Sasha Frere-Jones: Really?????

was talking about the triple c's album al & im offended at yr assumption

Jesus christ, that "fancy chord" thing is egregious - what would we think of a book critic who wrote about the "big word club"?

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,660,000 for big word literary analysis

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

lol @ fagen

words are hard xp

that myers reader's manifesto piece is one of the dumbest things ever written by anyone

I thought this thread had been revived because of this:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/10/26/091026crmu_music_frerejones

3000 new posts before quittin time is the o/u

pretty sure that is the reason deej revived this thread

Myers piece reminds me of Dale Peck but without the zings. I like close reading but he gets high on his own pedantry, his sacred cow-slaying, his evident beef with the critical establishment. You can pick apart McCarthy and DeLillo all you like but you can't say it's objectively bad prose when you seem to miss the whole point of it. I know that DeLillo's dialogue is phony, that McCarthy's prose is sometimes an end in itself which obscures rather than reveals - that's part of why I like them. They only "fail" according to Myer's false definitions.

That said, did Michiko Kakutani really call DeLillo "laugh-out-loud funny"? I can't imagine anyone genuinely lolling at a DeLillo line. Maybe a wry smile.

Regarding SFJ, I don't mind the piece but I can now add "Fancy Chords" to "Sophisti-pop" as a sure sign I should avoid the music in question. Steely Dan AND Elvis Costello? Yick.

White Noise is a lol riot.

Great Jones Street brings lols too

It's a bit of a bugbear of mine. Wry, amusing novels are routinely described as "hilarious" on the jacket as if nothing less will do. There are many gradations of funny that don't need to be oversold. But I guess "made me smirk knowingly" doesn't blurb as well.

i chuckled. once.

"bursts with that sort of dry wit that'll make you wonder if the shit you laugh at is actually pretty fucking juvenile tbqf"

^^^ would read

I need to write a book worthy of such a blurb.

I'll be the only person to agree with Myers. Sick of reading lit fiction that takes it upon itself to obfuscate. Lit crit establishment needs taking apart, since it's the most corrupt of all crit establishments: friends reviewing friends; writers refusing to say bad words about heroic figures (as Amis admitted after Updike died: crucial line in his panning of posthumous clunker: "This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive"). I suspect there's a link between endless critical indulgence and endless literary self-indulgence.

The silliness of that piece, though, is that there are tons of books published each year that fit Myers qualifications for correctness in literature. He seems to be mad that writers he doesn't like are getting attention from critics he doesn't like.

Kinda agree with significant parts of the Myers, and I think he sounds like a Dale Peck who actually knows what the hell he's talking about- but, while I'm glad someone else agrees with me that Paul Auster is a terrible writer, I think he just misses the point of McCarthy's style, and probably Delillo's (who I haven't read enough of). The whole thing seems undercut by a kind of paranoid, me-against-the-cultural-East-Coast-elites-cue-scary-music ethos the makes wish I disagreed with his tastes more than I do. That said, the best parts, as they often are in these kinds of things, are where he picks up on the awful, cliché-ridden prose of aforementioned "Lit crit establishment" types, a fish in the barrel target if there ever was one, but one in terrible need of frequent, harsh drubbings. What really hurts the piece though is that as he's raking writers over the coals for their overly flashy prose, I find my interest flagging because Myer's own writing is a little too dry and "workman like."

This kind of thing needs either relish (Dale Peck) or generosity (James Wood) and Myers has neither. He's also too scattershot - McCarthy and DeLillo are too different from each other (let alone Auster or Proulx) to yield any kind of coherent argument. And like Mumbles says, the self-aggrandising "Only I have the balls to challenge the pointy heads" tone galls pretty quickly.

the second anybody sees the scarequotes around "literary" in the first line is the last second anybody has any excuse for taking that guy & his reactionary & also politically v. v. v. suspect shit seriously

I'd be interested to see a UK version of this piece. Not aware enough of US lit crit to know whether the big problem with the UK – that the lit crit establishment and the lit writing estabishment are, by and large, the same people, resulting in outright corruption of the critical process - is the same across the Atlantic.

for example

t has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

fuckin despise this dude and hope he starves to death tbh

I remember reading the piece when it first ran and goin "oh great, my Dad has a job writing for the Atlantic now, soon we'll hear how free verse has ruined poetry"

John, why is it "reactionary" and "politically vvv suspect" to think that the lit crit establishment have got their heads up their arses? Surely the reactionary line is to accept that what is dictated to be literature must in and of itself be literature?

Or are you saying that he is reactionary because he is demanding content over form? In which case, would someone be reactionary for - to pick an example not entirely at random - preferring to listen to narrative songs based on personal experience, played on acoustic guitars, instead of wonky dubstep?

ok, one, false claim, I didn't say he's "reactionary to think that the lit rit establishment have got their heads up their asses." he's reactionary because clearly what he means throughout the piece is "ahh for the good old days when there was only one way to write & it was mainly done by my kinda ppl" (vide his conclusions w/his big-upping on Mervyn fucking Peake"

also CAN YOU FUCKING PEOPLE ALSO PLEASE LEARN TO LEAVE MY FUCKING DAY JOB AT THE DOOR PLEASE, also? instead of being fucking assholes in every discussion I try to join? thanking you. alternately, send me a precis on everything you do in your own life so I can be a bore and drag that in every time you speak.

swear to fuckin God it is the weakest fucking shit the way some of you guys pull this shit every fucking time instead of actually formulating an argt.

J0hn, apologies: couldn't work out at the time I was writing my post which part of his argument you were decrying as reactionary. And was referring to listeners, rather than players of music.

yep, as a former acoustic gtr. droning bore, i too must take issue with your constant unwarranted taunts, ithappens.

it's really only the beginning of what's wrong with that piece though which is a triumph of hyperconservative grandpa-ing - take for example

This one works beautifully, and with none of the "evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today.

which is just ultimate strawman dance party, or from the beginning of the same graf

Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English.

lol really herr myers? tell that to THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. tell it to Melville, whom you attempt to champion elsewhere in your essay when in fact the Myerses of Melville's day were exactly the dudes keeping Melville down.

and so on. sorry to get all lit up but I remember when this piece ran and being especially pissed because when he dismisses some writers I don't like, I totally feel this guy, but then I realize he's being dishonest; all he really means, to quote my favorite ilx post in recent memory, is "I remember it were all fields around here"

Er. there are no constant taunts: that's the first time I've ever replied to J0hn, or mentioned acoustic guitars, and I apologised immediately. I think you must be confusing me with someone else.

*shakes fist*

not even a big deal ithappens I'm just hypersensitive 1) generally and 2) to the idea that because I'm a singer-songwriter I'm somehow a champion of the form, when y'know I listen to more metal & ambient than dudes who sound like me/whom I sound like etc

God that fuckin piece is the worst thing ever

it the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing.

oh cool I'll just throw this copy of Ulysses in the garbage then you reactionary prick

This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE

off to Fox News w/you Mr Myers

ok I'll stop now

"This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE"

Okay, take out cultural elite - which is an idiot phrase to use - and that's a commonplace of critical reaction, and especially in music blog criticism, where the inability to enjoy certain acts does appear to mark the listener out as a cretin. Not an uncommon trend on some threads round here. With books, it took me years to convince myself it was okay not to finish them if I was bored - precisely because of the reactions Myers writes about. Though maybe that suggests more that I was unsure of my own opinions than anything else. But, yes, "cultural elite" would certainly take us into Fox News territory if prefaced by "liberal".

i blame jaymc for all of this.

it's the same thing. it means, "anybody who says he likes this must be lying, he can't like this thing that I'm ridiculing!" myers should be left outside overnight in Chicago in January imo

I blame the parents.

"it's the same thing. it means, "anybody who says he likes this must be lying, he can't like this thing that I'm ridiculing!" myers should be left outside overnight in Chicago in January imo"
Okay, but "you're a poser" doesn't exist without "you're a cretin".

Oh, why can't we all just love one another?

Back to SFJ ---

Jay-Z’s new album, “The Blueprint 3,” and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms. Disco, it turns out, is always a good default move.

“The Blueprint 3” falls in line with other recent mass-market successes in hip-hop. Compare it to Kanye West’s “Glow in the Dark” tour, or Kid Cudi’s breakout hit “Day ’n’ Nite,” and you will notice that this is hip-hop by virtue of rapping more than sound. The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs.

Oh no, hiphop hits are using disco beats in 2009.

In the past he whined that indie-rockers didn't have syncopation (and by the looks of his top 10 albums he has moved on from that) and now its the rappers who don't have it.

i don't think there's anything wrong with preferring bounce beats to eurodisco, tho postulating it as anything other than a constant need for new (or recycled) rhythmic fuel is probably a mistake.

on the myers piece, i'm always happy to see that dead horse dragged back out for another beating.

the real problem with the sfj piece is that he appears to only be capable of listening to like 3 hip-hop albums a year.

Hip-hop is in a state of permanent decline because Jay-Z continues to make mediocre to awful albums, says SFJ.

there was a good album released in 2008, but that will be the last one.

Does Mary J. Blige really have more personality than Rihanna? I like Rihanna precisely because she has a very specific (and admittedly very limited) vocal persona. I also thought this was more or less the standard critical take on Rihanna. Blige I always have problems with because despite the autobiographical bent of much of her material, she can sometimes seem a little anonymous as a singer - I don't tend to remember specific details of her phrasing like I do Rihannna (or Nina Simone for that matter). Or is the swipe really just the opportunity for Frere-Jones to get in the polemical pairing of Blige and Simone, evoking them as artists of equal stature and importance as a kind of rhetorical tweaking of people otherwise not paying attention?

As far as the overall argument, I think it only holds water if you maintain a very limited notion of what hip-hop is. A certain model and ideal of hip-hop, as represented by Jay-Z or Raekwon, might be on the wane, but hip-hop as represented by the Black Eyed Peas (though I guess they're "pop" now, not hip-hop) is doing just fine. Which might spell the end of civilization, but not the end of hip-hop.

This Myers lad is quite the douche.

He wants 'unaffected English prose' yet he stans for Mervyn Peake?!?! I love Mervyn Peake but, um...

And LOLOLOL @ 19th century literature showing us the 'unaffected'.

tbqf i think some of u guys are totally misreading what hes saying -- hes still rong tho

Let's just get back to the Jim Derogatis article. I hear he really takes SFJ down. I want to hear more about that.

Then why did you pass-agg call out sleeve on the Bambaataa thread, instead of discussing anything yourself?

That was quite a Bill O'Reilly move
Congrats dlp

I don't think anyone knows what thread you're referring to, as it's uninteresting. Whereas SFJ's misdeeds are major news. Can we please just get back to discussing this important issue. I hear he tried to expense a trip to a strip club.

dnftt

Why are you talking about Afrika Bambaataa instead of global warming

Why are we talking about anything except SFJ and a strip club. I hear that his writing wasn't up to snuff. And I can't think of any other important stories breaking right this moment in the music business.

Are you his publicist or what

Not one single other important story relating to the music business.

"Why are we talking about anything except SFJ and a strip club."

we are talking about that here. cuz we are on the SFJ thread. and we eat our own.

Maybe we should stop doing that.

Do you understand what a message board is?

xp can't believe you're dignifying this thread by posting on it. you're clearly part of the problem

"Maybe we should stop doing that."

you can! and you can go give that other story traction. on another thread.

I think it makes more sense just to post here for posterity when the first mention about that other minor story (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Daily News, Vibe, Billboard, Spin) gets referenced on ILM. Anyway, back to important ILM business. I hear that SFJ wrote a bad article about David Bowie.

go away

don't listen to brimstead. make the exact same point two dozen more times, I hear somebody will totally give you an award if you stick to your guns on this one

makes even more sense to post here for post-here-ity

I think it makes more sense just to post here for posterity when the first mention about that other minor story (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Daily News, Vibe, Billboard, Spin) gets referenced on ILM.

Which other minor story are you waiting to get its first mention on ILM?

i for one am INCENSED that nobody is talking about afrika bambaataa's abuse of teenaged boys in a thread devoted to... a music critic from the Los Angeles Times.

(the only reason i glance at DLP's posts is because for a split second i think they are by DJP.)

also, it's VERY IMPORTANT that we talk about VERY IMPORTANT THINGS like afrika bambaataa's abuse of teenaged boys because how else are important social problems going to be solved if we don't TALK ABOUT THEM ON AN INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD? if we talk about OTHER THINGS on this INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD then logically we are not talking about OTHER-OTHER VERY IMPORTANT THINGS that would be solved forever if we just TALKED ABOUT THEM.

DLP's got my back.

oh sorry, the thread skipped a bunch of posts and i see this has all been addressed with due sarcasm and dismissiveness. carry on.