[anthomtb]

I guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40.

For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z

[Gimpei]

I’m not a fan of their embrace of pop music. Music publications are useful to the extent that they introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. You can’t avoid hearing pop music all the damn time. Why anyone would want to read about it as well is beyond me.

[Solvency]

Since day one, Pitchfork (all white nerds) used to love to throttle good music but they'd always give a pass to mainstream rap, praising even the most generic mass produced hip hop, like they always secretly wanted to fit in with that crowd.

[giraffe_lady]

This is because the production value and musical vision & execution of mainstream rap has been very high for a long time. Combined with the extremely low cost of entry (a microphone), most bad rap is solo indie production and most stuff that gets picked up by labels is high quality on the genre's terms¹.

This has recently become true of pop as well, which is one of the defining qualities of the "poptimism" era. It's not that all the music critics simultaneously sold out and started giving undeservingly good reviews to pop, it's that the baseline standard of musical quality in pop became very high.

¹: There has always been, and continues to be, a subsection of rap that also succeeds on musical terms inherited from outside of hip hop, especially from jazz. This is usually what people who are not extremely into hip hop mean when they talk about "good rap." But someone who doesn't appreciate the role of eg lil wayne & young thug is frankly not informed enough about the genre & its conventions to have a useful opinion about quality within it.

[sangnoir]

..and yet they dinged Childish Gambino's critically aclaimed album[1] - maybe the white nerds were contrarian, or just didn't "get" hip hop.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39284608

[Lewton]

“Camp” was in no way critically acclaimed, it’s sitting at a 69/100 on metacritic which is squarely in the “eh, it’s alright” bracket

[sangnoir]

Sure, but Pitchfork rated it as 16/100, which is far from "eh, it's alright"

[SketchySeaBeast]

Do we even need that anymore? I play games of "follow the recommendation algorithm" around my streaming service and I've been very successful in what I've found. Been able to surface a lot of artists I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Between that and Reddit's genre-specific offerings I'm golden.

[ckozlowski]

I think so. Like OP, I would browse Pitchfork's reviews every so often, and often come away with things I never considered. That's the difference between looking at music reviews and following the algorithm. The latter points you to things that sound like what you're listening to, but the former opens your eyes to radically different sounds, or interpreting them in ways you hadn't considered.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Fair enough. I think it's two different search methods - it seems you're looking for breadth of musical experience while I'm looking for depth. I want to find that indie band with 3 followers, you want to see what's popular enough to be in Pitchfork but in a totally different genre.

[mrguyorama]

I listened to the catalog of ONE (very good) parody band and Spotify spent the next four months presenting me only meme songs so yeah, those recommendation algorithms aren't very helpful IMO

[hnnnnnnngggggg]

Pitchfork is not dead ass now but close. 15 years ago we were in lockstep. I find Gorilla vs Bear best of playlist retains that OG Pitchfork vibe the best.

[reb]

Is that available on spotify? I desperately check gvb every six months or so, but it seems like a husk at this point

[hnnnnnnngggggg]

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6gsuuOM6lSq6JnDLHO20hl