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

and the not-so-covert divide being expressed is White = intellect and aesthetics, Black = instinct and emotion, i.e. pretty much restating centuries-old racist paradigms.

yup

The visceral stank of Etta James

I find myself wanting to object to every single sentence in those two paragraphs you posted.

trash

racist trash

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

taking a break from ilx

Wesley Morris is black but y’all knew that right?

TIL Little Richard wasn’t a Westerner. Top notch musicological analysis right there.

Also, there has never been any folk music in the West ever. It’s all classical from Charlemagne onwards.

Anyway, stay in your lane, race x, and you too, race y. Gotta work those God-given genes.

I mean, there is a lot of interest to be said about white appropriation of black musical styles and affects, and it has been said so many times, in so many more nuanced and sophisticated ways that show so much more actual understanding of music.

I do think the piece is a little more nuanced than those excerpts suggest, although it's certainly not without its flaws. It actually has a lot more music-historical depth than what I would usually expect in an outlet like this. Tbh, it's only a few misplaced terms away from something you might get in a intro-level popular music/American music course. He's simplifying and generalizing historical Euro-American vs African-American musico-aesthetic priorities to tell his story, and doing so clumsily at times, but it's not worthless in terms of helping to explain the unique development of American popular music. Most of the essay is about how these things ended up being fused and interacting. He does discuss e.g. Motown (and soft rock/yacht rock) as musics that synthesize elements of these traditions. And he does refer to the Irish folk influence on the actual composition of 19th century minstrel songs, which isn't invalid. xp

So, right, there's much better out there but I don't think it's the worst introduction to this history for a lay audience in an outlet that's not primarily focused on music.

Today is my day to defend the indefensible, apparently.

barely-veiled essentialist thinking about race and music is, like, everywhere in highbrow cultural writing -- like, yeah, that might be a particularly egregious example, but you're lying to yourself if you think you haven't also seen it in some of the more erudite tomes in the 'good books about music' thread, npr recommendations + essays from more generalist newspaper writers whose ears perk up every time they notice that someone who wrote a recent top 40 hit is scandinavian

(I have no idea what he means by 'chromatic-chord harmony', though, I have to say. I mean, I DO know what 'chromatic harmony' means to me but blues and jazz are filled with it.)

i have skimmed the essay, but not read it carefully; it seems like what he's got going on is an effort to trade in race-essentialist terms in order to narrate a critical history that's aimed ultimately at somehow articulating 'the contradictions' in that history from the perspective of the present day and for the benefit of the present day, landing on a certain tone of impossible optimism after all too many episodes of knowingness about the ironies of the past. comes off as kind of chronologically chaotic and tonally discombobulated, and you have to grant him an awful lot on the way many passing judgments are expressed in order to help the structure maintain enough rigidity to make it from start to finish. eh.

seems like a lot of its problems come from its being 'good writing'.

That's fair imo.

Finally some people brave enough to take down the 1619 Project

I recently spent a few days with my 88 yr old father, whose house is full of copies of The Oldie, a monthly "humorous" UK magazine aimed at old people. It recently introduced a music column by Rachel Johnson, the socialite sister of the current Prime Minister. It is bad. I don't think it's available online, so you will have to take my word for the awfulness of her recent piece about The Clash and the teenage love for Sandinista she shared with Boris.

https://www.theoldie.co.uk/article/feel-the-byrne

Is this my beautiful house? Is this my beautiful life? What are we doing here? Search me, guv! We’re all on a Road to Nowhere. Both sides of the Atlantic.

I was there. I’d fly almost anywhere – sorry, Greta – to see it again.

back when i was on-staff at the wire it shared a publisher with the oldie

from a fawning interview with Chris Blackwell:

As I watch the gentle, tall, lean man chew his salad, composed with greens from his own farm, and patiently answer questions he must have replied to thousands of times, I can only sit back and marvel.

He has led a charmed life, he has brought pleasure to millions, he lives a modest life on his island in the sun, and this, he says, is his secret to his success.

‘Stay with what you love.’

Ya mon. Irie.

HE LIVES A MODEST LIFE ON HIS ISLAND

it's a starter island

Ya mon.

https://donnacwrites.substack.com/p/on-jack-harlows-sudden-success

“You’re not always going to make fire, you have to go through making that weaker stuff before you’re gonna get the fire,” Jack told me in January 2018. At the time, the statement was a revelation for me, someone who is so set on perfection from jump. Only later would I realize every talk with Jack is an opportunity to learn about myself.

"Years later, as I pulled back the hood of my robe, and put the challice to my lips, I wondered if maybe I was a little TOO devoted to him"

it should be noted that her muse there is this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFKb7JzSjaA

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

How is Jack Harlow's hair allowed to be that bad

the "what's poppin" instrumental is pretty nice; really can't listen to this guy tho

The video ("what's poppin") in that "article" being my first (and hopefully only) exposure to Jack Harlow, I have to ask: is there a syncing problem on the video or is Jack unable to lip-sync in addition to being unable to rap?

Lol, from the link:

I realized my take might not be so hot after all

it was days after I had first seen the “Dark Knight” music video, and as I expressed in my lede, I was shocked no one was talking about the work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgKKY8bg3N8

this is some clown shit

What is good about that? It has almost no musical content (the backing track); his rapping is fast and slightly more complex than other rappers his age, but he's still not saying anything worth hearing; the video just looks like a bunch of kids hanging out on a school night...this is literally worthless as art. The only thing worse than the song/video is the fact that someone somewhere thinks it's good.

what's good about that is that she found it first

this is literally worthless as art

Someone please deconstruct this statement before ILM self-destructs.

this is some clown shit

sometimes you have an entire career of making that clown shit before you're gonna get the fire

375,215,674 WHATS POPPIN Fans Can’t Be Wrong

okay I read that whole thing and that is a lot of purple prose to drop about your crush from trigonometry

waist like a cosine

imagine if karmin had come to prominence in the substack era

you guys realize of course that this kid is gonna be doing his OG hologram tour in 2035 and we're gonna have to put up with crustbabies talking about where they were when they heard his first tik tok

it was all a dream
I used to read Details magazine

i've only heard "whats poppin" but it's like a v normal run-of-the-mill song? not sure what's so earth-shatteringly terrible about it

it was posted in the rolling worst of 2020 thread basically immediately upon existing so perhaps i'm oblivious (yes i do realize he is a person of pallor getting played mostly at black radio, i mean other than that)

Try the lyrics

yes when i described the song as very average/typical i was clearly not including the lyrics in my assessment

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/14/21368137/wap-meaning-megan-thee-stallion-cardi-b

But Shakespeare, while he had an unending pandemic to create King Lear, never came close to creating this rhythmic flow of genius from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”:

Put him on his knees, give him somethin’ to believe in
Never lost a fight, but I’m lookin’ for a beating
In the food chain, I’m the one that eat ya
If he ate my ass, he’s a bottom feeder

In four lines, Megan Thee Stallion exalts the privilege of performing cunnilingus on her, before issuing a taunt, a guarantee of endurance from her vagina. Megan is a religious experience, a powerhouse, an apex predator, and a provider.

In the same way Shakespeare used monarchy, kings, and two awful daughters in King Lear to talk about family, mental illness, and fear of old age, Cardi and Megan use hyperbolic, fantastic imagery — even herpetology, the harmless garter snake versus the king cobra — to tell a story about the basic, absolutely human feelings of desire and arousal.

“It’s pretty simple,” Bianca Burke, a porn actress, told me. “When anything sexy is happening — like making out with a cute guy or when you replay last night’s hookup in your head during your 15-minute break at work, your pussy may get aroused, which can lead to it getting wet.”