for those about to rock

and back to hating pitchfork, in spite of the fact that i will continue to link to them and enjoy a lot of the writing on their page

here we have an entry from pitchfork's top 50 albums of 2006 feature.

bear in mind that, you know, a 'best of' list like this ought to maybe go out of its way to posit, ESPECIALLY for the sake of those who haven't heard some of the entries, why out of the thousands of albums released in a year, readers owe it to themselves to get cozy with the elite selection staffers whittled it down to. you'd think that'd probably apply even more so in the case of an album that's glaringly, uh, recognizable among the bargain bin nuggets enumerated. i guess you'd be wrong.

because i'm bitter that i can't write for pitchfork, and generally miffed on a more puerile level that i don't get paid to write anymore, and because it's my blog and i'll go ahead and pitch the damn fork here myself if i so please, i sprinkled outraged, invective commentary throughout in bold, angry italics.

on that note, this is also worth bearing in mind: i'm not taking apart the album in question. my opinion in that regard is inconsequential. my aim here's to back up a claim i made in an earlier post about how the positive appraisals in pitchfork tend to be weak, and so this is essentially nothing more than criticism of a piece of writing's failure to fulfill an expository obligation that it bears, being a piece of criticism itself. take the jt loving/bashing to the boards if you like.

on with the show:

25: Justin TimberlakeFutureSex/LoveSounds[Jive]

Justin Timberlake has a powerful, serpentine voice, but it's not suited for superhuman r&b pyrotechnics. It has a soft, timorous vulnerability [granted, from what i've listened to. we'll see if this is assumed to be an inherent good because it implicitly recalls michael jackson], a lost-little-boy quality [cute]. When he sings about heartbreak, he sounds like he wants to crawl into a hole and die. When he sings about dancing, he sounds like he's seeing nightclub lights for the first time. When he sings about pimping, he sounds like a kid playing dress-up [oops, the mj comparison alone proves inadequate. clearly, david bowie would be apropos, too. jt explores the many facets of a doe-eyed fish-out-of-water in a dangerously sexy adult word. cute]. But here, Timbaland takes that voice and traps it in a hall of mirror-balls, surrounding it with glistening strings, dizzy sci-fi synths, and itchy funk guitars [STOP THE PRESSES!!! you mean this album contains the same kind of ear candy featured on every dance record released in the past 30 some-odd years? oh, do tell!]. The result is a disco album both dazzling in its technical trickery [how? as a result of those innovative synths and entirely unexpected funk guitars?] and enormously satisfying in its emotional sweep [ah, yes, the whole fish-out-of-water thing is undeniably compelling stuff. gotcha]. If an album this ambitiously weird [again, from where does this observation follow?] can be one of the year's biggest sellers [because it's 'weird'? or is it perhaps actually in spite of whether it's weird or not, as the artist happens to already be insanely popular with the buying public, and the album would've sold just as well if jt had sung the whole thing with an organ grinder backing him up?], we're in good shape [read: not just a transparent concession to music that people have actually heard of, which we'll make every now and then as a token gesture to prove that at heart, we're unbiased purists in our love of all music. it may be popular, but it's also WEIRD, so, as you can see, we haven't actually cashed in our indie cred. you can go ahead and sleep peacefully, dear reader]. --Tom Breihan

posted by jomilkman @ 9:21 AM