Pitchfork's Review of Childish Gambino's Camp is a Textbook Example of Why People (Justifiably) Hate Pitchfork OR It's Time We Give Pop-Rap a Break

Let me start off by stating that I do not count myself among the people referred to in the title of this blog post. I love Pitchfork. Read it everyday. I find its reviews to be generally evenhanded, if a little too English MFA-y in style. I like that it operates in a milieu slightly below the mainstream but well above the underground, which is where my own tastes lie. I find the regular columns (particularly Poptimist and Resonant Frequency) to be of uniformly outstanding quality.

But every once in a while, one of Pitchfork's reviewers writes a piece so misguided that it lends total credence to the leagues of Pitchfork detractors and makes me feel like a fool for defending the site as much as I do. Today's review of Childish Gambino's Camp was one such piece and speaks to a larger problem with music criticism in general. I'll explain why after the jump.

The "Socially Liberal / Fiscally Conservative" Code OR Two Relatively Brief Political Diversions In a Blog Normally Unconcerned with Politics

It is not, generally speaking, my custom to write about politics in these pages. I once wrote a piece about my experience attending Barack Obama's inauguration, but that piece wasn't explicitly "political" in the sense that I did not write it to advocate a particular point of view. I'm not sure that this piece is political in that sense either, although I will be advocating certain points of view. I am writing this piece for two reasons:

1. To try to better understand why people identify themselves as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative," and 
2. To clear up a partially valid but embarrassingly delivered point I made in the context of a mortgage-crisis discussion I was having at a bar the other night with two (possibly three, my recollection is regrettably imperfect) new friends that I consider both highly intelligent and deserving of an explanation.

It is my hope that my discussion of the first topic will be interesting to a fair amount of people. I do not harbor such hopes for the second topic and suspect that it will be interesting to only that segment of the population that happened to be sitting at a certain table in a certain bar in downtown Athens around 1:00 in the morning two Fridays ago, and probably to only one specific member of the aforementioned population. Regardless, now you know what you're in for, so please click on the link below if you remain interested. If not, here is a link to a highly recommended YouTube video about cats.

2010!

Welcome! It's been a long time! Too long. You look great! The year has truly been kind to you. Please, have a seat. Would you like some hot chocolate? Some gingerbread, perhaps? Some gingerbread flavored hot chocolate?

I also have Matzah.

By all accounts, 2010 was a year and things happened in it. So many things. Like vuvuzelas. That was a thing. And Stieg Larson. What a name! And disasters. Some really great disasters. I am of course using the word "great" to mean "large or immense." I use it in the pejorative sense. I still want to know where my Haiti money went, Wyclef. 

A Short Piece of Fiction Inspired by an Allegedly Authentic Photo of an Infantile Hitler that I Found On the Internet