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

Flute! http://www.fastcompany.com/1682132/brian-ritchie-violent-femmes-bassist-turned-tasmanian-tea-slinger-japanese-bamboo-flutist

He always dressed like an Antipodean tea shop owner anyway.

Brian Ritchie is a really nice guy who is very into using his band as a way to deliver avant-garde stylings to unsuspecting audiences. saw the Femmes in the late 90's with their anarchistic horn section "Horns Of Dilemma" and although they were past their commercial peak (which, echoing other posts, was HUGE in the 80's), they totally killed it. I mean, they had a dude from Boy Dirt Car playing trumpet! I remember a well-dressed college gal holding her hands to her ears during one of their mid-song free jazz freakouts, but she was still staring, fascinated, at the stage.

(sorry for continued derail)

i'm learning a lot about the femmes here.

owns a tea shop in Tasmania and plays improvised lute jams in it or something like that

he used to own a second one in Sydney - back before the Femmes split up the second time, their website's list of tour dates and ticketing links would be like nine weeks of European clubs, three folk festivals in the US, one shakuhachi recital by Brian in his Surry Hills tea shop, five weeks of US clubs.

as a (non-honorary) Australian, he's also in an instrumental surf band with the Australian musicians of Midnight Oil, and curates this music and arts festival for an art museum, MONA, every year

the reason the guy from the Dresden Dolls has now Spinal Tapped into the re-re-formed* Violent Femmes' drum stool is that someone dropped out of the festival, and on three days notice the Dresden Dolls, Ritchie, Mick Harvey and John Parish covered the Femmes first album as a fill-in act


*they split a second time after Brian sued Gordon, in the middle of a nine-month-or-so tour, for selling Blister In The Sun for a commercial. possibly the one that was the only time anyone had ever heard of them in any country in the world, 26 years after it was released. the next reunion, six years later, lasted three shows before the original drummer - who'd first left c. 1985 - quit due to being screwed over money by the other two.

sorry, update: dude from Dresden Dolls quit this year because it's too hard being in a trio with two guys who hate each other and literally won't speak to each other

(this is probably the reason that m coleman found them near the top of my (very) short list of surly, smug, uncooperative interview subjects)

I'm finding the repeated assertion that Violent Femmes were a big band in the UK hilarious at this point, quite frankly. I don't care if you knew 2 people that owned the record - more cold, hard numbers as opposed to anecdotal evidence and maybe I'll begin to be convinced.

Who are you, the President of the Anti-Violent Femmes League?

x-post:

But yeah, I'm aware that they were a thing in Aus.

first album was absolutely massive in the US iyrc

I still like them a lot. III is really underrated as coked-out weirdo pop record. Also you can still hear their influence in lots of herky-jerky, neurotic-sounding, nasally-voiced songwriters (like, say, Ezra Furman, who I don't think was alive when the s/t Femmes album was released)

i heard the 2nd album first. college radio station i listened to played country death song a lot. i played that album a ton in 1984. quickly bought the first album after that. played that a ton. then never really listened to them again.

they were a band

https://medium.com/@sfj/why-i-liked-david-turners-de-la-soul-piece-9d69360ee66e#.3n70h3fu2

wtf is this horseshit

is this piece what was in those trucks

recent events aside, strip-fiend jones is basically right, there's more than a little "you will agree with critical consensus or SHUT THE FUCK UP FOREVER" to this protracted-beyond-its-hours discussion, and if an editor forced me to listen to, I don't know, [insert critically acclaimed canonical rock record that I hate] then I would likely react the same way.

which is something that shouldn't happen, because the role of an editor is in part to make their writers' (and publication's) prose look as good as possible -- and is something that won't happen, because it's me and I have no #personal #brand to #leverage, and no one's invested in the bag of sweet potato chips on my desk ("desk") right now -- but something that happens.

Really liked the SFJ piece tbh

he's right that people reacting negatively to this piece bc "it's a classic record!" are wrong but idk that seems an obvious point that is now a 10 minute read

as opposed to the 60-minute read of the past week in this thread

I enjoyed those 10 minutes?

well my issues were about the form it took rather than dude's opinion on the record

but i really enjoyed the violent femmes tangent

Each of those 60 minutes started a band.

sfj's prose style has evolved into rock critic mark kozelek lately and it especially bugs me here

I genuinely don't understand why editors don't routinely ask themselves, if not during line edits then during commissioning, "will this piece make my writer and/or publication look bad unnecessarily? if so, what can I do to prevent or at least mitigate that?"

feel like it's more that editors are routinely asking themselves "will this piece get people all riled up?" and if the answer is yes, hit publish!

so much of that piece seemed intended to make people cry millennial

There's a short-termism at work at bad outlets, where "will we look bad?" is subservient to "will this get lots of clicks and go viral?". Also this piece is not really going to hurt MTV's brand. Also there is no real investment beyond time when clicking on a weblink - it's not like someone's goung to say, "I got burned there, never going to pay to read something like that again". xps

I understand how it works. What I don't understand is how little cognitive dissonance people register in simultaneously thinking "I want to support/promote/mentor this writer so they can be successful" and "I am either actively undermining this writer or undermining them via inaction."

I am guessing those undertaking the latter either aren't really interested in the former or are kind of dense.

when MTV publishes a "scathing" takedown of an artist that it'll need to curry favor with come vma booking time then maybe it'll have a point beyond "lol we got the olds to rageclick on a piece about another bunch of olds, guess that saved us from the traffic ax for another month"

(note that two weeks ago all the salty tweets that an MTV account posted about Ciara were deleted once she complained. Ciara doesn't exactly have Beyoncé-level power on an individual level but pissing her off could have wider reverberations. and those were tweets, ffs!)

I think the first Violent Femmes lp was pretty popular over here. certainly seemed to be something taht a lot of people on the camp 5 years ago could agree on. I think that included a lot of Brits too. JUst think it was a bit of a slightly alternative lp that wasn't overly dangerous so appealed to a wide amount of people. I don't remember too much free jazz in the sound yet, do think that hearing the Modern lovers after them I could hear a lot of ML influence. & VF always reminded me of the MLs once I'd heard them.

Slightly surprised to hear that Mick harvey was familiar enough with their work to do impromptu sets of their songs though.

The editor who commissioned the De La piece was bad at her last job, and based on this evidence, she hasn't gotten any better now that she's transitioned to MTV. (Basically, if you're good already, she won't make your piece any worse, but if you're a writer who needs help, you're out of luck.) There might at least be an additional layer of copy editing at MTV, though, because while the De La piece was poorly reasoned and poorly written, it was at least missing the spelling and punctuation errors that were such a hallmark of The Pitch.

Obviously a lot has likely changed since then but back when MTV Hive was active there was definitely both line and copy editing in place.

Music and cultural "taste" is backed up with correct arguments and facts, not "digging".

― Banaka™ (banaka)

"feel like it's more that editors are routinely asking themselves "will this piece get people all riled up?" and if the answer is yes, hit publish!"

wait, this is just dawning on you...

it just seems, on the balance, bad that every time a piece critical of an artist or album comes out, it's likely to provoke a huge cross-media shitstorm.

(much of the non-music-critic response to this piece wasn't about the writing or the editing, it was about the scandal and outrage that a person could dislike an album not designated for dislike.)

No

xp

k

ha, was responding to scott's delightful "this is just now dawning on you" comment.

"We were years away from hip-hop authenticity wars."

dude lived in new york. in the 80's.

"Rap fans were still trying to get people to stop making fun of rap,"

in new york. in the 80's!

"I was generally in favor of rap becoming as user-unfriendly as the work of downtown types like Christian Marclay, who seemed to be referenced every time somebody had to write about rap."

it's true, every time you read about rap in the 80's you had to read about christian marclay. ??????????????????

"Everything rap or hip-hop (the name was still a toss-up at stores) was of interest to me."

It's true, I was there too. Nobody knew what to call rap in record stores in new york. some people called it the wicketty diggity doo.

i don't remember anyone thinking de la soul were weird or fucked up back then. teenagers loved them. and not because they were fucked up.

when MTV publishes a "scathing" takedown of an artist that it'll need to curry favor with come vma booking time then maybe it'll have a point beyond "lol we got the olds to rageclick on a piece about another bunch of olds, guess that saved us from the traffic ax for another month"

this

its like lame writing gave birth to even more lame writing. thanks, MTV! and thanks for the endless coverage of the madchester scene on 120 minutes. we had to go directly from the mission u.k. years to the ned's atomic dust bin years? sheesh....

De La were interviewed about the piece and gave some good answers (they're less riled up about it than everybody else). Also the interview touches on the Kendrick/Chance comparisons mentioned upthread. Good read

http://observer.com/2016/06/buffoon-mind-state-de-la-soul-and-the-killing-of-sacred-cows/

First album since 2004, of course they'd be circumspect