OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

they save the best for last too @ #1

it's a compelling argument tbh

no mention of Bee Thousand in the indie section

suzy is mr agreeable?

guys don't click come on you're just encouraging them

aaaand from my hometown "alt" weekly:

Miley Cyrus and Morrissey are basically the same person. One is a lyrical genius shrouded in sexual mystery who speaks on behalf of intellectualism, animal rights, and sordid youths, defying borders and generations. The other is famous for a butt that resembles uncooked turkeys, being naked, and sticking her tongue out.

When Morrissey was 23, he was "celibate." When Miley puts on a Michael Jordan jersey, she's rumored to have sex with Mike Will Made It. They both have signature hair styles. They both have rabid fan bases. They both love to annoy the opposition.

The likeness is striking. And now they both given it their all on stage, singing "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out."

Was certain the first graf was gonna pull the "and the other is Morrissey" switcheroo.

what is this magical rumor-granting jersey (and does it work in reverse?)

Was certain the first graf was gonna pull the "and the other is Morrissey" switcheroo.

― Devilock, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:06 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, the old unswitched-switcheroo switcheroo.

not sure what's supposed to be egregiously bad about that 1994 listicle thing. there's no good reason for it to exist but on that basis about 95% of contemporary music writing should be pasted here

agree. compared to that telegraph britpop thing it's a shining voice of reason. also have to give props for juxtaposing darkthrone with ace of base in 10 and 9.

i think AG is like a vietnam vet he has flashbacks and freaks out at any mention of britpop

1994 was pretty sweet and there's plenty of good music mentioned but citing Counting Crows and Cranberries as evidence in your favor is odd.

I dont like posting negative things, but i cant not post this - this is just jaw droppingly wrong and stupid, delivered with the authority of the expert who really has not the first clue. Each wrong headed assumption resting on another, this is easily the worst review ive ever read.

http://thequietus.com/articles/14332-various-hardcore-traxx-dance-mania-records-1986-1997-review

http://i491.photobucket.com/albums/rr277/kadield/KickDog.gif

An inherent problem with dance retrospectives is that unless you already happen to have a vested nostalgic or archival interest in the era, it can be hard to find reasons to dip in. While it's not unusual for new ears to get turned on to latter-day rock and pop via oldies radio, compilations and the like, the forward thrust of electronic music leaves a scorched trail that proves tricky to travel back down. Dance fans are not expected to know their history.

lmao what

its every line as well of it, you cant even isolate just one line. So authoritatively and definitely delivered! To be so sure, when you have so little clue

But did you like my other reviews, anvil?

Reminds me of this classic Momus review:

"... this capsule encyclopaedia entry for Charlie Parker at first seems a model of lucidity and concision. Its air of infallible authority, though, is only skin-deep. I just don't accept that Parker's main contribution is in having shifted jazz from 'arpeggionic flurries' to 'chromatisism', and it doesn't help that one of those terms is mis-spelled and the other made up. There's nothing worse than authority trying to blind the reader with science which turns out, on closer inspection, to be voodoo."

This thread isn't for posting every article that you disagree with.

It's not like the issue is the writer's Controversial Opinions, it's that...he appears to not know very much about what he is writing about.

I mean there are a bunch of downright factual inaccuracies all over it.

Well you can ask him, he's right here

I ain't getting into the mix of uk folx arguing dance stuff

I'd have thought that the thread where anvil and I were originally disagreeing about dance music two days ago would have been a better place to repost that. But I guess this thread has more prominence on ILM so I get why he put it here.

1,500 words on "blog rock"? Can do!
http://grantland.com/features/blog-rock-clap-your-hands-say-yeah/

1,500 good, thoughtful, interesting words imo. This thread needs to get back to baffling, barely literate garbage and clueless rockist trolling.

yeah fair enough, it's not so much the quality of the writing as the topic that made me raise my eyebrows. Carry on!

hyden is garbage but i admit i didn't get past the first paragraph on that one

he's a half-decent feature writer but he might be the worst critic out there

half of that piece was about him trying to remember where he was the first time he heard tapes n' tapes, it was painful

I don't understand the case against Hyden. Garbage how?

half of that piece was about him trying to remember where he was the first time he heard tapes n' tapes, it was painful

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, May 28, 2014 9:12 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's half of all his pieces. His excruciating R.E.M. series on the AV Club was 60% where he was when Michael Stipe first started enunciating.

If critics were sportswriters, Hyden would be the Bill Simmons.
Douglas Wolk=Matt Hinton etc.

I've not read anything else by Hynden but his REM series was a good read I thought, mapping the ups and downs of being an REM fan in a way that chimed with my own experiences (and I'm sure many other readers'). I'm not always a fan of the anecdotal approach - that Colin Meloy Replacement books is a snooze and Nick Hornby's 31 Songs is the pits - but this worked well. And it's not like the piece lacked solid critical analysis either.

reading other people opine/narrate/write long form articles about their own taste is unbelievably boring to me
it seems like a poor replacement for conversation too. that's what it sounds like -- a one-sided conversation. would prefer not to read that tbh.

i didn't mean that to sound so severe -- just that i would rather read music writing that is informative in a way that i can use. i'm sure the personal narrative serves a purpose for the people who read and write them.

his "critical analysis" tends toward the obvious and unnecessary, and his voice is so dull, his sentences so whatever, and always on some straight white guy rock bullshit

Fair enough, but the 60% 'where I was when x happened' thing is way off. Revisiting the pieces, they're not particularly excitingly written, but they're solid enough, and do a decent job of contextualising the albums. Not a patch of Matthew Perpetua's Pop Songs project, granted, but hardly a candidate for 'worst writing ever'.

mapping the ups and downs of being an REM fan in a way that chimed with my own experiences (and I'm sure many other readers').

It did this for me too, and his experiences didn't strike me as particularly unique or noteworthy; but more to the point, he apparently made no attempt to relate or frame those experiences in a halfway interesting way.

Also, BradNelson OTM.

(and tbf, I wouldn't call his stuff the worst ever...maybe just profoundly unnecessary)

lol you bringing up perp condemned him worse than i could

xpost

how are you defining "straight white guy rock bullshit" in this context, Brad?

lazily

one of his recent grantland thinkpieces wondered for a million words whether coldplay were underrated, overrated, or properly rated

he did one for pearl jam too. i literally cannot think of a worse format for criticism.

Just saying for the record that I find Hyden more thoughtful and eloquent than most of the critics out there and I don't really get what Brad's talking about.

i guess i mean he approaches varieties of pop from a perspective thoroughly dyed by rock, or you know, like someone who wrote an interminable history of '90s alt rock for the av club

it's cool i'm obviously just mad about how boring he is

let's say you've been assigned to write a piece about blog rock. ok, not the best assignment, but you could make the most of it. would you let this be your actual critical take on voxtrot?

Now that I have heard several Voxtrot songs, I can confirm that this band is pretty OK and very blog-rocky. Imagine if the Smiths sounded exactly like a Smiths-like band from 20 years earlier, but never made a record as great as The Queen Is Dead that would influence Smiths-like bands 20 years in the future, and you have Voxtrot.

would you find it hilarious/clever to admit that you have only heard one song from the tapes 'n tapes album?

I remember quite liking The Loon’s opening track, “Just Drums.”2 The rhythm guitar part was excellent, the bass was rubbery, and the drum solo in the middle was triumphantly competent. I liked “Just Drums” so much that I don’t think I ever played the rest of the record. No, sir, I was fine with just “Just Drums,” thanks.

would you bore ppl by writing things like this?

For instance, I remember being really excited when I came across the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album while perusing a CD jukebox at a bar in Madison, Wisconsin. And if you can come up with a blog-rockier sentence than that, I will send you the entire Annuals discography.

it's this voice he uses, sort of a lazy/detached internet commentator type of writing combined with endless amounts of first-person that make me wonder if he even likes writing music criticism.

The rhythm guitar part was excellent, the bass was rubbery

the turkey was chewy