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

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

listening tapes 'n tapes song is hilarious, not very clever tho

http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/05/5_reasons_we_love_to_hate_dave_matthews_band.html#incart_m-rpt-2

comment section is unbelievable

too much time on ilx

imo we should all just read books and never the internet again

^^truth bomb

i'm reading this right now. dude is opinionated as fuck! fuck you, bitch, jackie and roy rule!!

http://www.amazon.com/Biographical-Guide-Great-Jazz-Singers/dp/0375421491

tapes 'n tapes

they are a real band? I thought markers made them up

A Guide To Great Jazz Singers should be one of those joke books where all the pages are blank.

great record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-nEdceows

I know that Ziggy Stardust was like one of David Bowie’s personas, right? I’m digging the cover of this album, he’s standing next to a bunch of garbage with his guitar and wearing an amazing jumpsuit (which kind of gives him a FUPA on the back cover.) The lighting is dim, it looks like it just rained. I think this record is trying to tell me a story. I’m finding the second half of the name of the album a little cumbersome. “And the spiders from Mars.” Wouldn’t it be better just to call it “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust?” Doesn’t everyone always just refer to this album as Ziggy Stardust? No one ever mentions the spiders from Mars, but maybe I’ll feel differently after hearing this album, as I’ve never listened to it! The bottom right hand corner of the back cover says “To be played at maximum volume,” which I appreciate. I like little details like that that make you feel like the artist or the band are talking directly to you, the fan. I don’t know if he thought about it with that much detail, but I’d like to picture David Bowie thinking about some kid sitting in their bedroom in 1972, staring at the picture of him kind of looking androgynous and daring, and calling himself Ziggy Stardust and deciding, “I better tell them to play this at maximum volume, because they need that advice.

did Lex write that

ha I thought that was a parody, but no, she's still at it

this person called up a professor at Cornell University and interviewed them at length for a 2,400 article that is entirely about Iggy Azalea not 'shouting out' Charli XCX on the verses of "Fancy"

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/05/29/3443070/why-doesnt-iggy-azalea-give-charli-xcx-a-shout-out-in-fancy/

Halfway through the piece, literally every question is, "Yes, but why didn't she shout out Charlie XCX?"

"if Charli XCX had been in charge of Cornell University and had given you your job, wouldn't you want to tell people that?"

lol

Feel bad for that Cornell prof, like someone with real questions about race, authenticity, and hip-hop could have done at least an interesting interview with him around Iggy Azalea. Instead he got this weird Charlie XCX stan demanding justice.

I love how bad that is, my only complaint is that it isn't long enough. I want to see ivy league professors pushed to breaking point

stay tuned next week, when they sit down and watch every Icona Pop interview on YouTube and count how many times they mention Charli XCX

I want to see more journalists using their powers to troll profs into bringing their exorbitantly-valued expertise to bear on one inane & misconstrued situation over & over again

Haha

Can you imagine how many times that writer's coworkers and friends have heard a rant about this?

"It seems especially weird to me that Charli doesn’t get a shout-out in this song, given that Iggy is a rapper paying homage to all this classic rap."

lmaoooo amazing interview