Scaruffi on Blackstar

I also thought the album was overrated.

>>69770003

me to, but I have to tell others I like it or else people will call me a contrarian faggot and lump me in with scaruffi.

Scaruffi needs to learn that it's possible to dislike an album without being a total cunt about it

>>69770073
Also that it's possible to dislike a person without letting it influence your opinion of their work

>>69769876
He is legitimately autistic. I'm not joking.

If there is one line of consistency throughout his writings it is a complete lack of awareness of the people around him (which is a clear sign of autism). His famous piece on why it should be legal to have sex with minors and his rant about how the Beatles highly regarded merely because of their popularity (not to mention the hilarious rant-within-a-rant in the same piece where he sees fit to mock all of modern music criticism) both display this perfectly. He praises Aqua and Korn without any awareness of how those albums are literally considered jokes outside of his bubble for their poor quality. His "reviews" are extremely self-righteous, usually without any actual support for his claims. He can call a song a "psychodrama" and with no further evidence give that album an 8/10 while lambasting albums that are praised by literally every critic other than him. His writing can mostly be boiled down to the image of a grown man sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming "I'm right and everyone else is wrong!" over and over.

The true nail in the coffin is, however, his infamous "Friends of Piero" page. He literally has an encyclopedic database available to everyone on the internet, documenting photographs of him and his "friends." Look at the people in any of these photographs. Most of the time they seem unaware the photos are even being taken. Do you think Piero is still in contact with all of these people? Do you think they know of the existence of this page? Does he have consent from every single one of these people to post pictures of them online?

1/2

>>69770142
lol is this copypasta

>>69770154
but accurate, who the fuck keeps a list with pictures of all their friends, so weird

He's wack who cares

>>69770142
2/2

This page comes off as the attempt of a mentally ill man to increase his online repute. "Look how many friends I have!" it screams. He clearly has no idea how autistic it seems in actuality to have such a page in operation.Remember, this is a man who included his own hilariously overwrought poem on his "List of Best Poems" and claims to have "won several international awards as the most professional analysis of the career of pop group the Beatles ever written" despite no such awards ever surfacing. He is clearly desperate to fulfill some grandiose idea he has built of himself in his head, when in reality all he is is a mentally challenged little Italian man.

>>69770142
>"I'm right and everyone else is wrong!" over and over.
How? He's allowed to have opinions on music. You're fucking retarded.

>>69770258

too bad they're WRONG opinions.

>>69770073

Tell that to Christgau instead, he's a worse offender than Scaruffi

>>69769876
>Blackstar was so shit that Bowie listened to it, got cancer, and died

That was a little harsh, Piero

>>69770142
If you think Aqua is bad you're probably just a misogynist.

>>69770174
i think its cute

>>69770390
cute in an extremely autistic way, ya

>>69770142
May be an autist but you really gotta get an idea of what he's about, the lack of imtereference from other opinions is like integral to his style of writing

>>69770413
mental illness is a meme

>>69770280
yeah but at least christgau is funny af

>>69769876
Still loved Blackstar, but you have to admit his criticisms are very refreshing compared to every other critic, even if they do come off as slightly pretentious.

>>69770517
This mindset is exactly what I hate Scaruffi though. He goes against the grain just for the fucking sake of it. Literal contrarian bullshit.

>>69770546

Scaruffi only says what he believes.

He has praised plenty of things that other critics praise and shit on plenty of things that other critics shit on.

>>69769876
this filename never fails to make me laugh, i urge all other users of /mu/ to name their scaruffi pictures to "me the musical genius"

File: download (2).jpg (7KB, 225x225px)

7KB, 225x225px

>Any critic who hails [In Rainbows] as a masterpiece must be missing 99% of the music released in the same month.
>Death Grips' lame No Love Deep Web (2012) continued the artistic decline of the project.
>After a long hiatus, Daft Punk returned with Random Access Memories (Daft Life, 2013), a collection of incredibly trivial melodies and beats
>R Plus Seven (Warp, 2013) is too amateurish to be taken seriously.
>Cohen can't sing anymore and his poetry is trivial.

I'm literally crying right now.

>>69770591
no

>>69769876
Why do you guys care what he says? Dude has proven time and time again that he has shit taste

>>69770609
so true tho, except for NLDW, it's actually interesting

>>69770609
dont cry anon, scaruffi will die soon :(

>>69770609

>>Cohen can't sing anymore and his poetry is trivial.

fucking triggered

>>69770591
I did it because I have personated him in the past

>>69770546
nah imo there needs to be a devil's advocate
>>69770609
did anyone feel differently about RAM?

>>69770609
Is the OPN review new?

>>69770517
It's also glaringly wrong though - he's wrong about the premise of Lazarus and invents how I Can't Give Everything Away sounds, then hates his fictional version. He decries "melodrama" of a man legitimately facing a looming death. It's not exactly different in any way deserving admiration; it's a poor review that just happens to go against the grain.

>>69771023
This. His actual "criticism" of albums and songs is hilariously bad, basically Christgau except Christgau at least has a bit of self-awareness.

>>69770620
No, but it's hilarious of how much he is an asshole

>>69771023
very accurate anon, guy is singing about fucking dying for real and scaruffi thinks he is being melodramatic. Maybe he really is autistic after all.

>>69770517
>>69770546
>>69771023
>>69771063
the number of people on this board that hate him this strongly shows what a good critic he is
he provides the divisiveness in both his reviews and in the response to his reviews that would be almost entirely absent without him

>>69770073
if that's your view then why are you on this board?

>>69770191
Lmao did he really put his own poem in a "best" list?

>>69769876
this shit made me l;mao

>>69771023
>He decries "melodrama" of a man legitimately facing a looming death.
you can be melodramatic in the face of death are you serious? i dont completely agree with him but i do like the fact that he's being honest about the music itself, even if it's absolutely against my perspective

>>69771541
When pitched against most critics (i.e. the lovely staff over at TMT, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, etc.), Scaruffi is comparatively well-received on this board. By your (obviously wrong) metric of contrarianism/ divisiveness being a cornerstone of (or even having any influence on) quality, that surely means he's one of the worse critics of the times.

The truth, of course, is that it isn't so much the content of a critic's output that really ruffles the feathers of this board, but myriad reasons personal to each and every poster. Most people aren't roused at all. Most are those who lurk in silence, or want to discuss and discover music. There are a substantial amount of people wishing only to shitpost. They might dredge up a particularly contrarian review as fuel for shitposting, but they won't truly care about its worth as criticism. They know it will rile up the subset of users you've mistakenly taken to represent this board; this board is a cat and mouse game of the baiting and the baited, barely concealed by occasional attempts at music discussion. Scaruffi and other critics are just arrows in the quivers of baiters. They are only mentioned when they produce edgy or absurd works (see: 12 year olds, refrigerators, Blackstar, The Beatles, Korn), nobody cares for their genuine attempts at criticism. They and their opinions are commodities in a shit-flinging contest on a chinese messageboard. Don't mistake their opinions being discussed as proof of relevancy.

>>69771985
Of course you can ham shit up in the face of death, but it's an assumption on his part that he decides is the reality, then allows himself to use it as criticism and to sidestep the existence of context ("the circumstances at play in the creation of this work are moot because I deem them inauthentic"). He could sidestep that by simple taking the stance that context doesn't impact the product, but he can't help himself using it instead to make a dig that is ultimately contentless.
There's also no example of bathos in the album; it's all very small and introspective in its scope (besides the title track, which isn't where he finds fault with the melodrama), so it's silly to pretend there are any points in the album that are dragged down by melodrama - which is itself is not even inherently bad. It's an example of his preconceived views impacting his review. Don't pretend that he's being honest to the work when he displays (and has in the past displayed) a bias against Bowie.

Scarification has said in interviews he rarely listens to an album more than once and sometimes he doesn't even finish an album before rating it. He is the ultimate pleb.

Source: https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/interview-with-piero-scaruffi/

>>69772716
never fucking mind this dude lost all credibility in my eyes

>>69772463
lazarus was pretty melodramatic but i still very heavily enjoyed it, im not disagreeing that the context in which the art is made doesn't influence the consumer's interpretation of the end result.

>>69772716
he didn't even say that though

>>69773483
Did you even listen to it? he clearly says that.

>>69769876
it's blunt because he's writing a history of music, not journalism

>>69769876
You people really should stop worrying so much if the music you like is good or not based upon an opinion of one person.

>>69773375
>caring about the opinions of some old Italian man on the internet

>>69769876
>arguing about an italian meme on a mongolian basket weaving forum