Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

The news from the other site sucks so bad, just super grateful for Scott and the whole Stereogum staff for all the work y'all have put into staying afloat while also staying independent. Now, ahem, I did have a post at 27 likes on the Green Day listicle and I don't see it here...

Juice Jr. is due in four short weeks, and four weeks after that I get to start a new job running creative writing workshops for a nonprofit here in LA. I am geeked as fuck about both developments. Work will be a lot more challenging and engaging than my current office job, and having a child will be having a child, so I'm fondly bidding farewell to my era of endlessly scrolling/refreshing the 'Gum. See y'all occasionally!

Nation in a coma I know, I know it's serious.

The Opry and country crowdclutching pearls at cursing and drunk behavior is pretty rich.

As the person who insisted on using the term "The Other Site" I do feel the need to write a little bit about Pitchfork. I swear when I coined the term it came from a place that they were the indie rock web site GIANT and Stereogum was the underdog. I always felt constantly bringing up Pitchfork's name in this comment section would only reinforce that perceived divide. I never thought something like this was possible for Pitchfork because in my personal life (and likely in many of ya'lls), that site was the biggest web site on the Internet. They wielded so much power for this niche area of indie music that I've chosen to define a large area of my life. The amount of Pitchfork BNM'd albums I own on vinyl is literally too high to count. I mean, my general buying strategy for vinyl is: "purchase every album I downloaded for free between the years 2004-2016," which basically means: "purchase all the albums I learned from reading Pitchfork's daily reviews and Top Album Lists for each year and each decade." I've always been too proud to admit it, so when I'm asked what my musical taste is I generally say: "Music Festival poster." But in actuality, and we know this is very true for the late 2000s, early 2010s Coachella line-ups, those posters were strongly curated by what Pitchfork helped hold on high in the digital music press. It's EXACTLY why their festival was always a hit. They knew what was good because they had a pretty big hand in showing what was good music to the masses. So really, my music taste has always been largely: "Pitchfork-core" or "Pitchfork-wave" or "Pitchfork-house" since it seems fitting to pull a Pitchfork and make up a goofy genre name for this admission.

Since the fingers are flowing now, that realization is probably another defining reason for why I chose to be a large presence at Stereogum. I personally didn't want to feel like my music taste was solely defined by one web site. That's a weird thing to think about that my initial music taste was defined by Pitchfork and my later years music taste was defined by rejecting Pitchfork, in a sense. As an aging hipster (I'm going to use this term A LOT this year, it seems), it's overwhelming to truly process how monumental Pitchfork was to my music development. So you bet I've been scrolling Twitter the past few days reinforcing my private love of that other site even if I quite often pretended like I didn't care for it over here on this site. This isn't the first time I've pulled back the veil to show that what I've said in the past on this site isn't how I feel today (Lest we forget the time I saw The 1975 live... and then another time).

I'd love to rattle off all the bands I have Pitchfork to thank, but it would be way too long and I know I'd still forget plenty. Given that I'm all about the spirit of what comes to mind first, I'll end with a story of just one band that many haven't talked about in quite some time. Yet, I think the reason they're coming to mind right now is my recent love of Infant Island (who I DO NOT have Pitchfork to thank. That goes out to this site and you crazies for hyping them up. Holy fuck what an album) and now Vemod as of today (THANK YOU FRYE!).

ISIS.

Multiple reasons why ISIS comes to mind and I'll try to somewhat bullet point them: (A) Pitchfork's BNM on Wavering Radiant in 2009. (B) My love of that album leading to listening to ALL of their albums (I'm doing that with Infant Island this month) (C) HITTING myself for not knowing about ISIS in the early 2000s when my favorites Oceanic & Panopticon (not to be confused with band Panopticon, or to be confused, both incredible) dropped since they opened for my favorite band of the early 2000s TOOL. (D) The fact that despite point C, I had a web site in 2009 that was in the midst of blowing up Dirty Projectors, Phoenix, AnCo, et al. recommend me a melodic metal album that was a grand slam into exactly the type of music I loved. (continued below)

It's me, hi. I'm the hater, it's me.

I hated Taylor Swift. Haaaaaaated her, with all the power of seven italicized As. My first real exposure was seeing her open for Keith Urban, and it was instant and thorough. This was in the era when she'd stop dead in concert and gawk open-mouthed at all those people, cheering just for me, for minutes on end, with what read to me as wildly performative, insincere humility. She was still, shall we say, not a strong singer, not as huge a liability in full-on pop (and she's improved on that front anyway), but strange in the vocals-forward world of country. One of the songs she performed was introduced with a video where an interviewer asked her why she always wrote about the boys who wronged her, and her response was a self-satisfied "If boys don't want me to write songs about them, then boys shouldn't do bad things," the latter half of which then repeated over and over, and I rolled my eyes. Not because teenage boys aren't the worst – they are, absolutely, the worst – but because it announced to the world that Swift was in the business of being perfect and aggrieved, with zero percent of the blame for any relationship drama landing on her own shoulders.

Here is where I mention: I love teenage melodrama; just this weekend we lost the Shangri-Las' Mary Weiss, arguably the best to ever do it. And I love a great many female artists who take men to task as a general rule; ask me how much of the '90s I devoted to letting Aimee Mann and Liz Phair and PJ Harvey and Tori Amos excoriate me. What I think drove me crazy about Taylor Swift was her passive-aggressiveness, her leaving Easter eggs all over the place as to who any particular song was about and then, whenever anyone would directly ask her about it, suddenly turning coy and being all, "Oh, I'll never tell." I hated it so much. She was a bully who painted herself as a victim, a Regina George who pretending to be a Janis Ian. Teenage melodrama is one thing; Swift songs were like slam books writ huge. Feh. Feh to her. Feh to "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." Feh to "You Belong With Me." Feh to every one of her fairy-tale and pony songs that preceded this particular column. Feh to a great many songs that will appear in this column. We'll turn a corner once the pandemic hits. I'll try to pace myself. We'll see how it goes. It gets exhausting.

Heaven knows I'm miserable now (and the primaries are just beginning)

Looks like Rob really has been makin' copies!

There Is a Wall and It Never Gets Built

Hey, I wrote this!

I’m so happy I could make the leap from commenter to writer, especially on such an important record ❤️❤️❤️

Featuring lead single “From The River To The Sea,” a song about partying on the beach