Pitchforked! (Vol. 2): 5.8/10

Pitchfork is a website which primarily focuses on reviewing indie music. Generally speaking, I like the site a lot and admit that its writers are far better at writing than I ever will be. In fact, the site's reviewers introduced me to some of my favorite acts – including MGMT and Springsteen. Occasionally, though, their writing seems as though it's trying a little too hard to prove something. "Pitchforked" highlights these moments.

The practice of taking questionable writing and making fun of it was made popular by the blog Fire Joe Morgan. FJM is defunct, but the tradition continues on at Kissing Suzy Kolber (I also love KSK's usage of all-CAPS to make a joke funnier). I don't think I'm ripping them off; rather, I'm just expanding their idea from sports to music. Still, I'd feel sleazy if I didn't credit them with the idea.

One final note: Pitchfork is known to retroactively edit posts without warning its readers. This means that some of the quotes I feature here may no longer be part of what's posted as the "official" review. Believe me - I didn't make these quotes up.

From the review of the Crystal Stilts’ In Love With Oblivion

“What’s up with that guy’s singing, anyway?”

Hipster observational comedy is not very funny. “So what’s the deal with Moleskines? And do Polaroids really need to be shaken? I mean, am I right?”

“…in 2008, when Crystal Stilts emerged as one of the more interesting acts in the lo-fi Brooklyn jangle-pop pile.”

Jangle-pop piles are the natural result of years of wind and rain slowly wearing down rocks into fashionably alternative shapes. Geologists refer to it “gentrificerosion”.

“However, you didn't really need to know what he was saying (or, for that matter, what key it was supposed to be sung in) to dive deep into the lonely, dark, and difficult-to-inhabit world of Alight of Night.”

You didn’t really need to know what was being sung or how it sounded in order to enjoy it. I don’t even have a joke here; that’s literally what the guy just wrote. I guess it’s kind of like you don’t have to know what a Pitchfork writer is talking about or what language he’s using in order to enjoy mocking him.

“The murkiness continues to recede on the band's sophomore effort”

A receeding murkline occurs in nearly 70% of indie bands by their third album. There is no cure for male pattern murkiness.

“He can be funny, too-- like on "Invisible City", when he sings about crawling into a sarcophagus with a girl before repeating, like a too-clever suspect in the interrogation room, ‘We know what happened at death/ But I don't have to say why.’”

What? How is that funny in any way at all? Again, hipster comedy is pretty stupid. “Hey, have you heard the one about the girl, the sarcophagus, and the thinly veiled existentialist comment?”

From the review of Jeremy Jay’s Dream Diary

“Though overlong by about a third, the Bishop Allen-by-way-of-Modest Mouse bends of "In the Times", and the Belle and Sebastian-like breeze of "Shayla" boast some of Jay's finest lures yet.”

This was the second-to-last sentence in the whole review and I count three references in it. The over/under for references in this review was 3.5, so I feel like there was probably some reference-shaving that led to this sentence being written.

Pitchforked! (Vol. 1): 3.7/10

Pitchfork is a website which primarily focuses on reviewing indie music. Generally speaking, I like the site a lot and admit that its writers are far better at writing than I ever will be. In fact, the site's reviewers introduced me to some of my favorite acts – including MGMT and Springsteen. Occasionally, though, their writing seems as though it's trying a little too hard to prove something. "Pitchforked" highlights these moments.

The practice of taking questionable writing and making fun of it was made popular by the blog Fire Joe Morgan. FJM is defunct, but the tradition continues on at Kissing Suzy Kolber (I also love KSK's usage of all-CAPS to make a joke funnier). I don't think I'm ripping them off; rather, I'm just expanding their idea from sports to music. Still, I'd feel sleazy if I didn't credit them with the idea.

One final note: Pitchfork is known to retroactively edit posts without warning its readers. This means that some of the quotes I feature here may no longer be part of what's posted as the "official" review. Believe me - I didn't make these quotes up.

From the review of Talib Kweli's Gutter Rainbows:

"The beats on Gutter Rainbows are tight-enough neo-soul by committee-- 13 producers handle 14 tracks -- and most of it sounds like faintly modernized versions of Rawkus-circa-2002 boom-bap, with the occasional outlier in the form of a post-"Hello Brooklyn" old-school banger (Khrysis' "I'm on One") or atmospheric synthesizer dirge (Blaq Toven's "How You Love Me")."

Wait for it….wait for it…

"But isolating the beats from the rapper seems futile."

Bam! I feel like the ENTIRE previous sentence was all about isolating these beats. You just compared them to something called Rawkus-circa-2002 boom-bap (not to be confused with Rawkus-circa-2003 boom-bap, which was entirely different).

From the review of Destroyer's Kaput:

"Every era has a sound."

For example, the Victorian Era is known for a hilarious amount of fart sounds due to the 19^th century invention of the whoopee cushion.

"But Bejar's essential complexity ultimately feels human. It seems absurd to look for genuine wisdom in music in 2011, when we're constantly gorging ourselves on the all-you-can-eat buffet of post-modern web culture."

I like how you started a sentence with 'but' – classic hipster proseslinging. But I don't know about "constantly gorging myself on the all-you-can-eat-buffet of post-modern web culture". Are you calling me fat? I tried to eat the internet ONE TIME. Gimme a break!

From the review of The 1900's Return of the Century:

"If the sentiments are tough, the music itself is tender, borrowing from Belle & Sebastian and Brill Building pop to create a sound that is both pastoral and urbane, straightforward yet sophisticated."

Pastoral, but urbane. Straightforward, but sophisticated. Esoteric, yet accessible. Light, but great-tasting. Mud-wrestly, yet classy.

From the review of The Jayhawks' Hollywood Town Hall/ Tomorrow the Green Grass:

"What the Jayhawks never drifted toward was success-- at least not the kind that they and their fans felt the music warranted. Even so, a full 25 years after forming, the Jayhawks don't come across as also-rans, which is itself a minor miracle."

Other minor miracles include: convincing people that Animal Collective is a good band; making Park Slope the new Williamsburg; Zooey Deschanel.

"Those tightly intertwined vocals are reset in a dusty, electrified setting, marking perhaps the Jayhawks' greatest innovation."

Sadly, the Jayhawks would lose to Creighton in the second round of March Irony.

"The five bonus tracks neither distract from nor add to the original, but they do reveal the tracklist as a model of economic editing and sequencing."

Neither distract nor add! Hipsters are not constrained by our math operators. Addition and subtraction are played out. Actually, Pitchfork would never say something is "played out" since the term itself is dated. They would say something like "…the once formidable duo Addition & Subtraction – an early-decade dancehall staple which rose to towering heights on the strength of its bubblegum synthesizers and devil-may-care baselines – ultimately descended into self-parody in mid-2005."

Damn that's actually pretty good. Maybe Pitchfork is hiring?

Keep Pushing 'Till It's Understood

Move-in day for incoming freshman at my college was Thursday September 3^rd. I remember my own first day at school – butterflies, handshakes, forced smiles, teary mother, nascent friendships – and I became nostalgic watching a new generation of kids cliché their way down a new path full of journeys.

Some freshman looked overwhelmed with the sheer size of their new campus and its enormous student body. An uneasy mixture of ambition, angst, and Axe hung in the air. As with all freshmen, the men mainly wore cargo shorts and ill-fitting polo shirts and the women mainly wore nothing. Much like that recent Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow film Butt Cancer, I thought this was in incredibly bad taste.

New Student Orientation, or NSO, is among the most fun times on campus since dozens of open parties are thrown each night. Two friends of mine, also juniors, joined me in going to a few such events last night. I acknoweledge that I am too old to be doing this, but my alternatives were playing a Madden 1995 emulator and watching a rerun of Hung.

Parties during NSO frequently have crowds spilling out from houses onto the street. Campus security prioritizes student safety over actually enforcing any laws. Upon entry at the first party, I heard some guy brag that he had “eight beers, three shots, plus some jungle juice…no, was it nine beers? Yeah, I had ten beers!” Fortunately, I had taken him with the first overall pick in my Fantasy Drinking league so I knew that my team, Lendale Lite, was going to win its first round matchup against Dante’s DWInferno.

Too soon?

The conventional frat party was fun enough, despite my sobriety. The dance floor was sufficiently awkward, with enough people making the “hey check it out I’m fist pumping lol” joke that I knew it was time to go. We left around midnight and decided to see what else there was to see.

We crashed a hipster party. I braced myself for the worst. I assumed the women would be sporting ironic moustaches and the men would have ironic ovaries.

There were indeed enough snobbish hipsters to prevent me from fully enjoying myself or having self-confidence due to the fact that I weigh more than 45 pounds. That being said, the vast majority of them were wonderfully friendly and welcoming despite the fact that I was clearly a non-ironic fish out of mainstream water at their party.

It became clear moments after entry that the difference between the two parties could not have been more pronounced. The hipsters had set up a giant projector and screened Fast Times at Ridgemont High across the side of their house. I saw Damone impregnate a girl on a sixty foot screen. Hand-drawn cartoons covered the place and were inked directly on the walls. The frat brothers threw a bigger party and therefore felt that they should have a larger say in how the new republic was governed, but a hipster we met published a New Jersey Plan giving each party equal say. Bicameralism is one of the more ironic forms of government.

I got to know a few of them. I liked their music, their swagger, their comfortably predictable efforts and nonconformity. They were great conversationalists and drank Yuengling, a proud American beer. Most generally agreed with the mission of the United Nations, but found it too weak to affect real world progress and were alarmed by its anemic third down conversion rate. I liked these people.

The first hipster I approached was wearing a wife-beater with New York Times headlines all over it. These weren’t famous headlines, just ones like “Staten Island Councilman Stubs Toe”. He also wore a keffiyeh, mutton chops, and had hair down to his hips. He told me had had graduated, and I knew he looked familiar. I finally placed it, I went to Cheesecake and he was a mu-a-fi-a waiter there. I asked him what kind of music he liked expecting him to name some garbage by Animal Collective and Fleet Foxes. “I’m a huge Springsteen fan. Actually, pretty much everyone around here loves him.”

I met a girl named Ivy next. She had a friendly face, bangs, and light skin. She wore an oversized teal t-shirt, striped leggings, red shoes, teal earrings, and some very bright red lipstick. My friends and I kept making jokes about how “Ivy is probably a little out of our League” and “let’s just go hit on her less attractive friend, NESCAC”.

The night was nearly over. But then, from about twenty feet away, I heard a familiar chord progression as a guitarist and his drummer sang about trouble in the heartland. “Badlands”, perhaps my favorite song by Bruce, was being played by a hipster named Luke at the corner of 39^th and Spruce. He had a giant Adam’s apple, skinny jeans, and looked like a cross between various recessive and dominant traits.