Archive for the ‘criticism’ Category

90%

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

A couple of days ago, Michaelangelo put up a note on his Tumblr blog, quoting a wonderfully pretentious line from the new Ted Leo and the Pharmacists album, The Brutalist Bricks. Sometimes I find myself in the mood for a good piece of pretentious nonsense, so I gave the album a spin on Rhapsody (yes, I know that’s an anachronism–sue me). It more than met any expectations Michael had created. It’s just about the funniest collection of late ’70s new wave cliches I’ve heard since, oh, the late ’70s. I was especially fond of the song that shifts from a Nick Lowe rip into an Elvis Costello rip and then back again. The Jam rip may be even better, since it not only lifts their music, but their overwrought political phrase slinging as well. All that’s missing is a cod reggae track. It’s all so intensely sincere. I haven’t laughed so hard at a record in months.

But then, tonight, I’m looking at The AV Club, and I see they’ve reviewed the album and given it a B+. Hmm. Fair enough, I think, but what kind of B+? An honorable B+, or a somewhat cynical, this gets a fairly high grade because it’s so wonderfully ridiculous B+? I was expecting the latter, but surprisingly, what I got was the former. The reviewer, who I’m not familiar with, considers it a good, if not great album. Even more surprising was the comments section. The AV Club has some the snootiest, most cynical commenters on the web, and in the case of this particular piece of flapdoodle I thought they would deliver their best. Instead I got oodles of Ted Leo love, including sincere comparisons to The Drive-By Truckers (huh?), Yo Lo Tengo (as if), and The Clash (oh, fuck you). I expected cynics, and found fanboys—fanboys who can’t tell the difference between Ted Leo and The Clash.

I’m not upset or surprised by this so much as confused. Actually, I’m not even confused, just stunned once again by further evidence that whoever it was that said 90% of everything is crap was referring to the audience, as well. 90% of the audience is crap. There. I’ve said it, and I’m glad.

(Oh, and critics, too. Don’t forget the critics.)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in albums, criticism, pop culture | No Comments »

Something to look forward to

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Alex Ross’s new book, Listen To This, comes out in September. Sounds like the first three chapters alone will make it worth reading. His idea about “music…as a way of knowing the world” is something I’ve been fumbling around myself, in my own peripatetic, procrastinating way. And if you care about “art” music at all and haven’t read The Rest Is Noise, you should.

Tags:
Posted in Books, criticism | No Comments »

A couple of final kicks

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I’m about to take them off my RSS feed and my blog roll, but I did want to get one final kick in at the Maura-less Idolator. Two, actually. The first comes from Sasha Frere-Jones, who nailed the situation perfectly the other day when he said Maura had been replaced with “two iPhone apps that crash every hour.”

The other is in reaction to a post by the apps themselves. In a news piece on Nielsen Soundscan’s ranking of the best selling albums of the year and the decade, they make the usual comment about declining album sales, which they finish with “thanks in no small part to the advent of illegal downloading.” Now, I realize that as an all-pop-all-the-time site, they need to spend some time shilling for the major labels, but does that mean they have to be lap dogs for the RIAA, as well? Did they not notice how heavily most critical best of the decade lists are weighted toward the first few years of the oughts (Pitchfork’s top ten of the decade includes only one album made after 2004)? Albums stopped selling because more albums sucked, dimwits. I’ve long been amazed by the fact that the record industry, and therefore too many people who write about the record industry, refuses to make the connection between musical quality and sales. But that sort of thought is beyond the new management of Idolator—who are, after all, paid not to think.

So, goodbye Idolator. You’ve turned into that old house in the middle of the block that used to have really cool, creative people living in it, but is now full of crackheads. Let’s hope somebody bulldozes the place before the addiction spreads.

Tags: , ,
Posted in The Biz, criticism, media, pop culture | No Comments »

If ZOMBIEBOT says it’s OK…

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Now that it’s been a couple of weeks I would like to go on record just one more time and say that the Maura-less Idolator, now that the new writers are settling in, is even worse than it was at first. It’s bad enough, as many people point out, that all they now cover is pop, but the mindless attempts at humor and above-it-all cynicism are enough to make anyone gag (or want to apply one).

The comments section, however, has become a real hoot.

Tags:
Posted in criticism, media | No Comments »

Question: Do you hate the Black Eyed Peas? Why?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

This is a subject that has been preying on my mind for a while now, but something about Nathan Rabin’s AV Club piece on the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live has made it difficult to think about anything else (I mean that literally—I find myself waking up in the middle of the night with this going through my head). It isn’t the piece as a whole, but one particular paragraph that bothers me:

But the ultimate mark of desperation was that Lorne Michaels and the gang allowed Black Eyed Peas to perform three fucking songs. Three fucking songs! It’s bad enough that a show that once upon a time exposed audiences to Frank Zappa, Ricky Jay and Loudon Wainwright III had one of the worst, most obnoxious groups in existence as its musical guest. But to let Will.I.Am and his three fashion-victim stooges perform more songs than just about any act in Saturday Night Live’s thirty-five year history is just inexcusable.

I’m not going to spend time defending the Black Eyed Peas (at least not now, though I have a feeling I’m going to get to that sooner or later), but it seems to have become a point of pride among certain writers to not only put BEP down but to do so in the most aggressively vicious terms they can conjure up. This happens in conversation, as well—mention BEP and reactions will usually range from rolling eyes to primal screams. This isn’t a recent phenomenon, either—long before BEP took control of the number one spot on the charts, they were being attacked with a surprisingly intense virulence.

I fully understand people hating a band’s music, or their image, or even their personalities. What I don’t understand is why this band in particular generates such an incredible level of ire. I consider them harmless fun, sometimes good, sometimes bad, almost always interesting. But their detractors seem to consider them more than just bad, they think they’re evil, a symbol of everything that’s wrong with pop music.

So I’d like to put forward a simple question, maybe even a childish one: why? What is it about BEP, the music they make, the image they present, the philosophy they put forward, whatever, that makes them so hateful? Take as much space in the comments as you want, and feel free to vent your spleen in full. But also be prepared to justify you’re opinions. Comments like “Because they suck,” or “Because Fergie is a skank,” aren’t going to cut it. Even if you don’t hate them, but think you have a clue as to why they’re hated, feel free to contribute. Just be nice about it, OK? At least to each other.

Tags: , ,
Posted in criticism, pop culture | 4 Comments »

Sit down children, it’s time to meet your benevolent masters

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The new staff writers of Idolator have finally taken the time to introduce themselves in what may be one of the most condescending, childish, self-superior, we-know-what’s-good-for-you-better-than-you- do posts I’ve ever read. There’s nothing I can add to what’s already been said in the comments section, and ILX has been having a field day with this, as well, but I do want to say that, as one of the few sites that looked at all forms of pop music with intelligence, maturity, humor, and a world-wearied-but-never-nihilistic cynicism, I will miss the old Idolator tremendously. So good luck to Maura, Chris, Christopher, Dan, Lucas, Jess, and everyone else who has ever sailed with them. And if I had a million dollars…

P.S. If whoever is editing the Best Music Writing comp for DaCapo this year doesn’t include Jess Harvell’s piece on The Misfits, I’m going to be really pissed.

Tags:
Posted in criticism, media | No Comments »

The avant-garde/pop relationship

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Via Gertrude Stein (in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), Pablo Picasso explains exactly how the connection between the two works:

…when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those who do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.

It would be impossible to say how much this explains.

Tags: , ,
Posted in criticism, pop culture | No Comments »

Truisms their bread and butter

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Slate discovers another trend in pop music that’s been around for decades (if not centuries). My favorite comment title: “Why do you keep writing music articles?” They’ve got to fill those blog pages somehow.

Tags:
Posted in criticism, media | No Comments »

Wow

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Jess Harvell’s piece on The Misfits is some of the best music writing I’ve read in ages. I disagree with a lot of it–he’s much too negative for me, but then who says a myth can’t be negative? He still makes a powerful, impressive argument.

Tags: , ,
Posted in criticism, pop culture | No Comments »

Here we go again

Friday, July 24th, 2009

I generally like Simon Reynolds stuff, though he can get a little insider baseballish and sometimes misses the woods for the trees (there are parts of Generation Ecstasy that read less like narrative history and more like endless lists of obscure records you’ve never heard and probably never will). In a recent post, though, he doesn’t just miss the woods, but the whole planet. After discussing an article about a new strain of music called “hypnagogic pop”, which seems to consist largely of lo-fi new age music with various sound landmarks from the ’80s stuck in it, Reynold ends with this:

One question raised for me by the piece was: does this mean that every generation from now on will come up with its own equivalent of hauntology/hypnagogic, a working-through of the music/popcult assimilated during infancy and early childhood? You can see something like this process happening with wonky maybe, in the way that games music is such a strong influence… that palette of day-glo synth-tones seem to be heavily coded as “halcyon”, presumably because for an entire generation, a high percentage of the total amount of music they heard as children would have been via video and computer games…

The only answer to Reynolds question I can conceive is: Haven’t they always? Name an artist, in any medium, at any time, who hasn’t drawn on the surrounding environment, particularly the environment of childhood. This is so basic and obvious as to be almost not worth stating.

The only real difference I can see is that now the process is much more transparent: the references are less personal and more universal, as well as being more readily identifiable since they exist in an easily retrievable form and are more widely dispersed though the culture; and the artists themselves are young enough that they haven’t yet absorbed and personalized their early environmental influences in such a way that those references don’t stick out all over the place in their work.

Of course, coming up with a new name for the process, whether you call it hypnagogy or hauntology (Reynold’s own favorite term) or simply calling it “influence” as critics of a previous generation did, is part of the process as a whole, so I don’t blame Reynolds for his coinages. But to see it as something completely new, as opposed to a modern twist on an ancient game, suggests a lack of historical, or maybe even human perspective.

Tags:
Posted in criticism, pop culture | 2 Comments »