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

My husband read the first line to me last night and I was like 'please stop it hurts'

so someone expanded the "goop on ya grinch" tweet into a whole article?

I mean, Marc Lamont Hill did a whole video about 'why WAP isn't problematic.' His intended audience was primarily more concervative Black people, from what I could tell, but the whole thing was really bizarre.

https://imgur.com/a/qRejK2Q

defending the song is fine. saying you like it because it affirms female desire is a sound argument. so too is the counter that it does so in a way that still panders to the male gaze. this vox article with the king lear angle, however, is wildly stupid.

imagine shoehorning Lear into this dreck and not even quoting this part:

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

lmao

i take it back -- this piece is worthwhile, after all, as a set up for that post

Haha

One could see Shapiro’s comments as genuine concern; maybe he truly believes there’s a Sorcerer’s Apprentice situation going on with genitalia.

okay lol, article redeemed

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to 't
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above

the vox piece is clearly a stunt, probably because of a dare, probably the result of a bored digression in a slack channel

"hey bro, dare you to write a comparative analysis of king lear and wap, but like with the kind of shoddy reasoning and inflated claims you would see in a high school paper"

namechecking "King Lear" once is not a comparative analysis

what this piece presupposes is, what if it is?

king lear is discussed throughout the article

at least throughout the first couple paragraphs, which is all i read

CORDELIA: I cannot heave my heart into my mouth

Cordi B

but Regan Thee Stallion

Omg y'all I'm dyyyyin over here lol

thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er
the dirt

shall I compare Thee to a Hot Girl Summer's day?

i thought you meant country matters

once a week is ample

i looked up the author and slack-dare pieces like this are his wheelhouse

“Megan Thee Stallion” sounds like a Billy Childish project

If, like me, you spent an unfortunate amount of your young adult life digging through the record stacks at thrift stores, you probably realized it at some point: Nobody actually listened to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. Setting a period picture montage of Vietnam protests and assassination to footage to "All Along the Watchtower" is Boomer Whig history. The crates don't lie: Most people were listening to Andy Williams and Herb Alpert, not whatever San Francisco Blueshammer crap you just bought in a deluxe vinyl reissue.

Until very recently the ghost of easy listening still haunted FM radio. But Train and Savage Garden were just neutered and spayed version of the same adolescent product you could hear on the top 40 station in the late '90s, not an attempt to do something radically different, much less "adult." The good news, though, is that nothing really stands in the way of an easy listening revival. (The only reason Cheek to Cheek didn't work is that Tony Bennett no longer has the pipes and Lady Gaga never will.)

Spend a month alternating between old Angel pressings of Beethoven symphonies and Perry Como. I bet you will never want to hear an overdriven guitar again.

https://theweek.com/articles/827454/strange-death-easy-listening

Someone needs to tell this guy about the Easy Listening revival that happened around twenty-five years ago, it'd blow his mind.

That was more of a hipster thing, though, right? In the 80s, we still had radio stations that played this stuff. Sitcom themes were sung by Johnny Mathis instead of Barenaked Ladies. "Feelings" was a song that everyone knew. Someone who wants that world back is still waiting. Even the adult contemporary chart is now topped by people like Maroon 5 and Post Malone; there's not even a Celine Dion. (Maybe Adele??)

That said, I have a bunch of these records and I still prefer Hendrix (who I don't think was ever sold to me as 'what everyone listened to in the 60s').

That opening is stupid though. Obviously "nobody listened to Hendrix" is hyperbole, which fine I'm not that pedantic, but then saying it's anachronistic to play it over footage of protestors, presumably among the small minority of people who maybe actually did listen to Jimi (unless dude has never seen Woodstock?), makes you seem like a bullshitter in the Frankfurt sense.

Oh yeah, not saying the article is any good. Do non-Nrx people talk about 'Whig history' btw?

I've never heard that phrase.

what is NRX? In my line of work "Whig history" is definitely something people talk about.

Whig history is a standard designation in historiography ime

NRX = dark enlightenment

i.e., neo-reactionary

(I am also today literally working on Whig history, as in, history of the Whigs (well, of one prominent Whig in particularly, and of his Whigness, fwiw))

dark enlightenment? think I will stay away.

I feel like Mordy started a thread on it at some point, but maybe it was just a strand within the alt-right one?

yeah I don't touch that stuff

I also don't get the premise of the crate-digging revelation. Maybe he's not finding a lot of Hendrix records because everyone's hanging onto them(?)

Oh cool, thanks, genuinely didn't know it was a mainstream historical term. Yeah, you're fine staying away from NRx.

yeah I'm not a chart nerd, but this whole list seems like a solid refutation of the claim: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1968-10-19

It's a shame about Land amidst other NRx stuff, because some of his earlier thought is really insightful. He allowed me to feel like I really understood Kant for the first time. The turn toward fascism, while not totally surprising in retrospect, is very disappointing.

https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/The-Whig-Interpretation-of-History-300x460.jpg

"whig interpretation of history" is absolutely a milquetoast idea in the political analysis history, not something invented by or a gateway drug for the nrx

this is the classic text:
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9780/4137/9780413772701.jpg

correct

Yeah, completely believe it, not contesting that at all. Just a testament to my ignorance of political history scholarship that I came across it in the context of NRx guys who wanted to redpill the Whig version of history.

which tbf is what the easy listening guy wants to do