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pd~ wrote:Is Pitchfork allowed to dislike Radiohead?

When it comes to Pitchfork and scoring, I would say that you would be shocked by just how democratic the rating process is. Without giving much away (because I don’t think that’s fair to Pitchfork), it goes something like this: In general, a record is discussed by the writers and generally, through that, the site arrives at a score consensus (EDIT ON 1/21/15: Re-reading this and realized this sentence could be clearer. So, you know, not an announced and clear score consensus but you know, a general sense of where the record will fall on the P4K scale, whether it’s great, good, okay, meh, etc. The only people I ever discussed scores explicitly with were my editors, via email and it was usually them wanting to tweak the score slightly sometimes higher, sometimes lower.) Then reviews are assigned or fit to a writer (usually that writer has sent a pitch). So, in a sense yeah, the reviews are controlled by the editors because they assign someone whose opinion on the record (especially if it is a notable or relevant record) fits the view of the site. This really isn’t that different from how every publication assigns reviews. The one difference I would say is that Pitchfork is rarely going to give a review over to a critic with a cool point of view if that point of view doesn’t fit the editorial stance, especially if that stance is negative. Yeah yeah yeah, I work for SPIN, so this is probably a bad example, but SPIN let Rob Harvilla rip Watch The Throne to pieces (he gave it a 6). I don’t think Pitchfork would ever do that. At least not anymore.

neonblack wrote:I wanna hear some midlife angst. Make a noise record already! We know you can do it Thommy.