what does this pfm song review thingy even mean anyway?

one kind of music writing i really like (and although i don't love this review, it does fall in the category,) strays like nabisco says toward the literary, the slightly- or lots-more oblique. some people sure hate what i do, for instance, and certainly a ton of what ends up on my blog (no editor! insane turnover!) is total shit, but whether you enjoy it or not does seem a huge issue of taste/voice/style, and not of overarching quality.

The tube socks image is a good one, but I'm not sure exactly how it relates to guitars: how exactly can they be "hiked up" in the same way? Unless this is just meant to invoke geeky/anxious/etc., which I can maybe hear.

I don't know who Miles Kurosky or Alex Greenwald are: should I?

Also, by "Shins-Will-Change-Your-Life pop," does she mean the Shins? Or does she mean anyone who might appear on the Garden State soundtrack? Because this is presented in opposition to Phantom Planet, who maybe aren't a Garden State band, but they're definitely an OC band (they sing the theme song, yeah?), and I consider there to be a lot of crossover between the two.

Plus, what does it mean to say "Phantom Planet auditioning drummers"? Like it sounds like Phantom Planet but with a different drummer? Or is there an implication of sloppiness there? I'm guessing not, since sloppiness wouldn't give you much "So-Cal-style pep" (and speaking of which, I had to Google "Harder to Breathe": I haven't heard this song, but is Maroon 5 seriously considered "So-Cal-style pep"? When she used that phrase, I guess I was thinking Blink-182 or Sublime or something).

Scrappy Boris Yeltsin-lovers from Missouri are doomed to back pats and new friends (Missouri loves company!), what with charming foot-tap hooks like the ones on "House Fire."

This is music that will score you friends. The band is probably from Missouri, since that's where their fans apparently are. The hooks are catchy and the music is friendly.

Somewhere, some melancholic drunken geek is getting dressed to this-- first this skin-and-bones drum/keys intro, more guitars hiked up like mismatched tube socks tucked into pants, a bendy plywood voice emoting like Miles Kurosky or even Alex Greenwald.

This music is layered, but each part is distinct. I had to google for these two dudes, apparently the latter is in the later-mentioned Phantom Planet (context clues, ahoy!) while the first is in Beulah. I'm not sure what a plywood voice is, maybe it is layered while fairly bland and wooden. No wait, it says bendy. So the voice wavers. Metaphor saved.

Speaking of which, come chorus there's this weird So Cal-style pep (think "Harder to Breathe") that makes SSLYBY sound, for one extremely fleeting moment, less like Shins-Will-Change-Your-Life pop and more like Phantom Planet auditioning drummers.

Is this a reference to that Maroon 5 song? I have no idea what to make of this Shins reference, it looks like the reviewer is evoking the sound while also parodying it with a catchphrase. Apparently this song sounds more like Phantom Planet with a different drum style, or possibly a mismatched drum style, or even multiple drummers playing at once. Probably one of the first two.

Not too bad, the hanging references and in-jokes kill it for me though. If I owned albums by any of the mentioned bands I might be into it.

x-post, shit, jaymc beat me to this

But this isn't even close to an offender on those grounds; if it goes down as non-sensible, it's going to take a good portion of modern-day music crit right along with it. If you don't understand a single sentence in this review, it's either because you don't follow the references or you're just not a very good reader. (Neither of these things is a huge personal flaw.) So far as the references go, they allude to things that should be fairly well-known to the writing's probable audience; so far as the reading-level required, the toughest thing that's asked for is understanding how personification works. Not being able to provide those things isn't anything to be ashamed of -- it just means you're not a part of the specific audience this piece is aimed at -- but don't blame the writer for it; she's communicating pretty effectively.

(Whether you like the content/approach of the review is a whole other matter, as mentioned above; I haven't heard the song, so who knows. If I were to nitpick anything it'd be the use of "doomed" in the first sentence, the whole sock-pants thing, and little bit of grammatical looseness -- three tiny casual nothings that I wouldn't even consciously ideate if I weren't going over this closely because of this thread.)

But I did go back and reread this and I think it was fairly coherent.

That said, I like when there are single reviews like this but would probably want to hit someone who didn't give me more context on an album review.

Jaymc, you're right that the ending is making what's basically a very subtle distinction: between mainstream-indie Garden State change-your-life bands (Shins, maybe Death Cab) and a slightly more popular sunny/peppy SoCal sound (Phantom Planet, "Harder to Breathe"). It's a distinction subtle enough that there's crossover, but it still feels like a reasonable one to make in terms of feel.

I assume Phantom Planet are "auditioning drummers" because Schwartzman is making a movie something particularly active or rangy or heavy is going on with the drums at that part! (Auditioning drummers = other band members might be backing off and listening to what the drummer's doing with them.)

xpost, c'mon dude "back in the day recommended" is an all-time ilm mountain-out-of-molehill moment.

it was a glorious moment. gives me chills just to think of it. someday i'll tell my kids that i was there.

*tho this is not as baffling as why this review was singled out for a thread!

"this -does not- really sound like the Shins-Will-Change-Yr-Life"

see blog reference as perjorative: oh, awesome, in that case i'll like this. (but they won't.)

see blog reference as positive: oh, this isn't like that? nuts. (but they'd like it!)

Tom+Jess maybe OTM except that we were mostly bracketing that issue to talk about its readability. Also I'm possibly pretty forgiving of all that stuff Tom's asking for when it comes to Pitchfork's track reviews of indie-rock songs, which aren't always set up to make a critical case for the song -- this one works more like news, really, alerting the reader to a new act in the genre and offering a quick snapshot of what they sound like. If none of that good critical stuff showed up in the album review, I'd be more bothered.

tom - i think that there's a functional difference. this is not parsing the song, or trying to articulate what it sounds like to those who want to know if they should get it, but more of a riff on it, an expression of how it sounds to her ears, because that might be interesting to you if you hear the song too.

in other words, part of this (new?) of crit that seems motivated by instant-listen slsk/download stuff.

You can make references that will neatly sort out who will or will not like the music in question

Unless, of course, you've only heard from a friend that you should check out this review and song and have never heard Beulah or Phantom Planet or know their members or backstories. This is why PFM (and other sites I read regularly) are mentioned as sites for indie music obsessives. My sister was telling me about enjoying and possibly seeing Beulah live, but I doubt she knows the name of the singer. PFM singles reviews are for the obsessives, definitely.

"a bendy plywood voice emoting like Miles Kurosky or even Alex Greenwald."

has to do with getting dressed up.

(that part is kinda silly. skin & bones/socks/plywood voice)

haha, and the "fleeting moment" is also the worst part. (can you tell that i wish the Shins changed my life?)

Yeah well now's the part where reading any more closely starts to seem actively mean. Which is to say: it's a really short track review, one of many, and so picking on a failed metaphor or two might be getting a bit too demanding.

my main problem with this style is that there are actually no real people who talk like this/think like this. i guess it's supposed to sound speedy and preoccupied?

“The writer is having fun and being somewhat clever in ways that impress her, so good on her, despite the fact that I don’t understand this review, really, and have no more desire to hear this song than I did before I began reading it. Man, I sure hope my singles reviews don’t elicit a similar response.”

Dude, you are hanging out with the wrong people.

Yeah, I know that tone. I think it's trying to communicate a bunch of qualities about itself: excitement, personality, casualness, range of high/low culture references -- some trait we might call "freewheeling," you know? There's also an attempt toward density -- using that freewheeling quality to pack as much into a capsule review as can possibly be gotten in there.

I don't know that it really matters whether people ever talk like this -- writing is not talking, and nobody talks like the New York Times, either -- but you'll be either frightened or relieved to learn that there are indeed people who kinda talk like that, or whose discussion at least vaguely takes that shape.

xpost

Guys, L said he didn't mean this review, so much -- I think the reference runs more toward Sylvester-type capsules, really.

the syntax is off-kilter and often hard to penetrate but the weirdness is calculated and the grammatic acrobatics finely tuned. it's not a new trick i guess (trying hard to sound breezy) but i guess it's just a little more obvious when you've got this self-conscious overuse of parentheses, abbreviations, and unexplained references. i understand they're trying to keep these little blurbs to word count but there's still something distasteful about writers purposely alienating readers and casting themselves as "insiders" too busy to explain what the fuck they mean.

Again, for the record: it seems to me to be a better challenge for the critic to evade this issue entirely, and in fact I think the people lauded as top-notch critics usually do find a way to write that can be sophisticated and universally-understandable at the same time.

There's a problem of genre here. When people read music criticism (or at least, when I read music criticism) they want something along the lines of an IGN.com video game review or a newspaper movie review. Straight and to the point. It's utilatarian literature, they want the question "Do I want to hear this?" answered.

They aren't expecting something that looks like it belongs in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Reading music reviews on sites like Pitchforkmedia, I often feel like opening a technical manual for my car to find out how to change the oil and finding the entire thing is wrote in haikus.

'the writer is giving the reader a little credit' by referencing phantom planet twice

'the writer is just aiming to the most initiated portion of the audience, aiming for the approval of his/her peers' by referencing phantom planet twice

there must be an option d.

a lot of the reviews i'm thinking of try to come off like casually composed riffs. just thinking out loud, no biggie etc!!

This is certainly how I write track reviews.

Dan too.

(Also haikus are very clear and practical, not opaque.) (Also your haiku simile is an example of exactly the kind of literary tactic -- metaphor -- that I'm surprised people claim to have trouble reading.)

in conclusion it's nothing personal but rachel probably had to look up Phantom Planet on Allmusic.com before she referenced Alex Greenwald by first and last name. because any normal person would. that's reason enough to explain the reference, however briefly.

to reiterate, i might actually be more worried if she just knew it offhand.

"WHATEVER, NUTFACE/NUTFACE ABOOBIE/I'm sorry, I have to go take a drug test now." Watch out for those poppyseeds. I'm afraid all the Nyquil [you've] been popping turned [your]pee into Mad Dog 20/20. There's only one way to find out. I.P. Sizzurp. Polka party?

[three stars]

http://www.marchofdimes.com/images/chapters/NY_greater_Chris-Russo.jpg

If it's that easy Jess why was I told after submitting clips that Blender "would have no work to offer (me) but thanks for trying"?

So, for an example, let me load today's Pitchfork reviews.

Okay, the first review I read was the Espers one, and it's exactly what I want a review to be. Great job. High five.

So instead let's look at this one:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/q/quintron/swamp-tech.shtml

Starts off simple enough, but then gets to shit like:

Dumb fun trumps brainy tedium, and if Swamp Tech were an RPG, it'd be all whimsical mini-games, no arduous stat-building.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. The rest of the review is fine.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/n/nadja/truth-becomes-death.shtml

Though timely, Truth Becomes Death risks being a marginal record, if only because it has a nature so huge some might take it as scenery

I'm lost. I understand that it is an experimental album and may not become popular, but how is it's "nature" "huge"? What does that mean? And what does it mean to be mistaken for scenery? Is this just supposed to sound witty? Is the album's sound "large" such as Mogwai (which was cited earlier) songs, and that is why it may become marginal? How does that make sense?

In this barbarously delicate sea, the crashing guitars and horror house vocals of "Memory Leak" wreck damage in some other nearby room.

Oh, another metaphor. Okay, the album's sound is huge like the ocean, and it sounds kind of scary and "barbarous" I guess. Okay, that's nice, but isn't there a much easier way to say that? The review already once cited before how "large" the sound is using allusions to nature.

Nadja's not obsessed or stuck on ideologies, which is why they sound like latecomers.

I have no idea what this means.

So, even if you do think it is only minorly difficult to understand what all that means, my stance is this: minorly difficult is still too difficult. I want a music review. Not creative writing. I'd read something else for that.

big words in the wrong hands = dangerous

Mwahahahaha

Biggest words in Mickey's quoted material (by number of syllables):

ideologies
barbarously
latecomers
whimsical
marginal
delicate
scenery
arduous
tedium

Apart from maybe "barbarously" these are all pretty common words.

But a better retort to Mickey's post might be drawn from his own words: "I don't want to have to think about it." I suppose it's inevitable that there will be people who don't like thinking about stuff; I suppose it's inevitable that some of those people would nonetheless want to read music criticism (without thinking about it); I'm going to try and remain comforted by the idea that this is some perverse minority opinion. It's certainly the first time I've ever seen someone say he prefers writing that doesn't make him think.

Actually, this review totally put me in a bad mood. Mainly because i'm a die-hard (post movie poster) BoYo fan (common ways to say SSLYBY: the actual name, Boris Yeltsin and sometimes BoYo) I like saying SSLYBY (sly-bye) as well.

Let me ask, how would you feel if other product reviews were wrote in a Pitchfork-style? Say you wanted to buy new speakers, looked up a review, and they were described as having the sound of a barbarously dangerous sea. Other nature metaphors were used. Compared to videogames. Less like Mario RPG, more like Mario Kart! Come on, would your response not be "for fucks sake, I don't care about how clever you are or anything, just give me the straightforward information I want"? That's how I feel about music reviews. I don't think it's an unreasonable stance, despite it looking like I'm alone here on ILM.

Dumb fun trumps brainy tedium, and if Swamp Tech were an RPG, it'd be all whimsical mini-games, no arduous stat-building.

I'm reading a record review. Why am I thinking about video games here? Why not just end the sentence with "tedium" (and rephrase it slightly so it makes sense). I don't need a reference to video games to understand that the music is more dumb fun than serious.

My point is not at all that this is difficult to read. It's not above my head, nor do I not like to think. I just don't want any of that when I'm reading a record review, and that's the end of my thesis. Would you want it reading a technical manual? Front page news? TV Guide?

Yes, Mark, it is hard to find the type of review I want. Pitchfork writes them sometimes. The Espers review was perfect. Newspapers write them almost exclusively, but newspapers also don't often review music I'm interested in. I really stopped reading music reviews because they don't suite my purpose. I just scan through pages like Pitchfork and make notes of albums with high scores to check out later.

Haha, "seriously responding." As if my position is so indefensible that it doesn't even deserve a response. I should have expected a reception like this knowing ILM is so full of record reviewers. Next time I'll just keep my mouth shut and let logged out/unregistered person take the ridicule for criticizing PFM.

It's def. the common opinion among the masses. But that only means so much. (Da Vinci Code vs Shalimar the Clown, Pauline Kael vs Leonard Maltin, blah blah blah.)

In terms of crit i read for pleasure (which is almost all the music or literary crit i read these days), it's definitely not the same as what you're looking for.

i basically agree, except i don't see it as a mistake!

i was grooving along here, expecting a zing, but then...

I can't think of any other way to remedy these constant complaints that people can't understand basic literary tactics like metaphor (simile, even!), use of images, personification, and so on.

errrrr, no! surely you mean, if they read books n' shit then they wouldn't put up with such awkwardly assembled prose!

Artistic reviews are "utilitarian" by default; they are describing an artistic endeavor to the reader and offering a value judgement to help said reader form an opinion on the work in question. No amount of "subjectivity!" can alter that.

to help said reader form an opinion

Why do you think this is the only role that writing-about-art has?

Do readers want reviews that just tell them whether it's a worthwhile album, or do they want to have reviews that are worth reading as thought pieces? And more importantly, can we acknowledge that some of the thought pieces are badly written and not just because they transcend the thumbs up/thumbs down level of criticism?

I'm a music critic because I like writing about music, and some people like reading what I write. I'm not gonna pretend I have any interest in technical music analysis - in my own writing or others', - and while you see to think yours is a "ZIng! Ho-ho!" kind of observation, I don't find it particularly interesting.

Did I say that was the only role? I'm pretty sure I said that was the primary role.

Do readers want reviews that just tell them whether it's a worthwhile album, or do they want to have reviews that are worth reading as thought pieces?

I find this question mind-boggling, although it does explain why a good 90% of modern music criticism sucks.

Do readers want reviews that just tell them whether it's a worthwhile album, or do they want to have reviews that are worth reading as thought pieces?

I find this question mind-boggling, although it does explain why a good 90% of modern music criticism sucks.

it's funny, i think that by FAR the majority of published music crit (ie, 99%+) falls well away from "thought pieces", and is the reason why I find it so dull.

-- Dan (You Aren't Writing An Essay) Perry ([email protected]) (webmail), January 6th, 2006. (Dan Perry)

OTM

(xpost: Tom is OTM; the ridiculous binary is what I'm primarily reacting to up there. I've lauded oblique reviews in the past when I've thought that I had a good idea of what the music was like and whether or not I would like it, especially the Nick S. Pitchfork reviews I've read, so I'm not advocating a strict binary as much as forcefully asserting that reviews have a primary purpose at the end of the day and that primary purpose is not to satirize government or to paint poetic images.)

There is nothing wrong with music writing that makes you think. There is nothing wrong with reviews that make you think. But if you're not interested in performing the basic functions of describing and evaluating, you are not writing a review.

All that said, as I think some people have agreed above, this particular review does fulfill all the functions of a review while also being well-written and thoughtful, which is why it's a very good review.

I dunno, it just seems like reading a review isn't like driving down a road--if there's something you can't get through, you can always skip it, it's not like you're just stuck there, unable to go on. Half the things I read I end up skipping things, and that's cool.

Prefuse has always been scattered by design, interrupting his grooves with bouncing shards of jazz pianos or light static. But once upon a time there was a method to it, a dude who loved rap paying tribute to it by freaking its conventions. Somewhere along the line, his switch got stuck on autopilot, and now we get stuff like this, a couple of seconds of flipping-stations noises mutating into a half-realized lope, its backwards synth-tones paying no attention to its blip-drums, its non-sequitur Spanish guitar making no attempt to interact with the zip-blurp sound effects. This is not music, this is dicking around-- and I'd actually put some mud in my mouth if he'd stop. [Tom Breihan]

this is a matter of wordcounts, not fundamentals.

obv i agree, basically, eppy, except that "review" is a pretty shitty word, in this context, because it's going to cause all the confusion that appears in this thread.

"Reviews" are for most people "writing on a given album/song/gig, which appears in a paper, magazine or webzine, and has a heading like '[artist] - [album name]'."

If someone writes a review^eppy that's actually just criticism^eppy, but it appears in the form of a review^sean, people are gonna call it a review. but if they're like dan or mickey, and of course if we live in this world where everything fits into nice binary categories, then they're still gonna hate it because it's secretly criticism^eppy..

That sounds like the definition of a terrible review to me.

"first this skin-and-bones drum/keys intro, more guitars hiked up like mismatched tube socks tucked into pants, a bendy plywood voice emoting like Miles Kurosky or even Alex Greenwald"

-- i don't understand, not just cos i don't know who miles and alex are, but all i get from this is that there's an intro involving drums and keys (it sounds thin? intros should have more instruments? what?), and that there are some guitars (loud? to high in the mix? how the fuck do you tuck socks into pants? as in, to make your cock look big?)

Pants in US English = trousers

And is this unreasonable or unfair for some reason? It seems to make perfect sense to me. These "nice binary categories" aren't some construct I'm opposing on the text myself and attacking this straw man. I want you to load pitchforkmedia.com right now. There's a heading called "Record Reviews." See what I mean? If music critics (^eppy) want to start analyzing the inner meaning of a record and see what they sort of Marxist criticism they can construct to satirize goverment or something, so be it, but add a "Criticism" section. Let reviews be reviews. To repeat the same comparison I made before, it's like opening your car manual to find it's a series of haikus.

wtf does it mean that the faces are "petals on a wet, black bough"? are they flower people? are they not wet and just the street is? are they climbing trees? do they have no bodies? or are their bodies black too? (and wtf "apparition of faces in a crowd"? isn't a crowd mostly faces anyway!?)

---

Mickey - My point there was not a criticism of your position, which I understand. It was a criticism of Eppy's name for it. Because I totally disagree that "pure" criticism^eppy (i apologise for the retarded nomenclature) can't appear in a "record reviews" section.

we're not jsut talking about criticism that's heavy marxist shit - we're also talking about exaggerated-vsns-of-Rachel-Khong, where you write "this song is a merry go round staffed by a hispanic immigrant who only knows the english word 'RIDE!'" and that's it.

80% of the posts at my blog, which you would definitely hate, are mostly unhelpful in most of the functions you're asking for. but they're still clearly (to me) "reviews".

-- jz (j...), January 6th, 2006.

yeah, this is what i thought. so how do you tuck socks into trousers? vice versa i can see, to avoid getting oily legs while on a bike.

"secretly criticism" would be a good album title.

The hilarious thing about my position in all of this is that I am the first person to throw out an imagery-based description of a piece of music, but I'm not a music critic and I usually (not always) follow up with a breakdown of the musical elements that made that image come to mind.

so how do you tuck socks into trousers?

It depends entirely on how baggy your socks are. Or maybe she miswrote. Or perhaps she's trying to tease out an ineffable quality of the music that she finds utterly confounding in as few words possible.

If I'm writing something about music I want it to be effective.

"This made me buy/steal the record" = effective.
"This made me decide not to buy/steal a record" = effective.
"This made me play a record I'd already bought/stolen" = effective.
"This made me think about stuff" = effective.
"This amused me for thirty seconds" = effective in a limited way.

"I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about" = ineffective, usually.

(If I'm writing it for money I want it to be my editor's definition of effective.)

There are lots of ways to get to effective.

?

Wait no...

I also want constant bait and switching of "hipsters".

Instead it's being raised from the dead to use as the template for a whole new generation of snob publications. A shame because it often tends to overshadow good writing (in the same publications) along the way.

Only if it's released on Secretly Canadian.

*Pitchfork has plenty of good writers, and some of those responsible for the at times bad writing are plenty capable of not pulling this shit either.

Can't there be some balance between labyrinthine turns of phrase AND comprehensibilty? Isn't that what made Lester great?

In the five years, webzine reviews are just going to be comparisons to philosphical constructs and references to arcane Cam'ron lyrics.

haha wait so ilm doesn't frequently call bullshit on pfork's more impenetrable pieces? thats a bit disingenuous, no? maybe the reason more people aren't doing it in this particular instance is because the review is not actually that hard to understand?

Of course there can, but it's in a different place for everyone.

I just think it's bad writing period, and an obvious, rather old style utilised more for the benefit of the business interests and identity of the enterprise, than for it's usefulness (it's not) in exposing and celebrating great music.

Wait wait wait. Hold on. You can think it's bad writing, that's fine, although I disagree. But making the leap from the first part of this sentence to the second partis like jumping the Snake River Canyon. Are you saying that Pitchfork deliberately decided to get people to write badly in order to burnish its "image" of, what, bad writing? Being like Melody Maker? (College freshman: "You guys, check this site out, they're totally like this British magazine from when I was 3!") You think there's some lab where Pitchfork grows their writers, that they're not, like, real people?

Look, I know we all hate Pitchfork and stuff, but it's not an "enterprise," no matter how much you want to talk about its advertising income or its editorial oversight or anything. It's a bunch of writers and editors doing what they think is right and good, just like anything else, and treating it as an enterprise is just monumentally disrespectful to the individual writers involved. (If you want to talk about the "enterprise," at least say "Ryan.") It's been clearly demonstrated on this thread that many people think this is a good piece of writing, so if you want an explanation for how it got up on the Pitchfork website, why construct this whole devious scheme that apparently involves Pitchfork staking its identity on "obviously" bad writing (muh?) when it's much more likely that the editors liked the piece and decided to run it? Is that really that hard to believe?

Seeing as it's a project and a business, isn't it an enterprise?

you want the Voice to be more like Guitar World? why would music theory be relevant to a critique of music that largely rejects the "design" (to use Xgau's word) it allows?

I don't hate Pitchfork! I'm probably just getting old and bitter. I think it's poor writing just because it's SO exclusionary (to my admittedly subjective, English ear) and painfully 'fashion' conscious, whether this has any relation to keeping an identity going, and helping bring advertisers in better...

Yeah. I'm probably reaching. Guilty as charged. I'm just baffled trying to think of other reasons why they would persist with it, whatever efforts (admirable!) have been made to broaden the scope and ambition of the rest of the site... I still cringe hard at these kind of pieces. And it undercuts the cohesion, credibility even, of the whole website for me.

Not that I mind that much... I'll still read and enjoy the pieces/writers that aren't so painfully twisted. So, I probably am grinding some axe here (which is why I'd have been better staying out of it).

Ok some of my language choices there seem overly aggressive. Sorry! *Pitchfork has plenty of good writers add-on was my lame attempt at tempering my ire & frustrations with a compliment.

Calling it an "enterprise" rather than a website just seemed to fit better at the time, seeing as I was bringing the demographic angle into it. I think it's naive not to assume Pitchfork, Ryan, whatever aren't unaware of their position in the universe of influence these days. Quite a way from just a simple review page on the internet I'd have thought.

ROFL! Fair point. I guess as I don't pay anything to read Pitchfork I should get over myself here, whatever issues I have with it's odd desire to unnessecarily alienate massive sections of it's potential readership for what exact reason I'm pretty unsure of.

I actually assumed that she's English, and I mean that as a compliment.

If it wasn't totally totally obvious, I'm arguing with Mickey because his examples of unncessary opacity seem to be things that don't exactly take Ph.D.-level reading skills to work out, and I'm arguing him because he's throwing out this ridiculous across-the-board demand that criticism only ever do one thing and never ever aspire to being good writing along the way. His analogies are also kind of strange, in that if you followed them to the letter reviews would probably consist of a list of factoids about bands, ranging from town of origin to, say, the frequency range of each track. Also I like how he objects to the use of metaphors to express that a band's "sound is gigantic," which is ITSELF a metaphor, for god's sake -- reinforcing my sense that Mickey isn't actually against metaphor or stylish writing and is just asking for it to peg itself closer to his level. Plus let's just note that some of us don't read novels and such as some kind of arduous task for our self-improvement; some of us like lively prose because it's enjoyable, a pleasure in itself, and we kind of like the idea that a good writer might be able to bring some of that pleasure to WHATEVER he or she is writing about, whether it's speakers or desk-assembly instructions or whatever.

Okay. That said. Of course Dan's agreement with Mickey is right, too, because no shit, there are a lot of modern-day music writers who's "lively style" isn't actually that lively or stylish. Here's the thing: the problem is not that they're using literary tactics, it's that they're using them BADLY! So I cringe when Mickey's solution to this problem is for everyone to dumb down to some kind of ulilitarian Dick-and-Jane level (why not just list bmp and chord progression for the song in question?) as opposed to, duh, asking writers to WRITE BETTER. And I cringe, additionally, because I feel like I see way too many people doing some kind of knee-jerk dismissal of any music critic who asks them to invest the barest minimum of actual reading comprehension into the work -- like HOW DARE a critic ask me to actually read on anything higher than a fourth-grade level. If you don't want to invest that two seconds of energy to understand a sentence, that's fine, but don't leap to the assumption that the writer "makes no sense" until you've put that tiny bit of work into deciding whether it actually does "make sense" or not. (Otherwise this "doesn't make sense" complaint becomes like skimming two pages of Kant and then saying "that guy sucks, he Doesn't Make Sense.")

Okay and I would hope that anyone who's read any of my reviews will see where I'm coming from on this, because I make a definite effort to be clear about things (possibly even too much of an effort) -- I'm a big fan of clarity, just not in the terms that Mickey's preaching for it.

Which is kind of sad, if you ask me, but then I have whole other horses in this race w/r/t the survival of serious print culture.

So basically I think I'm not really in the Pitchfork demographic because the only writers they have I consistently like are the ones who I talk to here. Also pretty much everything you've written here is totally, absolutely OTM; if you're going to be "literary", study some literature first.

otm, but this happens across all the art forms. "i don't see a clear meaning in front of me, therefore it's meaningless." or "the artist is just trying to be difficult," regardless of what ELSE the artist is trying to be.

No

Anyway yeah, I'd like to think that if more people learned about writing criticism from the whole 20th-century history of critics and non-fiction writers and New Journalists and such -- and not primarily from the rock-crit establishment -- then the whole world of music writing would be less insular, less specialized or over-people's-heads ... both more sophisticated AND more "utilitarian."

and, yeah, technically, sure, you can learn lots of stuff from denby. just reading the new yorker, in general, you can learn a lot.

Also I like how he objects to the use of metaphors to express that a band's "sound is gigantic," which is ITSELF a metaphor, for god's sake -- reinforcing my sense that Mickey isn't actually against metaphor or stylish writing and is just asking for it to peg itself closer to his level.

Please stop with the insulting comments about "my level" of reading comprehension. I am more than capable of reading everything on Pitchforkmedia, except for the odd inner-references I may not be familiar with ("Shins-will-change-your-life") or extremely bizarre word choice (I will never forget the "melancholic gegeinschtein" in one review). I don't want music reviews to be taken down to "my level," but I do want them taken down to a level more appropriate for what they inherently are -- ALBUM REVIEWS.

Here's the problem, though: I don't understand why you think "utilitarian" writing is "appropriate" to the business of album reviews. Why would that be? There is plenty of art criticism that is far more esoteric than anything written on the web about music -- criticism of visual art, for instance, a lot of which isn't even accessible to people without some level of "academic" background. Criticism of literature, too, has its complex side, and not just in the world of academic study. An essay in the New York Review of Books (or, as you mentioned above, Harpers) demands more close attention from readers than most anything Pitchfork publishes.

So I ask you: why is "appropriate" for album reviews to be less demanding? Is it because we're talking about "popular" music, a pop-culture art form? But then film is a pop-culture art form, too, and film criticism seems to support everything from simplistic newspaper hacks to super-academic super-theoretical analysis. Same goes for books, too: you can read a tidy description of the latest thriller in your local paper, or you can follow the debates of "serious" high-level critics. Sure, all that high-level conversation about art -- books, films, painting -- tends to be aimed at a smaller, more initiated audience than the stuff in the local paper. But then again, isn't Pitchfork, too? (There are plenty more straightforward music reviews in general-interest magazines and newspapers, after all.)

So yeah, I'm asking you: why are you claiming that album reviews should/must restrain themselves to this humble straightforward role? Why is that "appropriate" to them in particular, when it's not the case with most equivalent sorts of criticism? Do you see what I mean here?

It's often written more clearly, too, yes, but that's not quite what I'm talking about right now: the point is that nobody writes to the NYRB to complain that a particular essay needs to be brought down to the level of "what it inherently is -- A BOOK REVIEW." People who wanted that sort of thing would just read Publishers Weekly instead.

And I might be sympathetic to the complaint that there aren't enough music publications serving that straightforward consumer-guide niche, except that I think there are loads and loads that do serve it, from AMG to EW to major newspapers to glossy magazines. The only places where the esoteric stuff really holds sway are online and in alt-weeklies, which just happen to be what everyone likes to talk about on boards like this one (presumably because that stuff is free). If there were a shortage of the straightforward -- not enough supply of it to meet demand -- that would be a very bad thing indeed, but I don't know that such a shortage exists.

most music fans and music magazine readers have as little or less 'technical knowledge' as the writers, so unless your readership was of a level of, say, readers of Guitarist magazine or another title aimed at musicians, then that wouldn't work, because the reader wouldn't necessarily understand the technical terms being (ab)used. which isn't to say your point of view is in any way invalid, but you're representing a faction of a music mag's readership.

as an avid reader of the music press growing up, i always loved writers who could demystify the technical aspects of the music just a little, but i never anted someone to lay it open. and i was always more interested in how this music related to its influence, contemporaries, followers, etc, and the experience of the musicians and how it impacted their art. and as a writer now, yes, i'm of limited technical knowledge regarding how the music is made, but i honestly don't believe that impacts on my ability to discuss the music. because i rarely appreciate it in terms of technical brilliance, but rather the personality of the music (for want of about a million better phrases), a more emotional response, i guess.

and i'm not really sure how a review's value judgement could be anything other than subjective.

So the more I think about it, maybe the kind of criticism we're all wary of here stems from exactly the stuff Mickey is advocating -- maybe thinking about these things as "just an album review" is exactly what causes the problem. If it's "just an album review," then why not freewheel and reference and slang it out? Whereas the clearest criticism -- in lots of different arts -- tends to come around when someone has something important to say about the world beyond the art itself. Because it has something to communicate beyond just describing the record for you, something that's actually more ambitious than that.

Guilty as charged! Although really if one goal of writing about music is to get people thinking about it, why is trying to teach your reader a little bit about the way the song is put together such a verboten thing?

dude, it totally shouldn't be! though i wouldn't be able to write that review.

my uncle often sends me letters saying he doesn't understand the stuff of mine that runs in the London Times, which is frustrating because that's generally the least-opaque, least-artful, most-straightforward stuff i write, and i *want (sometimes) to be understood by *everyone. he also clips out pieces in the paper that he liked better than mine, as 'guidance'.