It’s really hard to locate what’s actually substantiated in the language, the quantity that’s represented as a number.
That’s why I’m interested in adjectives specifically, or cliches, because I feel those are the first line of defense.
AT: So it’s almost like the quantification of the value has to justify itself, and almost by using these words, each word has a value in itself, and aggregated on top of all the others, that amounts to this mosaic that equals an 8.
1 or whatever.
NS: Yeah, because as we’ve already said, the number embarasses the language.
And the writer knows that and has to substantiate it in language.
That’s the brief given to the writer — they have to substantiate it in writing, they can’t just give a number.
One of things we see are a whole host of assumptions that reflect the basic assumption that’s made in the quantifying of the music itself.
And you know, I just have ideological differences in all that.
And we have to — I mean, I do that shit all the time too, I regularly use language like that to describe music.
AT: I use language like that all the time too.
Like “stark”, I always use the word “stark”.
Not with sound necessarily, but we use adjectives to describe things, like “ethereal”.
If it’s “ethereal”, do you have to not say it’s ethereal?NS: I don’t really have a problem with those words and in fact I do think they conjure certain images.
Often, these words are relationally established words that we’ve come to understand very specifically — that’s one of the amazing parts of language is the way that it’s coded to have these specific intertextual meanings and when you pair them together they create these cool structures that are poetic and expressive and can get to the heart of things.
The thing I’m trying to say is, the relationship between those words and the number is completely in question, and the tactics used to defend the number in language is something I would like to see further substantiated and I’d like to tease out the claims being made.
Or it could just be pure poetry.
And if it’s just pure poetry, that calls into question the use of the number even more.
Basically what you have to do is describe…it’s kind of, I’m sure in film there’s these tropes in writing.
In film criticism, the film critics often say: “don’t just narrate the plot,” it’s frowned upon in film criticism.
And in a lot of ways, music criticism doesn’t have that.
Music criticism wants you to narrate the architecture of the album because it’s not evident most of the time.
It’s actually just not apparent.
It’s just a hallucinatory kind of thing to listen to music.
AT: I guess what I’ve always seen in Pitchfork’s language though is they keep running into the inability to do that, right?.You have your own thoughts about writing about sound.
I don’t think it’s impossible to write about sound, but I think it’s harder to write about sound than it is to write about most anything else.
NS: Definitely, and I think music’s hallucinatory quality makes us really dependent on certain language tropes and really makes us lean on specifically the adjective and this really descriptive language to give it substance.
Essentially we’re carving narrative into sound automatically by using those things or we’re giving it something that it just doesn’t have — that being language — when we talk about it.
Or we have to talk about it through metaphor or we have to give it social or political valence in order to do that.
I think in the actual review text, there’s a very formal or structural things I’d want to be aware of.
If we were to isolate certain paragraphs in what a paragraph is trying to do, say the review is seven paragraphs, you’d probably have three or four of those paragraphs just describing the album.
You’d probably have one or two of those paragraphs giving some kind of social or political context, broader and then specific to that artist’s career or something.
So you have these very specific critical agendas that are actually coded into individual paragraphs in a music review.
This might be a larger data project, but almost like give those numbers or something.
As far as I’m concerned, if we look at that deviation thing [fig.
2, bottom], if we are getting more and more similarly scored reviews, I would also argue the actual shape of those reviews, the text of the review is becoming more and more alike.
So basically we’re getting these regurgitated forms that follow very specific scripts that are giving the same scores to probably the same music in similar ways.
So I mean, what’s the point at that juncture other than to affirm general PR campaigns?.And it just kind of becomes existential at that point.
It’s like, well, why do we even write about music?.And that’s why I think model of this bell curve breaks.
What is actually happening?If you go back and read some of the earlier Pitchfork reviews, there were some truly weird writing.
It was an experimental platform in some ways, and as things develop trajectories and the line gets drawn across a longer trajectories, you’re kind of only going to get more uniformity.
It’s kind of what you were saying about The New Inquiry too.
As a publishing platform, I think The New Inquiry was originally designed for some pretty rapturous writing or whatever — polemics, critiques, some outlet for a cultural underclass to freely write.
But as it became an institution in itself, you had this thing about what it meant to write for The New Inquiry, and you had this shape or this form that you’re ultimately — it’s a representation of what it’s actually trying to do.
AT: This is just length of reviews.
Fig.
4.
During the interview, the standard deviation (bottom right) was used to measure the variance of article length.
This was arguably a mistake, although arguably not: While the standard deviation is considered formally improper method for the measure of variance for non-normal distributions (like the right-skewed distributions of review length), it is considered so because of the weight it places on outliers — in this case, unusually long articles.
The discussion surrounded the idea of a normalization of writing in Pitchfork.
If that type of homogenization had occurred, it would essentially preclude the existence of outliers almost altogether.
It’s possible that although even if formally improper, the standard deviation, given the weight it does place on outliers, is a valid measurement in this particular instance.
Still, the median absolute deviation is included in this array for clarity (bottom left).
It shows no such increase in variance.
Regardless, both graphs refute the hypothesis at hand — that Pitchfork’s articles have become more regular in size — and either statistic was capable of momentarily disrupting a stream of criticism and prompting a consideration of Pitchfork’s virtues.
During the interview, the standard deviation (bottom right) was used to measure the variance of article length.
This was arguably a mistake, although arguably not: While the standard deviation is considered formally improper method for the measure of variance for non-normal distributions (like the right-skewed distributions of review length), it is considered so because of the weight it places on outliers — in this case, unusually long articles.
The discussion surrounded the idea of a normalization of writing in Pitchfork.
If that type of homogenization had occurred, it would essentially preclude the existence of outliers almost altogether.
It’s possible that although even if formally improper, the standard deviation, given the weight it does place on outliers, is a valid measurement in this particular instance.
Still, the median absolute deviation is included in this array for clarity (bottom left).
It shows no such increase in variance.
Regardless, both graphs refute the hypothesis at hand — that Pitchfork’s articles have become more regular in size — and either statistic was capable of momentarily disrupting a stream of criticism and prompting a consideration of Pitchfork’s virtues.
NS: The length has gone up.
AT: Well the variance of length has gone up [fig.
4, bottom right].
The length over the years is kind of across the board [fig 4, top right], there’s no real pattern to it.
And this is the distribution of review length just across all reviews [fig.
4, top left].
And this doesn’t tell you much, the fact that the median review is around like 700 words.
But this is the variance of length.
So there’s much larger variance than there used to be.
NS: Is that with reviews or features?AS: It’s with everything that has a score.
So at least in terms of the size of reviews, we might have to be a bit more charitable to them in that regard.
And that kind of brings up this other question, which is, isn’t there something good about Pitchfork?.At the end of the day, I would rather Pitchfork exist than Pitchfork not exist with nothing to replace it.
It’s still a music publication owned by Conde Nast, doesn’t have to write about Sote at all.
They could completely ignore that music entirely and there would be no major publication discussing them.
So in that graph of seeing their variance go up, I want to take the opportunity to say something nice about them.
NS: It might just be that they’re publishing more so there’s more variance just based off of the scale of what they’re publishing.
There’s all kinds of things that could be going on with that.
AS: But they’ve actually kind of leveled off [fig.
5].
Now it’s like 1200 reviews a year.
I don’t know how that compares —Fig.
5NS: That’s a lot.
I mean that’s like a machine, that’s so much writing.
Which is cool, I mean I like that fact of it.
I think one of the things I want to highlight is that there are a series of assumptions that I think come with the model, and I think sites like Pitchforks that quantify the aesthetic experience in the way that they do it, I think that is the kind of narrative thing you’re talking about, how it matches certain economic models that exist in other fields.
But I also think it exists in quantifiable lists and rankings of content as well, which kind of falls outside the purview of the review.
But it is something I think is ultimately a capitalist way of thinking.
AT: And like the American university has been decimated by this system, right?.My own university, Temple, their business school was in a rankings scandal for fabricating this data.
NS: Because they could attract more money by inflating these numbers.
AT: The whole ensemble of benefits that come with having higher rankings in US News.
NS: This is the same problem we experience in almost everything.
And in a way I almost like that flattening.
If anything that capitalist realism does, it flattens this kind of spectralization that we think music is this special little thing we can escape, but when we see how it’s turned itself culturally, we see the same old shit.
And in that way, I think that flattening is beneficial because it allows us to see things for what they are sometimes and the motivations for certain tactics that are used in publishing and criticism, the line of review rankings or whatever.
But my thing is like, there’s so many other models we could be using for how we talk about music.
Does it have to be this very obvious one that reflects a very specific set of values?.And that’s …Of course the thing is, how would we ever mount that?.How could we get people to write on those terms or whatever?.Because this is what’s understood.
And then we get into a very specific political discussion.
AT: This is the problem with a lot of data visualization itself.
Hopefully it’s not the problem with what we’re doing right now.
But with the first piece I made for Components, it was like the fetishization of order and numbers.
The instant you attach a number to something or the appearance of a quantitative method to something, you put it out of reach not just to most people because they don’t use those methods, but even the people who do understand those methods are still pulled in by the sheer gleam of its presence, the fact that you know where the glow of that light is coming from, you can’t help but feel like warmth of it.
NS: The presence of the number almost makes the language embarrassing, if that makes sense.
Say something gets a negative review.
Like today, James Blake, singer, producer, one of my favorite artists in like 2010, 2011 because he started this new production style of like spatial dubstep music while also being a singer-songwriter, he’s made this new album, he’s gotten really mainstream, a review got published by one of the few Pitchfork writers I still respect, a guy named Philip Schurburne, he gave the record a 5.
8.
I’m friends with him on Facebook and he posted this thing was like, “Had a rough day on Twitter today,” because he was just getting flamed by all these fanboys of this artist because he gave the record a 5.
8 after Pitchfork has had a huge history of giving his records Best New Music.
So basically like, you know he’s a phenomenal writer, but the presence of a 5.
8 was so scandalous to James Blake’s fans that then they could look at Philip Schurburne’s writing and just tear the guy apart.
The writing becomes this flimsy defense where the number’s presence and it being such a strong authority almost attracts human beings to look at the language and they just start ripping it apart.
And the language actually does become ridiculous at that point because you start looking at it and the number is just laughing at the language.
The number doesn’t give a fuck about the language and the whole thing just falls apart.
AT: Neither gives a fuck about the other.
NS: It’s almost this weird odd couple.
Then you look at the language and memes starts getting made, taking quotes from the writer.
If you abstract any sentence from it it just looks ridiculous.
But he has a point to make about James Blake’s career and he did a good job about talking about it in some way.
And if you were just chatting with the guy about his opinions on music over a beer — he lives in Barcelona, at a bar in Barcelona, I’m sure you would have a much better time talking about the record or actually learn more about his opinions on the record.
AT: But like, you could have a version of that conversation without the number.
Remove the number and you’re having that conversation at the bar.
NS: Again, I think it’s the authority that gives it that sensational quality and basically roots the whole thing to be part of this apparatus where you want people to have that reaction because you want to put things nice little places and rank them.
And everyone loves to make lists.
It’s a huge thing human beings love to do.
I love to make lists too.
There’s a big difference I think between making a list of 100 to 1 with 1 being the best and 100 being the worst, and having a crazy list of fractals spreading out in all different directions.
AT: The need for taxonomical order is so strong that even when we know the number is bullshit, we can’t help but react to it and be affected by it in some way.
NS: We either celebrate its presence or are oppressed by it.
It’s literally a stand-in for power.
It ultimately removes nuance from what language and writing about music effectively does, which is a very subtle, intimate reflection someone is having on a listening experience.
And the presence of the number is absurd.
It is absurd.
It’s like…what?.It haunts the writing in the most crass way.
AT: The number is necessary for Pitchfork’s existence though, right?.Conde Nast owns Pitchfork because Pitchfork publishes a number that people click to see.
Remove the number and they would not be a property of Conde Nast.
And that kind of goes back to this question of —NS: Capitalist realism.
AT: Well that certainly, I mean everything comes back to that question.
But the question of not having Pitchfork at all with nothing to replace it versus having it as it is.
And the capitalist realist reaction to it is like, this is the best you’re going to get actually.
And within the confines of the system in which we live where we demand quantification, measurement of everything at all times, Pitchfork is maybe the best version of that you’re going to get.
I mean, whole else are you going to get?.Fucking Rolling Stone?NS: Yeah, maybe on a mass scale.
And I think this is why we see experimentalism as a minor form.
You see these homegrown music writing communities or journals or all types of things that people flock to to deal with this problem.
Originally published at components.
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