Pitchfork why we fight

June 4 Skip to content Search query All Results. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. Uncomfortably Numb. Uncomfortably Numb Nitsuh Abebe touches on s-style druggy hedonism, from Less Than Zero to the Weeknd, to frame how Frank Ocean's clear-eyed songwriting vision cuts through the haze. Bubble Pop. On the Far Slope of the Uncanny Valley. On the Far Slope of the Uncanny Valley What happens when traditional ideas of personal expression are usurped by a patchwork arrangement of cultural references?

Embarrassment Rock. Embarrassment Rock Nitsuh Abebe defends the much-maligned notion of "rockism" and discusses the difficulty of articulating a love of rock music proper when the language used to describe it has been tainted and corrupted.

Your Chemical Romance. Your Chemical Romance Nitsuh Abebe on understanding musical tastes across generation gaps and why the large cohort that grew up liking or loathing emo acts such as My Chemical Romance is so important. The Imagination of Lana Del Rey. The Imagination of Lana Del Rey Nitsuh Abebe discusses the rise of divisive Internet star Lana Del Rey, touching on the ways our notion of imagination can work in different musical worlds. How to Be a Vampire. How to Be a Vampire Nitsuh Abebe on how we use music to meet our needs, one need at a time.

Chillin' in Plain Sight. Be Yourself. Unit leader Ryan Dombal said the departure of their executive editor — who had worked at Pitchfork for 20 years, eight of those as executive editor — had left the newsroom feeling vulnerable.

The union connected the two, and soon they were coordinating with each other. They decided to announce their new unions at the same time in March Those staff, which include certain writers and audience development team members, work closely with Wired staff but are not paid through the Wired budget, Newman said. The two sides ultimately decided to defer the issue to bargaining, and Wired was voluntarily recognized in December They have not yet started contract negotiations.

They also hung up posters in the office and organized a letter-writing campaign to editor David Remnick. The festival is an annual tradition that brings together influential political and cultural figures. The keynote speakers scheduled for the first night were Sen. Warren and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but the two politicians pulled out in support of the union and its digital picket.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder also withdrew his participation. The union then dropped its picket, and Warren and Ocasio-Cortez agreed to participate in the festival as originally planned, as did Holder.

The compromise we arrived at includes Just Cause, a principle insuring job security, and keeps editorial standards and judgments in the hands of the magazine.

Leaders at both unions credited the New Yorker Union for paving the way. The three units in the bargaining process regularly communicate to coordinate their negotiation efforts. Though each unit has individual concerns, there are some issues that apply across the board, like health benefits and policies regarding holidays.

The unions swap stories about their wins and losses and strategize how best they can push their message across all three bargaining tables. I'd guess that for a lot of you reading this, the answer is Newsom.

Which is interesting, especially if you think about ways these artists are mirror images of each other. As far as Newsom goes, it's pretty easy to identify her unique qualities: An odd, expressive voice with a creak like an old door; a vision of her work so elaborately detailed that it can seem stilted and overwhelming; and a love of words and attention to poetic effects so deep that it actually doesn't sound silly when she lists Vladimir Nabokov as a songwriting influence.

So we've seen healthy debate about what, if anything, those gifts have to offer us. People argued about whether there was something precious or fussy about her manner, or even something childlike about her imagination. Press material that painted her as some kind of unicorn-riding medieval fantasy didn't help. People argued about whether her obsessively crafted suites and allegories were really what pop music was for -- whether maybe all those elaborate, writerly constructions were just highbrow feats of imagination in a medium that should prize real-world actions and gestures.

You know: too pretentious, too many words, too many big words, too pretty, too satisfied, too comfortable, too much artifice.

And now, oddly enough, she's released a triple LP that defuses some of those arguments. Vocal-cord problems keep her from exploiting that old divisive croak. Most straightforward lyrics reassure us that she's speaking to our unmagical world, even if those lines remain packed with tricky poetic effects. Her recent photos look like fashion shoots. Simple things like piano and pop drumming allow us, for the first time, to say aha : we can finally identify her as fitting in with something concrete-- Joni Mitchell, Laurel Canyon folkies, s California, something.

So the question of what the hell to make of her talents travels its way further up into the mainstream, where every critic dutifully offers a list of the kinds of words you're going to encounter on her records "palanquin!

Pop star Gaga, meanwhile, seems to work in the opposite direction, despite being every bit as steeped in artifice and pretense as Newsom. Her latest product is eight songs and 34 minutes long, compared to Newsom's two-hour set; its most upscale English word is, by my reckoning, "saline," versus much-noted Newsom vocabulary like "etiolated" which also gets called out in the annotated edition of Nabokov's Lolita. This is the big difference, of course, and the thing that some people find lacking in Newsom: Gaga's big bundle of affectations may not be carefully constructed around a specific point-- it's not writerly in that Nabokovian way-- but it's rich and visceral enough that just about anyone can draw something thrilling or unsettling from it.

Newsom gets pegged as some woodsy creature whose art is highly constructed; Gaga gets pegged as some artificial construct whose art feels intuitive. Newsom's music feels private, a strange artifact waiting for you to come engage with it. People may not be conscious of that, but they are conscious too, at the same time.

If you're the sort of person who really cares about this stuff, in a way, I think that does carry forward to adulthood and beyond. If I had written my book a little later, I would have included Drake and Meek Mill , because I think that was a really interesting altercation. In another era, Meek Mill accusing Drake of not writing his own songs would have been a much more powerful accusation. It would have been much more devastating for Drake.

But we live in an age where celebrity is the new authenticity, and if you're famous enough, that justifies your place in the culture. This idea that maybe you're not famous but you're still considered important, that seems to be over. The only artists who critics take seriously and will discuss in depth are artists who are also hugely famous and successful.

As to whether Drake does write his own songs or uses ghostwriters, that still is unresolved as far as I know. It seems like it's pretty much accepted that he does, it's just not treated like a big deal. I'm not saying it's a big deal myself, but it's really interesting how that issue was totally set aside for the most part. It just became about Drake—the power of his celebrity, and how he could weaponize that and totally blow away someone who was lesser known than him. He's done that repeatedly in his career, and gets away with it because he's this famous guy.

We forgive it because, well, we love Drake. You're being exploited by the music industry. The music industry is sleazy. To do it in an open letter is maybe a shitty thing to do, because open letters in general are just the most condescending form of writing that exists—this idea that you're going to give advice to someone that you don't know and also do it in public.

But the content of the letter seemed pretty valid. Looking at what she went through with the "Saturday Night Live" incident —tearing up the picture of the Pope in — that just seems like like one of the most powerful musical performances I've ever seen on TV.

The intensity, and the lack of irony—this is as direct and brutal of a protest as you can get. It's incredible to see. It just seems so unlike musical performances that you see now, which are set up for the way that people consume media, through multiple screens, and multiple levels of appreciation and irony.

I really came to respect her and to empathize with her as I was writing the chapter. That process of how in order to survive in life, you have to make yourself lame—and how that's sort of an inevitable part of getting older, because if you don't do that, then you end up dying. That was kind of a heavy thing for me to write, and that's probably my favorite chapter of the book.