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

I WANNA DO A LITTLE STRUT
AS YOU WIGGLE YOUR FIRM BUTT

AMANDA

Sorry, wrong thread.

gross

o_O

Little known Beatles tune

i have been harassed in this fashion since the late '80s :-/

You'll hate the Boston thread, then!

if it's full of sexist jokes at the expense of amandas, i already do

not sure in what world responding to someone's comment about jerks sharing their first name being disheartening with actual harassment is a good idea

i don't want to derail this thread but i do wish to express that amanda jokes are gross and not funny like say video gaaaaaaaames jokes

xxpost:

This world, in which the comment was blatantly not aimed at the person whining about harrassment and was merely riffing on a thread which has been on this forum for... ooh, four years now and has offended absolutely nobody. But then, this is ILX where people, bless 'em, always get oversensitive, so... y'know, business as usual!

(If anyone hasn't read that thread, it's basically everyone taking the piss out of the Boston song 'Amanda' ... I appreciate it may not be funny if you're actually called Amanda, but I assume that most people on the planet with that name who recognise the song actually realise the song isn't directly about them.)

things like the 100th "poptimism is bad and ruining music, writing and everything" piece

yeah, everybody knows

get back to fuckin ilb morbsitronics lol isnt there a matt harvey incident to write about

The Marcotte article wasn't that bad.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a5/f5/21/a5f52196ef344a9bda47c56b17b4e62b.jpg

The Marcotte article wasn't that bad.

― Treeship, Tuesday, May 30, 2017 10:38 PM

neither is Sean Spicer imo

Her argument is rooted in a bunch of weird assumptions about what music is considered "girly" and what's "masculine" but she's on the right track. The Beatles had to die as a pop group in order to attain immortality in the canon. And a lot of the "experimentation" in Sgt Pepper's feels tacked on and annoying and the album succeeds,
in the end, on the strength of its songs, just like With the Beatles. And finally, there is something gross about the way the Beatles' original fans, mostly young women, were pushed aside and mocked.

Also she's right that disco was an underappreciated comet from the future.

marcotte is such a bad and irritating and incompetent writer that she can express an argument i agree with in such a shitty way that i start to wonder if i'm wrong

i find it annoying when ppl dismiss the beatles' early music as kid stuff or bubblegum pop or whatever but the contrarian argument that their later music was "pretentious" is just as unfair

and trying to draw a direct line from sgt pepper to homophobic attacks on disco is just a classic salon-style clickbait argument of the worst kind, completely unfounded and gross

Yeah. I mean, the most offensive aspect of the piece was the idea that "girls" prefer more accessible music you can dance to while "men," especially "nerds," like "difficult music.

This binary is kind of radically offensive and its the basis of her argument, so I guess the piece is, technically, "bad." But there is also a shred of something that is kind of true there as well.

Shred of truth wrt the Beatles' career trajectory, the politics of taste, hidden sexism in people's skepticism of pop and dance music, etc.

Not with regard to how she uncritically accepts many of the assumptions she should be critiquing.

the entire gist of the argument is stolen from a book that does it much, much better:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Beatles-Destroyed-Rock-Roll/dp/019975697X

Amanda Marcotte's arguments seems kind of similar one Robert Elms used to make, about how Sgt. Pepper's was the moment everything went wrong for rock music - but Elms's essentialism was regarding race rather than gender, iirc he said something like late period Beatles took the 'blackness' out of rock music. but the way Elms frames it is that it's pre-sgt.pepper's rock that is 'authentic' and 'real' etc and the sgt.pepper's that represents a shift to stuff that's plastic and shallow

But he adds: "I just think they are either childlike and simple or rather leaden and pompous - one or the other all the time."
Theirs is a sanitised and anaemic version of American blues-inspired rock and roll, he complains.
"For me they turned something that was once sexy and raw and had roots, into something that was totally soulless, playground sing-along music."

I don't think they were taking blackness out as much as putting whiteness (Englishness) in. Which is appropriate, given their own rather pale complexions. Indeed, one could argue that it is morally preferable to continued appropriation of black American forms.

Hence the music-hallish Mr. Kite and 64 (plus I guess Octopus's Garden, Yellow Sub, Mustard)

I don't think they were taking blackness out as much as putting whiteness (Englishness) in.

Which wasn't exactly novel in 1967.

Of course not, but negging the Beatles for sounding *less* like Chuck Berry for a few minutes is kinda ridic

Exactly, nobody was sounding like Chuck Berry in 1967, and that wasn't down to Sgt. Pepper.

the way the Beatles' original fans, mostly young women, were a pushed aside and mocked politely asked what they thought of the new direction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-keBliZndQ

i imagine some Rolling Stone articles did this but i don't think it was widespread. maybe in print rock crit which hasn't been relevant in decades. this feels like fighting an argument a few people had 40 years ago.

Would love to hear a compilation of the music that Otis Redding made towards the end of 67 under the influence of Sgt Pepper etc.
See what adding the blackness back into it would be like.

I heard that George Clinton recorded a full cover of the lp, so would love to hear taht too.
Is the Booker T & The Ms set Mclemore avenue a set of covers of the lp or Beatles in general or what?

That Elms quote is a great example of the *other* school of rockist thought i.e. music should come from the gut/soul, none of this pretentious art-school nonsense for me thanks! I don't think that's Marcotte's stance though, despite the bits about danceability.

xp Or maybe a set of covers of Abbey rd.

All of the songs on McLemore Avenue are from Abbey Road, hence the alb title and the cover shot:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Mclemoreavenue_album.jpg/220px-Mclemoreavenue_album.jpg

Sure was decent of Billy Preston to rescue their pasty asses on subsequent recordings. Otherwise they just would have kept releasing "Till There Was You" b/w "Michelle."

The Elijah Wald book that D-40 mentions is really great, essential reading imo, and makes a FAR more nuanced and historically informed point.

is that the blues one? if so I should be buying it next week.

I meant How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. (And his thesis is less simplistic than the title suggests.)

Right, should be getting Escaping The Delta; Robert Johnson and the invention of the blues. hadn't realised that the last bit of the thread had been about his other book on the Beatles.

That Elms quote is a great example of the *other* school of rockist thought i.e. music should come from the gut/soul, none of this pretentious art-school nonsense for me thanks! I don't think that's Marcotte's stance though, despite the bits about danceability.

― Gavin, Leeds, Wednesday, May 31, 2017 12:44 PM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this may not be Marcotte's stance, but I think it's similar to stuff that comes up in some of the more vulgar/clumsy iterations of poptimism, the idea that young women just enjoy pop music in some pure, unmediated, physical way, instead of overthinking everything like nerdy male music critics

I know a few women who were Beatles fans "until they got weird." But I think it was more about them promoting drugs.

It was the facial hair duh

this is a good review...

http://www.richardgoldsteinonline.com/the-original-sgt-pepper-negative-review.html

"And the pendulum started its long-term swings: progressive rock and corporate rock would be swatted back by punk and disco, hair metal would be blasted by grunge and hip-hop."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/arts/music/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-anniversary.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

I love how 70s music is still this weird rhetorical battleground. Back in the 80s I often heard that punk was a reaction against disco. I guess prog was kind of forgotten at that point.

hair metal obviously a reaction against disco.

grunge a reaction against hair metal. experimental horse music a reaction against grunge.

xpost reaction against baldness iirc

Pub Rock a reaction against Restaurant Rock which was a reaction against Cafe Jazz

this, by the way, was the beginning of the straight white male reaction against disco...

http://sleazethiscity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/VH7-e1425291398633.jpeg