Do you still read reviews? I still read reviews. When I say reviews I don’t mean the link roundups by the Wirecutter telling you which pen is the best or the 300 word reviews that essentially amount to a thumbs up or a thumbs down, I mean the dense, juicy stuff that rewires your brain.
The playlist runs from 1/1/24 to ~2/20/24 (idk exactly, forgot to date Me Now 110)
Apple Music link for the real ones
Spotify link for all of you out there who hate musicians
Pitchfork(dot)com still very much publishes reviews every day. It uses the same 10-point scale in use since launch in 1996. It still scores most albums in a compressed range between, say, around 6.2 and 7.8. And, though I’m below the peak of my readership in the early 2010s, I still use the website as a reliable source of music criticism.
None of the above paragraph would be of any particular note if there was a lot of money in arts criticism, if Pitchfork had never been sold to Conde Nast, and if it did not look like, for a brief moment in January, Pitchfork was all but dead.
On January 18, Conde Nast leadership announced their decision to fold Pitchfork into GQ. Two completely different publications under one banner, Pitchfork out grew its white-prioritizing, oft-antagonistic, review-centric origins to become a much more robust and egalitarian project of seeking out and treating with respect a wide range of music now stitched to GQ, nominally a Men’s Magazine primarily about fashion and style buoyed by a chummier relationship with celebrities. The decision to ignore the difference and fold one into the other betrays that the leaders of Conde Nast have no idea what to do with Pitchfork. Thankfully, that promised move is not quite complete, though the layoff of many Pitchfork staffers and seeming reduction in the volume of the reviews remain permanent. In the first bit of goodish news out of the platform, they announced the hiring of Mano Sundaresan as the head of Editorial Content in an article that did not quite settle the lingering fears, concerns, and misgivings that come with firing much of your staff. Mano, founder of No Bells, is cool and a good nod.
Pitchfork taught me that I cared about arts criticism by teaching me that I cared about music criticism. My shortlist of must-reads over years of readership include Craig Jenkins and Meaghan Garvey and Sheldon Pearce and Rawiya Kamier and Stephen Kearse and Jayson Greene and and and. The best reviews listened and heard what my ears couldn’t, read between the lines, and saw what I didn’t even know to look for. It was years of reading Pitchfork—and other standout platforms that housed music criticism and off-Pitchfork writing from the aforementioned list of writers—that rewired my brain to hear music and see culture.
This newsletter is indebted to the best of the writers I read. Specifically the arts and culture critics. Reading them stirred a piece of me that learned to think critically and build connections in high school English and Comparative Literature courses. So many writers admit that the best writing is a game of careful studying; which is to say reading, imitation, and practice germinate the best arts criticism. My published writing tried on Jenkins’ air of shrewdly dispensed knowledge, Kameir’s willingness to write the sentence beneath the one you’d expect, Baldwin’s tinkering with the limits of punctuation, and so on. Every essay is practice at the same time it tries to make a point.
The best reviews listened and heard what my ears couldn’t, read between the lines, and saw what I didn’t even know to look for.
In a Longform podcast episode Parul Sehgal—a phenomenal book critic on staff at the New Yorker—describes the act of writing a book review as a kind of working through. A writer reading a text with a closeness beyond the cursory read, not just for what it says on it’s own, but how it sits in the context of both the point of creation and the point of engagement. Arts criticism, at its best, shows a writer doing the work of getting through all of the different inputs and coming out with something to say, about a piece of art and the world.
I read arts criticism to access a reflective slowness that runs counter to the pace of media consumption. Thoughtful opinion forming, something that generally takes time and withers under the pressure of churn, tentpoles all good arts criticism and serves money-minded shills a built in rationalization for deprioritizing the effort. Why spend the time and attention to consider something that will not stick in the cultural mind for very long? And so arts criticism shrinks at a rate even faster than the general writing industry. Especially music criticism. What is the value of music criticism—the expertise required, the careful consideration, the mental archives the best writers among us sift through before coming to a “take”, the work of putting pen to paper—when anyone can listen to any album on Spotify and then tweet?
I’m not sure I’m lamenting anything here beyond the nerdish obsession that could be built up around good writing. In the way the YouTube film critic industry rewired how people watch movies in search of “plot holes”, music industry data and the self-obsessed measuring contest that is The Most Eclectic Spotify Wrapped punctured the way people listen to and talk about music. Things don’t last as long, our devotions are deep and yet ill-considered (I’m looking at you stans!). Our culture lost the ability to say something is neither good nor bad and instead wade through the way the best and worst qualities of a work mix to leave us with strongly held ambivalences, some of the best Pitchfork reviews are for works in that 6.2 to 7.8 range. Art criticism is an art itself and a public service, the best critics among us help situate a work and glue it to our cultural memory. Where would we be if more money was available to create better cultural criticism? Where would we be if we had a culture willing to read and absorb it all?
This is a reminder to go hug the nerds in your life and ask them questions about their nerddoms. Then maybe give them pen, paper, a computer, a website, and read every word they write.
To the playlist.
Gap Band: “Wednesday Lover”
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHXT? THIS SHXT IS CRAZY. When he starts doing “Computer Love” and then later tells a bit of his life story??? this is cinema.
21 Savage (really Doja Cat): “n.h.i.e”
I have a lot of respect for people that just-show-up-to-work. Doja Cat is one of those people. I really, genuinely think she does not like being famous because she’s a weirdo at heart. Her not writing and singing an ad lib on this song and just saying “ad lib” as an ad lib is funny as hell.
“Watermelon Moonshine” Lainey Wilson
Ok, a little industry secret: no one releases music in the last few months of the year and it takes a bit before Q1 heats up and music starts to drop. What that means, is that I’m most susceptible to poor music choices from December-February. I was sitting in my favorite coffeeshop which I love so much that anything over the speakers sounds good, this song came on and one Shazam later it found its way to this playlist. Let’s be clear: I am still vehemently anti-country (ask me about my country phase a few years ago).
Kaytramine: “Rebuke”
We all like to think that we’re better than the way the demographics we shake into might suggest, but I’m just another heterosexual cisgender man, which is a way of saying that one of the more dude things I do is listen to Throwing Fits. I think the podcast is funny and a good time, but my rule is I only listen when Jimmy and Larry have a non het-cis man on the podcast because when they do they ask insane questions and lean into the most bro-ey elements of their beings. I listened to the Amine episode and it’s funny and ridiculous and has nothing really to do with this song and also it is a very good example of TF at its best-worst.
Speaking of artists that I’m ambivalent about and could say lots of things about that ambivalence: Amine!
See y’all Friday with the link dump. Sneak peek on the theme: RNC