Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (RIP blogs)

Nabisco's essay is making me think I should have paid attention to Parenthetical Girls

J0hn, I think you're making the exact same point from a different angle; the scene calcifies around an identity embraced by the fans because that identity is held up as REAL and TRUE and makes the people in the scene feel validated because there are actually other people out there who are like them; viewing that perceived identity as a front or a mask means that the people in that scene are fake and/or deluded, and ergo not nearly as intelligent or perceptive as your are. That's the stance I'm getting from the article and I pretty much agree with it because I see that exact same sense of sneering dismissal from practically every musical subgenre I can think of (except possibly folk music because they're all too high).

I see that exact same sense of sneering dismissal from practically every musical subgenre I can think of (except possibly folk music because they're all too high).

the thread is about to arrive at the point of discussing the dynamics of subcultural spaces

ladies and gentlemen, we have liftoff

oh haha ok i agree with you then

re: newsom stans (do i count as one yet?) and 'expression': a lot of her recent press comes awfully close to maybe kinda sorta disavowing that. i dunno: in the arthur profile she talks about approaching some kind of state of 'skinlessness', which is considered in the article as what's really actually meant to be good about ys - whereas in the interview [nabisco] quotes (i think) she refers to her mindset at the time as smth like "basically pretty crazy"

3 x xposts

j0hn don't worry I won't persecute you for your facial expressions because they aren't the direct result of your trying to sing like angela lansbury

maybe my effort to sing like angela lansbury is just a crashing failure

future darnielle/newsom collaboration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ejhIZZvDgw

btw yeah HI DERE parenthetical girls as it turns out are kinda hot stuff

OTOH if you don't got love for the way the guy from Gene sings you might take a pass

owen p. is the octopus playing the drums in that video

btw I can't lie the 1st 3 minutes of "soft as chalk" have really grown on me

time signature changes I'll leave to Geddy & Neil & Alex tho

there are a bunch of tempo shifts but no actual time signature changes in that song, at least in how it was performed on Fallon...?

"performance/expression is a bogus binary"

This is so true that it's depressing that it even needs to be restated.

wait am i really supposed to wonder about what my opinions about JOanna Newsom end up doing? because i don't wanna do that.

it's all your fault

Or try their cover of the Smiths' "Handsome Devil", which-- over a quarter century later-- they manage to keep sinister and sordid. And then consider: whether you've enjoyed it or not, what do our opinions about stuff like this wind up doing?

Like, really? I have to have opinions on my opinions?

You don't want to hurt her feelings, do you?

How can you be an indie fan without that level of obsessive navel-gazing? I thought that the music for people who weren't that inwardly recursive was pop/metal/punk/insert-other-random-genre-here?

(On a more serious note, I think the point being made here is more along the lines of "everyone's words are more permanent, meaning maybe everyone should think about how they talk about music as if they were music critics". I don't know if I agree with that or not.)

i def agree that the fact that everyone can now write their opinions on the internet has badly blurred the line between criticism and personal preference, if you're not paying attention (and most people aren't)

i do wonder if nabisco overstated the influence of those who would cut down something for being interesting vs. all the super-sincere blogger types out there, as well as people who listen to music without feeling a need to talk about it on the internet.

"everyone's words are more permanent, meaning maybe everyone should think about how they talk about music as if they were music critics"

oh golly i hope not. that doesn't sound like much fun.

I think we talked about Dylan with regard to this? How I love him, but I love to make fun of him, I don't care if others make fun of him or what they say about him, it takes away none of my enjoyment from his records.

i do wonder if nabisco overstated the influence of those who would cut down something for being interesting vs. all the super-sincere blogger types out there, as well as people who listen to music without feeling a need to talk about it on the internet.

Well, nabisco is also a product of ILX discourse, meaning that random semi-clusterfuck threads like this one, where a subsection of ppl are really just trying to make each other laugh as an ongoing tangent that has subsumed actual conversation of the artist the thread is about, so I'm betting that 10 years of conversations like this one have had a non-negligible impact on his impression of online music discussion and how it can affect people who read it.

oh golly i hope not. that doesn't sound like much fun.

This I completely agree with; you will pry my stupid unicorn jokes from my cold, dead, elfin hands.

oh yeah, i agree, i certainly don't have a good feel for this stuff "in the real world" because none of my irl friends really like the same music i do

a subsection of ppl are really just trying to make each other laugh as an ongoing tangent that has subsumed actual conversation of the artist the thread is about,

this is kind of how i like talking about music, and most of the people i do talk to about music i think share the same sensibility: everything can be turned into a joke (which does get tiring sometimes, but the LOLs are worth it) but you can also talk music in a serious way. but i can understand how a thread such as this one can give you a warped sense of the conversation.

there are a bunch of tempo shifts but no actual time signature changes in that song, at least in how it was performed on Fallon...?

yes you are right - they function the same way for me, I like songs to keep their bpm steady, tempo shifts & time signature changes work the same way for me: they take me out of the song & I pretty much never find my way back. this is lizard-brain since-I-was-a-kid stuff for me, the first time I was listening to a pop song and it changed its game up a little I was like BRING ME BACK THE 4/4 I STARTED BOPPIN MY HEAD TO and I'm still like that for the most part. interesting side-note, actual real-life unicorns hate both time signature changes & tempo shifts and tend to start pissing with abandon if the music they're listening to starts heading in that direction, hence the well-known musical term "unicorn piss shift"

aint it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be quiet

I was talking to some dude about the visions of johanna song a few days ago and because that is the only line I really know it kept getting sung by dylan over and over in my head

plus there's that one part where he says the words all funny

xpost Orcs tend to favor additive rhythms, which is the irl reason for the antipathy between them and the motorik-obsessed unicorns.

iirc phillip glass is an orc

ha, meanwhile one of my favorite things ever in music are meter shifts where the main rhythmic pulse stays the same but the beat changes, like the swing from 6/8 to 4/4 in Walt Mink's Miss Happiness which is built off of a steady eighth-note pulse, or the rhythmic shifts in a lot baroque/renaissance music where you have a piece that starts in a 4/4 tempo that has a b section that takes the half note, divides it into 3 beats, and continues on in a much faster-feeling 3/4 but still is in a steady tempo up at the macro level (see for example Hassler's Cantate Domino)

just real quick: obviously that column's full of a ton of maybe and it's almost as if and perhaps we should think about statements -- like, Que, you totally don't have to think about the effects of your personal opinions; I just wonder how the way we collectively discuss stuff maybe changes the environment. (I don't know that ILX is uniquely hyper-critical, either: there are scads of places where people can be kinda wary.)

a big part of that claim, right, is that people are actually odd/strange; that inside every person-who's-just-like-every-other-person lies the unique quality of an individual's creativity.

and yeah, J0hn, you're absolutely right about that particular almost as if idea -- though I think part of what's getting me is that this quote, above, is actually a mentality that Lady Gaga has laid public claim to way more than a lot of quarters in indie! (I think Tom mentioned this on Tumblr -- rallying the "little monsters" and all.)

If there was one part of the piece that felt off to me, it's that in my experience there have been a bazillion more arguments over the artistic validity of Lady Gaga than Joanna Newsom (largely because I don't really know anyone IRL who knows who Joanna Newsom even is).

If this thread were an album it'd be 210 minutes long and get a perfect score

That "Virile Males" guide to Joanna Newsom was... well. Awful.

yeah that was super embarrassing, for vanity fair, for anyone reading it, for the universe

I was looking for a picture of a unicorn shaking its head "no" to post in solidarity but I found this instead:

http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu/archives/images/obama-unicorn%5B1%5D.jpg

now we're talkin

http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/home/cassandr/vcblog/archives/obama-unicorn-300x450.jpg

the horse-like body represents health care; the horn, reform

the GIS results for "obama unicorn" speak for themselves imo

Wow, there are kind of a lot of Obama unicorn images?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_QAKC6VmEKUw/SVFGjHUvQcI/AAAAAAAAAao/c5dbyVEwHtY/s400/obama_unicorn_cg.jpg
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/files/2008/10/cover_atl_election_24.jpg
http://www.artofobama.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/obama-unicorn1-550x344.jpg
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/13.obama-unicorn-logo-e1262277785567.jpg

Dems need a new animal mascot, sounds like. or just add a horn to the donkey.

add a horn to the donkey = gd sex euphemism

only if it a euphemism, for having sex with donkeys

the donkey certainly gave me the horn

i feel a bad donkey spell comin on

obama unicorn pics are for quick replies to people who wanted more reform & change & attention to what he campaigned on than they're gonna get iirc

wrong thread i kno ok

no let's make this a political thread

ok joanna newsom is a fascist

it is a political thread: unicorns are a metaphor

if gavin newsom wins lt. gov post, joanna newsom will potentially be able to influence california politics