Friday, August 05, 2005

Get Behind Twee, Pitchfork

Here is why Pitchfork sucks the big one:

On The Hold Steady's frontman Craig Finn: "Finn may not be Art Garfunkel up in this piece, but he uses his adenoidal rasp to blurt twisted, dense shards of squalid back-alley imagery and bruised druggy lamentations, broken teeth and broken bottles, and tattered hotel-room Bibles and hidden knives. He's the poet laureate of the loading dock behind the mall where the runaway kids get together to sniff cheap coke at 5 a.m."

Why this review is shit on a stick:
a) "up in this piece"
b) long-ass metaphors
c) huge, long metaphors from hell
d) gigantic, overwraught metaphors that make absolutely no sense, as riddled with existential discord as a fleet of post-op transexual Navy SEALs administering CPR to an obese Alaskan fisherman-amputee.

Another reason Pitchfork sucks: Twee. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, "twee" is an adjective meaning "overly precious or nice." Pitchfork has modified it into a noun, a verb, and even - oh, happy day - a genre! They derided it's use in a 2003 review of Guther "I Know You Know," dismissing twee as an "arbitrary genre subdivider in the record bin of music journalism". Since then, its use has only become more frequent on Pitchfork. Architecture in Helsinki "In Case We Die" is "off-tune twee" or "twee-pop"; David Bowie's "Hunky Dory" is "primitive twee-pop"; luckily (?) for The White Stripes, however, "Get Behind Me Satan" is apparently only "borderline-twee".

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