Not sure what’s going on with my hair these days.
I’ve read a terminal amount of comments sections today.
About half way through last year I was talking to some people from Triple R about Everett True, because Collapse Board had been running a series of articles about women and music criticism, and one of them said “Oh, he’s still going on about introducing Kurt and Courtney, is he?” and I thought Haha, yeah he does go on about that a bit, doesn’t he?
Then I was reading this today, where True documents his tour supporting Kate Nash in his band The Thin Kids and he excerpts a bunch of reviews of their performance, all of which mention that single biographical detail. So if it seems he alludes to that anecdote more than humility should dictate, one could argue it’s only because nobody else will stop alluding to it either. If he doesn’t own it then it may as well trap him.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Cloud Nothings
—Fall In
Cloud Nothings - “Fall In”
Turn-of-the-century pop-punk throwbacks are back in.
Sit Down, SPIN.
This is not a perfect rebuttal but there are some very salient points:
So he leapt to the same conclusion as everyone else: no one is interested in reading folk like him writing about music anymore, because everyone has the same access to music – critic and reader alike. It’s a spurious argument, and one that is based on a single model of music criticism: that of Rock Criticism as a Consumer Guide, something propagated by the advancement of graded reviews the world over. It’s one that makes several assumptions, mostly erroneous: that a music magazine’s readership only reads reviews to discover information about the record, how “good” it is (nebulous as that concept might be), that the review is in some way a stand-in for the music itself. No. It’s not. The greatest criticism complements and increases understanding about the music under discussion. It can stand alone, for sure. Usually, it’s best when taken alongside the music, though.
[…]
Honestly, I wish more magazines and websites would follow their lead – but this has NOTHING to do with demand from readers for music reviews, and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that most music critics can’t write reviews for shit. Why does music criticism exist? To create discourse around music. Will a bunch of near-incomprehensible, 140-character ‘reviews’, written in jargon, help do this? I really doubt it. (Yeah yeah. I know. This article exists. Whatever.)
Maybe it takes a particularly rosy-eyed narcissist or a cop-out Dadaist to think of writing itself as not just the means but an end in itself, but it takes an especially fucked up kind of myopia to think of album reviews as tools to satisfy a commercial interest - whether guiding the dollar of the reader or appeasing the desires of contemptible publicists - and not the opportunity to create something moving that not only contributes to the cultural influence of the album at hand but uses it as a foundation for making - fuck it - art. We’re in real obnoxiously sincere territory here but grin and bear it because this is the moment when we have to stop self-deprecating and start recognising that writing is an artform and if you’re not going to treat it like one then, well, start a Twitter account and admit that you aren’t capable of fulfilling its potential, or capable of even trying to. So the nine-to-fives don’t give a shit about what fancy adjectives you’ve got to describe the new Cloud Nothings, which I’m listening to right now, then the news for good or bad is that you’ve got two choices: start writing pieces that can be appreciated as works of their own or just take the craven route to its logical conclusion and write one-word reviews, either “BUY” or “DON’T”. Music criticism is not yet dead but nothing makes you feel so alive as when you’re faced with dying, so if this is the shock that’s needed to wake people up from the fucking coma that is writing consumer guide criticism, then let me be first in line to thank SPIN while showing them the door.
To preemptively clarify: I don’t have a problem with Weingarten because it’s clear that he likes writing lengthy pieces too, but this attitude is frustrating, short-sighted and toxic. Basically just what I’d expect from a declining business.
The @SPINreviews Twitter feed is a massive undertaking, aiming to be an exhaustively definitive listener’s guide and argument-starter for virtually every album or EP or mixtape that matters in 2012. Within the confines of a 140-character tweet, we’re hoping to take on more than 1,500 new records this calendar year alone, all reviewed by our eight in-house editors and a team of a dozen valued freelancers. As someone who survived writing 1,000 Tweet reviews in 2009, I can assure you it’s a project often as difficult to pursue correctly as a 1,000-word essay… and I wager it’s a lot more fun to read.
LCD Soundsystem - “Losing My Edge”
So of course I’m listening to LCD Soundsystem and reading old interviews today and uhh, has anyone ever asked James Murphy about the four or five seconds that start “Losing My Edge”? It occurred to me only recently that it’s like the sound of the final moments of some crazy rawwwcous gig, with the band just smashing on their instruments before walking off the stage, but why?
To quote the late, great John “Bloody” Legend on this mixtape’s title track — “we’re gonna to be rich foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”. What a lovely concept. Also a timely one, given the fact we’ve recently flown in to some hectic economic turbulence, where people routinely became billionaires overnight and then blow it all on red (or a red-headed bird with a huge personality) quicker than Jonny Greenbags can say “sub optimis prime special effects budget blowout”. Unlimited money, “like we even look at the fucking price tag”, buying first-hand books, tipping 15% for a vending machine soda and not stealing your Dad’s clothes when he’s interstate on business. For some people Good Living is a description associated with their existence, not just a pull-out section in the weekend newspaper which tells you about restaurants you’ll now never be able to get a booking at.
—
Polaroids of Androids: Rick Ross - Rich Forever
I’m thinking of taking up sculpting so I can make a papier mache simulacrum of Jonny from Polaroids of Androids from printed excerpts of his reviews. They’re that good.
“Let’s start a genre called Enya-wave. Can we make that happen?”
“I’d really like to put Enya to some House beats.”
“You’ve just invented chillwave.”
“Fuck.”
Well, it’s a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.
—Yeah, nice one Caroline from Chairlift. I mean, with electro-pop you just show up and press a bunch of buttons right? Dee da dee dee doop done, isn’t it?
Hey, here’s a long overdue post! This video is of one of the most idiosyncratic bands playing around Melbourne at the minute, Mad Nanna. Usually they play quite long spacious songs with real sick free-jazz kinda drums and David Fair kinda guitar playing, with beat lyrics and all that, which is ace and I would really recommend checking out their releases (a handful of 7”s and cassettes) - and though this isn’t a massive departure from that, it’s more structured, upbeat and, uh, poppy than most of their stuff which obviously appeals to me. It’s called My Two Kids, and this was performed at the Gasometer a few months back at a show we played with them. They were a three-piece this night, two guitars and drums. The bass player and violin guy I guess weren’t around that night. Mad Nanna, legends.
I’ll post our USA tour dates here really soon, just waiting to finalise a few more things!
This is pretty alright.
“Really, when are you coming to Melbourne?”
“OMG fucking NEVER!”
“Then I’ll just have to come and get you.”
It ain’t exactly seersucker and it ain’t exactly a Bloody Mary (it’s sav blanc) but we’ve all got our own style. Mine is apparently pasty and baby-faced, still working out the kink. That meeting went way better than expected; as it turns out, tonnes of kids doing degrees in creative fields commit suicide every year so they just wanted to make sure I wasn’t gonna off myself too. I’m not gonna, promise. Then again, they just played Jack Johnson on the radio, so what hope’s left anyway?
This is a brilliant piece of satire that mocks the myopic inability of Americans to see anything outside of their conception as anything but derivative of their own cultural ingenuity. I hope.
(via bbook)
then i left, called my girlfriend on the way to the subway, told her about the party, got on the subway, wrote this, got out of the subway, and then read through a Google Alerts email for my blog, which included mostly insults.
—David Shapiro, if you’re reading this, you seem like a really nice and polite guy and you’re way good-looking even though the glasses you wear are ridiculously too big and I once asked a girl I liked who she thought was better looking and she said you. I hope she was just negging me but there you go.
