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‘In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey's own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there's no spark and nothing at stake.’

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”

Nitsuh Abebe on Odd Future's energy, and their unfortunately exclusionary lyrics.

“Perry’s ouevre is nasty, sticky and a little bit stupid; it’s a kind of Hello Kitty-themed update on Carry On; fruit-scented lube on a rather imposing black dildo. It works perfectly because the American ideal of the teenager - wholesome and optimistic - is of course at odds with its reality of unprotected sex and casual drug use.”

On why Altered Zones is Pitchfork’s *younger* ‘sister site’, and the fundamental difference between music producers and consumers who don’t remember music before the web, never knew it was something you paid for, and aren’t as concerned with the rating of certain music as ‘bad’. I like this, but I have some big issues with this and want to return to it: 1. Altered Zones has its own set of problems, heavy among them the double-standard to which they hold DIY music. Baby bands at AZ get heaped with over-the-top praise, which at once unfairly removes them from helpful critical influence and subjects them to fame for which they aren’t prepared. As a result many are left in the dust of the Next Small Thing. 2. These music producers and writers don’t remember music before the web? I think this is patently false and that they absolutely do remember it; they generation that doesn’t isn’t reading Altered Zones yet. And what about those music producers sampling and being influenced by music that happened before the web (the 90s, the 80s)? 3. I don’t think Pitchfork is incapable of critically assessing the bands on Altered Zones; they just don’t have the time and energy for it. Which argument means I also don’t believe Altered Zones is not a filter for Pitchfork. How many bands debut on AZ or an AZ-affiliated blog, move on to the Forkcast, get a feature, and then get a bona fide Pitchfork Review? Several. Pitchfork’s own ‘The Week at Altered Zones’ pretty much is a filter by definition.

Thoughts on the tendency of the internet to empower and break down niches. “You can be a niche, but you’re a public niche, so you can’t expect to be left alone about it, or understood on your own terms. The internet makes niches possible, but it’s also a massive space in which loads of different people communicate — and spaces like that tend to pull everyone toward the middle, developing conventions and enforcing a cultural center. So far, this hasn’t stopped plenty of corners of the internet from getting extremely insular and specialized, but it’s still a form of cultural policing on this front.”

"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."

A good overview of where music creation and criticism is in late 2010. At least in terms of the sorts of bands who are making music for the sorts of people who are reading these sorts of blog posts (a lot!).

"If somebody you care about is bleeding profusely, it’s not loving to insist that she’s flawless and has nothing to worry about. The loving thing is to stop the bleeding then get her to a doctor. If a guy is clearly suffering from blood poisoning, ignoring the problem isn’t loving. Instead, say, 'Dude. You need to get that looked at immediately.' Or, better yet, go with him. Do what you can to make things better."

"To mark the publication of rock critic Rob Sheffield’s second book, an 'I Love the 80s'-style tribute to the music of his youth called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos took a unique approach to the author interview: a jukebox jury in which music critics, rather than songs, were the focus of discussion."

Is Lil Wayne's 'Rebirth' really that bad?

Getting politics wrong and getting pop wrong.

"You can try to know, and own the fact that there are things you do not know, or you can be knowing, and hide your own ignorance with sideways shots of been-there done-that familiarity. You can understand that shit happens and try your best to keep things together and accomplish something against all odds — YOU CAN DANCE, as this album begins — or you can blow up the hospital just to show everyone that at any moment anywhere, a hospital can blow up for no fucking reason whatsoever."

Jim Carrey as a genius, the "representative jester of our time." "Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience."

"If I was in a band I would write a slow song with an 808, reverb, and a female vocalist, and call that song 'Zach Braff’s Eyes Reflected in My Nano.'"

"This track is like being raised on velvet pillows and then, on your 18th birthday, having a crazy albino mannequin begin to rub sandpaper on your face."

Stylus is shutting down, unfortunately. Here's their own excellent guide to the best of the site. Great weekend reading.