XII -My Favorite Century: RIP Pitchfork
Last week, Slate ran an oral history of Pitchfork. It told the story of arguably the most powerful music review service in history, from its creation (in a closet in Minnesota) to its closure (at the hands of Conde Nast). There's a case to be made that Rolling Stone, Spin, or NME have a more storied legacy of reviews and impact, but for my tastes and age, Pitchfork was the one-stop shop for determining what I needed to listen to. This week's selection of songs is an homage to Pitchfork reviews, tastemaking, and music blogging. The My Favorite Century exercise would not be possible without Pitchfork, or if it were possible, it would have many more songs that I learned about from Carson Daly and TRL and the disc jockeys on Z104 out of Madison, Wisconsin.
In early 2006, The Strokes released their third album. I was a freshman in college, and I was bummed none of the people on my floor wanted to listen to the album with me.
The album is okay.
It's not perfection like Room on Fire and Is This It?, but it's pretty good. None of the songs on the album are top 100 material, but the first three songs are probably all top 250.
The title of the album opener, You Only Live Once, was later used by Drake for his song YOLO, and well, you all know how that phrase took off. I don't have any proof that Drake listened to the Strokes 3rd album, First Impressions of Earth. But I also don't have any evidence he didn't. If Drake did, in fact, steal the phrase YOLO from the Strokes, he'd never admit it. But in my book, Julian Casablancas invented YOLO, not Drake.
I said what I said.
Anyway, here I was, January 2006, trying to get someone to enjoy the You Only Live Once alternate version of "I'll Try Anything Once" and getting no takers. I lamented to an older friend that none of my friends wanted to listen to the Strokes with me, and he said, "Get new friends."
Then he sent me a link to a Facebook Group called "I Listen To Better Music Than Everyone Not In This Group."
And voila, that's the day I became a music snob.
Pitchfork was required reading for music snobs. For about 25 years, It reviewed five albums a day, gave them a score of 1-10, named some songs Best New Tracks, started a music festival, and created a cult following. Not for nothing, I just tried to see if Pitchfork, which reviewed everything, had time to review James Blunt's Back to Bedlam, featuring the song that launched this whole thing. Not even Pitchfork had time to cover this song. It's a brutal indictment of Blunt.
I digress.
With Pitchfork meaning so much to me, I wanted to share their actual words with you about a few songs that also cracked the top 100 for me. It would be a nice way to eulogize a site that meant a lot to me.
I am not plagiarizing anything here. I am legitimately mining old Pitchfork reviews, throwing those words in quotes, be that when they named a song Best New Track or labeled an album "Best New Music," and then I'll throw in some Sam commentary if I have anything to add.
One of those bad scores that makes you want to listen to the album.
The oral history explains Pitchfork's ability to make or break an artist and how even getting roasted by Pitchfork was better than scoring something like a 6.2. Pitchfork truly was the blog equivalent of the Facebook Group I stumbled into in 2006. They
To this day, I still think I listen to better music than most people, even if my music exploration has mostly ended.
I had great taste for about a decade. Is taste a skill closer to riding a bike (once you get it, you get it) or learning a foreign language (you need to practice routinely to keep up with it)? What do you think? Is good taste permanent or ephemeral?
This week's theme: An Ode to Pitchfork
Song
Ultralight Beam
Artist
Kanye West
Released
2016
Lyric
I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail
He said, "Let's do a good ass job with 'Chance 3'"
I hear you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy
Let's make it so free and the bars so hard
That there ain't one gosh darn part you can't tweet
This is my part, nobody else speak
This is my part, nobody else speak
This little light of mine
One Word
Gospel
|More Than One Word|
Pitchfork: "Kanye is barely on "Ultralight Beam." He asks for a few blessings, then goes away. Within the song's realm, he is at once the higher power and the fallen. Perhaps he doesn't feel like his voice deserves to be on a track that professes its belief with such clarity as it plays host to a 4-year-old possessed by the Lord and Kirk Franklin; perhaps he's right. In his place, though, is a spiritual son. Chancelor Bennett was 10 when Kanye first made Jesus walk. He was raised on the sweet Kanye, the chop-up-beats Kanye, and now he is the closest we're going to get to that holy ghost. In one virtuosic verse, Chance raps his redemption, how he was saved by God, by Kanye, by his baby daughter. He's giddy, young. "Ugh, I'm just having fun with it," he glows as a swell of brass joins his exaltation. Then those same horns dissipate, leaving Kanye alone with his cavernous choir once again."
Chance is the star of this song, and frankly, it's the standout moment on The Life of Pablo album.
Ergo, Chance is best thing on the Kanye album?
In his verse, Chance manages to make a biblical allusion as he mentions that his ex is looking back like a pillar of salt, and as a big fan of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, this one makes me smile. The song is great to blast in the car, builds to the end when a chorus comes in and gives an already powerful song a little more heft as they rhyme through some real emphatic words. Again, it's great to include a Kanye song that doesn't have much to do with him. If I'm being honest, it's easier to think of this as a Chance song, and since none of his solo works make the cut, let's go ahead and do that. Welcome to the club, Chance!
Song
Inspector Norse
Artist
Todd Terje
Released
2012
Lyric/Moment
0:56, the weird flourishes and outer space sounds are replaced by a keyboard, and it's about when you immediately start bopping.
One Word
Energetic
|More Than One Word|
Pitchfork:
In early 2012, the music director of a Norwegian state-funded radio station called P3 declined to add a song called "Inspector Norse" by disco producer Todd Terje to its rotation, saying it sounded like "background music at a beach bar." When an interviewer asked him what he thought about the radio station's description, Terje said he agreed with it. "It sounds like elevator music. Good, danceable elevator music." Then, in a pun fit only for hypothetical dads, he added, "Elevate your body!" In Terje's world, there is no distinction made between beating and joining—it's all join, join, join.
Inspector Norse" is staccato burst of energy. It starts with a playful thump and wastes no time getting to the song's melodic core, hitting a peak designed to destroy everything around it before retreating back to a sugary modification of that opening thump. The pleasures derived from the song are basic, elemental, and intangible. The narrator of the song's music video says it best: "There are certain types of electronic music that gives me the urge to dance, and I feel I have to dance when I hear it."
Returning to Qatar for my third year, I was met by my friend telling me he was about to do a runner. A runner happened when someone was under contract for one period of time, but they were going to bail early because it was sometimes easier to leave Qatar than stay there.
It's just like leaving a job without giving two weeks' notice, but in Qatar, leave notice is often onerous, like seven months' notice, so this was a bit more abrupt.
We hired a driver for his leaving party and did a bar crawl. This was still in some of the wild-west days of Doha before the ramp-up for the World Cup had begun in earnest. The bars in Old Doha were seedy and populated by drunk Saudis and Filipina prostitutes. That afternoon was the first time I'd ever heard Todd Terje's song Inspector Norse. As someone known to get down to funky electronica from time to time (shoutout Hot Chip and Ratatat), Terje infused his tunes with a little more Scandanavian flare. I do not belieive someone could hear this song and not want to dance. That's my challenge to you. Record yourself not dancing.
Song
Hannah Hunt
Artist
Vampire Weekend
Released
2014
Lyric
Though we live on the US dollar
You and me we got our own sense of time
One Word
Discerning
|More Than One Word|
Pitchfork: "It's really hard to even talk about the internet without seeming instantly corny," Ezra Koenig told Pitchfork recently, "even the word 'blog' sounds a little grandma-y." He should know. The Vampire Weekend singer and lyricist gave up on his own Blogspot site, Internet Vibes, seven years ago, as he finished up his English studies at Columbia University (the final post's title: "I HATE BLOGGING"). But before he graduated from the ye olde blogosphere, Koenig held forth on a vast array of topics—from geography, to Wellington boots, to music writer Robert Christgau's allegedly unfair critique of Billy Joel's oeuvre—looking at everything from an incisively self-aware, curious, and optimistic angle. What's most impressive is the way he's able to connect art and ideas from different eras and continents into a kind of ecstatic worldview. Pretty good for a 22-year-old kid from middle-class New Jersey.
Then there's "Hannah Hunt." In some sense, it seems like Vampire Weekend's entire career thus far has led to this one song. It begins with the hiss of wind and some vague background chatter—the sounds of the everyday—before it's all quickly tuned out in favor of Batmanglij's piano and bassist Chris Baio's upright plucks. Koenig comes in soft, telling of a couple on a cross-country road trip. His details—crawling vines, mysterious men of faith, newspaper kindling—are sparse, delicate, perfect. And then, after two minutes and 40 seconds of quiet beauty, the song blooms, and Koenig lets it absolutely rip: "If I can't trust you then damn it, Hannah/There's no future/There's no answer/Though we live on the U.S. dollar/You and me, we got our own sense of time." On an album preoccupied with the ominous ticking of clocks, this is the moment that stops them cold.
This song is sad. There's no two ways about it. A band that I fell in love with for their ability to write joyous little ditties about campus life and comma usage managed to crack the top 100 by just being sad and talking about a relationship that isn't quite over but is undoubtedly on its way.
I think any band that can run the range from ebullient to depressive is a band worth sticking with.
Artist
Sufjan Stevens
Released
2014
Lyric
I should have known better
Nothing can be changed
The past is still the past
The bridge to nowhere
I should have wrote a letter
Explaining what I feel
That empty feeling
One Word
Forlorn
|More Than One Word|
Pitchfork: As the snow melts and the season turns, here comes Sufjan Stevens to remind us that everything dies. His new album, Carrie & Lowell, is centered around the death of his mother, Carrie, who was in and out of his life from the start. "Should Have Known Better" takes us back to the beginning he remembers, where Carrie leaves him in a video store at the age of "three, maybe four." In a hushed voice, he sings like he's clinging onto a blanket for warmth as he fixates on the black shroud that enveloped him in the wake of her absence, muting his ability to transparently express himself. But halfway through, an uplifting electric keyboard line kicks in; a subtle percussive note steadily taps out a reminder to keep going; his voice shakes off the ice and forms a chorus with itself, flowering into something hopeful. Sufjan flips the melody from the black shroud into a tender lyric about shoving aside his fear, discovering an oasis of perspective when he looks to his brother's newborn daughter and sees his mother in her face. When he sings "nothing can be changed," he doesn't sound resigned, but ready to look forward. It's the dawn at the end of a long night, a prayer that past traumas might be healed by a beautiful present.
One of the saddest albums I've ever listened to is Carrie and Lowell, where this song appears. It's basically tragedy after tragedy as Sufjan displays all the ways his mom (Carrie) really left him with some emotional trauma. This is definitively beautiful and explicitly not joyous. The type of music that someone listens to and thinks, wow, if I tell people I like this, they might put me on suicide watch.
Honestly, a different song on the album has climaxes with Sufjan serenading us with the words "we're all going to die." That said, this song is probably the peppiest of the entire album (hard to believe because it definitely starts with him talking about his mom abandoning him at a movie store when he was three) but ends by calling out that his brother had a daughter, and the beauty that she brings.
I saw Sufjan perform this album live, and I'll never forget how cathartic it was. Additionally, the man wore his hat in a funky way and cut the sleeves off his t-shirt to reveal staggeringly huge biceps. Take a gander at what happened to him in 2023 to see why that's a big deal. Here's hoping we get another entirely depressing album about the saga any day now.
Song
Sabali
Artist
Amadou et Miriam
Released|
2008
Lyric
Sabali! Sabali! Sabali yonkontê
Sabali! Sabali! Sabali kayi
One Word
Patient
|More Than One Word|
Pitchfork: Somewhat improbably, Amadou & Mariam have become a musical laboratory where the two principle players, the blind couple from Mali, are willing to try nearly anything. Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoli drops in on one track and it feels completely natural. Pianos aren't common in Africa because the weather makes it tough to keep them in tune, but there's piano all over this album, and it sounds great rubbing up against koras (17-string West African harp) and balafons (West African marimba). On the title track, Amadou's guitar accents the chorus with big, bent surf chords, and it sounds not only logical but inevitable.
That opening shot is part of an eclectic landscape that at times sounds West African and at others sounds completely divorced from geography. Dimanche à Bamako, which means "Sunday in Bamako", Mali's capital, felt like a product of that city. Welcome to Mali, however, seems a strange title for a record that sounds so global. Damon Albarn also drops in to produce the opening track and first single "Sabali", one of the best things he's been involved in this decade. The song opens in overtly nostalgic territory, with Mariam Doumbia's resigned opening lines run through a light filter, but it soon jumps into a different realm, with her falsetto sweeping over mournful keyboards. It's not every day you hear an African record that uses ELO as a touchstone, but this song does it to devastating emotional effect.
I was listening to this song in preparation for this post last night. Leen was only sort of listening, but even this song managed to cut through the noise to get her to stop and ask me: What are we listening to? When I explained that we were listening to a blind husband and wife duo from Mali, her natural response was: Why? And how did you hear about this band?
Simply put, Leen, I learned about them from Pitchfork. When in doubt, if I’m making you listen to something, I probably heard about it from Pitchfork.
I do not know if the factoid re: Pianos in Africa is "true," but it's a detail that really made me pause and go, "Huh, wow. Who knew?"
Again, a suggestion to read the downfall of Pitchfork piece that I linked up top.
Otherwise, hope you enjoy these jams.
Happy Easter.
