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

Sitting on another set of lawn chairs was Craig, a civil engineer who’d spent the morning perfecting a spill-proof beer bong. The only thing more sculpted than its arrangement of PVC pipes and valves was his body.

Amazingly, this was not written by Bob Lefsetz.

Closing paragraph:

The hippie movement is actually a great case study in the intersection of pop music and activism. Listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” (Yes, she famously missed performing at the festival she wrote the definitive song about.) “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young calling out police in the wake of the Kent State shooting in “Ohio.” Listen to Bob Dylan skewering government warmongering on “Masters of War.” 2017’s ambitious pop crop could wield this same power if they wanted. But do they?

hey Katy Perry pricked her finger on a rose thorn in that one video. that's about as deep as you're gonna get these days

Before I heard you, I didn’t think it was possible for someone to front three separate bands over their career, and on top of that, release several albums as a solo artist. How could someone be that universal?

Your voice sends chills to the spine. Your words stir the wheels of thought. Your melodies invent emotions most of us never even knew existed.

Your songs have gotten me, as well as many other people, through some of the darkest, as well as some of the best times in our lives. You touched more people than you can imagine. And now you’ve hurt us.

http://www.alternativenation.net/say-hello-2-heaven-open-letter-chris-cornell/

nah

i wrote worse than that in my journal in college. she's 21 ffs

Yeah, post denied

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2017/05/donald-glover-pop-culture-streak-is-unprecedented

https://media4.giphy.com/media/xT1XH3nKVJMCvzAc8M/giphy.gif

donald glover's pop culture streak is unprecedented....if you woke of from a coma in 2016 and have total amnesia

if you woke from a coma in 2016 and have total amnesia

Primary qualifications for being a pop culture journalist in 2017

I don't like the Beatles at all, but even bands I hate don't deserve to be the subject of an Amanda Marcotte piece.

oh *that's* what people were talking about

I Wrote the 500th Sgt Peppers Challops Article...and that's okay!

It’s no surprise, then, that the Beatles’ shift toward a more respectable and artistic branding meant shedding their sex appeal. The “Sgt. Pepper” album cover features the Fab Four dressed in goofy-looking uniforms that couldn’t be better suited to repel the female gaze. Beyond the title track and “Lucy in the Sky with the Diamonds,” there’s very little on the record that makes a lady want to shake her hips on the dance floor.

“Sgt. Pepper” is a good pop record, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a record I resent, because it helped cement this notion that music for girls is silly and music for men is artistically significant. It’s a notion that is doubly appalling because history shows, time and time again, that girl-tastes are the ones that are ahead of the curve.

waht

have we done a t/s: sgt pepper vs sgt pepper's? feel like we should put the thorny matter of how to shorten references to this album to bed once and for all

personally i believe anyone who prefers to say sgt pepper's should be dragged into the street and summarily executed

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Extermination Squad

why the fuck would you call it Sgt. Pepper?

because making it a possessive without a subject just sounds fucking weird and wrong, mainly

also would you mind stepping out into the street for a moment, i have something to show you *cocks pistol*

no thanks. after what happened in Portland, I'm steering clear of armed zealots

'Highway 61 Revisited' came out two years earlier and

*gagged and dragged off by mansplaining police*

does Dylan get lady points for introducing hip swinging rhythms to folk music?

I think the thing I like most about the article is that it robs women of the agency to be pretentious!

does Dylan get lady points for introducing hip swinging rhythms to folk music?

― President Keyes, Tuesday, May 30, 2017 2:20 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Funny, just reading positively 4th Street and it sounds like Richard Farina is more responsible for that. Maybe Dylan was exponentially more popular though, but that seems to be a couple of years later.

But Dylan got the grief for it at the Newport Folk and Mansplainsinging Festival

P sure that piece wins.

Is there any actual evidence that women did not buy Sgt Pepper btw?

Tina Turner and Nina Simone were planning on covering post-Peppers Beatles songs but instead decided to stay home and dance alone in their apartments to Robyn

i get as excited about amanda marcotte articles as i do about jason whitlock articles, which is saying something!

yeah, it's pretty well-established that, of sgt pepperses' 32 million copies sold, only twelve of them were to women

but every one of those women went out and published a #hottake of their own as a result

What wing of the military was Sgt. Pepper in and did they even allow woman cadets?

sgt pepper didn't actually hold a rank - 'sergeant' was just his first name

billy shears was a four-star general tho iirc

@scott_tobias A stupid Amanda Marcotte take. Well now I've seen everything.

— Slammin Bod Jeb Lund (@Mobute) May 30, 2017

I think the thing I like most about the article is that it robs women of the agency to be pretentious!

while I think people dragging A.M. tend to come off pretty gross this is the most legit problem with this article imo: it's rank essentialism. this is a broader problem w/in "I LIKE POP. YES THERE I SAID IT, CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW TRANSGRESSIVE I AM TO LIKE POP, ALL YOU HEGEMONIC ROCKISTS" discourse imo

it's the kind of piece you might write if you've only heard of rock essentialist writing and decided to make some weird points that other people probably wrote about in ways that make sense

Beyond the title track and “Lucy in the Sky with the Diamonds,” there’s very little on the record that makes a lady want to shake her hips on the dance floor.

upbeat dance classic lucy in the sky with diamonds

I am not a lady but when I was a child listening to this album on endless repeat, the song I danced to the most was "Within You Without You"

guys Lucy is a lady

“Sgt. Pepper’s” was the point when rock stopped being the music of girls and started being the music of men five year old children.

beatles just chilling around trying to figure out what the unsexiest outfits would be

I really don't see the difference between this and some of what's in the latest Rob Sheffield book that everyone was falling over themselves about, except perhaps that one was a book and one was an essay pegged to an anniversary, with accompanying research time.

you can't link to a book

like, besides some throwaway sentence ends ("hip-hop’s dominance of the pop charts that continues to this day" is the exact opposite of what is happening on the pop charts today), most of it -- the disco backlash being tinged with if not rooted in racism and misogyny, grunge being celebrated by critics for removing bubblegum pop from the zeitgeist, the Beatles' trajectory from proto-boy band to established canonical group -- seems as if it would be recognized for the generally accepted critical consensus that it is if people weren't conditioned to have a negative response to the byline and URL

she completely left out racism re: disco

which confused me more than anything

<i>Look at disco, for instance. Disco is classic girl music — or, more accurately, music for girls and gay men. Those things, <b>along with some barely concealed racial resentment,</b> were among the biggest reasons that disco was so demonized and despised by so many straight white men of the 1970s.</i>

it kind of reads as if she independently discovered that critical consensus but didn't quite have all the pieces, despite music journalism churning out similar articles for decades?

fuck

follow the markup yourself

oh duh, sorry

maybe it just felt weird as an aside?