Liz Phair has a new album out, and Pitchfork gave it a 2.6 out of 10. That’s bad. Dismal, even. In April, Courtney Love’s resurrected band Hole didn’t do much better with Nobody’s Daughter
Perhaps we’re paranoid, but does Pitchfork have something against women over 40? Has a blend of ageism and sexism crept into their reviews, or are they just brave enough to spurn complacent records and give them the grade they deserve? To indulge our suspicions, we compared some of Pitchfork’s album reviews of artists in this demographic with the averages found on the review-aggregate website Metacritic. Check out our findings, along with Pitchfork’s harshest criticism leveled against each member of this random group of mature women, after the jump.
Artist: Courtney Love, 45
Album: Hole’s Nobody’s Daugther
Metacritic’s Rating: 55/100 = 55%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 2.9/10 = 29%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “What we’ve gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on — despite her public meltdowns, Love remains preoccupied with posture and pose.”
Artist: Madonna, 51
Album: Hard Candy
Metacritic’s Rating: 65/100 = 65%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 5.3/10 = 53%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “Her vocal training and singing lessons in the ’90s broadened her range but she’s never sounded as hungry since, and her phrasing on Hard Candy is frequently dreadful — words so evenly spaced and emphasized that it sounds like she’s reading aloud to a class.”
Artist: Laurie Anderson, 63
Album: Homeland
Metacritic’s Rating: 82/100 = 82%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 8.3/10 = 83%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “‘Only an Expert’ makes a pervasive, subtle theme momentarily explicit: How shared illusions about security and plenitude perpetuate a predictable cycle of cultural, environmental, and existential crises. But this threatens to make the album sound punitive, when somehow, Anderson’s wrath feels compassionate.”
Artist: Tracey Thorn, 47
Album: Love And Its Opposite
Metacritic’s Rating: 77/100 = 77%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 6.9/10 = 69%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “It’s not especially clear how much self-aware [sic] Thorn’s hammy singer-songwriter character is, because if you don’t suspend a bit of disbelief, then ‘Singles Bar’ and ‘You Are a Lover’ seem more a stilted narration of an unhappily independent woman inhabiting Lilith Fair’s second stage.” [Emphasis ours: Ouch!]
Artist: Sharon Jones, 56
Album: Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings’s I Learned The Hard Way
Metacritic’s Rating: 81/100 = 81%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 8/10 = 80%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “But there’s more to their sound than a nostalgia trip — it’s an affirmation of the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago.”
Artist: Lucinda Williams, 57
Album: Little Honey
Metacritic’s Rating: 72/100 = 72%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 5.7/10 = 57%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “While Williams generally sticks to her strengths and suppresses most of her more unsavory musical habits, she maintains her curious reliance on tacky AABB rhyme schemes and lyrical clichés like ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ (on the otherwise excellent ‘Circles and X’s').”
Artist: Patti Smith, 63
Album: Twelve
Metacritic’s Rating: 65/100 = 65%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 2.7/10 = 27%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “Twelve, on the other hand, is nothing but a big comedown, a placeholder in a career that’s long been about soldiering forward, not stumbling backward. It’s not an album to get lost in. It’s an album you listen to once, then lose.”
Artist: Alison Goldfrapp, 44
Album: Goldfrapp’s Head First
Metacritic’s Rating: 68/100 = 68%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 6.6/10 = 66%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “Just don’t expect to remember many of the details when it’s all over. You might be the best-dressed person at ’80s dance night, but if there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about you otherwise, nobody’s going to recognize you out of costume.”
Artist: Juliana Hatfield, 42
Album: Peace and Love
Metacritic’s Rating: 60/100 = 60%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 3.9/10 = 39%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “With its acoustic strums and coffeehouse intimacy, Peace & Love sounds like that stalest of ’90s relics: the unplugged album. In fact, it seems to be defined by Hatfield’s limitations rather than her strengths.”
Artist: Sade Adu, 51
Album: Sade’s Soldier of Love
Metacritic’s Rating: 79/100 = 79%
Pitchfork’s Rating: 7.0/10 = 70%
Pitchfork’s Harshest Criticism: “It’s a tricky thing to praise, the kind of competency that’s always just a few steps from blandness.”
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Results:
With the exception of one, Pitchfork gave each album a lower rating than Metacritic. Pitchfork’s average rating for the above 10 albums is 5.7/10 (57%) while Metacritc’s is 70/100 (70%). (Interestingly, one blogger tracked Pitchfork’s scores for all of 2009 and found that 7.0 was most frequent, with half of reviews falling in the 6.1-76 range.) So, what do you think? Does the site have a bee in its bonnet about middle-aged ladies?
Comments (10)
The problem is that most of these artists are generally past their prime. I tend to agree with Pitchfork on the reviews of these artists, but the main issue here is comparing their reviewing practices with an aggregate site like Metacritic. Web-sites like Metacritic are going to be influenced more by the extremes than by the averages, which is generally the opposite of what studies like this posit. Using Metacritic to see the average is punitive at best and represents nothing more than a devotion to internet populism than to comparing legitimate reviews done by professionals.
And just what exactly are Lucinda Williams’ “unsavory musical habits” ? And blasting an artist for cliches – idiomatic expressions, a staple of a lot of songwriting – is very much pot-kettle where most music journalists are concerned.
I actually don’t see any wide disparity between PF’s rankings and the aggregate scores above … taking a shot at Hole is pretty easy, don’cha think?
Stupid post from a stupid website. Don’t worry, Flavorpill– some day, you guys will get page views. It’ll happen! I promise! :-\
You should just do this with all reviews. It would be cool. @ Leftfoot, MIGHT HELP WITH THE PAGE VIEWS!
I think this is an interesting question but one that can’t really be answered using this approach. Potential gender bias aside, it might be just that in general Pitchfork gives lower ratings than Metacritic – to middle-aged ladies, middle-aged gents, and any other age/gender combo. To make your case, you’d have to actually show that the ratings are systematically lower than Metacritic ratings *only* for middle-aged female musicians, and not others.
I believe that sexism and ageism can subtly (or not subtly) influence music reviews, but agree with other commenters that you did a sh-tty job proving it. I also think Dan Aloi is right that a lot of the ratings are actually very comparable. So….sorry guys, but FAIL. If you’re trying to bring a bad-@ss feminist perspective, then *bring it* and otherwise don’t waste my time.
Pitchfork gave the albums bad reviews because they were BAD ALBUMS. I mean, did you hear that Liz Phair? Atrocious.
Sorry guys, but there’s nothing to see here.
Isn’t that always the party line answer when Pitchfork is criticized? Whether it be for not listening to the music they review, or stealing from smaller music sites, or for being dismissive of women? That the other person is raising questions because they want attention? Or traffic? Or to stir up trouble. But would P4k dismiss a man’s work as “inhabiting the second stage of Lilith Fair?” No. Because men in music can be nuanced individuals creating complex works of art, but women are either in favor or out of it. And when they are determined to be out of favor, that get slapped with this lazy bullshit masquerading as criticism.
‘lazy bullshit’ is the best description for what pitchfork does.
[...] handbrake on any real kind of diversity. Certainly, Pitchfork does appear to be biased against certain types of musician, but that’s not unusual in itself, as every publication has its own audience and its own [...]
Come back when you’ve got a control, e.g. middle-aged (white?) men and their reviews.
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