The Last To Know: Pitchfork

Pitchfork makes me want to blow my brains out while slitting my throat and chugging gasoline, but I keep coming back to it.

Pitchfork has to be the most smug, hipster music review site on the internets - they are the review site equivalent of diesel sweeties' Indie Rock Pete. At the same time, I always go back. In fact, I think it's their schtick. The reviewers consistently project a tone of: "because you think this album is awesome, I dislike it that much more".

Case in point - a reviewer criticizes the Avett Brother's new album as being "the most contrived record I've heard this year". Really? More contrived than the new Brittany Spears album that was genetically engineered by producer-cum-psychologists who were masterminding her comeback? But there's the extra sting - they are so cool that they only review music so good that even the good music is contrived - and the stuff that really is contrived - well they've never even heard it. It's like the roam an alternate universe, where reviewers retain personal handlers who employ hapkido to keep non-grounding breaking music at bay. Or try this: when the album is "good, it's intrusively good". How's that again? Is there some quota on sincere praise? Imagine trying that on your woman: "Yeah, the sex was good; but it was intrusively good."

This isn't about the Avett Brothers at all - Emotionalism is a solid album, but I'm not going under blanket on youtube to defend their honor. This is just (another) bitch session about Pitchfork, and the elitism of reviewers on the web (see the AV Club). In fact, this review starts with an insult, but continues to state that they keep coming back. Which is where I come in. Pitchfork seems to love music, but hates all the musicians they review. Like pitchfork, I hate the site, but am addicted to reading their reviews, in a blind hope that they will deem an album I like cool. I keep coming back, and refuse to offer any pure acceptance of admiration. Here I am, 32, and dying to find approval and affirmation from strangers. Giuseppe's come a long way.

I guess I come form the Roger Ebert school of reviewing, where the goal is to present your own honest opinions, and not try to elevate yourself above the art, or more importantly, your audience. Maybe these reviewers really are musical geniuses who ghostwrite reviews under pseudonyms when they aren't releasing 5-star LPs. Maybe they think they are elevating the common man to their elevated state. More likely, they are a group of hipster cornholes who want to be "the camera behind the camera behind the camera". Even when the music is good, it could be better (or its intrusively good). Even though its readership is smarter than the general populace for being aware of pitchfork - its audience is nothing more than a one-eyed man walking through the land of the blind.

File this under "V"

for "vomit"

I'm glad that conservatives have people like Anne Coulter on their side - it helps validate my beliefs. It also makes me realize as much as I hate Bill Maher, I hate Anne Coulter times seven.

In the interest in fairness and accuracy, I'll post the link to conservative news source Fox's coverage of Coulter's remarks, made on Donny Deutsch's CNBC program. Here's some highlights...

DEUTSCH: Christian — so we should be Christian? It would be better if we were all Christian?

COULTER: Yes.

DEUTSCH: We should all be Christian?

COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny?

Later...

COULTER: "...Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

I have to agree with Deutsch's sentiment that the scariest partt of her diatribe is not her zombified goosestepping allegiance to the most mundane and intolerant aspects of organized religion, nor her total ignorance the the relative sameness of all 3 prophetic religions, but that she sees nothing offensive about her remarks at all. Could it be that she really believes that "we want to see us all as christians". Of course, it doesn't hurt that she she takes a controversial socio-religious dump on the airwaves just as her book is about to drop. She is helping to alert the other vampires in her coven that its time to open their wallets - she's so helpful.

Another nice touch his her enlightened comments about inter racial marriage. "You walk past a mixed-race couple in New York, and it's like they have a chip on their shoulder. They're just waiting for somebody to say something, as if anybody would" What!? Am I on drugs? You might as well assert that they entered wedlock just to see the gasps of horror on the faces of smiling benign white Christians. Yeah - they want to offend you. Project much, Anne? I like shocking people. I should divorce my wife, find me one them black women, have a shotgun wedding, and crank out some mixed race babies - just so I can piss off everybody ("everybody" being white christians). Yeah, that'd be sweet. You know, she seems to be pining for those golden glory days where white people were large and in charge, and never stopped to hear a peep out of anybody else. What was the role of women in those good old days again? Oh that's right, servile baby makers. But I guess she can have her cake and eat it too - its her racist fantasy after all.

Look, I know she's got a schtick and that being a conservative rabble rouser is probably what lets her live at the end of private road in Connecticut all summer, but this is really disturbing. I hate to be the cliched liberal who gets up in arms at the drop of conservative shock pundit's hat - that's why most of what Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh say sound like a jumbled mess of syllables by the time it hits my ears. This puts too fine of a point around what's wrong with this flavor of christian conservatism. It's and embarrassment to our country, to white people, to chill christians who don't want to convert me or dream of world without muslims, who just want to go to church on sunday and pray for a better day. It makes me embarrassed to share any common demographics with her. It literally turns my stomach.

I think I'd like to hear a public endorsements of these statements to be made. By the KKK. Then maybe she'd get a sense that by definition, ignorance is a trait that one is unable to perceive in oneself.