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PITCHFORK COBAGGERY WATCH 2011-UNEXPECTED!!!!!!!

PCW 2011

I need to be honest, this feature is less fun for probably two reasons, one UC doesn’t make me laugh nonstop anymore, though I know he would if he could, but also that the music this last year seemed just so boring. The inexplicable and the terrible have been replaced by the sadly predictable. Minimally, if we are gonna stay in this game, we should at least bring back this feature- where the mean record store clerk gives an internal monologue for your purchases. The best part is we could all hammer our favorite albums

The 2011 Track List at Pitchfork

Previously:

2010

We previously sprung the rest of the Top Tracks of 2010 as placed on a Ritz cracker by Pitchfork back in surprisingly April. The list was here, but maybe it is so old it might 404?????

2010 Numbers 20-1

2009

Pitchfork listo here. Our previous 100-81 here. 80-61 here. 60-41 here. 40-21 here. Somebody should graph our output over the year. Diminishing returns? I think not. UC delivers! Suck it, All Music Guide!

2009 Numbers 20-1

2008

It is done.

Previous here and in links.

2008 Numbers 20-1

2007

Here, here, here, here, here.

2006

Here, here, here, here.

2011 JUST IN TIME FOR 2012! And here. we. go.

100. Thundercat “For Love (I Come Your Friend)”
PP says: The intro on this is very free-form Spinal Tap jazz odyssey. Now I am wondering if this is a Destroyer-level joke/awesome ironic/serious take on something, but now I feel like it is cool kid irony reversal, make something so uncool that you can reverse direction on a dime and declare it cool when nobody is looking, guaranteeing that you will lead the charge. My feelings on this: jazz fusion is either great forever, or mostly never, but it is one or the other, and if you can’t explain it without using the context “no, this is cool now because it isn’t cool” then it is probably just a noodly wank. Novelty mixtape trashbin material, but inoffensive.

Continue reading ‘PITCHFORK COBAGGERY WATCH 2011-UNEXPECTED!!!!!!!’

BLARG

Everyones, this blog has been getting 60 spams a day. They don’t make it onto the blog, but they completely swamp my will to do anything. Consider them the tree in the yard that does nothing but drop stinky pods that must be raked. I loathe such rakers.

Anyhow, there is now double the math for your commenting fiascos. Unless plover can figure out, as plovers are wont, where in the style sheet the new Captcha font color is called out, your tiny eyes will do nothing but strain to make out the directions for your math Waterloo. As much as I hope that shady Ruskeroo criminal computers would be even more disadvantaged in squinting their cpu to conquer such Captcha, I feel we might be in trouble.

Anyhow. I have probably about 10 days to finish Pitchforke Cobaggery Watch 2011 before 2012 rolls around. Nothing says how boring the list must have been last year than the great effort put out by music lovers (Seitz), and snark lovers (Brando), and Pinko haters (UC) and in betweeners (PP) that we could not make it through 100 songs in 350 days. Onward.

Did I miss the election? What happened?

Oh Ian Cohen-This is a Bridge Too Far

PITCHFORK writes the Andrew W.K. apologia. WE JUST DIDN’T GET YOU ANDREW W.K.!!!! Compare to Ry Schry’s original take:

And yet, some of these ‘punk’ and ‘indie’ kids are still willing to back WK up with a number of ridiculous excuses that they deep-down know are inherently flawed. “It’s catchy” is no kind of argument. Every pop song you’ve ever truly hated is catchy. “It’s ironic” is wack, too, since there’s exactly zero irony to be had on any of I Get Wet or in WK’s motivational interviews. “It’s fun” is about the only legitimate excuse a guy could come up with– and that’s the one thing I’ll give it to warrant the .6 in the rating– but this world of music which history has graced us with is loaded with fun music. Even fun music with substance, fun music that doesn’t talk to you like you’re some kinda total dipshit that wouldn’t know Boredoms from buzzworthy. And you don’t even have to look that hard! So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK’s blistering tard-rock? That’s right, folks: there isn’t one.

SHORTER SHREIBER: “YOU, READING THIS, YOU AREN’T AN IDIOT, ARE YOU? I MEAN I CLEARLY DON’T THINK YOU ARE, AND SINCE YOU AREN’T, YOU CLEARLY DON’T LIKE ANDREW W.K., DO YOU? I KNEW YOU DIDN’T. THANK GOD WE GOT PREVIEW COPIES OF THE LATEST BOREDOMS 7 INCH FROM THE FUTURE. IN FACT I HAVE BUILT A TIME MACHINE TO ENSURE THAT IT IS NEVER RELEASED AND YOU SHALL NEVER HEAR OF IT. I WILL DESCRIBE IT TO YOU IN WAYS THAT YOU SHALL NOT UNDERSTAND, BUT SURELY YOU WILL RECOGNIZE HOW MUCH IT MAKES YOU A DIPSHIT.”
Continue reading ‘Oh Ian Cohen-This is a Bridge Too Far’

PITCHFORK *CHECK PLEASE*

Relevant

UC chastised me for participating in Le Pitchfork’s People’s List, where everyone got to vote for their favorite albums from Pitchfork’s existence. They said they’d take all the data and present it in super cool ways. Instead, they show some top 20 lists parsed by some geography and a few questions (most listened to genre). For the whole shebang they give the top 200 albums on a nice looking page and a graph where they break the thing down by albums from year with a table or so about some of the data. They just seemed like they failed. Where they succeeded is I assume some information harvesting app because they required voting through social media sites. Who knows. UC and I kind of had a group vote- we traded suggestions back and forth with arcane rules for vetoes etc.,

Suggestions for what would have been actually cool:

1) Top 1000 or even 2000 albums- nothing in the top 200 is surprising so much, but it would be interesting to know what albums were in the next pockets of interest (since there were tons of albums voted for) and a great way to remember some albums that have maybe fallen off.

2) Top write-in albums (bunch of well known albums were not in their database) UPDATE- OOPS- they did have this one. This was a little bit sad because these should have been in the database- I would have liked to see how many of the top 200 were suggested in their pages for the top rated albums- perhaps a little selection bias maybe

TOP-VOTED WRITE-IN ALBUMS
PAVEMENT BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS
REFUSED THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME
LAURYN HILL THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL
BRAND NEW THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME
PULP THIS IS HARDCORE
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE RATED R
DEFTONES WHITE PONY
JAY-Z REASONABLE DOUBT
BEASTIE BOYS HELLO NASTY
PAVEMENT TERROR TWILIGHT
THE WHITE STRIPES DE STIJL
BLUR BLUR
DELTRON 3030 DELTRON 3030
OUTKAST ATLIENS
DR. DRE 2001
SLEATER-KINNEY DIG ME OUT
MUSE ORIGIN OF SYMMETRY
THE VERVE URBAN HYMNS
MUSE ABSOLUTION
JIMMY EAT WORLD CLARITY

3) Distribution of rankings for albums in the top 20 at least (kind of like how IMDB lets you look at distribution of scores for movies- and then gives some demographic breakdowns).

4) A selection of some people’s number 1s that didn’t make the top 200 and their comments. People’s comments were a nice feature. I presume they harvested a ton of comments from people on albums they love, yet they only used 10 of them. It is nice to see regular people write about stuff without trying too hard (™ Grayson Currin writing about metal, Ian Cohen writing about re-releases, maybe anyone at Pitchfork?).

5) They had one small list of albums that scored OK but had no number 1 votes. That was interesting. They could have had more breakdowns along these lines.

6) Maybe geography by state instead of two entries for NYC (holla Brooklyn!)

Request for reader blurriness: Should Three Bulls! Incarnate (Inblogate?) Incoherence?

Rebuilt Cop Id = Public Editor

A word from Errata Brushbins, 3B’s I-blur-topic ed.

I’m looking for “reader” input on whether and when Three Bulls! keyboard monkeys/meese/birds/fungi/ombudsganisms should insist that “sense” is overrated and ought to be dispensed with in any “content” inflicted on hapless viewers of this website.

One example mentioned recently by a small, potted plant that has never actually read this site: As noted in the recent XLVIX-part series “Under the Bench: A Gum Wad’s View of the Supreme Court”, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” the rules of curling when he used curling stones supplied by his wife which could be remotely steered from a bunker under the Heritage Foundation. The plant seemed perturbed by the plausibility of this scenario.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for the lateness of Pitchfork Cobaggery Watch,” a phrase to which Uncanny Canadian responded in a December column by saying: “”.

As a denizen of the Three Bulls! mausoleum, Mr. [sic] Canadian clearly has the freedom to be non-responsive. My question for readers is: should actual non-silent posters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for Three Bulls!, there should be a post stating, more or less:

“Mitt Romney is just a theory. All hail IceWedge.” (IcePorkins getting no love per usual.)

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message found in a bottle washed up on the Three Bulls! private beach. He/she/it/bird wrote:

“My question is what role battle raps play in inducing the heat death of the universe. The main problem with entropy is that it doesn’t work fast enough, especially when living organisms are around. I continually mourn the amount of order I add to the universe and rely on 3B as a synapse randomizer. If the site’s overarching goal is the dismasting of the ship of reason so that it is helpless before wind and water and soon devoured by lampreys and laser-urchins, oughtn’t its principal posts fire their cannons on all cylinders? In other words, if Matthew Yglesias stubs his toe in a forest and no one is there to hear, does he still sound like an emu? And shouldn’t the result be sampled?”

This message was typical, perhaps even archetypical, of “mail” from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to Three Bulls for variety in distortion and evasion. They worry that 3B might one day show something, that, without requiring the assumption that the phonemes mean something when strung together in one of chief languages of the planet I______ IV, could be called judgment.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, do we care? We can point to actual sentences in the universe like, “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” What more could you want?

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign debates, 3B has employed a special invisible sidebar where we ignore them entirely. Do you like this feature, or would you rather our ignorance be incorporated into our regular posts?

Please feel free to leave a comment below or send an e-mail to public@nytimes.com with the subject line: Must Credit Three Bulls! Beware of comment moderation policy.

PS The collective noun for ombudsganisms is: an ombudsgasm of ombudsganisms. No one who has met one has lived long enough to devise a collective noun for laser-urchins.

Unrelated

Pitchfork Cobaggery Watch throws down- e me at 3bulls/gmail. If you have any takes on any of the songs, send them along and we will include- this will allow some picking and choosing while myself and maybe my cohorts slog through the entire thing.

Is UC in this year? Seitz is gonna join in. I work on a list and we pass it back and forth, or you can just e-mail me your feelings on this business and I will add.

Also, I project that battle rap gonna street this week. Devastating.

Definitely Nobody Expects Pitchfork Cobaggery Watch 2010 Tracks 20-1

We previously sprung the rest of the Top Tracks of 2010 as placed on a Ritz cracker by Pitchfork back in surprisingly April. The list was here, but maybe it is so old it might 404????? Just kidding, I finished the top 10 tonight. I had to get myself in shape for 2011′s list, soon to be released. UC, are you joining us?

And off we go!!!!!!!!

20. Erykah Badu “Window Seat”
Pinko Punko says:Sounds like a Erykah Badu singing over a vaguely Massive Attack “Protection”-like beat with some Quiet Storm like touches. OK but so unmemorable I forgot to do this list until November or read anything about why this song is supposedly exceptional.

UC adds:
Continue reading ‘Definitely Nobody Expects Pitchfork Cobaggery Watch 2010 Tracks 20-1′

Solidarity

As documented below, ZRM has joined Von in the highly exclusive club of flagged commenters. This is a blatant example of anti-Zombie bias, and we will not stand for this action against our honoured colleague. The Ombuds Collective beseeches Pinko to find some way of fixing this. Think of the children!

(Although in fairness it could be that Akismet has become self-aware and is punishing ZRM for his admission that he has “used Pitchfork reviews to discover new music.” There is still no excuse for banning Von, and there never will be.)

In the interim, we would like to open the floor to proposed protest actions.

OTHER BUSINESS:

1. In a follow-up to the Pitchfork post, regarding the release of Jay-Z albums on inauspicious dates, we should mention that Nickleback’s debut album came out on September 11, 2001. We offer no other comment.

2. Jennifer asks: Wasn’t there a contest going on? Yes, and we are appalled to see our header up there.

3. It is somewhat startling that none of this is fish’s fault. Discuss.

A sad day

among aficionados of Dick Cheney jokes (of which, Kathleen reminds us, Yosef remains champion): the contents of his “man-sized safe” have been revealed to contain, in part, a letter of resignation should he become incapacitated due to health reasons.

It makes no mention of in which jar to store his brain, but I am sure our loyal readers will have some suggestions.

OTHER BUSINESS: Since Pinko insists on mentioning Pitchfork outside of the traditional season for doing so, I will therefore inflict upon you their thoughts on the 15th anniversary of their founding. A snippet:

So many– but certainly not all– of the site’s earliest reviews are heavy on the shit-talking and light on the discussion of the music at hand.

“And so are the rest of our reviews, only with more vocabulary,” they did not add.

Any other business?

Three Bulls!

Welcomes Tom Breihan to Stereogum. We only ask that he attempt to top his atrocious current event reviewism at Pitchfork. Behold the master, on the new Jigga/Yeezy platter:

In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another catastrophic stock market downturn has led some critics to conclude that the pair’s boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That’s a fair case to make.

Pugsley does not try to poop so hard if he ate a gallon of cashews. How about this:

In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet Robbie Keane’s signing with the LA Galaxy has led some other MLS’ team fans to conclude that the pair’s boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That’s a fair case to make.

or

In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another Carl’s Jr. mixup of a turkey burger in place of a teriyaki burger has led some eaters to conclude that the pair’s boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That’s a fair case to make.

or

In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another internet music related site hires Tom Breihan has led some blogs to conclude that the pair’s boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That’s a fair case to make.

We kid!