This is mostly for music nerds of a certain pre-Spotify age, but I found it fascinating: the oral history of Pitchfork from Slate magazine.
Greene: It was always, and only ever, a bunch of nerds writing essays about records. It was that before it became famous. And it was that after it became famous. It was only ever that, and those are the people who still come to Pitchfork, but I guess it wasn’t enough.
Somehow I missed this when it first came around. Stereogum interviewed the band Air and went through each track on the 1998 album Moon Safari to explain their influences and background.
ill peach, BLOOM. Dumb name for a band, but a good track. I like the beat, and the bridge at 2:01 is a lovely transition. Gives me some strong Metric vibes, minus the guitar. The rest of the album is hit or miss, but they have a couple of other good tracks from earlier EPs available.
The runner-up from last week:
Acopia, This Conversation is Getting Boring. Much more downtempo, but another good groove. I wish the bass was better quality; the sound is flat and sounds just a hair late on the rhythm and not in a good way. Other than that, excellent.
Jesus, I can’t believe this song is almost thirty years old, and somehow it got stuck in my head all week:
Ah, the days of frosted hair and puka shells.
Also: tangentially related: the time the guy from Creed got in a fight with the band at a bar in Baltimore. Good times!
The GAP used to be a central hub of the mall, back when the mall was the central hub of teenage life. A former GAP employee has been collecting the centrally-curated music playlists from two decades ago and building them in Spotify for everyone to enjoy. (via, via)
I read this morning that Pitchfork, the music review site that basically set the tone for criticism and indie approval in the early days of weblogs, is being folded into GQ Magazine after mass layoffs. Apparently they were bought by Condé Nast a couple of years ago and weren’t getting the kind of eyeballs some algorithm required. They lost their hold on the critical pulse of modern music years ago but they were still good to check in on every couple of days to see what was new. Stereogum is still going (and is an independently owned site again) and there are a couple of others out there, but this is sad news.
Strange, I wouldn’t have guessed this: kids using TikTok have exploded the popularity of shoegaze. Old-school bands like Slowdive are making a comeback (they started long before TikTok, actually) but new ones are sprouting up based on snippets included in video shorts.
Most compelling of all, is that the bulk of shoegaze’s fastest-growing acts are a cadre of super-young artists who most shoegaze fans over the age of 25 have likely never even heard of. All of 2023’s breakout stars are teenage solo artists making music in their bedrooms, bucking the conventional identity of shoegaze as “band”-centric music with a barrier to entry amounting to the cost of a pedalboard and a Jazzmaster guitar.
Music-Map is the kind of thing that shows up every couple of years with some new technology underneath it, and it usually disappears after a few months. In any case, this one does what it says on the tin: plug a band in and you get other bands that sound similar. Bookmarked. Also related: Gnoosic, which follows a slightly different format.
Cabel Sasser runs a studio called Panic, which makes excellent software for the Mac, has dabbled in video game production, and recently designed and shipped their own handheld video game console. Yesterday on his weblog he posted a number of scans of a series of catalogs produced in the 1980’s which featured gadgets of all kinds. The DAK catalogs had everything from breadmakers to radar detectors to audio equipment, and they used to come to our house addressed to the previous owners. As a young impressionable middle-school student I read the description for one of their products, a graphic equalizer, and obsessed over it for months. I recall asking for it for Christmas, my Dad turning me down, and me being a dick about it, which still haunts me.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy it, and I hooked it up to the huge Fisher audio system I’d bought the previous summer with money from painting the house. As I recall it didn’t amplify anything (the ad copy claimed my stereo would “literally explode with life”) but made the mix a lot muddier, no matter how much I fooled with the channels. I messed with it for months but eventually disconnected it, having learned an expensive lesson about believing ad copy without reading any reviews.
Thanks Cabel, that totally took me back. Read his post—it’s a fun look into the wild and crazy days of direct mail in the 80’s.
Steve Albini has an outsized voice in the music industry of my generation; he engineered some of the seminal albums of the 80’s and 90’s. He was/is also a notorious curmudgeon, with an almost pathological need to offend and anger anyone and everyone. He’s slowly changed a lot of his attitudes about music, people, and his place in the discourse, and most importantly, has owned up to his responsibility in all of it.
As the years wore on, his perspective started to shift. “I can’t defend any of it,” he told me. “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in any of that language.”
It’s fascinating to read about someone who unabashedly, unashamedly owns up to his faults without the aid (or hindrance) of an army of PR flacks and crisis managers.