Staff Picks: The Year in Rock and Rap
The Pitchfork Review
Pitchfork
3.3 • 844 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2020
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest installment of our year-end podcast coverage, we’re talking about 2020’s best rock and rap albums. Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by News Editor Evan Minsker, Contributing Editor Jayson Greene, and Staff Writers Alphonse Pierre and Madison Bloom, who argue in favor of their personal favorites, from Yves Tumor and U.S. Girls to Westside Gunn and Jay Electronica. They also get into some broader discussions about the state of the genres more generally, including: Which old heads or new kids ruled rap in 2020? And what does “rock” even mean these days?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Pitchfork Review. I'm Pooja Patel, the editor of Pitchfork. |
| 0:11.8 | So on today's episode, we're going to continue our great year-end debate. To mix things up a little bit, |
| 0:18.2 | we'll be talking about some of our favorite albums in two really big genres this year, rock and rock. To start, we have our news editor, Evan Minsker, and staff writer Madison Bloom, here to walk us through some of their favorite rock albums of the year. Hey, guys. Hi. Hey there. Madison, welcome back. Lovely to have you. Evan, the water is warm, as Jeremy said on the last one of these. |
| 0:40.6 | So one thing that has been increasingly difficult, I think, for us as a staff, is to specifically |
| 0:47.4 | genre-fi music. |
| 0:49.5 | And with rock, it has been especially kind of infuriating and funny at times. During our year-end listening, |
| 0:56.7 | we did these breakout listening rooms by genre. And in the rock room, it became so kind of confounding |
| 1:03.6 | as to what landed firmly within the genre of rock that we started this ongoing joke of like, |
| 1:10.6 | does it rock? And if it does rock, then it is |
| 1:14.8 | rock music and it lands in the rock genre list. But the reason that this is so difficult is |
| 1:20.3 | because, you know, we have to consider whether singer-songwriters and folk musicians like |
| 1:26.1 | Phoebe Bridgers or Waxahatchee or songwriters like |
| 1:29.8 | Bob Dylan land in the rock list. Evan, you were in those listening rooms. I think I was the first |
| 1:35.7 | person to get into the rock room. Like literally I would log on and nobody else was on. So then as everybody |
| 1:40.6 | would log on, I could ask people, hey, what's up? You ready to rock? |
| 1:44.6 | Just every single person who had come into the room, I could ask them if they were ready to rock, |
| 1:48.7 | and that was super fun for me. |
| 1:49.8 | But I feel like there are these very weird fine lines that happen where some singer-songwriters |
| 1:56.1 | definitely rock. |
| 1:57.5 | Like, the Waxahatchie album is a rock album, in my opinion, and I think a lot of |
| 2:01.9 | people had those kinds of, well, this album has like a lot of rock and moments. The Phoebe Bridgers |
| 2:07.6 | album was discussed as like, oh yeah, there are definitely some rock songs on that album, whereas |
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