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

;_;

"So it is that the Millennial Whoop evokes a kind of primordial sense that everything will be alright. You know these notes. You’ve heard this before. There’s nothing out of the ordinary or scary here. You don’t need to learn the words or know a particular language or think deeply about meaning. You’re safe. In the age of climate change and economic injustice and racial violence, you can take a few moments to forget everything and shout with exuberance at the top of your lungs. Just dance and feel how awesome it is to be alive right now. Wa-oh-wa-oh."

the arpeggio was in fact invented by millennials for their pop soma

Just dance and feel how awesome it is to be alive right now.

cf. the entire history of music

every micro-generation imagines itself as less frivolous than the next

That reads like biting sarcastic satire

...

"Mary had a Little Lamb" at 438 Hz A4 is so disturbing because those notes, I don't know them, and it is the knowing of the notes that makes music comforting and not the intervals.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/26/12657446/young-thug-harambe-song-no-my-name-is-jeffrey

It’s at this point that the Smith quote appears. The obvious conclusion is that Ocean is talking to Smith, or at least sitting and listening to “A Fond Farewell” while he ponders questions that have no answers.

This is the strangest thing I've ever seen on a music blog. Is it satire or sponsored content or...?
http://www.alternativenation.net/live-nation-ceo-michael-rapino-influenced-life/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/26/12657446/young-thug-harambe-song-no-my-name-is-jeffrey

― 龜, Friday, August 26, 2016 12:17 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They spelled Jeffery wrong.

Back before Fred Durst revealed himself as the Antikurt, he listed four "perfect records" for a Spin profile: Nevermind, Ten, Aenima, and Nothing's Shocking. Perfect--Nirvana for cred, Pearl Jam for reach, Tool for stupidity posing as underground, Jane's Addiction for ambition posing as transgression. All that's missing is hip hop--which for Bizkit, whatever its roots in Durst's grayboy humanism and blackface sexism, turns out to be about market positioning--and Smashing Pumpkins for ambition indistinguishable from egomania.

You need at least two ambitions in there because the truly new thing about Durst is the candor of his will to power. True, hip hoppers often comport themselves as black capitalists first, artists second. But black capitalism is marginal by definition. Durst's isn't. However symbolic his Interscope vice-presidency may prove, his rise to the top of the center was a striking piece of image-making for a trigger-happy loudmouth who'd just ridden his second album into Hollywood from the Jacksonville he'd sworn never to leave. Mewl about "mooks" all you want, ring Durst up for inciting to rape at Woodstock 99, but recognize that he shares those crimes against progress with America itself. In his ambition he's an innovator.
[...]
Who's the vice-president mad at? Who else? Playa-haters, plus idol turned Bizkit basher Trent Reznor, who inspires a tirade called "Hot Dog." Given which gender usually gets raped, this is probably just as well. But it's tedious in a way rock's ambitious and insecure so often are. Maybe we'd all be better off artistically if Durst continued to confront, however pathologically, the pain he shares with the guys who love him. Instead he's playing a playa, a fast-lane success fantasy for "mooks" as surely as Christina Aguilera is for the girls they fear and crave. What a bitch.

wow.. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/britney-spears-glory-review/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

on top of the offensive misrepresentations of britney, this paragraph gets poptimism wrong as possible:

I have, though, always been a sucker for the effervescence of pure pop music, and on some superficial levels this album is machine tooled perfection, in that every track sounds like a single, with slick grooves, zinging hooks, ear-worm melodies, catchy choruses and some little spike of tension in the Britney-shaped centre that makes you question your own judgement as you find yourself singing along.

got as far as 'by neil mccormick, music critic' and peaced out tbh

slick grooves, zinging hooks and catchy choruses do tend to make me question my own judgement

Haha

i really enjoyed this album... but did i "enjoy" it?

this is a really bad review of a shining show at the triple rock. it contains this gem: "I knew nothing about Shining, the next band to take the stage. Being me, I hate to research bands."

https://girlattherockshows.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/this-is-not-a-dream/

Last night this whole idea of being surprised backfired and it backfired hard.

I'm still trying to reconcile the plot hole where she was completely disgusted yet was still close enough to the stage when the singer was dancing with an audience member that she feared an interaction

Huh didn't know about that blog, though that Swordlord productions dude stays putting on 10 band bills of metal bands with hard to read logos

MH - it's a small venue, being close to the stage or "farther back" on the floor is like 15 feet difference

Triple Rock? seemed bigger than that to me when I was there, like you could go chill by the back bar

might be misremembering

the comments on that blogpost are something else

Black metal in its purest form is the complete opposite of “nice”. The genre has a long and storied history of fucking with people’s heads and not giving a damn what kind of psychological trauma is inflicted.

Mayhem’s vocalist Dead would sniff dead ravens before a show. They also often had pig heads on pikes and lots of animal blood. Several of their former members are dead.

"Several of their former members are dead" is also true of e.g. Freddie and the Dreamers tbf

FUKK
AUGUST 27, 2016 AT 12:19 PM
You don’t get it, darling. This is MEANT TO BE disturbing. This is no theatrics. Black Metal is a Music for which people have been killing dach other back in a day. It is no ‘safe haven’ to go and identify with some lame makeshift community. It is evil. And I do not mean some imaginary, methaphorical, conventional PC evil. It is evil in flesh and blood.

https://pitofultimatedarkshadows.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/evil.jpg

Actual evil is a bad thing, iirc. You're not supposed to murder people.

idk

she had a bad time. it seems unfair to hoist her up for her writing

Bad show. Bad writing. Bad comments.

The comments are of course ridiculous for the most part, but going to see Shining and complaining about the pro-self-harm, bloody, hostile, suicidal vibe is like going to see Parliament and saying "I was aghast at how funky the show became"

Are you making a sly reference to this canonical piece of music writing, my friend?

lol classic

"I would have loved to see Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who can be just as entertaining with speeches as Kanye West, be on hand to announce the nominees. If he wasn't available, maybe Steven Tyler? The Aerosmith singer has a new country album out, after all, and can usually be counted on for a potentially viral moment.

...

Coldplay has a show in Colorado tonight, but had a day off yesterday. Alessia Cara, who is on that tour, was at the VMAs. Surely the band could have come in for a special performance. Both Beyonce AND Rihanna were there -- imagine both of them coming out for “Hymn for the Weekend” and “Princess of China.” Alas, it wasn’t to be.

So many rock acts have new music either out or on the way. Surely, one could have been booked to perform. In the golden days of MTV, bands would leave holes in their touring schedules around the VMAs, seeing it as a prime promotion opportunity for a forthcoming project. That said: Green Day’s first album in four years, Revolution Radio, is out on Oct. 7. Korn’s 12th studio release, The Serenity of the Suffering, is out Oct. 21. Disturbed’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” was used on Dancing with the Stars for goodness sake. Taylor Momsen’s The Pretty Reckless has a hit with “Take Me Down,” and would surely attract some viewers. What about 5 Seconds of Summer? That band is exactly the right demo for the VMA audience.

Bon Jovi has a new record -- This House is Not for Sale -- coming out October 21, and the single just dropped. Surely the VMAs could have found a way to work with a guy that has so much history with the channel (Jon Bon Jovi once gave away his childhood home in an early MTV contest)."

http://www.billboard.com/articles/events/vma/7488030/for-those-looking-to-rock-at-the-2016-vmas-a-disappointing-show

surely the VMAs should've booked Bon Jovi

why does mtv never want to rock

Their VMA nomination for “Missing You” -- where the band surprised fans with video chats thanking them for support

rock so popular that bands individually call up their fans and thank them for support?

who says a funk show can't play rock?

is this supposed to be a list of rock acts that are relevant to our times because wow

l (Jon Bon Jovi once gave away his childhood home in an early MTV contest)

Disturbed’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” was used on Dancing with the Stars for goodness sake

Panic! At the Disco’s anthem, “Victorious,” contains lyrics that would have been perfect for a VMA crowd -- "Tonight we are victorious / Champagne pouring over us” -- and a driving guitar line would have lit up Madison Square Garden, easy.

was he told to write that article and decided to sabotage it by making all rock sound really bad

Make the VMAs White Again

Terry Teachout on why rock 'n' roll is doomed to historical irrelevance, and why preservers of "golden-age popular music" like Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli are the future.

Teachout is actually a good writer and critic--books on Ellington and Armstrong are well done. He posits himself as a "musically trained" critic who tends to look down on laymen who don't have his background. Also dislikes Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, who I think are two great critics. Strange guy with a lot of virtues and what I think are some pretty big blind spots.

Yeah, I liked his Ellington book a lot - got me to revisit the guy's music, which I'd mostly shrugged off as Fine, But Not For Me.

I like Murray, can't stand Crouch. And not because of his musical taste; because of his prose style.

This exchange made me think Teachout wasn't exactly well-equipped to write about Ellington, or anyone else, for that matter. So I skipped his book (though his Armstrong bio is not completely worthless).

LOPEZ: One of the “peculiarities” of Duke Ellington’s career, you write, is that “he was a major composer but not an influential one.” Why is that? How does that happen?

TEACHOUT: He wrote great music, but his techniques were so intensely personal and unique unto himself that they were for all intents and purposes inimitable. Hence he didn’t influence anybody — all that other artists could do was play his songs in their own ways.

Yeah, that's a pretty ridiculous definition of "influence."

Terry Teachout on why rock 'n' roll is doomed to historical irrelevance, and why preservers of "golden-age popular music" like Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli are the future.

That is one strange article. It's fair enough to say "I prefer jazz and pre-rock pop to rock" but it's pretty bizarre to extend that to making broader claims that the most celebrated and ubiquitous classic rock music actually has no real audience.

In what universe do these statements make sense?:

The rock of the baby boomers and their Gen-X siblings is, up to a point, a different story. Nevertheless, most of it, from the Who’s “My Generation” in 1965 to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, was also created by young people for consumption by younger people, which helps to explain why so little of it is capable of holding our attention today.

Who now listens to (say) America, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 4 Way Street, Yes’s Fragile, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Pink Floyd’s Meddle or Janis Joplin’s Pearl for any possible reason other than nostalgia?)

Does seem to discount Ellington's influence on Mingus and George Russell, for example. The above is kinda what makes Teachout so frustrating--on the one hand, he has a point there, because Ellington's manner and his ability to integrate his players into his vehicles for their idiosyncratic abilities is really important. But Teachout is being so reductive. Neo-con jazz writer who's convinced that no one who doesn't actually play music, as he did before he began writing full-time, has anything worthwhile to say.