Every so often, when I’m bored and find myself crawling through the Internet looking up music reviews, I end up on Pitchfork. Pitchfork doesn’t really cover the genres of music I typically listen to; however, sometimes I attempt to broaden my horizons and saunter over to their website to see how they feel about a particular album.
While every so often their reviews are insightful and informative, most of the time you get convoluted prose such as, “For three albums in the early aughts he devilishly rewrote the rules of pop music to shoehorn hip-hop into the national spotlight, but here he’s winded, struggling to keep up with modern pop conventions, genuflecting to trap on ‘Rap God’ and EDM on ‘The Monster,’ dragging his biggest competitor Kendrick into one of the worst songs of his young career, and soldering on hooks from singers of varying anonymity wherever applicable to ensure this patchwork monstrosity is too big to fail, all of this under the guise of a return to form, his second in three albums.”
Seriously, the above is an actual sentence from their review of Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
Pitchfork has taken their fair share of criticism on the Internet, often in a humorous manner. The Pitchfork Review Generator provides you with a pair of lines that would not seem out of place in a Pitchfork review.
A quick jaunt to the website netted me this doozy of a phrase: “On a personal level the album appealed to me as a nonconformist triptych of damningly colonial solar-grime.”
I don’t know what that phrase actually means. I also don’t know what “genuflecting to trap on ‘Rap God’” or “singers of varying anonymity wherever applicable to ensure this patchwork monstrosity is too big to fail” means either.
But Pitchfork itself is not the problem. People know what they are getting when they visit their website; they are getting a series of pretentious phrases thrown together rather haphazardly with made-up genres and a series of descriptions of each song, which don’t really have anything to do with what it actually sounds like.
My problem is with writers who look to Pitchfork as the gold standard of music criticism in this day and age.
Too often am I reading album reviews with phrases embedded in them such as, “the tightness of the ’80s neo-core post-apocalyptic chillwave pop band is readily apparent on their latest 7” vinyl release.”
Personally, I read an album review to get a better idea of what the album sounds like and to see what someone who has the authority to be writing a review thinks of it.
Reading the above line—which is not from anything... that I know of—makes me very confused as to what it actually sounds like.
To writers everywhere: Before you throw six adjectives before the song name, take a step back.
When you listen to Eminem’s new album, does it sound like The Marshall Mathers LP, or is it a totally separate entity?
Tell me things you actually hear, not things that you think would make a great review. A great review describes the album as well as possible. It doesn’t need a million descriptors or a track-by-track breakdown of how you can hear an influence from the most obscure musicians of all time. Find a comparison to artists I might have actually heard of.
Instead of looking to Pitchfork for a guide on how to write an album review, look at arguably the greatest rock music critic of all-time, Lester Bangs.
Bangs inserted his unique style into everything he wrote. And he too would wax on about bands, comparing them to whomever he thought they sounded like. Let’s take a section from a Yes album review from 1970.
In it, Bangs writes, “Their sound seems to be a mix of several of the most currently popular approaches, notably Crosby, Stills and Nash (vocally) and Vanilla Fudge (instrumentally). Unlike the Fudge, they have a sense of style, taste and subtlety, and the record is a pleasurable one, if a bit familiar-sounding.”
In this, Bangs evokes a comparison to two different artists, both of whom were culturally significant at the time, but tells the reader how they sound like those other artists. I actually get an understanding of what the album sounds like as opposed to just a series of thrown together comparisons.
To close out my rant, find your influences (and that could be Pitchfork), but find your own voice. If I want to read a Pitchfork-style review, I’ll go straight to Pitchfork. If I want to read your opinion, give me your opinion, through your own lens, not a Pitchfork-hazed one.
Want to bitch at Brian Pitchfork style about this column? Email him at weidy@wisc.edu.
