The Best Worst Record Review of All Time; 10.0, Best New Video

For those of us who are in the above-25 age bracket, it’s old news that Pitch­fork, that ven­er­able bas­tion of hip­ster trend­set­ting and mediocre prose, was once down­right ter­rible. Unar­guably, inex­cus­ably so.

Prob­ably every home­grown pub­li­ca­tion has these embar­rassing teething prob­lems, but in Pitchfork’s case this Ter­rible Epoch coin­cides neatly with the time when Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ryan Schreiber was a reg­ular con­trib­utor. In the course of the site’s slow, stum­bling crawl from sub-Geocities design and sub–Karen’s LOST Note­book writing toward the point where Schreiber could be listed as a nom­inee for Time’s 2009 Person of the Year, the media mogul pub­lished a string of cringe-inducing “reviews” of albums—some emi­nently for­get­table (Walt Mink? 10.0? What?) and some clas­sics. And Ryan was at his absolute worst when appre­ci­ating leg­endary artists.

Case in point: Schreiber’s hair-clenchingly godawful writeup of John Coltrane’s Live at the Vil­lage Van­guard. This hood classic (thanks, Mike) has recently been given new life by some enter­prising YouTu­bers with a knack for ani­ma­tion and silly voices. Look here:

If watching it wasn’t enough for you (you sick, twisted person), you can read the unabridged orig­inal text of the review (since banish-ed from P-fork’s hal­lowed halls, per­haps in recog­ni­tion of its shameful nature) here.