Pitchfork is a Plague in Hip Hop

Put six covers side by side and the whole thing falls apart.

Pitchfork gave Ice Spice's Y2K! a 7.6. Sexyy Red's In Sexyy We Trust got a 7.5 . Latto's Big Mama got a 7.3.

Now the other side of the table.

Kendrick Lamar's GNX got a 6.6. J. Cole's The Fall-Off got a 5.3. Drake's ICEMAN got a 4.8.

Those are Pitchfork's numbers, not mine. I'm just reading them out loud.

This isn't about the women. It's about the scale.

Let me be clear before anybody twists it. Ice Spice, Sexyy Red and Latto made the albums they set out to make. Good for them. My problem isn't with them.

My problem is a publication that tells you a 7.6 0r“7.9 means an "Excellent record" and "'Best in class' for its genre" in its own scoring guidelines. Then it hands that same tier to a 2024 Ice Spice record and drops three of the biggest-name rap albums of the moment beneath it.

If those numbers are on the same scale, the scale is broken. If they aren't on the same scale, stop putting numbers on them.

Even the critics didn't agree with Pitchfork

GNX had an 87 Metascore on Metacritic, which is universal acclaim. Pitchfork's 6.6 stood out from the major outlets. This wasn't the culture against the critics. It was Pitchfork against everybody, Kendrick included.

So when Pitchfork hands Drake a 4.8, I'm not taking it as the final word on ICEMAN. I'm taking it as one more data point from an outlet whose numbers move with the mood.

The numbers move with the mood

Look at Drake's own history at Pitchfork.

Take Care got an 8.6. Views got a 6.8. ICEMAN got a 4.8. Same artist, same pen, same ear for a hook. What changed is how cool it is to like him.

Cole gets the same treatment. 2014 Forest Hills Drive, an album that went platinum with no features and a generation still quotes, got a 6.9. The Fall-Off got a 5.3.

Meanwhile Sexyy Red's Hood Hottest Princess got an 8.0 That's higher than every Cole album I just named. Kendrick's Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers got a 7.6. Same number as Y2K!.

Read that again. Pitchfork says Kendrick's most personal album and Ice Spice's 2024 debut sit in the same tier.

The classics they "discovered" late

Here's what tells you everything. Pitchfork's perfect 10s for hip-hop's untouchables mostly came decades late.

Illmatic got its 10.0 in 2013, 19 years after it dropped. Ready to Die got its 10.0 in 2017. The Chronic got its 10.0 in 2019. Those were retrospectives, written long after the streets and the charts had already settled it.

The one hip-hop 10 it handed out on release day was Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010.

So the pattern is that the culture decides, and Pitchfork shows up years later with a 10 and acts like it was there the whole time.

My read

This is my opinion, and I'll own every word of it.

Pitchfork doesn't grade hip-hop. It grades how hip-hop makes Pitchfork look. Score the hot new viral act high and you look plugged in. Score the giants low and you look brave. Either way, the album is beside the point.

As Pusha T pointed out, its a pay-to-win system. When the numbers look this random, it's clear who's pushing agendas and who's pushing what the culture is actually keeping in rotation. "Reviewers" like these and the likes of an Anthony Fantano rate music biasedly and arbitrarily just look at Fantano's low rating for ICEMAN, main reasoning it being too "Narcissistic"

If you're as puzzled as I am by that statement then you might be one amongst a dying breed of logical thinking human beings

With publications like Pitchfork rap is becoming a political popularity contest with a 10-point scale stapled to it. Whoever the scene thinks is cool this month wins. Whoever has been on top too long loses. Drake has been on top for fifteen years. Do the math.

And that's the part that should bother you. Pitchfork wants a seat at the table where the culture gets defined. It wants its number in the headline, in the fan wars, on the album's Wikipedia page forever. But it doesn't treat the music with the seriousness that seat demands. It shows up late to the classics, swings at the giants, and grades on vibes.

You don't get to influence a culture you don't take seriously.

Pitchfork's 4.8 isn't the verdict on ICEMAN. The people streaming it are. And twenty years from now, if Pitchfork writes a retrospective review, I already know how it ends.