This Week You Will Contemplate the Fall of:

• Pitchfork
• network TV
• that guy in Anatomy of a Fall

Thanks to Miller for dropping in this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

In what maybe the last Pitchfork Sunday Review, Elizabeth Nelson attempts to unravel Dylan’s “Desire”:

“Black Diamond Bay,” another long story song on an album full of them, is remarkably tuneful, ruefully ominous, and utterly batshit. I have been listening to it for two decades, and I still have no clue what is happening. There is a Greek man, a woman in a Panama hat, a soldier, a tiny man, a volcano. Portends of suicide and disaster percolate: scheming gamblers and sunken islands, betrayals and broken bonds, the kind of Book of Revelation stuff Dylan would get into full-time soon enough. Through some mysterious alchemy, its incoherence yields real beauty, abetted by an incredibly committed performance from his ace backing band—led by bassist Rob Stoner, another musician who figured prominently in Dylan’s career and then seemed to disappear. Try to grasp the details of “Black Diamond Bay,” or just let the imagery carry you away. Like everything on Desire, it’s all misdirection and magic anyway.

At Defector, Israel Damarola grimly assesses what Conde Nast’s layoffs and reorganizing of Pitchfork portends for music journalism:

Throughout the industry, features and reporting and music reviews have taken a backseat as companies push for more social media and video content. What has filled the vacuum left behind by actual music criticism is a loose collection of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences, and fan communities that engage with music solely through their obsession with a particular pop act. This has all helped produce a mass of music fans who don’t understand the value of criticism and outright detest being told the things they like might suck. Even worse, it has helped destroy what scant opportunities remain for obscure or up-and-coming musicians to find an audience. It’s harder than ever to make it big without a cosign from Drake or Taylor Swift, and stuffing one of the few music publications left that swam against all these currents into GQ’s stuffy environs isn’t going to help things.

And Grace Robins-Somerville keeps the fire burning at Salvation South with a deep dive into Wednesday’s regional roots:

Although the stories from these records mostly took place across the state from me in Asheville … there was a distinct North Carolina-ness to their music. The layers of distortion piled on top of [MJ] Lenderman’s riffs are the sonic equivalent of the sweltering humidity I’d never known until I experienced a Carolina summer. I could try to describe how a hot, lazy afternoon by the Wilmington Riverwalk feels, but then I listen to the golden slide of Xandy Chelmis’s lap steel and realize I’ll never come closer than that. When I hear Karly Hartzman whisper and wail about ghosts in backyards, kitschy off-kilter billboards, and condemned buildings that are as beautiful as they are creepy, it felt like she was giving me a hand-drawn map to all the curiosities I was discovering in real time.

For wired, Angela Watercutter argues the Emmys demonstrate the improvement in television in the streaming era:

When the cast of Grey’s Anatomy came out it felt like a flashback to the days when one death on the show (you know which one) would send the Television Without Pity internet into a (t)Izzie for a week. And Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air. It’s a beloved comfort watch, but it hasn’t been nominated for an Emmy since 2012. That’s because streaming, and prestige cable TV before it, has transformed what people watch and how. Networks used to pump out big-budget, popular shows like ER, and everyone would watch. That changed as shows like Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale became real contenders. They never got the viewership of, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, but it didn’t matter. They made streamers and small cablers—and those in the middle like HBO Go/Max/etc.—look good.

Bright Wall/Dark Room offers Micah Rickard’s reading and celebration of Anatomy of a Fall in its Best of 2023 issue:

The obvious question at the center of the film is that of Sandra’s guilt. That line of inquiry is only a mirage, however, behind which lie questions around the uncertainty of truth and the ambiguous nature of our demand for it. Every detail of the trial is buried in the uncertainty of memory, the speculation demanded by audio recordings, the weighing of one motive against another, and the inescapable possibility of seeing each new piece of evidence in radically different lights. Triet further confounds reality by introducing the complexities of language, story, and projection. Voyter is a native German on trial in France, and she frequently relies on English to communicate most clearly. She’s also a novelist, and the prosecuting attorney points to similarities between her earlier work and Samuel’s death. Can fiction be evidence against an author? Is the imagination of a writer the same as that writer’s emotional state?