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 most common criticisms of Pitchfork come from two camps: mainstream music fans who hate the site for being elitist and underground music fans who consider it unworthy of its taste-making reputation because it is too mainstream. The latter criticism is ridiculous on its face and would only come from someone so far up their own music-snob ass that they cannot see the rank absurdity of referring to Pitchfork as mainstream. The former criticism is occasionally valid.

Today's Camp review was written by Ian Cohen and fully embodies Pitchfork elitism at its worst. The first sentence of the review sums things up nicely: "If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp," the subtext being that if you like this album, you are not cool enough or familiar enough with with the genre to appreciate "good" hip-hop. Cohen delivers the line with a wink and a nod to the tiny segment of his readers that spend too much time on rap message boards and a brazen "fuck you" to everyone else who were just curious to see if the album is any good.

Cohen's issue with the album is that he perceives Donald Glover to be simultaneously out of touch with and too derivative of the prevailing trends in hip-hop. According to Cohen, Glover does not have the right to brand himself as a hip-hop outsider since Kanye, Drake, and Cudi have been playing the emo-rap v. street rap game for so long that the outsiders have now become the insiders. All right Cohen, fair enough, you're probably right about that. Now, can we please talk about the sounds that come out of the speakers when you play the album?

And he does. A little. Cohen excoriates Glover for "painfully leaning into herniated punchlines like . . . 'Asian girls everywhere ... UCLA!'"; for being out of touch: "note how [Backpackers] co-opts the one epithet more outdated than 'hipster' in rap music circa 2011";  and for "R&B hooks so garish and impersonal that they make Lupe Fiasco's Lasers sound dignified."

Of course, Pitchfork would like you to forget that two weeks ago they bestowed an 8.6 and a Best New Music tag on Drake's Take Care. In the album's first track, Over My Dead Body, Drake both delivers an Asian-girl-inspired punchline ("You know I want it all and then some/Shout out to Asian girls, let the lights dim some") and name-checks the backpacker haters ("The backpackers are back on the bandwagon/Like this was my comeback season back, back in the day"). Again, this is all on THE FIRST TRACK OF THE ALBUM; the garish R&B hooks come later.

So what's the difference between Gambino and Drake? You may point out that the reviews were written by two different people with two different opinions. Fair enough, but Pitchfork has editors to ensure that their ratings maintain consistency over time, and these reviews were only two weeks apart. You may also argue that Drake is just flat out objectively better than Gambino in terms of delivery, production, or whatever else. While this is true, I think it's impossible to make the argument that if Gambino is a 1.6 then Drake is a BNM'd 8.6. Drake is better, but he's not THAT much better. He's certainly no less derivative of Kanye West.

All things considered, it seems clear that the main difference between Drake and Gambino is that somebody somewhere for some reason decided that Drake is cool and Gambino is not. It's the only reasonable explanation. Amusingly, this supports basically everything Gambino is saying in his lyrics. Glover's backpacker persecution complex is both completely validated by Cohen and the primary reason why Cohen hates the record. Go figure.

Cohen isn't all to blame here. His review is representative of the completely inane and myopic Internet Rap Conversation that has been raging for years. Rap fans are just so totally and ridiculously obsessed with their genre that they seemingly have no interest in music as a vehicle for pleasure in any way, shape, or form. They only see rap as something to argue about; heaven forbid it could be enjoyed. Paradoxically, Cohen totally understands this idea and references it in his review. The onset  of the "post-racial, post-cred [hip hop] utopia" that he thinks we are closer to than ever and ostensibly wants is being hindered by precisely these sorts of reviews that focus on anything but how good the album is to listen to.

It reminds me of when I was growing up. My friends and I were fans of alternative/grunge music and nothing else. If a given musical act didn't play its own instruments and if those instruments weren't a guitar, base, and drums, then that act was completely unworthy of our attention. One of the things that I love about being a music fan today is that most of us simply do not feel this way anymore. Things like genre and authenticity don't seem to be as important now, and that is a great thing. If it sounds good, listen to it.

I'm not saying that all ardent hip-hop fans now are like how the rest of us were back then, but I am saying that this obsession with specific genre signifiers is more prevalent among ardent hip-hop fans than any other music fan group.

They certainly seem to be slowly coming around to Cohen's post-genre music utopia and it's been exciting to watch it happen. Kanye West deserves more credit for the transformation than anyone and that's what makes him such an extraordinarily important musician. He has enough credibility to be taken seriously by rap fans and enough universality to be loved by everyone else. The next step is for "serious" rap fans and music critics to finally recognize pop-rap as a legitimate sub-genre.They don't have to love it, but at very least, they should acknowledge its right to exist and recognize the fact that the world is not going to end if they find themselves bobbing their head to the odd garish R&B hook.

Pop-rap is rarely going to deliver a true masterpiece, but albums like B.O.B.'s The Adventures of Bobby Ray, Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday, and, yes, Lupe's Lasers clearly have some pleasures to offer. Some of Cohen's criticisms are legitimate (even if the slimy way he delivers them is not), but the problem is that he is so overwhelmingly concerned with genre that he blows up these criticisms into completely unforgivable sins and writes egregiously pejorative reviews for albums that simply do not deserve them. Sure, pop-rap albums generally aren't going to be 9.8's, but they don't have to be 1.6's either. Pitchfork would be well served to at least acknowledge the fact that these albums are bringing something to the table. A quick trip to Metacritic shows that the rest of the music press already does.