Boards
Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip on those Pitchfork and DiS reviews
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The new album has had both positive and negative reviews – do you ever read what the critics write about your music? Drownedinsound.com seemed to have a pretty damning verdict on it…
Pip: We get most reviews sent to us. For me it’s good to evoke such an emotion. If everyone liked it then either we’re not being covered in enough places if it’s only the people who want to review it, or…I dunno. The biggest selling records of the last decade in the UK were Dido and James Blunt. Very bland but therefore has mass appeal. I’m far more comfortable being a part of something that will split people – some people will like it, some won’t.
For every one person that hates it, one person will like it.
Pip: Yeah, exactly. And then another person that’s never heard of it. So there’s three people.
Dan: Reviews have an agenda. You can read a review in isolation, but you have to put it in a context of whom else that reviewer likes and reads and stuff. We had a really bad review of the first album on Pitchfork but this writer generally thought Puff Daddy was the greatest rapper of all time. People who read those publications religiously know the personalities of the writers so they’ll know whether to take it with a pinch of salt.
Pitchfork does seem pretty elitest.
Pip: Pitchfork is a pretty hipster site. It can be great; it can be a really good site.
Dan: Pitchfork and Drownedinsound, before [the latter] sold its soul to advertising and running lots of other sites not under the Drownedinsound brand like sports and all that that, but yeah before they did that, Drownedinsound had the potential to be a British Pitchfork but this sort of agenda-less journalism actually leads to massive amounts of agenda. The first Drownedinsound review disliked us on reasons unrelated to music. One interview we did where Pip said he liked Sage Francis, the writer said ‘Sage Francis is a racist’ so that makes us racists.
Pip: Obviously Sage isn’t a racist either so it’s all really twisted. It was all over this guy looking on a white power forum and they were discussing whether they it’s okay to listen to people like Sage who are white people making black music and this bunch of racists decided it was okay, so their individual opinion then makes Sage a racist and me liking Sage then makes us racists.
That sounds pretty pathetic.
Pip: It’s craziness. The one thing with the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice and everyone can express their individual opinions so you can’t really complain about that. Even if their opinion is shit.