Slashdot Mirror
Winning Critical Acclaim
Alex Reynolds writes "'Are pop critics doing a good job? What does it mean to do a good job as a pop music critic? What is the difference between good and bad pop music criticism?' Loren Jan Wilson's innovative Pitchformula project takes the archives of music criticism and journalism from the popular Pitchfork web site and analyses them for commonalities in content, determining what attributes make for a 'good' or 'bad' evaluation. From this data, Wilson sculpted his compositional and performance technique to write rock music that should win critical acclaim."
Here
and here rather.
That'll teach me not to preview my damn posts...
If he wanted to compose "original songs" based on a predictable formula, why use pitchfork as a source?
So, look at this scoring system. He says anything over 7.4 is a positive review, and he counts up the words used in it. What happens when they review the latest Radiohead album, give it a 9.3 and whine for 500 words about what wasn't perfect? To me (a daily reader of pfork), they are good at talking about new indie music and getting the word out, but they are pretty arbitrary with whether a 7.9 review was an awesome album (junior senior), or a mild disappointment (modest mouse's latest) in their eyes.
If you want to make a point and say "here's the formula to a good song", why use pitchfork? Why not use Entertainment Weekly or something that is much more mainstream and will follow trends?
Shit, half the time pitchfork doesn't even talk about the album. It could be a guy reminiscing about childhood or how he used to hate/like these guys, and then end with "so that's MY life story. (Album gets a 7.4)".
Metacritic (www.metacritic.com) averages reviews from many sources and weighs the scores as they see fit.
Anyway, I love pitchfork, but I don't see them as the basis of anything even remotely systematic.
NIN releases are routinely bashed on the pitchfork site. Look at a broad base of rock critics however, and you will see NIN being generally praised. It's not just NIN, either. Some of the critics as pitchfork seem to have an agenda against certain bands, and make sure to give said bands poor ratings at every turn. (Though I'm not sure, a cursory look at the site seems to suggests that the one positive NIN review they have up, written by one James P. Wisdom, was the last review written by said reviewer for the site).
my pet machine
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but SomethingAwful did a pretty dead-on parody of Pitchfork a few months ago. It should, indoubtedly, be checked out.