them. It's been a really fun way to expand my musical knowledge and I've heard a lot of great pop, rap, and country albums I never heard before (and much rock).
A couple weeks go I picked Blonde because I remember hearing so much about how great it was and how amazing Frank Ocean was. I listened to the entire thing. It may have been the least enjoyable album of this entire project. Normally I can at least appreciate if I'm just not getting it. I got it. There was nothing to get. An occasional moment of "oh, that was nice" followed by dreck.
This wasn't "oh, that's a well crafted version of something I don't like." It was just a lot of "wtf is that and why do people claim this is brilliant?" Truly baffling stuff.
blonde is this frivolous curator's typhoon of bookmarked sensibilities w no central personality, ideas, or proficiency. this explains why it's bad but also why it's acclaimed.
I remember being crestfallen when that album came out about how bad it was. I loved her prior work, including whitechocolatespaceegg, which many of my friends were lukewarm to but which I thought was a signal of an evolving sound. Then this album, I listened to it over and over in the hope that there was something buried in there that I missed, but no. The key part to selling out is trading artistic value for popularity, but this album was never popular.
I know nothing about Liz Phair and the context she exists in other than what i’ve just read here and my memories of her being on the cover of all those issues of SPIN that I used to hate read as a teenager. But that first song linked here about being a psycho or whatever, the first song by her that i’m aware of hearing, definitely just earwormed me so maybe I’ll go listen to the Guyville album or whichever one is supposed to be better.
It is great to hear someone proudly do a vocal eyeroll about Promising Young Woman though. Knew I could count on ya, Freddie.
I hear what you're saying about Promising Young Woman as it does occasionally get preachy, but I still liked it for the most part. Yes, it was tailor made for the MeToo movement, but I was still entertained by its twisty plot. Oh well.
Great piece. It seems to me like you like these days can almost predict the critical reaction to a piece of music by who makes it.
White Highbrow:Carly Rae Jepsen, Lana Del Rey type artists
White Lowbrow:Imagine Dragons, Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Modern Country
Black Highbrow:Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, Frank Ocean, Cardi B
Black Lowbrow:Trap rappers, especially if they say offensive stuff like DaBaby
If an album fits well into what critics typically consider highbrow than it gets a good review, almost never a really scathing one. If it fits better into the lowbrow category it will probably get a middling or bad review .
"If it fits better into the lowbrow category it will probably get a middling or bad review ."
And man do they hate it when they have to give a low brow artist a middling review!
I remember years ago, Dave Matthews Band released an album, and I listened to a very well-known music critic review it. He 1) thought it was a good album and 2) was clearly angry that he couldn't trash it and had to admit he thought it was okay through gritted teeth.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but it's fascinating. A look at a culture war I totally ignored because I was too young/didn't care enough at the time.
I was in college when Exile in Guyville came out. It was a revelation, particularly to a guy like me whose album collection was stuck firmly in the 60s and 70s (kids, listen to whatever you want, but if you think you're being cool by listening only to music from decades ago, I promise you you don't come off like that and you're missing a lot).
I loved it; still do, one of my favorite albums ever. I was a big Stones fan, so I dug the vibe immediately. But that wasn't the meat - I had never in my life heard such personal songwriting. Dylan was always armored with irony and politics and poetry, layers of stuff that kept the listener far away from the man himself. And since he was my blueprint for great songwriting, finding someone who did exactly the opposite was like discovering a new color. It really was something, and Juvenilia was great too and Whitechocolatespaceegg had its moments. We saw her play a bunch and she's charming live and had fun fans. Really one of my favorites. The Girly Sounds recordings is the only music I've ever downloaded illegally. That's a tribute of sorts, right? I did it on NAPSTER. Get off my lawn!
And yeah, the self-titled album is unlistenable. It's a shame when a voice as unique and compelling as hers gets lost in an attempt at selling out, but my feeling has always been that miraculous output over decades just isn't really a thing. Most people don't have that much in them. Maybe she'll pull another great album out someday - who knows? In the meantime I'll listen to the old stuff.
And Pitchfork is just preening. That it's (woke, I guess?) preening now instead of cooler-than-thou preening ("what do you mean you don't "get" Interpol?-lol... how can you say that In the Aeroplane Under the Sea isn't the most important album ever released when you only listened to it once?") feels like a lateral move.
Regarding Phair's "personal songwriting", yes, she did it very well and with a very GenX sense of self-awareness and irony (this was before irony became a sad joke), but there certainly had been very personal songwriters before: Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, and Tori Amos (whose "Little Earthquakes" came out a couple of years before "Guyville") to name just a few that come to mind offhand.
I was going to mention Joni - the only artist that I was listening to at the time that did the same thing ("Blue" will never stop being in my top three favorite albums). But I didn't want to ruin the really amazing "Dylan/Phair" dichotomy thing I blurted out. :)
i'd love to hear what you think about stan culture and how these sieges of 14 year olds posting fancams push pitchfork/stereogum/whatever to publish favourable pieces about forgettable music. i wouldn't be surprised if any of these publications just let themselves get bullied into publishing puff pieces about dogshit music just because jiminluvr663 called them bigots for Not Stanning K-pop.
with rolling stone's new top 500 songs list, it's patently obvious that including stuff like bts is literally just done to placate angry 15 year olds, and they've given up on following any sort of real criteria on what makes art worth recognizing. like robyn makes fine music i guess but you need to make a STRONG case for dancing on my own being the 20th best song ever written. honestly that list as a whole would be fascinating to hear you opine on, it's absolutely brutal. i swear that list, and its associated non-criticism type of criticism is the late-stage capitalism equivalent of art analysis. total anomie. total loss of meaning. a complete cultural vacuum that invalidates itself and runs itself aground. jesus.
anyway thanks again freddie :)
I refuse to click the link both because that sounds terrible and "Pitchfork changes their ratings of old albums to more closely align with contemporary thought" is a premise that exists in a perfect equilibrium between "this is so ridiculous it didn't happen and Freddie is making it up" and "this is the most Pitchfork thing ever." I don't want to upset that.
Re-rating the Grimes album that came out literally 17 months ago is the most hilarious part of this ill-advised exercise.
I didn’t even hear this was happening until Freddie’s article. Are people in general buying into this?
It’s not unprecedented, though. Rolling Stone did it ten, fifteen years ago. They went back and re-reviewed all the albums that the initially hated but sold a billion copies and whoa! You’re not going to believe this, but they discovered, twenty years later, that Led Zeppelin is actually like the greatest band ever and boy did they fart in church originally oh mea culpa.
Once-relevant institutions gotta do something. Sneer at em and move on I think.
Rolling Stone also recently redid their 500 greatest songs list so that they could make the top three woke. It's one of the most cynical things I've ever seen.
What, after their previous #1 had literally shared the name with the magazine? This level of cynicism is nothing new. I remember watching MTV count down their all time best videos as a youngin, with Thriller #1. Less than a year later, after Kurt Cobain's death, Smells Like a Teen Spirit had jumped something like 15 spots to #1. A few years later, after the grunge moment had passed it was something else. From a young age it's just been clear that the whole industry is a complete joke.
I mean, isn't that the issue with all art criticism?
To begin with, the overwhelming majority of people do not approach art with their minds but with their hearts. They want to know why the thing they love is Actually Good and the thing they hate is Actually Bad; they don't want to have to put in the work to learn an entire new language and frame for how to 'properly' appreciate art (and that's before you get into the art accessibility debate).
And on to that the constant changing trends and fashions, and that previously panned art can, by its very popularity, change the definition of what 'good art' is...and you've got an impossible situation where you're either an out-of-touch snob that nobody wants to listen to, or you're a vacillating windsock that just amplifies whatever is popular.
yeah this is the main counterargument i'd co-sign. there's music as music, and then there's "music" as understood to mean something broader as youth culture. and so of course music critics are often accounting for culture, not just music. and either way we're often just accounting for feelings.
which isn't to say that our accounting can't be off or our pitches ill-advised. it helps when we're more considerate and forthright about the distinctions.
But 'critics' should say when they are doing the one (or trying to) and when they are doing the other. How the culture develops can change how you hear a piece, but one can still distinguish influence from 'merit' (or whatever you want to call it). Hearing a lot of classical music can help me appreciate stuff that *was always there* in Bach and that I failed to notice before. You can trust that the later revisions of a critic like Robert Christgau (he's done a few) are more like that than the RollingStonePitchforkMTVblob because, even when you disagree with him, he's clearly consistent and not influenced by trends for their own sake.
I didn’t hate that re-ranking until I saw Imagine in the top 100. Talk about a truly horrible song with virtually no artistic value.
Well, musically it's pleasant. The lyrics are kind of horrifying once you realize that they basically boil down to, "Gosh, wouldn't the world be so much nicer if everyone thought like me?"
Imaaagine alll the PEEEEEPLE....
A self-righteous song preaching against religion. Few see the irony.
These polls are ultimately just a reflection of the voter composition - picking the pickers in this case is effectively the editorial decision, and just as you might end up with a curiously high amount of Bollywood movies if you polled 250 random people in India on the best movies of all time, Aretha Franklin is gonna bubble to the top if you have more black and female voters. I don't think it's grossly cynical of them to diversify the voters. But the result does feel incoherent - if you polled 125 people in France + 125 in India on the best movies of all time, you'd have a pretty strange looking list too.
Went through their top 500 list and....
"Fuck tha Police" is #190, but "Fight the Power" is #2. OK.... "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is #5. "Alive" by Pearl Jam is #416. I get that it's a compilation, but the choices seem really weird. Similarly successful songs from the same genre and time period have wildly different rankings. I do not believe it was the natural result of many independent voters. I'm supposed to believe that "Fight the Power" was almost the top choice of over 250 people in the music industry today, 33 years since the song's release, who collectively submitted over 4000 songs. I'm skeptical this happened. It would be weirdly cool if true, but I'm old enough to remember when these songs came out and this list makes no sense.
No disrespect to Aretha Franklin (ahem) but I'd be fine with her song being in the top slot if it wasn't obviously a demographic checkbox they had to fill. "Oh, we have to have a woman POC in #1! Who is plausible?" The cynicism is pretty obvious when you can't find Diana Ross or the Supremes anywhere in the top 100. Just the top act in Motown, 12 #1 singles, 4 in 1965 alone.
Also they hate Eminem lol.
I made the mistake of trying, in a fit of curiosity, to scroll through sufficient ads to load up the top three of those 500 songs. What was I thinking?
I've noticed AllMusicGuide sometimes revising reviews too. I'm dead certain that their original review of Coldplay's first album gave it only two stars, but once they became superstars with their second album, it was replaced by a completely new four-star review. Hmm, I wonder if the Wayback Machine still has the old one...
Ironically, their first album is their only good album, the rest is shit, and that’s a hill I’ll die on.
all of them are so funny in different ways. digging up foxygen just to bury them. bumping up chief keef and regina spektor ten years later by exactly one point. upgrading daft punk from a 6.5 to a literal perfect 10.
This is so funny/ fun for me to read. I just recently pulled out Exile in Guyville on a road trip to introduce her to my partner, who had never listened to her before. I bought it when it came out in the 90s and just loved it. It was so disappointing to listen to again, although I definitely understand why I liked it at the time. Fuck and Run was a perfect garage band sounding/ bedroom produced sardonic sort of anthem to suburban girls who were pissed off and wanting to embrace a sort of feminism and still hang out with their friends. It was an inside to a teenage girl's inner world before Tic Toc and Instagram made this all ubiquitous. IMO Liz Phair is not a great musician and I find most of her lyrics not that interesting aside from a few songs that you mention. I bought Whip Smart when it came out, listened to it a few times but thought it a rather boring follow up to Exile in Guyville . I remember reading an interview with her when Whip Smart came out and she talked about her song about wanting a baby. Does anyone know what that song is? I remember her describing herself as an ordinary suburban girl wanting ordinary things like the house and a baby. IMO she got really lucky to have a long career due to Fuck and Run, which I still do love. I just don't find her that interesting or talented otherwise!
I was one of the only people who liked that self-titled album then, and I still am now, and you claim to saying 'selling out is OK' (I agree!) but then that the album 'uniquely negates' what was good about her before. Just like you say your childhood is in the past and nothing can ruin it in retrospect, similarly for an artist's earlier discography. And it's not a great album! It's a 5-6. Why Can't I is a good pop song. Little Digger is really good. Several of these songs I still find myself humming many years later. The hooks work.
I feel like this post, and the reviewers then, just don't like that an artist that made deep music you respected switched to making shallow music you don't in a genre that isn't cool. And maybe you think every pop album is a 0.0 with no value to music, and that's fine, though I don't think this is as soulless or ridiculous as, say, Jewel's 0304 (though Jewel was terrible as a singer-songwriter as well). But this type of album can't be judged by picking out shallow lyrics – the best pop albums marry lyrical depth and amazing tunes, I want to say Robyn's Body Talk here, and this isn't that kind of album, but that makes it mediocre, not terrible.
Meet the Fockers doesn't 'negate' Raging Bull or any of De Niro's early career. But more importantly, Meet the Fockers isn't worse because Raging Bull exists. If it's a 3, it's a 3, it doesn't become a 0 just because you're mad at De Niro cashing a cheque. Liz Phair is a mediocre album, a 6 even feels a bit high, but putting it at a 0 says a lot more about the critic than the album itself.
Funstyle, on the other hand...
"And maybe you think every pop album is a 0.0 with no value to music"
I very explicitly say otherwise in this very piece
You do, admittedly that was hyperbolic – I think it's inconsistent to rate this an 0.0 without rating all other pop albums, or at least the vast majority of them, as 0.0s.
I think some pop is better and some worse. I think your album is very bad. It's just taste; it's fine if you disagree. But there's plenty of pop I think is, like Carly Rae Jepsen's first album.
Idk, I'd give this album a low score, but I'd give lots of pop albums 10s. For example, any Kelly Clarkson album is 10x better, in my opinion. I also love Body Talk.
Related tweet: https://twitter.com/DanBoeckner/status/1445422933640466435?s=20
The self-titled album tries so hard to mimic the style of mid-00s girl pop that was everywhere for a few years (Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, Michelle Branch, Hilary Duff, soundtracks to teen rom coms). But you can tell that Phair’s heart wasn’t in it, and that’s why it’s weak even by the standards of that era. I’d never seen the video; she looks dead inside.
Out of curiosity, I checked out how it’s doing on Spotify. “Why Can’t I” is Liz Phair’s most popular song by far with 24.3 million plays, followed by “Fuck and Run” with 5.2 million. But the rest of the self-titled album has very low numbers. So it seems like her biggest commercial success for whatever reason.
However, “Why Can’t I” is not doing well by the standards of similar singles from that era. Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” (the one she lip-synced on SNL) has 45.5 million plays for example. There is some justice because Michelle Branch is twice as popular (“Everywhere” = 90 million plays).
As a person who likes her romcoms & Mark Ruffalo, I can tell you (with i only the faintest whisper of embarrassment) that "Why Can't I" was the signature track (or whatever you call it) in 13 Going On 30. My guess is that 99% of those streaming it have no idea who Liz Phair is. I remember being shocked it was her when I found out later. I never would have recognized her just from listening.
The only thing really new about this is how open they are about it, the way the elites no longer conceal the contempt they hold for the rest of us, but swan around in designer dresses before masked serfs while openly looting the country. So in such a milieu, why not transparently spout hip bullshit?
It's never really been only about the music. For example, how many ugly successful female singer-songwriters have their been? Joni Mitchell of course was the greatest, and lucky for her (and for us) she was also a transcendent beauty. The musical world would have been much poorer had she simply been a plain-looking girl from Saskatoon, playing her guitar at market fairs and hoe-downs. And Judy Collins and Crosby Stills & Nash wouldn't have reordered two of their biggest hits.
BTW, the opposite of selling out, Joni Mitchell walked away from superstardom after recording Hejira, and spent the next thirty odd years recording jazz music she enjoyed, but relatively few others did.