Best Music Writing

DO U SEE? Still have to read it properly, for all I know all that stuff is in there.

It is, in some ways. If was the first article you ever read about pre-war blues and recording and the obsessive collectors and ethnomusicologists who went in search of ghostly voices on old 78s, you would get all the necessary background. But he presents it with the context of this being an already familiar form, so if it's the 100th iteration you've read it doesn't feel tedious or pedantic.

Plus of course he's got hold of a great story.

haven't read the times story yet but strongo linked to this thing he wrote for the oxford american earlier this year, it's pretty great - http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2014/feb/18/chop-upbeat/

Thanks, balls! (That's not something I have reason to say very often.) Somebody I sent the Times link to just replied with this, by Michael Hall. Note date: McCormick's blues crisis/the blues' McCormick crisis well under way 12 years ago, as Sullivan indicates.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/mack-mccormick-still-has-blues

was excited for a sec that that meant 'something that strongo wrote'

The beginning did seem like the whole thing might turn out to be a rehash for noobs, but with this kind of subject you've got to balance it for old hands and those who came in late, relatively mass mainstream publications-wise, anyway. It's tricky (which is why I may lay off reviewing reissues for a while, if possible). He handles it pretty well, duh.

Is this really for real? Are we sure it isn't some kind of April Fools Day's joke two weeks late? There is some kind of weird almost sci-fi dimension to this: nobody at the beginning of the previous century left us a recording of Buddy Bolden, nobody tracked down the first person who sang
Line
Line
Another Line

So here at the beginning of this century, what is left for us to find. It's like a Ballard story "The Man Who Walked on the MoonGroove"

Oh wait. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=28883&width=320

digging deep into that NYT american-blues article now. it is epic.

From the Texas Monthly article:

In 1988 McCormick wrote in the Smithsonian's American Visions magazine that he had promised Johnson's killer that he wouldn't publish until the man died.

not only is the NYT piece an example of great writing, it's an example of great layout and savvy use of multimedia elements. the video clips that populate the article landscape help bring the story alive.

Agreed, and it also makes a case for the continued value of big media, or at least deep pockets. Anyone can publish anything now, but to pay for the kind of reporting and design presentation in this story takes serious resources.

Now if we could only get those guys to track down the lost bebop home demos from during the recording ban.

Or the lost take of "Is That All There Is?"

This story reminded me of the titular subject of this thread as well as at least one character in it

Dr3w's argument against 'best records'-lists (refusing to do a Baker's Dozen for tQ) is eloquent, intelligent en some fan-tas-tic writing

oh cool, can't wait to read this.

not a writer but v-blogger the needle drop seperates the men from the boys

can it just be assumed that I reposted this^ to every ILAFL thread ever

Great piece. All true of course bar one slight detail: we use lists to keep our heads just above water not to coin it in. Great writing. Great musician. Total hero.

anyway, the DD piece is great & the guy's a total zen guru. in defence of numbers? it's a scoundrel's defence, but they're a means of initiating a discourse (however flawed) in order to proselytise music in an efficient & copious way. this doesn't invalidate DD's arguments, though - just makes us all scoundrels :D

Doran, if he chose to bless tQ with such elegant & voluble writing, he obviously digs your site regardless of its occasional reductivity ;)

The piece was written with our complete blessing. We knew what he was doing from the start. We're going to be changing the Bakers Dozen format next year to make it more interesting and this articulates a lot of the reasons why very well.

That's very nice to hear Doran. Also, this piece - subversive towards a format you are publishing - couldn't appear on a better music website than tQ.

nice! it definitely strikes me as one of the more important pieces of music writing from recent years and one that could definitely alter the way i personally categorise albums by bands

my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry. know what else people make lists for? the grocerys. laundry lists. lists of 10 ways to keep your man. The hell has this got to do with raw musical passion? the way i see it, you wanna read about music, leave it to the pitchfork boys and anthony fantano. but forget the lists and all this intellectual mumbo jumbo. just some thoughts..

Thanks for the kind words! I'm a big believer in variety though… I likes me some intellectual mumbo jumbo to balance out my raw musical passion. Too much of the latter and not enough of the former and I start feeling like I'm an extra in Point Break.

"my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry."

I dunno, I feel like the industry has a lot more efficient ways of being killed

"Top Ten Ways In Which The Industry Is Being Killed!" *starts writing list*

Great article, minor gripe – would be nice if there was a View All option instead of having to click 13 times to read the whole thing. I get that you're trying to increase clicks but it's a pain to navigate through it and makes reading it seem kind of disjointed.

hahaha that works well though when page 12 rails against it

~meta~

applauding that piece

yeah I laughed at that bit too

a lot of these are very valid points but I dunno, I like the Baker's Dozen feature, the tokenism and fronting that he talks about here is way more representative of an RYM list - most BD's read more like "these are 13 albums that are important to me that I want to talk about"; like half of 'em have some variation of "ask me tomorrow, and I'll come up with a completely different list"

As someone who loves making lists, Drew's article is OTM and brilliant. Though I think sometimes that's why I like list-making, because the very process of doing it forces me to think about this stuff (well, not the advertising revenue bit, I guess, although if anyone wants to pay me for my "top 50 nuclear war records" list or similar, I'd be very grateful).

It really is spectacular, Drew's piece.

not to be all "squee cuddlestein mountain" but it cheers me up to see these positive responses to the piece, thanks for reading what is a rather long affair. Glad the Quietus were down to present this. Don't wanna weigh in about the comments on the Quietus too much as that's not something I can be objective about, but the invocation of "white guilt" is interesting, to me.

the comments are hilarious

not sure i prefer a 14 page click-thru listicle about why best-of lists suck to a 14 page click-thru listicle of albums worth checking out

tbf there are are still lots of references to and photos of cool albums so arguably i'm getting both recommendations and self-awareness about recommending

Vanity project, emotionally crippled, precious boy, pretentious; it's almost as if you've hit a nerve there Drew, reading those comments ;)

I frequently enjoy the Bakers Dozen, I enjoy artists I am into speaking with passion about records they love, especially when they enthuse me to check out something I am not acquainted with yet. But your essay is already very valuable to me, and I will revisit it and the many interesting perspectives it gives me.

good writing though, last page aggressively otm

recently i interviewed an artist for the quietus and it was originally going to be in the bakers' dozen format - i specifically asked to change that to something more freeform/flexible because the idea of this artist talking about what i'm 100% sure would've been canonical rock records would've bored me to death

(and to the quietus's credit they were 100% ok with me requesting that)

cool story bro

?

are you confused why someone would think your story about the time you asked not to have to write about an artist's favorite albums because you thought their taste in albums would bore you was cool?

there's something self-serving and suspect about Public Displays of Taste.

Doesn't this objection apply far beyond just list-making? Pretty much all public announcements of aesthetic judgment are vulnerable to this suspicion, that what's really at stake is the writers's own narcissism. If list-making is done well, I don't see that it's worse in this respect than other kinds of criticism. Or is there something importantly different (in terms of self-portraiture) between talking about one's favourite records and talking about not-one's-favourite records?

xp i'm confused as to why you're being an aggressive cunt over a pertinent personal experience. if you think i intended to look cool or to self-aggrandise with something as minor as that, how do you even get through basic human interaction every day

If not for "Public Displays of Taste" I dunno what garbage I'd be listening to today. I trust the tastes of someone like say LJ or Dominique Leone a lot; I know DL has posted a few lists here and there and I find them very valuable

oh man i want to do a weird obscure list! i'm not famous though...or in deerhoof or whatever.

i have my list-y moments.

I'm working on one at the moment... my 13 favourite screen drunks. We may blast the idea into smithereens after Xmas.

I've picked up some amazing LPs via Bakers Dozen and that was maybe the secondary or tertiary reason for me starting the series originally but after a while it did feel like I wasn't reading enough interesting choices after a while. So it feels like just giving people the option isn't maybe enough, like we have to actually pro-actively say to people, 'Will you choose your 13 favourite Turkish psych records' or 'Will you choose your 13 favourite horror sound tracks?' just to get it back to more of a potential buyer's guide or listening recommendation device.

I would do: 13 Records that Dr*w Dan*el Would LOVE to Pieces!

I loved doing mine w Luke but was disappointed that I didn't actually go deep with the how's and why's of Total Freedom's music saving my life

:///////

*squares hero-worship of hammill w/ all this, can't, weeps*

i suppose his thing was always to stray the slightly wrong side of emotional largesse & get away with it on the strength of the music, plus he's fairly seasoned now, not that this is an excuse

I like A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers as much as the next man but that was a major own goal right there.

Personal taste in music is transferable. Because if somebody- anybody, really, doesn't have to be someone I know or care about- is sufficiently enthusiastic about a record, I am going to listen to it in a different way, and after I am done there are two likely outcomes: I will love the record, or I will hate that person. There are plenty of bands I simply didn't like until I read a recommendation from someone who was really enthusiastic about that band in a compelling and persuasive way.

This looks wonderful (and organised by an ur-ilxor, too). The list of contributors is v.strong.

http://marksinker.co.uk/birkbeck_under_over.html
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/underground-overground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85
http://therockwriteproject.tumblr.com/

UNDERGROUND / OVERGROUND
The Changing Politics of UK Music Writing: 1968-85

This will be a two-day symposium at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As. Run by Mark Sinker, former editor of The Wire, it will bring together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s with academics and other media commentators, to discuss the emergence and evolution of the countercultural voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. The plan is for proceedings to be recorded and transcribed, to form the core of a subsequent published collection, alongside additional memoirs and essays from participants (especially those unable to attend).

so mad i won't be able to fly to london for this.

That does look like a great May event:

Simon Frith , Paul Gilroy, Barney Hoskyns, Cynthia Rose, Charles Shaar Murray ,Bob Stanley Richard Williams and more

ILX's Michaelangelo Matos has the best Christgau interview from his book tour up on Red Bull Music Academy. Fantastic piece:
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/robert-christgau-interview

Another good post from Damon http://pitchfork.com/features/oped/9667-drop-the-bass-a-case-against-subwoofers/ - apparently he's writing a book. Good news.

On a different note: I'm going to see the Patti Smith Horses tour in a month, and I was thinking I should read up beforehand and then I looked up the 33 1/3 book on Horses, but judging from the user reviews it deals mainly with post-structuralist thought / academia stuff, and so I figured nah I'll just reread Just Kids. Made me think about what I like in music writing, which is not really clever analysis, more like narrative and poetry.

I read that Horses book when it came out and I don't remember it being that academic-y. What I found strange about it was the amount of space the author devoted to Smith's life and career leading up to the album, only giving the album itself an inordinately brief song-by-song analysis. I think any fan of the record will find entertaining, if not particularly revelatory, but I can't really argue with the decision to reread Just Kids again instead.

A double dose of Taylors - love both of these.
Jia Tolentino reviews Taylor Swift in Washington DC for Jezebel: http://themuse.jezebel.com/taylor-swift-is-definitely-in-her-zone-1718196417
Taylor Parkes interviews Sleaford Mods for The Quietus: http://thequietus.com/articles/18327-sleaford-mods-interview-2

Not sure if this is the canonical Best Music Writing thread, but anyhow I'm greatly enjoying (most of) the writing on this site, as well as the tournament they're running and the 90s nostalgia it is inducing: http://www.marchfadness.com/

(also rooting for "Groove is in the Heart" to take the title)

who is voting on it? some pretty shameful results there so far

but i did just read some of the essays and i will agree there is good writing to be found

Anybody can vote! Look in the "current games" page. I think lots people are voting for the more faddish songs rather than the best songs, hence the embarrassing results.

the writing is good but scanning the list of writers I do not see many people known for writing about music, and do see rick moody, which is a trend that (selfishly, obviously) worries me

Anybody can vote! Look in the "current games" page. I think lots people are voting for the more faddish songs rather than the best songs, hence the embarrassing results.

*of

I wasn't familiar with Rick Moody but I will brace myself because I guess he'll be writing the Final Four analysis this year again.

Anyway, vote for Deee-Lite everyone!

If everyone could go and vote against "Torn" today, I'd be much obliged: http://www.marchfadness.com/#/championship/

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/15/520133445/culture-wars-trap-innovation-atlanta-hip-hop

thought this was kinda worthy (mumble rap thread participants may disagree. I dunno)

what would be their objections?

Too superficial maybe. Others might say "well of course the city is not supporting 'trap' culture"

Damn, Quincy Jones has some stories: https://www.gq.com/story/quincy-jones-has-a-story