'Hipster'

[Leo2112]

the only piece of music writing I've ever seen that comes even close to that clusterfuck is Paul Morley's now infamous 'He' piece on Patrick Wolf for Drowned In Sound

I only found that recently, bewildering stuff.  See how much you can get through:



DiS hasn't ever run an exclusive biog' and then, like buses, two come racing toward you at once. DiS is very excited to share this piece from the legendary journalist Paul Morley about Patrick Wolf's forthcoming album The Bachelor.
PATRICK WOLF

HE. by Paul Morley

Things you can know about Patrick Wolf from reading about him on his giddy, moderately helpful Wikipedia site: his middle name is Dennis, his parents were artists and musicians, he's 26 on June 30th 2009, he made a theremin when he was eleven, he was born in south London, he started recording songs when he was twelve, he plays a lot of instruments, he is classically trained, he's modelled for Burberry, at 14 he joined the Leigh Bowery sourced inflammatory art pop unit Minty, at 16 he left home and school and formed a pop group dedicated to fusing white noise, dance rhythm and the pop song, he has written and performed pop music ever since, and his music is described in various ways as though it can be described by using a word, a classifying genre name, when in fact words used to name and represent his music do not need to end with "tronica" or anything like that. If there was a way to use the word "pop" and also communicate that within that word is the meaning transmitted by words like 'dislocated', 'intense', 'convulsive', 'discreet', 'mesmeric', 'blow'. 'delirium', 'questions', 'little by little suddenly', 'indiscreet', 'answers' then he is a pop singer. He questions the relevance of traditional aesthetic categories. Watch as.

He falls in love with exactly who he wants to fall in love with.
He falls in love. With love, and then what happens, and then who knows.
He falls in.
He falls.
He.

Watch him work, play and etc in a video you might come across. He.

Permits you to watch. He. Studies himself. He. Is assembling himself right in front of you. He. Smashes his way through limited judgements of taste. He. Is detached from everything including detachment. He. Is in rude health. He. Is looking in a mirror. He. Is looking out of a mirror. He. Studies you. He. Is constantly touring. He. Screams lust and heartache into listeners ears. He. May yet shock the masses. He. Has not been brought to your attention by accident.

His tumultuous, eager, naïve, spunky, audacious, gifted, lustrous 2003 debut album was Lycanthropy. His angelic, devilish, deeply felt, defiantly different second album released in 2005 was Wind in the Wires. The third spirited, determined, sparky, album in 2007 was called The Magic Position. You might detect a trend and expect his fourth album to be released in 2009 – and The Bachelor is to be released in 2009, but the fifth album will be released in 2010, already planned, breaking the pattern, because one thing that is consistent in the way Wolf works, and the way he moves through himself to get to his destination, is that patterns are glorious, and patterns are there to be broken. He. Senses movement. He. Has toured the world more times than makes sense and felt himself spinning out of control/world weary/alarmed/sad/angry/determined/. He. Comes back to exotic English earth and makes sense of where he has been by looking for his home, his family, his music, himself, his friends, the history of everything that has made him who he is today. He. Turns this into a record, two records, and truth, beautifully, clashes with, fantastically, illusion, and he comes closer to finding the perfect savage/sensitive sonic method of announcing himself. He. Is sure of his purpose, and his fourth album is full of cosmically angled Anglo-centric purpose, and will appeal to those who love Purcell, Webern, Mingus, Joni, Barratt, Psychic TV, Morrissey, Robert Smith, Panda Bear and Mars Volta. He.

Pays microscopic attention to the texture of individual experience. He.

Has a feeling for the destroyed and for destruction itself, and in many ways such alliances, with forms of junk, and with various seductive drifters, are part of what it is he is and does, as he turns his sensitivity towards a desperate plight and transforms corrupted nature into song. He.

Has flirted with making provocative public gestures. He.
Has made a name for himself and a fool of himself and expressed concern about his usefulness and attracted enough fans to make him think its all worthwhile and decided he is serving a purpose and wandered around in a circle and worried that he was wasting his life and developed a strong will to put things right and is always anxious that the pride of improvement and liberation ends in waste and destruction.

He.

Then has to restore his balance, return to art, or himself, or a combination of the two, something serious, less trashy, fleshy and flashy, so that his life becomes a story of survivals, a series of recoveries, the coming out of conflict, the search for some kind of dignity, for some sort of sense of who he is, not because he wants the whole world to know and care who he is, but because he must know for himself.

Think of that 11 year old building a theremin and that 12 year old writing songs, when he was good he was very good, and when he was bad he was horrid, already thinking about what he is going to do with his life, and home is so sad, the sources of evil are in the house and in the family, and he starts to take joyous shots at how things ought to be. He.

Is buying his first guitar from Argos and treating it as much a sacred object as a musical instrument. He. Works out the relationship between noise and consciousness. He. Estimates the relationship between singing songs and the secret chambers of his mind. He. Is precious to himself. He.

Is 11 years old in front of a mirror playing a moog with a table lamp as a spotlight, playing at fame, famous in his own mind before he is a teenager. He.

Is picked on for playing the violin and having red hair and a choir boy voice. He.

Finds what he is looking for and then loses what he is looking for. He.

Is 13 and miming to Yoko One songs on stage with Lady Bunny and making a fanzine writing about the Pixies, the Breeders and Wendy Carols, selling "about 3 copies" but finding a purpose. He.

Is disappointed, confused, over-excited, tirelessly eclectic, writing through music his autobiography, and he is not yet 17. He.

Is provoked by the response to his hair and songs and his resolve increases. The hair is white. The make up is loud. He hangs out with performance artists. They're unlimited. They bend and stretch and turn themselves into other beings and life is to be faced and lived and they rename themselves they appear to disappear in front of your eyes they have a temper they're gentle and depserate they find a new position and they want your attention. He. Notices this. He's serious. He's sombre. He's having the time of his life. He. Wants more. He. Falls for the danger of rhythm's enigma. He.

Needs to be driven into the margins where he thinks he will find what he wants, where he will find clues about his personality and its needs. He.

Becomes someone something else time and time again. He.
Swerves. He. Slips. Between. Gaps. In. The. Road.

Read between the Wikipedia lines. He has been the experimental child star, emotional runaway, self-centred tearaway, generous hedonist, extreme heartbreaker, regularly heartbroken, lost and found, stricken angel, dissenting romantic, damned son, dedicated worker, tearful dreamer, planning action, celebrated artist, necessarily abstract, lysergic sage, fierce thinker, lost little boy, this charming man, shamed deserter, restless traveller, inventive composer, endlessly stressed, shadow dancer, wounded loner, wise child, occasional hermit, the cause and subject of passion . He.

Is accompanying Nan Goldin's savagely evocative visual diary slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Tate Modern, and his ecstatic, mystical Englishness collided/connected with and regenerated her degenerate, exposed New York-ness, the abstract relationship between his tribe, and hers, between those travelling through a certain intense, occult Lower East Side and those finding themselves in a secret night time London as if the two nervy cities are next door to each other in time and space. He. Uses music to capture the density and flavour of life, the colour, smell, sound and physical presence, in the way she uses photography. He. Is as much a documentarian as a teller of fables. He. Sees finds the truth embedded in fiction. He. Is singing on his new album with Eliza Carthy. He. And she. Create a visceral anglo-ghostly version of the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood boy girl pop couple. He. Loves the full moon. He.

Has so much he wants to say, about what happened because of who he was and why that turned into where he ended up, and he takes refuge in song, and joins his heroes in the company of music, where he wants to be adored, and understood, and understand how art rears its head, and speak its mind. He heads, frenetically, in the direction of love, and hate, and he sings about death, and mad saints, and he is not yet 18, and no one believe that he can do this. He.
Is on his own, and he loves and hates the feeling. He. Must not die in vain. He.

Knows that he needs a new name, because pop stars always have new names, as part of the way they invent themselves, and they leave behind a banal old life they eventually realise, to their horror and/or fascination, they can never really escape. He thinks about Madonna, one name, this is me, Patrick, and he realises it's not a great pop star name, more David than Jobriath. He. chooses Wolf. He. Is given the name by a spirit medium. He. Reads Angela Carter and he was exploring English mythology because he wasn't interested in becoming an American creature he was English born and bred and Carter and folklore was leading him to wolves. He. Finds the name in the air around him. The skinny 17 year old told his artist friends that he was now Patrick Wolf. They laughed, "You're more Patrick Lamb," they said. He. Puts on a continuous show. He.

Is actually very tall indeed, too tall to hide, to slip into the margins, too tall to be the shrinking violent, and it is easy to understand why his favourite animal is a giraffe. He.

Becomes Patrick Wolf, someone else, an other, two minds inside one body, two bodies inside one mind, doubled, douibleness, which makes sense to him, because when he was six, or twelve, he felt split, between one person and one other, or maybe a few others, and now, there's one him that buys milk and speaks to the accountant, and then there's Patrick Wolf, the singer with third person detachment on good terms with making noise and singing about, say, sin and disturbance. He. Was making his first album as this twisted, ambitious 18 year old representing his tender, candid innocence and changing points of view through the eyes of an older, stranger, wiser person. The star struck pop fan stepped back into diseased mythical thinking, so here is this fan of Britney, and yet also Kate Bush, who responds to the seething poetic power of mythology and who has studied the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk and loves mediaeval religious music. He.

Is a little bit Kylie and a little bit Throbbing Gristle, he's dressed up in leather and glass, steel and membrane, skin and bone for furtive play, and thinking a little deeply about war and decay. He's part simple glamour and meanwhile deranging his senses with the potential of sensation. He.

Loves the vivid embrace of pop stars but remembers his grandfather talking about ghouls and banshees and the grim reaper. He.

Remembers fighting, digging, yearning to find a stranger, odder, murkier Englishness that was beyond his aunties giving him tea and visiting the garden centre and watching Antiques Roadshow. That was outside Britpop and union jack guitars. Finding Thomas Hardy and Derek Jarman. He.
Stands out against the uniform grain of the Oasis age. He.

Wants to be a pop star but without losing his sense of outrage. A pop star that rattles the cage. He.

Is whether he knows it or not Adam Ant and John Donne at the same time, Madonna and Robert Louis Stevenson, MIA and Fairport Convention. Infernally fabricated Patrick in the charts and in wonderland, in tights and in ecstasy, chic and psychic, light and dark, oblique and fabulous. He.

Video: Patrick Wolf 'Vulture'

Isn't as careful as he might be in organising this marvellous collection of possibilities.

The pop world likes the make up and hair and glittery goggles but not the dangerous obsession with forbidden passions, savages and gunpowder, the songs that are as likely to confound through form and content as comfort and console. The indie side likes the debauched fascination with madness and rhythm but not his arrival at the edges of Heat magazine. He.

Signs a deal with Universal Records, the glamour and security he's been craving since he was a young teenager. He.
Thinks it will be a great adventure. He.
Thinks it is a sign he has been accepted. He.
Thinks he's making an album of demented Japanese Motown pop – from the fan of Suicide/Front 242 and Sugababes/Girls Aloud – but they think he's this years/months/weeks new thing, packaged shock, diluted mischief, perfect for the Charlotte Church Show, perfectly glamorous, a pop star they can package. He. Is, to confirm, made up of carousing pop, and dance, and the attack of a spider from mars, or a slider, or a banshee, or a tricky character, but. He is also made up of the bloodthirsty, the blasphemous, the irrational, the diabolical. He. Is energetic show business. But he. Is not always wanting to jump for joy. He. Is a showman. But he. Is dedicated to the creation of a new beauty. He.
Ends up at loggerheads with his new label. He.
Wants to experiment, to produce himself, and stay in control of his destiny, and Universal want the conventional commercial producer makeover. He.
Loses heart. He.

Would rather be poor – he surprises himself with the intensity of his response to the stalemate between label looking for the commercial obviousness and artist wanting artistic control – and homeless than give up the one thing he has that in the end he can call his own. He.
Is horrified that they try and change him. He.
Is labelled a trouble maker by the label. He decides that he will take this as a compliment as the people who think he is impossible to work with and far too precious are the kind of people who get excited about the next Kate Mehlua album. He.

Accepts that he would rather make an album he is proud of that reaches a small audience that make a single he had little to do with that is a success. He.

Leaves, or is left in the cold, by Universal, and part of the relief he feels fuels the energy, range and content of his latest album, The Bachelor, the kind of intensely personal, abrasively intimate album he could not have made as a provisional pop star on a corporate label. He. Names the label where he will release The Bachelor – and it's conceptual and sonic partner The Conqueror – Bloody Chambers after an Angela Carter story, a darkly erotic reworking of Bluebeards Castle. The Bachelor is an album about someone recovering from a dream that became a nightmare. Wolf, nothing to hide and everything to share, sings songs about the dark, dangerous adventures he has suffered and enjoyed and resigned himself to as he crawled closer to becoming a subversive pop star, and the dawning realisation that the risks he takes to become a pop star threaten to destroy the love he has for music, and family, and friends. He.

Hasn't the discipline to become the obedient celebrity. He.
Is doomed to think and feel and confess too much. He.
Has lived to tell the tale, but only just. He.
Is master of his own destiny, for better or worse, once more. He.
Started making the album feeling miserable and exhausted, and Tilda Swinton, as the voice of hope, as his mother, as his conscience, as his creative spirit, scolds him for being so defeatist, and he ends up, perhaps, where he began. He.
Is hopeful.

He.

Is setting out on a new journey, and everything is possible. He. Has been punished and driven to the edge of sanity, the star breakdown, the narcissistic anxiety, but has found ways to mend himself – through love and song and the love song. He.

Is once more the hyperactive 16 year old – feeling the strength and enthusiasm of when he was 16 going on 17, the tenderness and candour, brimming with wonder,the clamour inside , pleasing himself before he even thinks of an audience, distraction and stimulation closely linked in his nervous system - who writes songs to save his mortal soul and dreams of becoming a surreal pop star. The kind of gloriously persuasive surreal pop star packed with colourful complexity and musical ingenuity there isn't much room, time or space for any more. He. Cannot stop. He.
Has no choice. He.
Has a future. He.
Will see you tomorrow. He.
Has never quite lost the feeling.
He.
Is what he is.

Paul Morely, 2009.

[Smeraldina Rima]

You can always rely on Paul Morley to say the word "banal".

[Famous Mortimer]

I made it to his discography. It's times like this that I realise some of my snap judgements - in Paul Morley's case, thinking he was a wanker after seeing him almost try and fellate Newman and Baddiel during an interview - are entirely correct.

[chand]

You might detect a trend and expect his fourth album to be released in 2009 – and The Bachelor is to be released in 2009, but the fifth album will be released in 2010, already planned, breaking the pattern, because one thing that is consistent in the way Wolf works, and the way he moves through himself to get to his destination, is that patterns are glorious, and patterns are there to be broken.

Sweet fucking Christ. That's a sentence that reads like the musings of someone who's staring blankly at an artist's Wikipedia page trying to think of something to write about. That's about as far as I could get in that review, the rest of it is written in such a way it makes the most pretentious reviews from The Wire read like Heat.

As for Pitchfork, I like it for the most part, but they do occasionally put up some articles that you think are just designed to wind people up. I remember them giving ex-Dismemberment Plan singer Travis Morrison's first solo album a 0.0. The criticisms in the review were pretty harsh but fair comment, it was a bit of a messy record with some misguided elements to it, but sticking the 0.0 on it just seemed bizarre and not at all justified by the rest of the review. Morrison credits it with essentially ending his career;

"I just got the sense [Pitchfork] thought I was a rock star and they wanted to take me down a peg, but I don't think it occurred to them that the review could have a catastrophic effect," says Morrison, who is working on a new album, with a new band. (He's also working a day job as a programmer for Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive.) "Up until the day of the review, I'd play a solo show, and people would be like, 'That's our boy, our eccentric boy.' Literally, the view changed overnight. . . . I could tell people were trying to figure out if they were supposed to be there or not. It was pretty severe, how the mood changed.

"The review isn't the story. The reaction to it is. The seriousness with which everyone takes Pitchfork is kind of mind-boggling."

I can't check this now because the links are all dead, but this guy claims that someone at Pitchfork took an entire point off the score for Tool's '10,000 Days' for some reason.

[Hank_Kingsley]

Is a wussbag with crap hair. He.

[purlieu]

Doom metal became hip? Really?

I've never known the difference between doom and drone metal, but over the last year or two bands like SunnO))) and Earth have become namedropable.  It's hilarious.

[Squink]

...but who the fuck are these people buying Woods albums?  Even people who base their whole listening diet on the site think they're complete bollocks.

Huh? i like Woods. What made you single them out in particular? I play Songs of Shame all the time. "Rain On" is a really beautiful song. They have a sweet Galaxie 500/Bongwater thing going on, and their Woodsist label is consistently excellent. This video captures them really well:

http://www.vimeo.com/5760130

[ThickAndCreamy]

I also like Woods, they're not mind blowing particularly, and their instrumental stuff isn't wonderful by any means but they still do manage to create a few excellent songs.

On the other hand Wavves are indeed shit, although that's more of a consensus than them being good I now believe.

[Deadeye Dick]

Heh, that's me told at least!  Not a fan myself (as I'm sure you guessed), but I chose them more because even the kind of people who seem to view Pitchfork as an ultimate arbiter of musical taste don't get the fuss they've been given Woods lately.  They're not alone in this - Wavves have got a few good songs, but they've clearly been given hype that they're clearly not ready for it yet.  I just don't find much appealing in Woods though , and as much as some of the current lo-fi crowd can be contrived and irritating, there seems (to me) to be a real 'can't-be-bothered, will-this-do?'  with Woods that just pisses me off.  Insert that age old opinions/arseholes saying should you wish to make this post even more cripplingly pointless than it already is...

[Squink]

Putting differences of opinion about Woods' musical worth aside, it's interesting to see what's regarded as 'hype'. A search for Woods on Pitchfork really doesn't produce that much. In fact, Pitchfork has ignored most of their albums. Songs of Shame is the only one they've reviewed. Aside from that, there's an interview, a couple of music videos and a few reviews of individual tracks. It doesn't feel like Pitchfork is particularly frothing at the mouth over them.

http://pitchfork.com/artists/27672-woods/

In other news, here's a funny video of "He" throwing a bit of a strop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY6hSw-BbQ0

[Deadeye Dick]

Haha, Patrick Wolf in over-reacting nob shocker!  Still not as impressive as the remarkable hissy fit thrown by Kevin Shields at Dingwalls in 1988 (a bootleg that's interesting for entirely the wrong reasons, that one) or Mark E Smith almost every day of his life though.

[vrailaine]

I was just called a hipster for saying I'd rather go to a festival with loadsa good bands instead of two or three great ones.

[chand]

In other news, here's a funny video of "He" throwing a bit of a strop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY6hSw-BbQ0

Haha, that's the least frightening angry man I've ever seen, I think I would piss myself if he threw a strop like that at me.

[DJ One Record]

The new mark for ITAOTS was for a reissue, it wasn't completely out of the blue. I would agree that it was somewhat needless. They presumably wanted to big up the re-release though which is hardly a sin. Reviewing an album years after it has been released, having lived with it, is completely different to reviewing a pre-release review copy. It would be difficult not to take 'wider impact' and 'influence' into account on some level. Taking down the original review was definitely ludicrous though.

They did that for the Boards of Canada reissue as well.

[Lee Van Cleef]

One of the forums I used to frequent (Doom Forever Doomed, formerly the official Southern Lord forums) is so full of "hipster" hate.  Pelican were frequently slammed for being a favourite of "Nigel hipsters" (only their first release is worth a damn apparently), but it seems strange that a band like Sunn, that has more "cool" cache, avoids the same kind of beatdown.  So in a way it seems to me hipster is another tag to dismiss things you don't like that have some kind of credibility with others.

[CaledonianGonzo]

The thing about a re-release getting a better review than the original issue is entirely fair enough.  It's by no means a recent phenomenon and isn't exclusively an online or a hipster thing.  For every album where opinion gets revised up the away, with the attendant hype is removed and with the benefit of hindsight, there are probably double the amount where the original take gets revised down the way, stars get removed, etc.

I see no issue whatsoever with looking at something with a fresh pair of eyes/listening to it with a fresh pair of ears.  Music should and is open to re-assessment, and I don't think any self-respecting editor would see one review or another as the final word on an album.

Pointing at a publication and saying 'Hah!  You've changed your mind!' is, in itself, a hipster position.  Aaaaah! 

Well, it is at least an inflexible one.  Sort of.

[The Boston Crab]

I think there's an inherent problem in rating music (or anything) quantitatively. I like reviews which enthuse about music, describe roughly what it sounds like and put it in some kind of context...aside from that, what the fuck can you say that's worth sheeeeeeeit, brother?

[Famous Mortimer]

For every album where opinion gets revised up the away, with the attendant hype is removed and with the benefit of hindsight, there are probably double the amount where the original take gets revised down the way, stars get removed, etc.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but how many examples have you got of this happening in the timeframe we're discussing here?

I see no issue whatsoever with looking at something with a fresh pair of eyes/listening to it with a fresh pair of ears.  Music should and is open to re-assessment, and I don't think any self-respecting editor would see one review or another as the final word on an album.

It's the albums they pick, and the reasons for the re-assessment, that I think has inspired some of the comment in this thread.

Pointing at a publication and saying 'Hah!  You've changed your mind!' is, in itself, a hipster position.  Aaaaah! 

Well, it is at least an inflexible one.  Sort of.

Aside from the Black Kids post, which I kinda disagreed with anyway, my comment was about the reason they'd changed their mind. The re-release wasn't signficantly different but "ITAOTS" was by that point almost an indie sacred cow which had gone beyond criticism. I think the article they did where they interviewed a bunch of indie musicians about the album was much better - it gave a broad spectrum of opinion and placed the album in its musical and historical perspective. The review not only misrepresents it ("this album is not cool" - bollocks it isn't) but does little other than attempt to further cement its position as untouchable. I think them leaving the original review up would have done a lot, but I'm just repeating myself now so I'll shut up.

[confettiinmyhair]

The thing about a re-release getting a better review than the original issue is entirely fair enough.  It's by no means a recent phenomenon and isn't exclusively an online or a hipster thing.  For every album where opinion gets revised up the away, with the attendant hype is removed and with the benefit of hindsight, there are probably double the amount where the original take gets revised down the way, stars get removed, etc.

I'd love to see a publication that would re-review albums in 12 months time. Just to allow the hype and pandemonium to die down. The so called Golden Age of Music Journalism benefitted from belated reviews.

[TheWizard]

Elitism fuels Pitchfork, one only has to look at the about turn that the site has made towards so many bands, case in point Black Kids.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10743-wizard-of-ahhhs-ep/
to
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/

Now you can say that the reviews are individual opinions from the contributing writers, but the 2nd 'review' would be vetoed if it didn't reflect the general feelings of the site editors.

To be fair, the second review is by Scott Plagenhoef, the Editor-In-Chief.  There's a post from him in the comments http://idolator.com/398951/black-kids-are-ready-to-save-the-world-until-the-next-best-thing-comes-along#c6813643 talking about orginally the review read 0.0 etc

[Vitalstatistix]

For P4k to review the Neutral Milk reissue and leave it as a 7 just because it was originally given this (I'd be interested in reading that, by the way) would be ludicrous!

I don't buy that it was because of its fashionable position. I think it was because all those guys fucking love the album and felt it was deserving, like many people (myself included, obvvs!).

Gonzo's right about the acceptable nature of reassessment - in fact it's important and necessary, inevitable and natural in music criticism. The dodginess is the re-writing of history in removing old reviews which could be viewed as out of step with current consensus (if that's what they've done) which is lily-livered bullshit alright.

I wish I was a hipster!

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I've never known the difference between doom and drone metal, but over the last year or two bands like SunnO))) and Earth have become namedropable.  It's hilarious.

This is surprising to me. I could imagine them appealing to chin stroking muso types who might wax intellectual about it, but I thought metal of any sort was pretty much precluded from ever being hip. I certainly can't imagine folk walking around Hoxton in robes and long beards.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Probably as good a place as any to draw attention to the current Pitchfork countdown of the top 500 tracks of the 1999 - 2009 decade.

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7685-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-500-201/

Warning:  Opinions of some tracks may have changed since date of release.

As you'd expect, it's comprehensive, incomplete, spot on and baffling in equal and obligatory measure, but it'll pass half an hour at lunch while you try to figure out whether by including Black Kids they're trying to rewrite history for the first, second or third time. 

Annoyingly, though, the first 300 don't have reviews.

[Johnny Townmouse]

This is surprising to me. I could imagine them appealing to chin stroking muso types who might wax intellectual about it, but I thought metal of any sort was pretty much precluded from ever being hip. I certainly can't imagine folk walking around Hoxton in robes and long beards.

I think the last time this happened (that metal could be deemed 'hip') was when Earache records were at their height, releasing stuff by Godflesh, Fudge Tunnel, Scorn etc, as the bands were toying around with electronic sounds (Techno-Animal), experimental (John Zorn, Naked City, Painkiller) and stuff that Kevin Martin (from The Bug) was releasing on Pathological Records. Since then, I don't think anyone has had much good to say about metal, until this new crop of droney folks has come along.

[Famous Mortimer]

As you'd expect, it's comprehensive, incomplete, spot on and baffling in equal and obligatory measure, but it'll pass half an hour at lunch while you try to figure out whether by including Black Kids they're trying to rewrite history for the first, second or third time. 

Ah, lists. I don't give a toss about Black Kids, having never heard a single second of any record they've ever done, but I do like a nice list. How dare they put song X at 273 but song Y at 269? MOTHERFUCKERS"

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

That list has Lady Sovereign on it. That list is wrong.

[The Boston Crab]

The most annoying thing for me, about Pitchfork, is not their enormous indie white-boy wankathon nor their sporadically wacky attention-seeking reviews. The most annoying thing is their treatment of R&B/commercial hip-hop as anything other than 'ringtone shit'. I'll be honest enough to say that as a 28-year-old white man living in China, I have no workable context in which to place this type of music.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Pitchfork's Top 20 greatest singles of the decade has now gone live and it's stuffed to the gills with R&B/commercial hip-hop:

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/1/
http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/

[purlieu]

This is surprising to me. I could imagine them appealing to chin stroking muso types who might wax intellectual about it, but I thought metal of any sort was pretty much precluded from ever being hip. I certainly can't imagine folk walking around Hoxton in robes and long beards.

Heh, no, the droney doomy whatever stuff is hip in music nerd hipsterland at the minute, and metal vests/t-shirts have been pretty 'hip' on the more fashionable/Hoxton/wankerish end of it all, possibly in a slightly ironic way.  I have a friend in Shoreditch who's always wearing Megadeth or AC/DC tops and stuff. 

[Famous Mortimer]

When the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle started a message board thread on 100 reasons for this song's greatness, every single fraction of "Ignition (Remix)" got its own nomination (and the list went well beyond 100).

It's okay for us to like R Kelly! Someone out of the Mountain Goats does too!

Ah, I'm being too unkind. But it's still a lot of old rubbish.

EDIT: Well, it's not, obviously. I just feel the music that speaks to me from the last decade isn't anywhere here. It doesn't have to be, but I've never realised how far my tastes are outside the mainstream and the Pitchfork-mainstream. Ah well.