Music Review sites like Pitchfork serve zero purpose. (Hey kids! If you don't want to read this fuckfaces incoherent mumblings, just skip down until I give you the thumbs up!)
Lets clear a few things up before I get torn apart by noodle-armed indie boys(i.e. my people). Book reviews I can understand. A book takes literally hours of your attention and time to complete. The same goes for movies - you have to physically move to the theater and get gum on your feet.
Oh. And you have to pay for them both.
Then again, you're supposed to pay for music too. That's weird. That's an alien concept to me. I was in the room when my mother was looking up a song on the iTunes store - she needed to learn it in a few days for a gig, and so was going to buy it. I stood in amazement
Two hours later I was transferring the entire album over to her computer from my USB drive. (Forty minutes to torrent it, the first 1.3 hours being spent searching for the damn thing).
I guess if I try very hard I can feel some remorse for the artists themselves, seeing as every other member of my extended family is a professional musician....but it fades once I stop concentrating.
You can get any god damn music you can imagine for free without leaving your chair.
Even if I did feel remorse, thats far too tasty for the likes of me to pass up. And by the likes of me, I mean anyone savvy enough to torrent. We can never go back to paying for music, even at a dollar-oh-four per song or 10 bucks an album. Much less going out and buying cds.
I own....two cds I purchased with my own money. One of them is the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Return of the King, I believe. The other was I think the Paris Combo? I cant find either of them right now.
I also have a binder of some odd dozen of burned cds from the days before the ip-od, but even then my brother was using our dial-up on Napster and Bearshare. Then Kazaa, then Kazaa Lite (yeah, that stopped the virii for sure), then Limewire, then Azureus-which-is-now-fully-Vuze? Whatever that means?
The point is music is FREE. For that matter, so are movies and to a lesser extent books. But therein lies the difference: A download of a movie is probably going to be a lower quality, and in the end you'll be either watching it on your computer (screen size 22" if you're AWESOME LIKE ME) or burning it to a disc/streaming to your Xbawks to view on your TV (I have no idea the dimensions of an average TV nowadays).
A download of a book will be hard to read - it wont be a book, it'll just be the words. Etc.
The point is if I care for a movie I will see it in theaters. Or at least rent it on my mothers Netflix.
If I give a crap about a book, I will buy it, or at least sit in the provided chairs from 3:00 to 4:00 PM in the Borders Express in the mall. Since Fall 2008 I've read....uh....over ten books there?
The point is if I care about a new music coming out I gain nothing by buying the physical cd, or even the downloaded songs. I would just throw away the disc after uploading the tracks onto my harddrive anyway.
Yes, I'm going to college on money my grandfather made on music royalties (Album sales diluted down to the artist themselves). That just means I'm WAY qualified to make this speech.
My father worked in a recording studio for a few decades, and he says he can hear the difference between a compressed mp3 file and a vinyl record. (And that the LP sounds better).
....I believe him, because he's made a living off of it and I played with one of these as a child
My brother just spent six years getting a masters in creative writing and smokes and drinks and writes poetry in San Francisco, and he buys new indie artists on vinyl records because he says it sounds better.
...I don't believe him, because he's an artsy fartsy music snob.
My friend DJ goes on and on about something called FLAC, which stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. He raves about how unlike MP3 (a lossy compression format), lossless audio preserves the quality perfectly. Perfectly.
....I believe him, because he's the kind of guy who gives ten shits about that shit.
Now, my personal experience with vinyl records (and to a lesser extent tapes and CDs) has been "Oh, man, this old thing! *blowsdustoff* Lets see how it sounds *tenminutespluggingstuffin* OH WOW THAT SURE DOES SOUND LIKE A SCRATCHY PIECE OF CRAPMUSIC YOU HAVE FUN WITH THAT."
Maybe there is a generation gap here.
LOOK. The god damn POINT is I cant stop rambling and I have work to do and I have a headache and A Real Shitty Day That Nobody Seems To Care About Except me.
I've got a chalkboard chock-full of (chocolate?) artists that caught my eye when I scrolled down my iTunes list.
The point is I've been systematically Wikipedia-ing their discographies and then taking them and then listening to them all day on the bus. The crossed off ones are fully completed, or at least to within my accepted policies of Jesus Christ There Are Like Nine Albums By A Tribe Called Quest Damn I Don't Even Like Them That Much.
....yes it is in alphabetic order.
Look, the point is that I downloaded a Zero 7 album that was new for me, and I googled it to find out when it came out (2006). I listened to it on the bus coming back up the hill, and it made me happy and thoughtful and I was glad I downloaded it.
Then by some chance, maybe I wanted more facts from it or something, I ended up at the Pitchfork site where there was a review for that album: 3.2 out of 10 points. This tight-jeaned pooftah proceeded to write an entire page on how the album was contrived and noodling, how even the messy parts were produced immaculately, and how the whole thing was a travesty of a mockery of a load of horse shit and would everyone please just try their best not to throw up at the mere mention of Zero 7 from now on.
And then I listened to it again, and yes, there were parts where the singer oversings. She does that. Yes it was meandering and light. They meant it that way.
(Okay kids! I think he's finally arrived at his initial point! It must be a new record! Who does this faggot think he is?)
This pompous Pitchfork fucker had tried to ruin my music because......because why?
I had no idea. He was trying to convince me to....to not listen to it?
Am I supposed to read Pitchfork and only download music that gets a good review score?
I mean, I could understand if I was paying, like, real dollary-doos for it, but come on. We're living in the year 2000 and then some. We don't do that anymore.
If my friends tell me a movie sucked, I wont see it. I have better, more masturbatory things to do with my time.
If anyone tells me a book they read sucked, I actually throw confetti and give them a medal for reading a goddamn book and leave it at that. I get my own literature anyway, I don't need your opinion.
The fourteenth point is Music Reviews are Useless. Pitchfork Media is stupid. Rolling Stone Magazine is dumb. Pitchfork gave Zero 7 a 3.2 out of 10, and Lil' Wayne got an 8.something on his latest record.
AND IT DOESNT MEAN ANYTHING. AUUUUGH. I CANNOT ARTICULATE MY WORDS DOES ANYONE GET THIS? WHO "GETS" THIS? DO YOU SEE WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT?
In my daydream (at midnight) right now, I get in my *car* and drive over to my *friends* *apartment/house* and bang on his/*her* door and throw pebbles at her window until she lets me in, then stumble past her to the well-lit kitchen where we share *coffee* and *cigarettes* and *turpentine-water booze* and I pace around spewing the exact same drivel I just wrote down only it's so much more eloquent because I am liberated by chemicals and company, and most importantly I *arrive at a logical conclusion* and *collapse on the nearest and most comfortable horizontal surface*, *comforted by the fact that I'm not a madman tonight*
The words paired with asterisks are the *fictional* aspects of my dream.
(P.S.) Oh, whoops. I supposed it would reinforce my whole point if I let you decide for your self.
Zero 7!
Also, Panacea! A Mind On A Ship Through Time!
