Opening Post/Hello!

 Pitchfork is huge. And their top 100 lists (or, in the case of the 00s, 200) basically dictate the taste of hipsters the nation (and world) over. Now normally this would be the part where I link to one of the myriad old-media articles detailing Pitchfork's influence on the world of music, but I can't be bothered right now and besides, you have Google. Suffice it to say that if you're in music, Pitchfork can and will make (ever heard of the Arcade Fire?) or break (poor, poor Travis Morrison) you. A few years ago I wanted to increase the size of my music collection, and what better place to look for suggestion than the Pitchfork lists? I'd bought some albums on their recommendation before and liked them a great deal, and the lists were loaded with stuff I either hadn't heard, didn't own or hadn't even heard of. It seemed like a good idea, and I had some spending money (which I wish I had now, but you can't predict the future, can you? Or, at least, the job opportunities for recent MFA grads). Anyway, the rest is history.

I promise I will never say that phrase again.

So: the purpose of this site is to go through the albums on Pitchfork's top 100 lists, one at a time. Are they good? Bad? Did they screw up in putting the list together? I know it's difficult to make your own decisions about these important things, so never fear: I'm here to do it for you!  In the interest of comparison, I will provide my own Pitchfork-esque (Pitchforky?) decimal rating of the album in question, from 0 to 10.0. To help you figure out what these numbers mean, here's a handy chart:

10.0 - Ol' Dirty Bastard (alive)
9.0 - Ghostface Killah
8.0 - RZA
7.0 - GZA
6.0 - Raekwon
5.0 - Method Man
4.0 - Inspectah Deck
3.0 - Masta Killah
2.0 - U-God
1.0 - Ol' Dirty Bastard (dead)
0.0 - Cappadonna

Understand? So, an album that I give a 7.2 to would be somewhere between GZA and RZA, but closer to GZA. Not too hard. Also, each review will be supplemented with a link to Youtube of a track from the album. The track will be chosen to be representative of what the album sounds like, not necessarily the best track. Although the two dovetail more often than not.

More general notes: I can write with penetrating clarity and depth on pretty much any other topic, but music baffles me. Writing about it, I mean. I consume it like some eyeless alien worm, but I cannot for the life of me transform that interest into memorable prose. In short, I don't think I'm very good at writing about music. When describing it I search and search for the appropriate phrases to use, only to fall helplessly upon things like "This song rocks" or "This album has really good songwriting". I'll probably still do that, because there is one hard and fast rule: one review a day. Unless I'm dead or otherwise without internet access, this rule will be maintained. So there won't be a whole lot of time for rewriting or taking out embarrassing passages (and trust me, when I write about music, the issue is less whether or not the writing is embarrassing to begin with than the overall level of embarrassment). Basically, I wanted to write about music because I think I suck at it.

I'll be working backward from the 00s to the 70s, so get ready for Jay Reatard's Blood Visions!

Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
Top 100 Albums of the 1990s
Top 100 Albums of the 1980s
Top 100 Albums of the 1970s