simon reynolds: classic or dud

smart people say the stupidest things:

anyway it occurred to me that the only truly convincing and coherent defence of Hilton would be one that based itself on Bataille's ideas*, a case based entirely on the celebration of her as a figure of pure excess, non-productivity, wastefulness (e.g. the carbon footprint of her UK promo trip, massive entourage including three tour managers for no actual tour, all flying first class). Paris as a solar anus of expenditure-sans-return. Indeed precisely through not having earned the money she spends, she is all the more “sovereign”--sovereignty defined in Bataille's value system by the distance one has from the “servile” and profane realm of production. The sovereign, according to Bataille’s mystical economic theory as outlined in the Accursed Share * * never does but only is. Which is precisely what the Paris-haters complain--"she doesn't do anything!". She does get paid for "work" admittedly--modelling, appearing at parties--but that's as close to publically "just being" as you can get, and the beyond-handsome pay is way out of proportion to the effort so therefore as little like work-work as is imaginable.

say what you will about his words but after meeting him in Seattle I know Simon Reynolds is smart and teh cuetness

i know he's smart -- he's read bataille. i guess it's not simey's problem that bataille was a bit of a douche.

i know he's smart -- he's read bataille

just checking, this is a joke right?

anyway dingdingding simon you almost kinda got it though it took like 103 posts

say what you will about his words but after meeting him in Seattle I know Simon Reynolds is smart and teh cuetness

-- Maria :D, Friday, 29 June 2007 13:41 (26 minutes ago) Link

I can't disagree, especially when he politely listened as I ran my mouth off about the greatness of Shannon.

This thread is going great places, I can feel it.

simon isnt nearly as authoritative in person as he is in print. at least thats how it seemed when i saw him at a rip it up n start again panel debate thing last year. in person hes still a teensy bit patronising but he kinda holds it in (not sure if thats better or worse).

still, great writer.

yes it's a joek. he is pretty smart generally though, just let down by residual attachments to tedious cult studs figureheads like bataille. but no not dingding simon, it's bullshit.

lol people say i look like simey so teh cuteness? i'll say.

xpost

he's adorable! no wonder the ladies love him. i've had my problems with stuff he's written and mostly cuz he IS a smarty. dim bulbs aren't worth the time. paris as solar anus is awesome. i might have to steal that.

ll grimey s

if we're talking cuteness i can think of several (ok one or two) male music journalists who are way cuter (this is admittedly not the most fertile of ground)

matosharvellotherguy.jpg

"he's adorable! no wonder the ladies love him"

i have seen a lot of dodgy music journo porn where simon reynolds head has been transplanted to bodies of other men. theres clearly a huge demand for this sort of stuff. from the ladies of course.

everetttrue.jpg

Reynolds looks a little too much like Mark Lamarr for personal tastes.

i have seen a lot of dodgy music journo porn where simon reynolds head has been transplanted to bodies of other men. theres clearly a huge demand for this sort of stuff. from the ladies of course.

-- titchyschneiderMk2, Friday, June 29, 2007 8:15 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

i hope you're serious here, what the shit?

Where's that NME writers slash page?

Ah, here it is: http://community.livejournal.com/sleepingwithnme/

unfortch i don't recognize that many of the names now :/

in order to preserve my sanity i'm just going to assume that was a lie and not click on that link

http://static.flickr.com/24/57274408_93e8b76061.jpg

that guy's hands are freakish

is that that exeter guy?

xpost

Southall?

zing!

There isn't any slash on that slash page

"i hope you're serious here, what the shit?"

the heads of john harris, alex petridis, simon reynolds and paul morley are the faces deemed most popular in music journo porn.

JOHN HARRIS?

man alive.

journonjournoaction.com

i have no idea if you're joking btw. internet is a weird place.

xpost

not clicking

jesus i hate the internet

It's true. From his homepage:

John Harris was born in 1969, and raised in Cheshire, possibly England's least remarkable county (although, come to think of it, Hertfordshire might put up a convincing challenge). 19 years later, he began writing professionally: though he had just begun his first year at college, the much-missed music weekly Sounds added him to their pool of freelancers, and he wrote his first cover story the following year.

Regrettably, Sounds closed in 1991 - but after a brief spell at Melody Maker, and three months spent studying for an MA in Political Theory, he became a full-time writer at the NME, where he stayed until the summer of 1995. Fortuitously, this represented ideal timing: John was around for the birth of what became known as Britpop, and wrote reams about most of its key players: Suede, Blur, Elastica, Oasis. His April 1994 interview with the Gallagher Brothers, during which Liam and Noel all but came to blows, later achieved legendary status thanks to its release as a single entitled Wibbling Rivalry.

Having served his statutory three years, John left NME to become Features Editor at Q, and then Editor of Select magazine, before deciding to return - two weeks before his 30th birthday - to the life of a freelance writer. Since then, he has written about music for Q, Mojo and Rolling Stone, and contributed articles on a variety of subjects to the UK newspapers The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The Observer.

After 18 months of research and writing, John Harris's acclaimed first book, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair And The Demise Of English Rock, was published by Fourth Estate in May 2003. He is currently reading Marc Resiner's Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, and listening to Love Is Hell Pt 1 by Ryan Adams, for what it's worth.

In April 2007 he signed a contract with the noted gay porn distributor Triga, and will both appear in and direct at least five upcoming DVDs, including "Scallyboy Orgy 6" and "Piss Baracks"

theres blogging fetish categories too with woebot, k punk, the impostume and simon silver dollar (thrown in for grime-blog retro appeal im guessing) too. i dont know how they got everyones heads though. i didnt even know what they look like before.

ok now you've pushed it too far. no-one is getting off on k-punk.

Piss Baracks

blissblog gone a bit quiet?

Dunno whether to buy "Energy Flash". Heard this guy is good on dance music, but I've already read loads of books on it. What's he bringing to the table?

Go to the top of the thread.

But he seems 'nuum'ed out for now. He must be trying to absorb changes in his fave Brit scenes or be just busy raising his young kids.

calculations show
we're pretty much
toast

i will probably buy the updated 'energy flash' why because it look intersting. and i haven't followed the nuum since the last one came out. i do wonder how positive SR feels about how most of the threads he was following -- eg techno -- have played out.

"Abboting" looks pretty desperate.

eh?

New Blissblog policy of posting pix of cartoon penguins is pretty mystifying.

If you look at his recent entries he has come up with the term "Abboting" as the obverse of "Wyatting," named after eighties comedian and hitmaker Russ Abbot.

So if two people do it together, they are Co-Abboting?

*groaaaaaannnnnnn*

New Blissblog policy of posting pix of cartoon penguins is pretty mystifying.

At least it's not For Better or Worse.

lol I did some 'wyatting' a couple of evenings ago.

I can't say I felt bad

"Abboting" has been going on for a number of years. I believe the alternative term for it is "Guilty Pleasures."

Then: lucid, well-regarded music journalist
Now: raving schizophrenic image troll

I like!

Dude e-mailed me to apologise for smacktalking Danny Wilson.

True story.

Through Energy Flash right now, and enjoying it. The way music is described in the book makes you want to listen to it. He slags some people whose records I like, but as he does so with fine writing, it's ok.

It's a long way from "Pip Pyle RIP" that's for sure.

I think I see a pattern forming on his blog now. Baffling smoke signals.

Has he posted any pictures of cuckoos yet?

I think the story is this: every time he sits down to post a new blog, one of his kids climbs up on his knee and says 'Daddy, more backyardigans pictures! Want more backyardigans!'. Being a proud and attentive dad, as well as an afficionado of l'objet détourné he thinks, 'Hmm, why not? Why not indeed? This may lead to fertile new territory for my jaded musical mind, after all'. Even more characteristically, he then begins to ponder on the relationships between kids cartoon characters and no wave band photos(see especially the most recent entry, a highly suggestive compare-and-contrast). Except some ruminations on kids cartoons and the epistemology of rock posturing soon.

all i do is think about the backyardigans! me and simon are on the same page. the music is brilliant.

"he then begins to ponder on the relationships between kids cartoon characters and no wave band photos"

um, the relationship between the backyardigans and that picture of the lounge lizards is evan lurie. who does the music for the backyardigans. and who was in the lounge lizards. unless you knew that. you probably did.

Ah no, I did not know that. Well there you go. The answer is more prosaic than I imagined.

And he's now blogging about it, and about other music again.

Quite a good record, that new Backyardigans album, but really this is wishful thinking beyond rationality.

Reading Energy Flash I'm realizing it has the same kind of odd disjunction that bothered me about Rip It Up. Each chapter functions perfectly on its own, but in order to pull that off there's constant reiteration of previously established facts. It gets tiresome.

Also a nitpick with both books: he covers the UK scenes first and with greater enthusiasm, so when he gets to the US he seems to have run out of steam and just be playing Big Musical Movement Narrative Mad Libs. "(Originator 1) met (Originator 2) in high school, and before long (Originator 3) fell in with the duo and they started farting around with analog synthesizers...."

Doesn't first wave US house/techno/garage precede any UK discussions in Energy Flash? Actually i'm basing this on reading the US version Generation Ecstasy, which maybe was differently structured, but I remember it trying to follow a reasonably chronological order (within limits: a lot of stuff was happening concurrently obv).

I agree that it's pretty clear that the coverage of UK hardcore and jungle is more excited and exciting than the coverage of any US stuff - I suspect a lot of that was cribbed from articles he'd written at the time of the music's emergence, so there's a less scholarly feel to the coverage (in that sense your above criticism would sort of apply - only to the order of writing rather than presentation).

One thing I do remember really liking was the too-brief coverage of US Garage where he talks about the Strictly Rhythm and Nu-Groove records he really likes. I wanted more on that, perhaps because it's an area of music that you don't often see broken down in that romantic-formalist way (usually it's all either deflating discussions of hi-hats and programmed bass or pipecockian evocations of soul).

In general, SR's relative disinterest in house (compared to other dance musics) seems to conflict with his excellent capacity to capture in words what makes a house track (that he likes) really great.

no longer very grimey simeys top 10 of 2008 from fact mag:

01- Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend [XL]
02- Blackout Crew 'Put a Donk On It' [All Around the World]
03- Giggs Walk In Da Park [SN1]
04- Portishead Third [Mercury]
05- The Backyardigans 'Almost Everything is Boinga' [Nick]
06- Crystal Castles 'Courtship Dating' [Last Gang]
07- Gang Gang Dance 'Dust' [Social Registry]
08- Moon Wiring Club Shoes Off and Chairs Away [GAS]
09- Beck 'Gamma Ray' [Interscope]
10- Skull Disco Soundboy's Gravestone… [Skull Disco]

ew

Grimey can drop to that

"09- Beck 'Gamma Ray'"

really?

i haven't heard this.

but five gets you ten he was hating on beck in '93-6 when he didn't totally suck.

05- The Backyardigans 'Almost Everything is Boinga'

What on earth is this?

Nick Jr TV show soundtrack

has reynolds talked about giggs anywhere before? (or indeed any ilm stuff besides clueless marcello bollocks?)

i can understand why he'd latch on to him in terms of it being a big underground uk event (kinda, i guess, i dunno? the freestyle, and whatever old dr dre offcut it was on were totally ubiquitous, moreso than 'bongo jam' or anything, but as a theoretical return of uk hiphop, or giggs as the uk's first indigenous grassroots jeezy figure, or whatever anything else it is that people are supposing it all might mean, i have deep reservations about the lot of it) but... is he actually into it? living in new york, having the tastes that he does - why?? simey really do be grimey huh.

especially since he's pointedly choosing giggs over any funky house or even let's say the trim mixtape (for which one could just as easily transplant weezy for jeezy were you indeed inclined to that particular piss-weak argument.)

i mean, i should also probly make it clear i think giggs is fucking terrible. he sounds just like probly-not-even-playing-football-any-more's shabazz baidoo when he was doing his mc terminator comedy schtick. (which was just him talking like arnie.)(which everyone thought was rubbish, obv.)

01- Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend [XL]
02- Blackout Crew 'Put a Donk On It' [All Around the World]
03- Giggs Walk In Da Park [SN1]
04- Portishead Third [Mercury]
05- The Backyardigans 'Almost Everything is Boinga' [Nick]
06- Crystal Castles 'Courtship Dating' [Last Gang]
07- Gang Gang Dance 'Dust' [Social Registry]
08- Moon Wiring Club Shoes Off and Chairs Away [GAS]
09- Beck 'Gamma Ray' [Interscope]
10- Skull Disco Soundboy's Gravestone… [Skull Disco]

what the fuck is all this bullshit

Baidoo is now at Croydon Athletic xp

i thought this dude was up on juvenile and aaliyah back when all the other rock critics were bangin out to uh beck and portishead

That was before hauntology happened.

Although yeah, for a guy who was riding for Weezy back in 98, this helpfully explains what happens to people when they get a mortgage.

05- The Backyardigans 'Almost Everything is Boinga'

Right about that one.

I can't tell you how confusing this thread became in the 30 seconds before I realised Shabazz Baidoo wasn't actually the gay dude who got kicked out of Big Brother a few years back.

i had that same moment pondering why reynolds would ever have smacktalked danny wilson, dude had a good run at barnsley

oh come off it

guy decides his favorite records of 2008 aren't predominantly hip hop, world continues to revolve, don't be cunts about it

somewhere someone is bitching pointlessly at how much dom likes los campesinos -- "see, this is what happens when people have a student loan"

guy decides his favorite records of 2008 aren't predominantly hip hop, world continues to revolve, don't be cunts about it

― thomp, Monday, December 15, 2008 9:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've got some questions

are any of them hip-hop?

who the fuck is thomp?

what the fuck are these records anyway?

hahaha, blackout crew. kudos simey.

xpost. Giggs is a UK rapper http://www.myspace.com/trapstargiggs

imo a very shit UK rapper.

> are any of them hip-hop?

probably not.

> who the fuck is thomp?

this isn't a clubroom

> what the fuck are these records anyway?

vampire weekend - popular preppy rock band. you may have heard of them.

blackout crew - absolutely ridiculous british rappers explaining that all music sounds better when you put a donk on it; you'd loathe it; he's being uh populist

skull disco - bristol dubstep people, vaguely 'intellectual' end of it

ridiculous british rappers otm, you want to put a donk on that mate

put a thomp on that

05- The Backyardigans 'Almost Everything is Boinga'

ROLLING TODDLERPOP 2009 THREAD

i thought this dude was up on juvenile and aaliyah back when all the other rock critics were bangin out to uh beck and portishead

― ladies and gentlemen, mr. biff_tannen (and what), Monday, December 15, 2008 4:34 PM (6 hours ago)

he spent solid time pre-rave deep into the cure and the smiths etc

hes making my enjoyment of 'put a donk on it' being so fukkin stupid a lot less fun -- like i suspect he actually thinks this shit is better than all american rap

nah im sure he likes it as a critique of british pop or something

hmm well -- i think its still pretty lolzy -- i have to take back the implication that 'donk' is fukkin stupid, i actually think its quite smart

jesus christ you are not just overthinking Put A Donk On It, you are overthinking your own entitlement to consider whether it is smart or stupid

get a grip quicksmart (and put a wicked donk on it!)

b-b-b-b--b-b-b-BBASSLINE!

you are overthinking your own entitlement

Nancy Dell'Olio on Newsnight the other night to thread...

Saw his hip hop book in a bookshop in Camden that sells every book for £2, I bought a book about Trojan Records instead because it had a free CD with it. If only Simey had included a free CD with his book.

There was a free CD with the first run of Energy Flash which was arguably better than the book.

i bought the hip hop book for £2 and haven't looked back, though it does include unedited blog posts about 'college dropout' and divers other non-essential items.

Did any grime artists get GS in to do mixtape shoutouts? Missed opportunity imo.

The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum #1: Hardcore Rave (1992)

http://www.thewire.co.uk/images/issues/issue105/main/TechnicalEcstasy.jpg

xpost - what bookshop is that?

When British youth first encountered the term Acid House they misconstrued it. In Chicago, acid came from ‘acid burn’, slang for ripping off someone’s idea (by sampling it). But in Britain, it was assumed that ‘acid’ meant psychedelics

that "acid burn" thing was written by a clueless nme or mm journalist in '87 who was having his leg pulled by some chi-town producers.

oh great, reynolds tries to make dance music fit in with tired critical theory memes pt. 94.

titchy -- i've seen it in numerous places, including unsworths on euston road.

that's not really a meme, it's just plain wrong.

i have the book actually (the bring the noise one right?), i just wanted to know where you can get books on trojan for 2 quid!

Simon Reynolds is dead.

Dead serious about dance music.

What a lamestain.

I will not be swingin' on the flippity flop with him anytime soon.

that "acid burn" thing was written by a clueless nme or mm journalist in '87 who was having his leg pulled by some chi-town producers.

And his name was Simon Reynolds?

"I'm Paul Harvey."

Reynolds did correct himself on the acid burn wrongness in Energy Flash to be fair.

from his blissout blog

On February 11 I'm going to be in Liverpool to give a talk on the Hardcore Continuum hosted by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), in association with The Wire. There'll be an audio-visual component (expect: rude 'n' cheesy) and the main body of the talk will be followed by an onstage discussion with Mark Fisher (Acting Deputy Editor of The Wire/K-punk) and then a Q/A session with the audience.

Location: FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L14DQ
Date: Wednesday February 11th
Time: 7.00pm to 9-00 pm
Admission: £7.00/£5.00 (members & concessions)
Information: tel. 0151 7074444 or http://www.fact.co.uk

i have the book actually (the bring the noise one right?), i just wanted to know where you can get books on trojan for 2 quid!

Camden High Street!

the main body of the talk will be followed by an onstage discussion with Mark Fisher (Acting Deputy Editor of The Wire/K-punk) and then a Q/A session with the audience.

this is gonna make frost/nixon look like a mutual handjob session.

watch out simon! prepared to be tested!

Liverpool, though.

He likes terrible music.

Yeah I wasn't feeling that last Ruff Sqwad mixtape either.

the Giggs love is baffling

I don't think that's fair, I think he's still got it. Did he not set up all the goals against West Brom the other day?

i just knew someone was gonna make that joke

No you don't understand, Ryan Giggs is the name of my dog.

his debunking of some of the tony wilson / factory myths in WORD this month is a right lol. i half agree with him.

so now he's atacking Factory? IS NOTHING SACRED?!

In this Sunday's Observer, Nick Cohen debunks the myths about Grunwick and Lady Falkender.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1923&Itemid=105

this is getting into jom jones territory tbh.

k-punk undermines himself by dismissing the role of funky and also typically (not so much of him but of "hardcore continuum" boosters generally) completely mischaracterizing it.

Plus a perfect example of my strawman "people will argue that Kode 9 being into funky makes it interesting" complaint.

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

neither is a great way to go about listening to music.

i guess the desire for a 'rupture' comes from 1) some kind of notion that this shit has something to do with revolutionary politics 2) the fetishization of 'rupture', change in 'paradigms' or 'epistemes' in various once-fashionable theorists.

but it sounds more than anything like some old lag demanding a 'new punk', on the misguided assumption that there was an 'old punk' that was as savage and beautiful a rupture as one might read about in books.

The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is. You could make as big a case for nu-school breaks being part of the continuum as you could for bassline house. But no-one will because it's shit/uncool.

and he does really need to get his head out of his ass boosting bassline house while being down on funky. I'm no stan of the latter and hold it in far less estimation than a lot of people on ILM but damn, bassline is exciting but funky is undercooked?

I think Simon himself is a bit more nuanced about the way he talks about the "continuum" - or, rather, more straightforward: the continuum is the audience, and by extension whatever the audience listens to. Which helps to separate the theory from his own personal tastes. Simon's own stuff on funky (which he doesn't like by and large) basically says "this is the current incarnation of the continuum but i don't like it much."

I don't mind the basic model that Mark is using here but I think where he goes off track is in his tendency to box things very quickly and then diagnose a broader theme that relies on that boxing process. Funky isn't going to shock you if you have mentally decided that it starts and ends with "Do You Mind" and therefore refuse to listen to anything else under that tag. If he actually heard Lil' Silva's "Seasons" or Pro2Jay's "Skank Calm Down" or Roska's "Climate Change" or Donaeo's "African Warrior" (all of which sound much more "continuum"-ish than bassline or dubstep) the whole argument would quickly founder.

I agree with Mark when he says that a 1998 techstep or 2-step garage track would have sounded very odd 4 years earlier, but this has more to do with the general speed of sonic advances across the board - you could as easily say that of a 1998 Timbaland track, or a 1995 IDM track, or etc. etc. In its early stages "the continuum" was swept up in this same process - how could it not be? But I don't think that's ever been a central fact of this music.

While it's correct to say that this population of listeners switch up their tastes very quickly, it's also been clear since the emergence of speed garage (i.e. for the last twelve years) that this tendency does not possess the futurist linear narrative progression that mark ascribes to it here. Yes the transformation into 2-step made things more interesting sonically, but this is more about the way in which this music generally tends to absorb music from outside of itself and quickly mutate it, rather than some conscious dedication to futurism. You can hear the same thing going on with funky.

"The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is."

Again, I think the term works only in the more pragmatic/prosaic reynolds sense of describing an audience (east london basically).

tbf, once upon a time reynolds would have been alone among his peers in picking out a random nu-skool breaks banger in the name of ardkore continuuist cheese.

what makes k-punk most intolerable for me, quite frankly, is that he totally lacks flair.

otoh, if the two of them think a new miserly continuum is the best available stick for beating down bullshit like zomby then MARCH ON, MY RHIZOMORPHIC NODES!!!111!

tim's last par makes a lot of sense on just... commonsensical grounds. an air of mystification envelopes the nuum otherwise, especially when it's apparently a matter of (forgive me) spoddy white dudes with degrees peering in enviously at what other people are listening to in east london.

i suppose i mean it isn't music criticism as such. im also a bit suspicious of the futurist-rush element, too -- it's obviously tied up with ulterior, irrelevant stuff, and k-punk is not exactly good at being specific about what makes x more future-y than y.

i also think that the notion of 'scenius' is soooort of... dodgy. brian eno and other culture heros get to be individuals who make decision. but the nuum has a kind of 'course correction' because it has a perfect producer-consumer loop. i suppose it's a matter of personal preference, or in k-puink's head political choice, but he and reynolds are ok with romantic individualists when it suits them. (and why not?)

The irony though is that a lot of the emphasis on the scenius angle in simon and (especially) mark's writing dropped away circa grime, at which point more traditional cult of personality stuff took over. Which is how Burial then became such a pivotal figure for both.

funny that r|t|c invokes zomby at this point because I was just thinking about him in connection to this thread. One issue I have with the way the "hardcore continuum" argument is trotted out is that it increasingly becomes "tell don't show" - producers and artists are praised because they explicitly align themselves with this theory, in a kind of grisly feedback loop that ultimately results in museum pieces like "Where Were You in '92" (not that Zomby necessarily talks about the "hardcore continuum", but there's a sense in which this kind of boomkat-approved revivalism is the easiest way to get critical nods nowadays).

Back circa 1999, reynolds would praise New Horizons tracks that brought in a bleep'n'bass plonky metallic feel, but there was no sense that the value of these tracks was the way they paid tribute to early LFO or whatever, or even that the producer necessarily knew about LFO. It was the unintentionality behind these coincidences that made them interesting and that made the "continuum" an interesting idea - this sense of an ever expanding bank of dancefloor tactics that could be redeployed in new combinations and reiterations.

I may have mentioned this in the funky house thread, but now you get everyone actively ignoring the (increasingly prevalent) LFO influences in funky until the point where Mr Roach releases a rather weak tune actually sampling LFO and suddenly everyone's mind is blown. Which strikes me as the musical equivalent of tuning into the new 90210 because you might see five minutes of Shannon Doherty.

See also: everyone overrating Lil' Silva's funky remix of "Pulse X". I guess critical hardheads need to be hit with blunt objects in order to register anything.

Re scenius: I'll make the tired point again that you don't actually see people writing about Dubaholics and Groove Asylum in the same glowing celebration-of-scenius sense that they write about Remarc.

These people have terrible, terrible taste

perhaps they just have broader taste than you

Our Hannah has broader taste than etc etc

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

This was pretty apparent when he went through that I-like-Girls-Aloud-they-herald-a-new-age-of-robot-people phase.

They might have broader taste than me, and terrible taste

They might have narrower taste than me in some areas, and terrible taste

gonna stick with 'just broader' for now

grow up pinefox

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1949&Itemid=105

^^ cif makeweight dan hancox, explaining the meaning of the term 'procrustean bed' and amusingly attributing it (or so it seems) to lenin.

annoyingly right, though, i guess.

'procrustean bed'

Sounds rather unpleasant

hard lols at thinking Lenin invented the term procrustean bed but basically very otm article.

redux:

if u don't like funky
LEAVIS ALONE
if ur not a badman
LEAVIS ALONE

ha ha.

I've decided that my efforts to get with K-Punk's position usually founder on the following contention (snipped from his website):

"The 'moral' critique that Alex detects in my post - though I'm not really sure that 'moral' is the right word - is aimed at writers, for allowing slackening rates of innovation to become normalised; or what amounts to the same thing, for succumbing to the general condition of reviewing - as opposed to criticism - where records are assessed on blearily defined hedonic criteria alone, part of the background twitter of tepid cheerleading for late capitalism's minimally different commodities."

The broader issue is "what is the point of writing about music". At base Mark's position seems to be that we should write about music in a way that somehow challenges the capitalist status quo (either because the music does or because the writing does).

The narrower issue is "how does one identify innovation".

This raises pretty much the same perspectival issue that I was discussing w/r/t louis in the ILM Albums Poll. Funky (like - let's be honest now - garage and grime) is a genre whose "innovations" can only be discerned close up, when you're exposed to enough of the music to see what it's doing. I think part of Mark's argument above involves an implied insistence on standing back from music for fear of being tainted by the dirty job of mere reviewing - if the innovations don't leap out at you across that distance then they're not real, they're a hedonic mirage. (jungle is in a separate category: I think its obvious futurism at the time is more indicative of a general technology/drugs/culture based futurism that characterised early house/techno/etc. almost across the board from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties)

US writers by and large never acknowledged what was so distinctive about garage or grime ("Timbaland does this better"/"Southern hip hop does this better"). Mark did but I wonder how much of that was due both to access and prior official endorsements given by people like Reynolds (this is perhaps an unfair allegation but let's leave it in for the sake of the argument). Certainly (Dizzee Rascal excepted) he always seemed to talk about the idea of these musics more than the music itself (again perhaps part of his rejection of "reviewing").

Except that he's always been willing to get his hands dirty w/r/t dissecting dubstep (esp. Burial and Kode9), Junior Boys, even wonky, for all his reservations about the last. The common thread being that all these artists tended to be pursuing individual aesthetics with a faintly intellectual (or at least music-history-savvy) agenda. So in form he appears to be tied up in engaging with a "genius" model of music while at the same time deploring the relative depletion of "scenius" criticism.

Perhaps Kode9/Burial/Mark now all have a very similar "critical" approach (obv. Burial only through his actual music and interviews etc.) which involves always seeing the present as something which needs to be redeemed by the past. One of the first articles Hyperdub ran (when it was still a thinkpiece website) was on No-U-Turn's garage sub-label 'Turn-U-On'. Still think that was a great name trick and the Horsepower records they put out were ace. But the overall implication was very much: "you can measure garage's worth by the manner in which techstep is now buying in - i.e. garage becomes interesting insofar as it continues (albeit twists beyond easy recognition) the legacy of techstep". This logic is repeated in Kode9 making "funky" records which redeem funky by drawing them into a dubstep narrative, and of course Mark then ritualistically bigs-up these records as being a potential means by which funky might actually be useful and meaningful. This is the most heavyhanded way to go about endorsing the hardcore continuum: looking for moments when the old music actually doffs its cap to the new.

I would love to see Mark write about honest-to-goodness 2-step garage (rather than Burial, or dubstep, or some cop-out halfway position like Dem 2/El-B/Zed Bias/Steve Gurley aka the "roots of dubstep" godfathers) because I would love to be proven wrong in my suspicion that his distaste for hedonism extended to basically not liking much of the genre in actuality.

I do remember an article he wrote at the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001 hating on a Dreem Teem mix-cd and bigging up So Solid Crew etc. He might have been exaggerating his antipathy towards the former so as to be more obviously on the side of the future, but the mix in question actually had a fairly unimpeachable track selection, not to mention quite a bit of So Solid related material!

To my mind an emphasis on futurism at the expense of hedonism is a really dubious way to think about garage in particular. It cuts out 90% of what the scene was about and basically makes it into the dubstep-forerunner that so many fans of dubstep like to pretend it is.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2028&Itemid=101

tl;dr (xp)

Simon Reynolds' recent bit on the 'nuum (which is the worst name ever) is positively embarrassing. Dismissing the post-rave fringes for not being suitably popular just seems pathetic. "Look history is on my side! See I was right all along!"

I find that if you squint hard enough, history's always on your side.

^^^ OTFM

Simey on the 'nuum: "it's not a theory...it's a fact. it's an objectively existing entity."

Suuure it is.

lol hegel

i was googling guido fawkes's rave past and wondered if grimey had every addressed the fact that not everyone in rave culture was a smiley-faced party-in-the-face-of-fatcher type, and it turns out he did indeed, in 'energy flash'. in fact he discussed guido (aka paul staines) himself. so kudos there.

but among reynolds' many many stans there seems to be a misconception that rave represented a progressive social movement of some kind. some dude at this reynolds talk i went to said jungle was 'the most militant music in history', in a good way. he was one angry bro too.

and a lot of this hauntology/dubstep stuff seemed predicated on same analogy. bit like 60s pirate radio, which robin carmody says was all run by really shady right-wing mofos iiirc.

some dude at this reynolds talk i went to said jungle was 'the most militant music in history', in a good way. he was one angry bro too.

if he was an intense speccy redhead from leeds, then i totally went to univeristy with this dude.

i can't remember. think he might have been indian?

http://www.jazzyworkshop.com/lp_pics6/apache_indian_chok_there.gif

I have always hated the subject of Energy Flash, but the current (UK?) edition's cover art (the one Fopp are selling anyway) must be offensive even to people who like the idea of the book

"but among reynolds' many many stans there seems to be a misconception that rave represented a progressive social movement of some kind."

This reminds me of critical theory at uni - couldn't stand any third-party paper on derrida, but quite liked the guy's own stuff, most of the time anyway. The viewpoint above seems more k-punk/dissensus than reynolds. If I recall correctly Energy Flash seemed more devoted to the notion of rave as intransigent youth culture rather than progressive or rebellious per se.

It would be fair to say that reynolds starts to lose interest a bit when rave can be more easily assimilated with what he calls "the leisure industry". I guess he liked the sense in which early rave culture seemed almost incommensurate with ordinary existence (certainly the notion of weekly raving and heavy drug use combined with full time work exhausts me personally). That's the real thread b/w Energy Flash and Blissed Out, which was kind of unofficially a positive treatise on eighties alt-rock as decadence.

i.e. bohemian as wastrel rather than bohemian as progressive

Pretty sure the fellow NRQ refers to is my friend Bat.

!!

Isn't Bat a marxist social worker now (not that I know him)?

He is SWP, yeah.

Though not a social worker!

I think I can live without hearing this angry bro talking about Heidegger too many more times, but if there is one episode in his history of public interventions that I wouldn't mind witnessing again it is his epically inflamed stand-off with mild child Kate the Saint on Throwing Muses: Experiment vs Pop.

Elvis Costello and Martin Amis: Prophets of Doom
Simon Reynolds, Arena, Summer 1991
The highbrow hysteria of Elvis Costello and Martin Amis

Listening to his new album, Mighty Like A Rose, I had an abrupt, blinding thought: Elvis Costello is the Martin Amis of pop. For people who don't read many books and don't listen to many albums anymore, Amis and Costello are the only ones left who dare to go for the grand, over-arching vision of our time. They take the pulse of the age and diagnose the malaise. Nobody else has the ambition or temerity to take on this task, which is why Amis and Costello are seen, by some, as saving graces and solitary saviours.

Amis has made two stabs at encapsulating the fear and greed of the Eighties in Money and London Fields, with their Dickensian anti-heroes John Self and Keith Talent – repulsive incarnations of the era, pimples on the zeitgeist's backside. Costello, too, has been lunging for the Big Picture’s jugular for over a decade. His albums arc cross-sections of a diseased British body politic, drawing tile dots between personal and political squalor; between the husband's brutal fists and the election-winning war (Armed Forces was originally titled ‘Emotional Fascism’).

Against this backdrop of degraded private and public language, Amis and Costello dramatize themselves as solitary bulwarks against the moronic inferno of popular culture. Amis flinches and shudders at the masturbatory nature of remote-control culture (TV, porn, video games). Costello has produced perennial diatribes against tabloid culture, the ‘chewing gum for the ears’ of conveyor belt pop. On his new album, ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ is a predictably vituperative blast against dance culture: "The dancing was desperate, the music was worse." ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ similarly dramatizes Costello as one of the few who refuse to collaborate with the new regime of "non-stop Disco Tex and the Sexolettes".

For Amis and Costello, one of the reasons the world is in such a state is precisely because no one reads books or listens to albums any more – or at least the kind of books and the kind of albums that tell you what a state the world is in (precisely the kind they write and record). Both mourn the disappearance of substance in a world of superficial slogans and clichés, the withering of attention spans. For Amis, the role of the author has been usurped by soap operas, the gutter press, even style mags. For Costello, the problem is the decline of the songwriter in the face of a pop culture organized around videos, 12-inch remixes, the sampler and the DJ. In their embattled world view, the kind of audience they demand is an endangered species: people who’ve absorbed a lot of literature, who are schooled in the rock canon, and well-versed enough to get the references that riddle the Amis/Costello oeuvre. The prospect of a ‘disliterate’ population (technically literate, but who never bother to read anything), or, in Costello’s case, a rock culture no longer based on the reverential interpretation of lyrics, is terrifying. A future based around TV/ video/12-inch, rather than novels or albums, bodes a nightmare world of emotional illiterates, like John Self in Money, who doesn't have the self-analytical skills to know why he's fucked up, or the teenage girl in ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ who's "crying cos she doesn’t look like a million dollars", but "doesn’t seen to have the attention span" to work out how media and advertising have messed with her mind.

In the Amis/Costello universe, things are always dying: love, language, truth, the planet are all on their last legs. America has a particularly diabolic status; it’s the leading edge of the apocalypse, the original moronic inferno. The replacement of politics by advertising, the castration of rock 'n' roll, a junk culture where porn is the biggest grossing leisure industry, mugging, yuppies, MTV – you name it, the US trailblazes it. Amis and Costello document a Britain slowly succumbing to the crappiest aspects of US mass culture, but without the space and the naivety that is America’s saving grace. In America, the born-to-run reflex is a safety valve for class antagonism: people just move on. In Britain, rage festers and turns to bile. Amis and Costello have a vivid grip on the stuffiness of English culture: Amis is good on the modern British pub, stuck between the fustiness of tradition and the plastic tackiness of the future. Costello could have been a Springsteen, but, growing up in more confined circumstances, became a poet of claustrophobia rather than of wide open spaces.

In their early days, both of them were regarded as bitter and twisted misanthropes. Costello talked of how he only understood two emotions, "revenge and guilt"; Amis was renowned for stories that left a bad taste in the mouth. Both have mellowed with age, but their forte is still the banality of evil and the evil of banality: portraits of bastards, brutes, cheats and crushed inadequates. Revealingly, neither of them can ‘do’ women. Manipulative or manipulated, their female characters are ciphers. Nicola Six, the ‘heroine’ of London Fields, is even compared to a black hole, the ultimate misogynist metaphor.

Ultimately, this misogyny is just a facet of a general misanthrophy. Amis and Costello belong to a peculiarly British strain of satirical imagination, a tradition that includes Evelyn Waugh, the Ealing and Boulting Brothers comedies, and Private Eye. In this world, there are no heroes, only shits and the shat upon – an odious, privileged minority and the loathsome, downtrodden multitude. 'Good' characters aren't admirable, but despicably unworldly and naive, weak and gullible fools like Guy Clinch, the amorous fall-guy in London Fields.

Amis and Costello give this black, bilious brand of satire an apocalyptic, fin de siecle twist. London Fields was at one stage entitled ‘Millennium’; new Costello songs like ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ and ‘Hurry Up Doomsday’ are panoramic panic attacks. Through Amis's paranoid upper-crust eyes, the Portobello Road is transformed into a Hell's Kitchen of lowlife iniquity. Costello's distempered gaze pans across a culture rank with the stench of mendacity, rife with "professional liars" and "perpetual suckers", zombies and bloodsuckers. Like all apocalyptic visions the Amis/Costello line is prone to overstatement, over-ripe imagery, a certain stylistic overkill. And one problem always looms for the professional prophet of doom: how to keep on upping the apocalyptic stakes.

While Mighty Like A Rose suggests Costello is condemned to spurting exquisitely crafted bile in perpetuity, Amis has taken a sideways step with an oblique angle on the Big Picture. His work-in-progress, Time’s Arrow (previewed in Granta 31), borrows its premise from science fiction: the protagonist experiences time running backwards through the eyes of an American doctor called Tod Friendly. This has the salutary effect of making our everyday human procedures and transactions seem eerie and absurd; all power and energy mysteriously originates from the toilet bowl, kind-hearted pimps give money to whores who then squander it on old men, doctors make their patients sick and ambulance men rush victims from their hospital beds and painstakingly insert them into wrecked cars. Although the device has been used before in science fiction and comics, Amis does it well: after reading the Granta excerpt, it takes a while for the uncanny feeling of time running in reverse to wear off.

Abandoning the omniscient eye-view for a baffled and bemused first person is a smart move for Amis, and timely, too. The judgmental gaze is too sneering and know-it-all for these dazed and confused post-modern times. The leading edge in contemporary fiction and music aims to mirror chaos, not offer salvation from it. But this cutting edge can be hard to grasp for those who cling to an old-fashioned idea of art as re-inforcer of values or source of guidance. These people still look for an angry voice of sanity, a Big Figure to tell them what's going on.

Deploring the waning of literacy and the craft of songwriting, but lacking the energy to keep up with the state of the art, such middle-brow types look to Amis and Costello for reassurance: firstly, that the culture is still deteriorating; secondly, that they are on the side of righteousness. In reality, they're part of the problem.

© Simon Reynolds, 1991

Listening to his new album, Mighty Like A Rose, I had an abrupt, blinding thought: Elvis Costello is the Martin Amis of pop. For people who don't read many books and don't listen to many albums anymore, Amis and Costello are the only ones left who dare to go for the grand, over-arching vision of our time.

...and that's as far as I got.

Shame. You missed some tasty nuggets:

For Amis and Costello, one of the reasons the world is in such a state is precisely because no one reads books or listens to albums any more – or at least the kind of books and the kind of albums that tell you what a state the world is in (precisely the kind they write and record).

My local Borders book store outside Washington DC has marked down the paperback US version of Rip It Up to $3.99.

you guys...

amis/costello HOW DID I NOT SEE THE CONNECTION?

what a load of shit.

Simon Reynolds on "music-microcultures" (wtf?):

and another interesting post from Styx, drawing a parallel between writers workshops as mutual inhibition milieux with the way that mnml keeps itself on a leash

it probably works this way in lots of music micro-cultures: a sort of collective self-policing system where subtle administerings of approval and disapproval keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint.... that safety zone where non de trop always teeters on the edge of non de script

especially when that peer-review homeostatic system is then enmeshed with a narrative of music having lost its way, "true people"

detroit techno and deep house true-pathers and pedagogues are an obvious example

backpackerland too

--------------

This concept of "micro-cultures" strikes me as more than a little bit cheesy. Has anybody ever experienced these "administerings of approval and disapproval" that "keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint" in any way shape or form outside the world of *ahem* music criticism? I think when you start lumping people's self-determined preferences and tastes (i.e. i have a penchant for early 80s synth pop, 60 british psych, whatever) with some kind of cultural tag you're essentially stereotyping the way that people consume/create music. As if the genre of "MNML techno" is somehow self-aware! And it prefers early 80s synth pop to 60s british psych!?! This all sounds ass-backwards to me...

Some people recognize that to achieve subtlety and effectiveness in music composition/production takes rare skill & talent. Use the word "music" however loosely you like.

Additionally, there is no single ideal within "MNML techno" or any other genre for that matter. There may be "rules" but every musician carries there own ideals as to what constitutes "good music". And obviously these values are always constantly in flux.

Simon's monolithic view of musicians is so tired and naive.

"a sort of collective self-policing system where subtle administerings of approval and disapproval keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint": Anyone who's participated in a "scene" could come up with dozens, if not hundreds of examples to support this. Examine the hundreds of sub-genres of punk rock and try and work out how they police the borders of their genres.

This would almost make sense if dance music wasn't driven by novelty.

Even the old school underground 12" culture that SR refers to in this article is a lot more diverse and inclusive that he would like to admit. Where exactly are the boarders of Dam Funk, Walter Jones, Floating Points, Theo Parrish, Sun Ra, Burial, and Ace and the Sandman? What happens when somebody throws something else into that pot unexpectedly and it works? Does everybody in this loose grouping of people like exactly the same tracks by the same artists in the same way for the same reasons?

Not all dance music is driven by novelty. Most of it isn't. Perhaps it's easy to think of examples which contradict his presumption, but it's just as easy to come up with examples that fit it. He's not saying it's universal.

"Does everybody in this loose grouping of people like exactly the same tracks by the same artists in the same way for the same reasons?"

I don't think that's what the quote suggests at all. I think it's more of a truism point that if a scene has a basic (albeit loosely) defined set of ideas about what characterises the music within the scene, stuff that falls within the scope defined by those ideas will generally be more successful than stuff that doesn't.

I think the mistake in the quote (or in connection with it) is sr's persistent mischaracterisation of minimal as being fixated on subtlety/restraint/refinement - compare/contrast with pipecock's longstanding complaints that minimal is ignorant of history, to steeped in rave culture and drug culture.

I tend to think of minimal (though this is less clear now than it was, say, two to three years ago; mind you "minimal" as a term is much less prevalent than it was then too) as being something of a covalent accomodation between subtlety/restraint/refinement on one hand and raviness/populism on the other. I can sort of see why such an accomodation makes it the worst of all possible worlds for some people, sacrificing whatever positive values those listeners locate in music at either end of that pole. But I think sr's characterisation is off the mark to the extent that it fails to perceive that act of compromise.

However, if anything the very fact that minimal was aiming for a balancing act makes the process of border-policing that much more interesting - e.g. in 2005-2006 big trance riffs were quite common, but by 2007 this option was considered too naff I think. Whereas you simply don't hear trance riffs in "proper" techno (which is not to say you don't hear other forms of anthemic melodicism).

that quoted bit from SR takes out the link to my blog, i guess he was trying to diss us for not being trendy. i wish him lots of luck with that.

i don't understand why the "self policing" of a "microscene" is a bad thing. i for one am quite glad that the nights i go to don't play hipster electro, dubstep, or any number of other trendy shit genres i have no interest in hearing. i don't believe that it is so tightly constrained as he makes it out to be, otherwise it wouldnt remain interesting to anyone. if anything, the "microgenre" i deal with is definitely growing but without getting wack or adopting nonsensical things from outside of its general purpose in order to be cute or ironic.

"I tend to think of minimal (though this is less clear now than it was, say, two to three years ago; mind you "minimal" as a term is much less prevalent than it was then too) as being something of a covalent accomodation between subtlety/restraint/refinement on one hand and raviness/populism on the other. I can sort of see why such an accomodation makes it the worst of all possible worlds for some people, sacrificing whatever positive values those listeners locate in music at either end of that pole. But I think sr's characterisation is off the mark to the extent that it fails to perceive that act of compromise.

― Tim F"

i don't think that there needs to be any compromise in order for a genre to be popular and good at the same time. i do see your point though, and maybe that is part of my irritation with it. i see too many parallels with the weaknesses of "progressive house" for it to be okay with me, but that is probably what allows it to be all magazine cover and Ibiza.

I should note that I meant "compromise" in the sense of two contradictory impulses mutually agreeing to meet somewhere in the middle, rather than in the more specific sense of letting go of a principled stance in the name of populism.

But I can also see how, for you, in the case of minimal, those two meanings of the term would both apply.

On fragmentation, Arcade Fire, and other things

can we please move past picking apart everything this guy says

^ for real

"Picking apart" = "discussion"

can we please move discussing everything this guy says

oops, move past

i suppose saying it was all of a good standard, theres just too much of it is one way of looking at it. or you could say most of it was just of an okay standard, but thanks to money being less of an issue in making something 'professional' you could seem better than you in fact are.

can we please move discussing everything this guy says

move to Cape Of Good Hope imo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/jan/04/clearing-up-indie-landfill

Interesting article, but I think he never heard The Strokes: "The Strokes had a curious post-techno precision and propulsiveness to their sound, their mathematically plotted, grid-like songs at times resembling Daft Punk if they actually had gone punk rock."

That's a fairly standard line on them actually.

"At the start of the noughties, indie was seen as the rubbish dump of contemporary music. But by the end of the decade, it had produced some of the most impressive sounds"

really?

i would have said the opposite

well that was the subeditor's paraphrase. as usual it may or (more likely) may not be an accurate précis of the article in question.

It's a pretty accurate summary of the article.

I guess it depends on what you think of Micachu and the Shapes.

Who do not sound at all, remotely, in any way shape or form, like grime, whatever sr says.

Moratorium on grime as placeholder for "rather odd sounds that are either electronic or percussive" plz.

I'm guessing it's more a placeholder for 'feisty girl from London who is a bit shouty' more than anything tho

is it reynolds who's saying that micachu is influenced by grime, or is it micachu who says so?

what do you, o critics, do with artists whose explicitly stated influences and "stuff they listen to/consume/dj on a regular basis" don't quite match up with what you think their resultant product sounds like?

x-post - I thought that was dealt with by the "riot grrrl" part of the "riot grrrl meets grime" equation.

karen - I would say "micachu say they listen to/consume/dj this thing and they sound like that thing"

maybe they are consuming and being influenced by different elements of their stated musical elements than you are able to hear

Maybe, in which case you can say so in your piece.

Sure the critic doesn't have a monopoly on interpreting the music at hand, but nor should they ignore the evidence of their ears, else their job would be simply to reprint the press release (of course it's going that way...)

franz ferdinand used to go on about being into crunk and R&B but i could never hear it in their music. not even a bit. even if they had just shouted 'okayyyyy!' on a remix i would have been a bit more impressed. but dont bands always do this? like stone roses going on about all the black music they were into but not really sounding much like those genres (even if they were more heavy/groove based then the competition, which arguably is prob better than sounding explicitly like an influence).

franz ferdinand used to go on about being into crunk and R&B but i could never hear it in their music. not even a bit.

Not sure they ever claimed to be attempting to put it there really

I do think the tendency to conflate statements of "we like x type of music" in the course of an interview (in response to a question, or part of a conversation, remember) and "we are trying to sound like x type of music" is confused far too much

Yes, yes, of course.

Note I am referring to SR's description of Micachu etc. rather than what they themselves say.

What's odd is he specifically commends The Klaxons for not conflating "we like x" with "we must sound exactly like x".

i was gonna say, in an interview i'd mention what the band are into (along with whatever authors, artists etc they like) (if any of this is interesting), in a review who cares what they say. in a longer review there might be room to go into eg the xx effect, whereby they say they're influenced by one thing, don't much sound like it but if you squint you can see where they've taken up certain qualities that that thing values.

calculating how much you'd have to pay me to read that SR article.

i don't think that s.reynolds is attempting to 'ignore the evidence of his ears' but that his ears may be picking up on evidence different than yours - what would be your ear-evidence of 'grime' signifiers, if you have discounted 'rather odd sounds that are either electronic or percussive'? just curious.

"I do think the tendency to conflate statements of "we like x type of music" in the course of an interview (in response to a question, or part of a conversation, remember) and "we are trying to sound like x type of music" is confused far too much"

true enough, but bands often use 'we like x music/genre' as if to signal that x genre/artist is somehow imbued in their own music. kind of like piggybacking off a certain edgier sound/artist even if the influence is sketchy at best (sometimes obv the influence can be pretty subtle, i know, doesnt have to be overt, but a lot of the time its just PR crap.

not read the article yet but i hope SR mentions hadouken!

the xx effect, whereby they say they're influenced by one thing, don't much sound like it but if you squint you can see where they've taken up certain qualities that that thing values.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^because this to me looks quite more common from a music-producer point of view than a lazy journo giving things a casual listen, not hearing what they expect in terms of genre signifiers and dashing off in another direction

but of course i may be biased given that i've only ever been a music-producer and never been a journo lazy and casual-of-ears or otherwise

i don't think that s.reynolds is attempting to 'ignore the evidence of his ears'

that'd be a shocking departure from his usual then

well i dont actually, they were shit, but they did actually mix grime and indie.

Karen I would expect anything that even remotely resembled actual grime sounds like a grime beat maybe. Grime does not equal any electronic or percussive odd sound y'know.

Funnily enough "riot grrrl with production from herbert" conveys the sound of the album much better.

but of course i may be biased given that i've only ever been a music-producer and never been a journo lazy and casual-of-ears or otherwise

Hmm I better cede the point now in the face of this serious cred-move. You might also profit from describing critics as failed musos at this point.

idk im not reading the article but that description of the strokes is reeeeaaaaaaching to a ridic extent.

i'm not going for a cred move, i'm simply stating the fact that people who compose music tend to listen to music in a completely different *manner* than people who do not. i'm not saying that it's better or worse, it's just a structural or compositional way of listening to music which will catch different things

for instance, hearing beats as the one and only sole signifier or a genre as opposed to hearing atmosphere or instrumentation or methods of working

or for example hearing 'shouty girl' as being evidence of being slotted into the 'riot grrrl' genre and nothing else - which is more than enough evidence of your laziness as a critic

there are very many things wrong with that s.reynolds article but spotting a 'grime' influence in micachu simply isn't one of them

bloc party's zephyrus really does sound like grime.

Probably poor form to quote wikipedia here but I seriously didn't know Micachu's pre-Shapes backstory. Maybe it explains SR's grime reference?

Levi performed as a DJ and MC around the UK garage and grime scene in London, and released a mixtape titled Filthy Friends, which was posted on her Myspace page. For Filthy Friends she enlisted the help of friends and musicians of various backgrounds including MCs Man Like Me & Ghostpoet, singer-songwriter Jack Peñate, jazz band Troyka, London pop-band Golden Silvers, producers Kwes and Toddla T. Following its release, Filthy Friends had become sought after on the London club scene.

"there's always been a dance element to our music"

there are very many things wrong with that s.reynolds article but spotting a 'grime' influence in micachu simply isn't one of them

Maybe you could mention a couple specific Micachu tracks and the grime elements you hear in them? Or are you just going to stick with "well if you're not a musician you wouldn't be able to hear it."

I didn't raise riot grrl in connection to micachu, simon r did in his article.

In fact micachu's vocals don't sound that much like riot grrl to me - more like the raincoats - but even less like grime.

I think the nearest track to grime on Jewellery is probably 'Wrong' btw, specifically during the verses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4OhRVn_b80

^ oh yeah, also this

i don't have the micachu album with me so i can't quote chapter and verse, but there are certainly tracks on the album which have that skittering off-beat broken up rhythm that i associate with grime and in the process of googling, if we're allowed to quote wiki as a source, ooh look whose listed as a grime artist right there under m:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grime_artists

Funnily enough "riot grrrl with production from herbert" conveys the sound of the album much better.

and it's interesting that you back off on the riot grrrl comparisons after agreeing so soundly on this ^^^^^^^^^^ because one thing that micachu lacks which is as inherent a genre signifier of 'riot grrrl' as skittering beats are of grime is the political content

All I meant by the above is that simon could simply have used the herbert production angle to convey the necessary impression of cool jagged rhythmic futurism. Anyway if you wish to claim victory on the grounds that i agree that micachu aren't riot grrl then go right ahead.

It seems foolish for me not to cede all points in fact given your foolpoof google-review of grime.

I saw this article yesterday and was hoping to god no one on ILM felt the need to highlight it.

Generally speaking, grime is less beat-focussed than pretty much everything else in the history of UK dance music, so the idea of indie bands using a 'grime beat' as a fashionable signature sound doesn't really work with me.

damn tim how does it feel to have been so thoroughly owned by karen tregaskins music production experience and ability to check wikipedia

if i were you id just quit the music crit game and join the french foreign legion

In truth, the best stuff by these bands had more rhythmic life and surprise in it than the majority of hip-hop or dance music made these past several years.

Hmmmm, Animal Collective...(he cites them, Vampire Weekend and Micachu)

i truly look forward to the day where i am such an accomplished cognoscentus as s.reynolds or tim f because only then apparently will i know how to really listen to music and judge 'genre' because clearly i've been doing it wrong all these years silly me what was i thinking

i truly truly aspire to reach the levels of snark attained on this thread, clearly this is what i need to discuss music properly as i'm apparently doing that wrong as well!

i feel liek thats the final step on the ilx journey: earnest music poster > stando ile person > sub bord mainstay > indecipherable one liners > sock master

― ice cr?m, Thursday, February 26, 2009 4:21 PM

i'm simply stating the fact that people who compose music tend to listen to music in a completely different *manner* than people who do not. i'm not saying that it's better or worse, it's just a structural or compositional way of listening to music which will catch different things

oft repeated but I don't think it's a very accurate account. you'd have to tread v.carefully to flesh this thought out into something useful because most ways you could take it end up very reductive and not very FACT-LIKE.

seems like a dubious move to bring it in to help yr case, anyway.

oft repeated but I don't think it's a very accurate account. you'd have to tread v.carefully to flesh this thought out into something useful because most ways you could take it end up very reductive and not very FACT-LIKE.

i don't understand how this gets reduced into having-to-be-snipey when other facts about type1 listener vs. type2 listener (i.e. the music geeks and completists of ilx vs 'people who just listen to what's on the radio' dichotomy?) don't. is that defensiveness because there are far more music critics on this board compared to music producers? which is the opposite of most boards i've posted on

(one thing i notice is that when one is actually making music most of the time one is so engaged in the process of making it that one doesn't actually bother thinking about genre. one just thinks what-this-sounds-like-in-my-head. so of course i get confused when someone reviews a track i've done and says 'oh this is genre x' when i barely even know what x is - or the converse when you spend ages listening to genre y and decide you want to do a track in genre y and the reviews mention every single other genre in the musical universe apart from genre y)

i know from my own experience of listening to music with other people that i'll often hear things in a different way to others. i used to drive my ex girlfriend crazy because we'd be listening to a piece of music and i'd be going out of my skull at a specific hihat sound she didn't even notice was there. maybe my concepts of 'this piece of music sounds like x' or 'this piece of music sounds like y' are completely skewed because i'm listening to the building blocks and noticing the tracery around the windows while someone else is just looking at the general shape of the building

perhaps i'm listening to micachu and seeing grime-shaped windowsills when tim f listens to the same record and sees that the building is indie-shaped because he isn't interested in even noticing windowsills. and so we both think each other are cloth eared for not seeing what the other hears

i'm not even sure what this argument is about any more but if i'm following some sort of path to ilm regular status then so be it i should get off the internet and go and take a bath or something

I wonder what Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo (who wrote for New York Rocker and others) and other critics who then began putting out their own music think of your theory? Did they start hearing music differently when they switched jobs?

I'm not a musician, just an amateur critic, and I'm uncomfortable with this notion of a composer hearing music differently from how anyone else does. You might just as well say that people with red hair hear music in a different way from those with blond hair tbh

my 2c

ira once told me he always wanted to be a musician, but it seemed too impossible an aim, so he became a music writer to get closer to that ideal somehow.

You can just say you are a musician tho, if its easier.

i still don't know entirely how tim f got from my statement that composers listen to different things in tracks to his "all critics are failed musicians" straw man meme because if anything my statement seemed to imply that what was wrong with critics was that they were not musicians at all - failed or otherwise!

but i did learn from my time of lurking that this is quite a common thing here. that if you merely mention any kind of conventional-wisdom-truism then you'll be saddled with the load of them, whether they are actually related or not

i'd say all different kinds of musicians listen to music all different kinds of ways, like anyone.

its those musicians who are also critics and vice versa i feel sorry for. must be awful never being sure which ears to use.

Micachu and the Shapes are not grime, but to say that they don't "sound at all, remotely, in any way shape or form, like grime" is surely not seeing the forest for the trees. There's common ancestry in there. If we say that Micachu doesn't sound remotely in any way shape or form like grime, then what are we going to say about Elton John?

I'm not a musician, just an amateur critic, and I'm uncomfortable with this notion of a composer hearing music differently from how anyone else does. You might just as well say that people with red hair hear music in a different way from those with blond hair tbh

that's not it at all

it's much more akin to the idea that sheep don't all look alike to a shepherd

You should never let the internet prevent you from taking a bath.

Likening ALL music producers or musicians view of music to a shepherd's job doesn't work as an analogy for me

i don't like bathing very much especially in cold weather

trying to put this into words is difficult as i'm not a writer

see also the architecture analogy above of musicians as architects looking at bricks and mortar and the shape of the molding about windows while a non-architect non-muso would look at the shape of the building and go 'oh it's a house'

seems esp ironic that a discussion abt the politics of riot grrl should devolve into a privileging of 'musicians' - im sure most ppl on ilx have made some kind of music, at some point or other - and of course, plenty of musicians have proved themselves to be dull, unimaginative music critics, when they've tried their hand at it

i always say this is what's wrong with modern music too many sheep and not enough shepherds

BATH TIME NOW

this thread =

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a106/radface__/w2d3xv.gif

I know this isn't strictly the place but can someone please explain to this relative newbie why this board is referred to as ilx rather than ilm (there's a couple of examples above). I realize ilx is the site but most of the time when people say ilx they seem to be talking about the I Love Music board only. thanks.

most of the time when people say ilx they seem to be talking about the I Love Music board only.

er, they're not

Hope this helps

x=variable, placeholder for ilm, ile, etc.

"[gertrude stein] says that it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done."

for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results

even the ilx 09 poll results?

if gertrude stein says it, it must be true.

Getting back to the point in hand anyone seriously claiming Micachu and the Shapes are bridging the gap between riot-grrrl and grime is making that particular bridge do an awful lot of work.

i can't quite manage any sort of opinion on micachu because i can't quite manage to listen to any of her songs all the way through. whatever this is, it SUCKS HARD. if indeed it is related in any way to riot grrl or grime, it does both a huge disservice.

that's a shame as micachu is a lot better than s.reynolds makes her sound

xp lex otm, I heard this album at the weekend it had a total nails down blackboard effect on me.

i'm just gonna do a lazy-journo categorisation thing w/this chick and throw her in with the rest of this era's pestilent Quirky Girls who think wearing bright colours and singing like a toddler are substitutes for talent

honestly it just makes me a bit sad listening to this overhyped and overpushed girl (and the rest of her peers) while seeing ridiculously talented artists like teedra moses having to drum up interest on twitter for her latest self-released venture b/c so many critics and industry people are unable to recognise real talent

people who sing like five-year-olds and try to make a virtue out of inability should step BACK this year and let women like teedra through to do their thing

The idea that an artist like Micachu (who has sold, what, three records?) is crowding out space that would otherwise be taken up by Teedra Moses is ridiculous.

lex sounding oddly rockist right now

not etherial enough to be a quirky girl tbh i think that gender is a red herring and she belongs in the same catchbag as the blenderphonic post-prog of her tourmates like late of the pier, metronomy, connan moccasin etc. tho i don't know the ilx oops sorry ilm hivemind party line on those bands perhaps i can google that too

Also can we have a moratorium on loose-to-the-point-of-meaningless words like "talent" please?

I don't get a whole lot out of her music tbh, but what Micachu has got going for her though is that she just doesn't really sound like anything else much. Totally resists easy categorisation. Also she sings pretty much like she talks as far as I can make out, don't think it's affectation.

says 'oh this is genre x' when i barely even know what x is

fwiw, I never heard of "blenderphonic post-prog" until 20 seconds ago.

that's ok i made it up

The idea that an artist like Micachu (who has sold, what, three records?) is crowding out space that would otherwise be taken up by Teedra Moses is ridiculous.

her and her ilk

don't care if it's rockist to think that people with a modicum - or even a massive fucking amount - of talent should not have languishing careers while people who sing and play instruments like they're in primary school get critically fêted

'...and they can't even play their instruments!!!!' lex you are becoming more rockist by the moment any second now an emerson lake and palmer l.p. will sprout out of your newly burgeoning beard

don't care. this is shaping up to be the year i listen to nothing but sade, anyway

sade being another example of REAL TALENT

don't care if it's rockist to think that people with a modicum - or even a massive fucking amount - of talent should not have languishing careers

Never knew you went to Berklee, Lex.

Hey Lex, Susan Boyle sold a lot more records than Micachu last year, be fair here.

not heard a note of Micachu because STUPID FUCK OFF NAME

But anyway if Teedra Moses' people can't even sell her records the millions of people who already like RnB, that's probably not the fault of the publicists behind some shitty parochial indie act.

Micachu incorporates some early 80s postpunk in her sound and it sometimes works, though I am not clear why Simon thinks she's exempt from "retro" references.

is it supposed to rhyme with "pikachu"

one solution to the dilemma of micachu is to move to the united states where you will never have to ever hear her, ever

thanks to the constitution

boston 1776: benjamin franklin throws tea, and micachu records, into the sea

It's pretty easy not to hear her records in the UK as well.

rly tho

more liek micaWHO

plz say it's pronounced my-CATCH-uh

ok so maybe one solution to the dilemma of micachu is to never read an article by simon reynolds and never go on the internet

I did both of those of things back in 1991. AND LOOK AT THE RESULTS.

ok so maybe one solution to the dilemma of micachu is to never read an article by simon reynolds and never go on the internet

i'm halfway there!

late of the pier, metronomy, connan moccasin etc. tho i don't know the ilx oops sorry ilm hivemind party line on those bands perhaps i can google that too

The ILM hivemind non-UK contingent says they suck cos we've never heard of them and the UK contingent says they suck because they are middle class/English/too young/wear capes/have a stupid name/were praised by the wrong publication/toured with someone unfashionable etc etc. Pretty sad that there's only about three people on this board who have any enthusiasm for more interesting contemporary British pop music.

yes its TRAGIC

capes?

Pretty sad that there's only about three people on this board who have any enthusiasm for more interesting contemporary British pop music

yeah we need more people on funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

King Boy Pato and the Capes.

"people who sing like five-year-olds and try to make a virtue out of inability should step BACK this year and let women like teedra through to do their thing"

erm right, yeah, cos if micahu wasnt about, her fans would lap up someone likd teedra.

teedra would do well to actually have some songs as good as be your girl.

*like

people who sing like five-year-olds and try to make a virtue out of inability

I don't really want to play the you-know-that-Micachu-had-classical-training card on you here, but uh, you know that Micachu had classical training? So it's not really musical inability (unless you mean an inability to make pop music?), it's an aesthetic choice.

Lex is an internet mentalist who doesn't read Simon Reynolds and doesn't listen to Micachu & The Shapes. So of course he's all over the thread where we discuss Simon Reynolds' writings on that band.

So it's not really musical inability (unless you mean an inability to make pop music?), it's an aesthetic choice.

This prompts the question, is it rockist to dislike faux-primitivism?

i am a bit surprised by this article TBH. didn't Simon coin the phrase "record collection rock"? nowadays, indie record collections are that much broader. doesn't mean much has changed on a fundamental level, does it?

i feel like a lot of indie bands seem to get a pass for trying things they are not as good at as the people they are borrowing from. its not a question of talent or the scope of what is being attempted... but something else I cant put into words...

i havent heard micachu's music. cant you still try and make a virtue of inability (which is really the sound of inability) even if you are able?

While maybe it's a discussion worth having on a general level, Micachu doesn't try and make a virtue of inability. That was something which Lex said upthread which was wrong.

For reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvuNIQO1Zrg

ah ok

at work - i will listen at home tonight

thanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4OhRVn_b80

Vocally, the only thing I'd ping her for is the super-strong accent and even that is more a stylistic thing than an actual negative.

The song itself is a melange of minimalist ideas with the idea of DIY punk-pop mixed in with some of the sonic harshness of industrial music, in and of itself not really hateworthy but not super enticing, either.

xp: re: "Golden Phones", that's riffing on similar themes and kind of seems to be riding the "what if Gang of Four was fronted by a woman" idea

yeah, but does it have grime-shaped windowsills?

'Golden Phones' sounds kinda like Stump to me.

Lex would fucking hate Stump.

the 'untalented' point is obv deadwrong: her guitar is out of tune on purpose, dontchaknow! also the band is really tight, fancy compositions, interplay etc. i get why this would sound shitty to a lot of people, but it's not like she was trying to make anything different than what she's playing. all the micachu haters should at least admit that she's very good at making music that you don't like rather than acting like she's some poor child struggling to play gang of four tunes on an out of tune ukelele.

some poor child struggling to play gang of four tunes on an out of tune ukelele.

YSI?

j/k

xpost. The Stump comparison is a decent one. Even more like The Mackenzies or the Dog Faced Hermans at times. But with wacky keyboards and hoover sounds chucked in too.

did i or did i not make it clear that 1) i was not just referring to micachu 2) i was aware that the description was lazy and probably inaccurate because i found her so unlistenable that i couldn't get to the end of any of her songs, and as such really have no interest in whether i describe her accurately?

Apparently you didn't! (just saying, otherwise half of the most recent posts wouldn't have happened)

(oh who am I kidding, of course they would have)

I've heard promising things about Micachu. Am I led to believe I might rather like her output?

You could try clicking either of the two Youtube links posted almost directly above you and find out...

haha i actually scrolled back up to check that i did

but yeah ilx is full off cunts like "everything", whom i have never knowingly interacted with or noticed before, who think they know me and can call me out. lol.

xps

Calling me a cunt is about the most accurate thing you've said on this thread so far.

lex, chill. some people might regard everything as a valuable and knowledgeable poster too. and yeah, passions have run high, but you're taking it too far.

Even more like ... the Dog Faced Hermans at times.

OK I'm sold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNSpLqmY6K0

ok one track in on spotify and i am sold like sex in amsterdam

could we wind up with both of my favourite albums of 2009 written by female artists? take that, my masculonormative taste! :D

Cheers for leaping to my defence LJ. I shouldn't have called Lex an internet mentalist (even though he obviously is one).

there is a place for lex and a place for you, although if he'd not leap in and fuck around badmouthing music that isn't of interest to him that'd be nice. i don't suppose you or i spent our sweet time trashing paris hilton's album. and if we did, we shouldn't have. her movie otoh

anyway this album is utterly awesome and i am a joyful ball of joy. well, as much as i can be while slumped around in pyjamas with no motivation to leave the house or do my MA course.

i was going to do another point-and-laugh-at-lazy-journo moments because these two things re: micachu are the basic any-fule-kno facts that even a casual music fan like myself had gleaned from one plan b interview: 1. micachu is classically trained 2. micachu was/is a grime dj and feel quite smug because i was better informed than two published music journos but i'm not going to do that because it brought up another question which is

how much does ones aforeknowledge affect ones listening to and interpretation of music

that is because i knew these two facts in advance i 1. detected a grime influence and 2. thought there was more depth to her than quirky girlhood

while perhaps tim f and lex didn't because reading press releases before reviewing an album makes you a tool of the man or something

perhaps it's down to expectations having been primed? i've been told to expect grime and classical influences so i look at the windowsills and see them there while our valiant music critics were not so hoodwinked!

SR is right here -

Given the predominance of recycling across the sonic spectrum, even indie's more conservative operatives seem less culpable than they would have in the early noughties (when there was real futuristic action to contrast them unfavorably with). Regardless what you think of the actual result of the process, how different in essence is what the Horrors do (mashing up Goth, shoegaze, post-punk, late-80s neo-psych in the Loop/Spacemen 3, etc) from what post-dubstep operators like Untold, Jam City or Martyn are doing in relation to their own tradition? Just like the Horrors, they're engaged in assembling a distinctive, fresh-enough style by mix-and-matching elements from all across the last couple of decades.

just depends on whether you look at that as a negative or not.

though thats prob better to discuss cut n pasted in the uk funky or dubstep threads.

this is pretty much SRs new favourite line of argument though - that indie is more fulfilling and interesting than other genres at the mo (eg - that vampire weekend review of his a while back).

while perhaps tim f and lex didn't because reading press releases before reviewing an album makes you a tool of the man or something

i think the actual reason is that because neither tim nor i were reviewing the album

(i don't read most press releases though. badly written and uninformative. i have google.)

the world needs more >35-minute albums tbh

they're engaged in assembling a distinctive, fresh-enough style by mix-and-matching elements from all across the last couple of decades.

"Fresh enough" means they're taking elements that he likes. I don't expect musicians to be creating something completely new, so that approach makes some sense although I though he had also discussed the current time period as being an "inbetween" period. This seems more enthusiastic than that.

perhaps it's down to expectations having been primed? i've been told to expect grime and classical influences so i look at the windowsills and see them there while our valiant music critics were not so hoodwinked!

― Karen Tregaskin, Tuesday, January 5, 2010 9:00 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Would strongly advocate quitting while you're ahead at this point btw

xp acoleuthic- jewellery is painfully short, but i usually listen to it twice in a row and that's awesome in a way.

I'm listening to 'Wrong' now and I hear more of a theme from Muffin The Mule influence than a grime influence. The drums could at a stretch be called a grime beat but then you might as well call them a dancehall beat - after all dancehall is where those rhythms come from in the first place. But arguing that Micachu bridges the gap between dancehall and riot-grrl would sound EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS.

oops

i mean <35-minute

i am saying the length is a good thing

sorry for being a muppet

not sure matt'd say that if he'd written Muffin the Mule, if you were some sort of muleherd looking at a windowsill

but mr karen I agree its significant the way ppl are different sensitized and what they notice, but I don't think the producer/critic camps are a very useful/truthful way of analysing those differences. i'm pretty sure i'm not part of some broader ilx touchy critic crew, I just hate the "i'm simply stating a fact" face.

no mention of "Fisher Price" yet? disgusted by all of you

*differently sensitized

Given the predominance of recycling across the sonic spectrum, even indie's more conservative operatives seem less culpable than they would have in the early noughties (when there was real futuristic action to contrast them unfavorably with). Regardless what you think of the actual result of the process, how different in essence is what the Horrors do (mashing up Goth, shoegaze, post-punk, late-80s neo-psych in the Loop/Spacemen 3, etc) from what post-dubstep operators like Untold, Jam City or Martyn are doing in relation to their own tradition? Just like the Horrors, they're engaged in assembling a distinctive, fresh-enough style by mix-and-matching elements from all across the last couple of decades.

just depends on whether you look at that as a negative or not.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Tuesday, January 5, 2010 3:03 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

all dubstep fans i know are also indie fans so

btw heres what noz posted in reaction to sfj/simon r on hip hop:

http://www.formspring.me/noz/q/25153873

http://www.ldm.lt/VPG/nuotraukos_2008/Pirosmani_4_m.jpg

"not sure matt'd say that if he'd written Muffin the Mule, if you were some sort of muleherd looking at a windowsill"

http://www.formspring.me/noz/q/25122672

sad lol of recognition

can't wait til SR learns about crabcore...

no 'casual music fans' read interviews in plan b magazine

Titchy saying that Teedra's only good song is "Be Your Girl" is one of the wrongest things you've said!! It's not even top 5 on her album!

Karen I'm glad I can provide a focal-point for your hatred of critics, but I was well aware that Micachu used to be a "grime DJ" (at least to the extent that you might describe Lady Sovereign's second album as a "grime album", which I guess is less egregious than, say, people calling M.I.A. "grime" or Warp's Grime series of compilations - basically this is the foundation of my gripe here, which was a passing gripe and not really interesting enough to form the basis of a long argument with a new poster trying to earn his stripes: "grime" is one of the most commonly mis-attributed genre terms ever). But Micachu's background has nothing to do with whether it's correct to describe her music as "riot grrl meets grime".

This is because the sound of music isn't mechanically determined by its creators' musical experiences, which in the majority of cases are too multiple and varied for every formative experience to concretely express itself as a musical resemblance in the finished product. The fact that The Beatles made "Eleanor Rigby" does not mean that every Beatles album thereafter sounds like a string quartet, the fact that New Order dabbled in electro at the same time does not make "Age of Consent" or "The Love Vigilantes" into electro.

Basically i cosign Matt's post:

I'm listening to 'Wrong' now and I hear more of a theme from Muffin The Mule influence than a grime influence. The drums could at a stretch be called a grime beat but then you might as well call them a dancehall beat - after all dancehall is where those rhythms come from in the first place. But arguing that Micachu bridges the gap between dancehall and riot-grrl would sound EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS.

Also, er, hello post-punk.

Unless I'm totally off-base about this and The Pop Group were secretly a grime crew all along?

And here I though Simon liked them because he was feeling nostalgic about the Woodentops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hK30XBC3lc&feature=related

Actually it occurs to me that on a purely sonic level I would trace the relationship of Micachu's most electronic tracks (basically the last two tracks on the album) to grime as being that they sound like a more indie version of Lady Sovereign's rip of the dancehall rip of The Cure's "Close To Me".

i LOVE this one. reminds me of my old band The Chronic Masturbators:

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

that's the only one i know by her though. i'd probably like a whole album. i like teedra moses too though. and the woodentops.

Don't be too alarmed scott, I'm pretty sure those things aren't mutually exclusive!

finally listened.

feel the same way about this as i have about most records in the last year or so:
not bad but what is all the fuss about?

Funnily enough "riot grrrl with production from herbert" conveys the sound of the album much better.

so glad those youtubes were posted before I ran out to buy this based on this sentence!

yeah the issue is "which Herbert album am I talking about" - obv not 'Around The House', 'Bodily Functions' or 'Secondhand Sounds'.

Just got here but I guess it's not surprising but Simon seems to have no conception of the fact that not everybody's route to beats/electronic music was the same as his. I mean, he assumes in practically every sentence that every single person is his age, initially liked post-punk rock etc, then converted to dance music/pop etc.

There are other huge "we all did this" sentences, I don't know anyone who thought "oh the white stripes are shit, wait they're okay, OH WAIT THEY'RE AMAZING." In fact that whole thought process sounds a bit weird...why did he think they were shit initially? What changed his mind? Did he not actually listen to the record the first time around?

He always writes well but the conclusions are kind of shonky, if he's going to write from so far inside his own experiences he should personalise the pieces more. "Simon Reynolds likes rock music again" is no wider musical story, in fact the piece reads like an apology/justification for him deciding he likes boring mainstream music.

Or at least..music he knows the vast majority of people who like his writing consider to be boring/mainstream.

Reynolds is moving to Los Angeles. His wife, writer/editor Joy Press, got an editor job with the L.A. Times.

And he just had a article in the L.A. Times....

The Energy Flash blog has had some amazing stuff on it of late.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gu5C4bPIXw&feature=player_embedded#!

already posted that in the "blissed out" thread. i like his "effing hipster" glasses.

10:11 - so tired of austere postpunk vibes, just wanna "wail out" and "grow my hair" y'all.

classic haircuts all around

I recall seeing him on some VH-1 chat segment back in the day, touting (well, maybe not touting so much as recommending) Omni Trio as "one to watch" in the coming year...I don't think too many casual VH-1 viewers rushed out to pick up Music For The Next Millenium forthwith, but what a wonderful world it would be if they had!

http://www.nndb.com/people/340/000022274/poundstone-9930-pic.jpg

Interesting to see that clip, 'cause when I read Reynolds' writing I always picture Andrew Sullivan. And in the video, their speech patterns are somewhat similar.

I think on the video he resembles Patrick Marber playing a weird character on The Day Today.

Do u feel 'saddled with' chillwave?

hi piece in the current issue of the wire about the digital revolution repurposing music is just about the most on point, on the money thing i have read all year. classic all the way.

I'm guessing that's not online? He's been obsessed with the varying definitions of "boogie" on his Blissblog blog.

Is it taster of his new book?

yeah, looked for it, couldn't find it. wire seems to keep the latest issue out of the archives, for good reason, i suppose.

the boogie thing is in reference to the delta swamp rock compilation that defines itself as "boogie rock".

we were talking about the book (extensively!) over here. is the Wire piece an actual extract can anyone say?
Retromania: Pop culture's Addiction to its Own Past. (New Simon Reynolds book).

I've only read half the article and none of the book, but The Wire describes the former as "a sequel to his new book".

the boogie thing is in reference to the delta swamp rock compilation that defines itself as "boogie rock".

― broodje kroket (dog latin), Monday, May 16, 2011

But he then references other uses of the term with videos and more---in disco, etc.

Had no idea he'd moved to LA until I read the hypnagogic pop thing in Frieze. Welcome, Simon!

Archived interview w/ him on Domino Radio pop-up station, recorded earlier this past week:
http://dominorad.io/show/all_things_reconsidered_richard_king_simon_reynolds

x-post-- he's been in LA for about a year

Reynolds is moving to Los Angeles. His wife, writer/editor Joy Press, got an editor job with the L.A. Times.

― curmudgeon, Monday, June 7, 2010

he shouldnt do radio interviews. he comes off too imperious/unimpressed/unbothered. like he thinks hes too smart to field questions from anyone else. then again he comes off like that a lot of the time on his blog, but at least there i dont have to hear his voice.

wow, I don't get that impression at all.

Yeah, kind of strange... I've seen him speak a few times and he's been unusually personable and polite - especially given the field he works in and the amount of bile a lot of people seem to have for him. Likewise when I've spoken to him.

about done with rip it up and start again. good read.

tho i kinda wish he would have just cut out america altogether if he was gonna do such a halfass job on the non-devo/pere ubu stuff

sandwiching B52s into the NYC chapter with liquid liquid and etc was weird enough but having it be the only oral history style chapter just seemed to be an admission of "oh fuck it, here ya go"

the New Pop stuff was fascinating, didn't know much about that, outside of hearing those hits

It's an excellent book, rip it up. Don't know why it was decided to have the whole mutant disco bit done in interview format, but if you get the outtakes/bsides book Totally Wired, it has a prose chapter devoted to that stuff.

The US published version of Rip It Up is shorter than the Brit published version. Someone wrote on amazon.com:

Three chapters have been cut in their entirety and portions of other chapters have been cut or shortened. In total, the US version of the book is nearly 200 pages shorter.

yeah i'm reading the Brit one i think? not 100% but i thought that what my friend said...it has an SST chapter...

i dunno, anyway i've really loved the book.

yeah iirc he talks about Huskers, Black Flag and Meat Puppets and... that's it. Seems more or less arbitrary, I get the impression he doesn't really know anything about hardcore (related: some 90s piece in Bring The Noise which is like a semi-jokey faceoff between oi and gangsta rap, hamstrung by the fact he clearly has no actual interest in the former)

yeah i bothered me that he basically acts as if hardcore was just the american version of Oi, a retrenchment to rock tradition after a period of experimentation, when it's pretty clear if you have ears that hardcore didn't really sound like any other rock music that had ever been made, there are so many classic hardcore songwriting tropes that feel unique to the genre...and hardcore was actually moving towards something too, it can be felt in tons of stuff that came later like thrash etc.

oi sounds like folk songs play by slade

i mean i get the comparison to some degree...the macho stuff, the assholism, violence, closemindedness of the audience (or parts of it)

But you're right re the differences.

The American and Brit versions of the book have different covers.

He does veto hardcore from his agenda throughout the book, citing other people's work on the topic

my cover is bright yellow with pink large kinda "cut up" font type stuff

Pretty sure thats the U.S. version, iirc.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=rip+it+up+and+start+again&x=3&y=17

UK version is yellow with pink letters

while US version has pink with photo

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_44?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=rip+it+up+and+start+again+postpunk+1978-1984&sprefix=rip+it+up+and+start+again+postpunk+1978-1984

mine is uk version!

in any case i should be so nitpicky overall it's been a great read and i've learned a lot!

I'm not too bothered to re-read Rip it Up, but it was hugely formative for my music taste when I read it at 15 or 16. It got me into dance music in a roundabout way: Remain in Light -> Ze Records -> disco etc.

my version had twenty or so pages switched out with some cowboy book about Reagan or something. LOL publisher fail

This and Our Band Could Be Your Life kind of invented college for me.

my version had twenty or so pages switched out with some cowboy book about Reagan or something. LOL publisher fail

No, that was just the chapter on the Mekons.

loll

hahahahahahahaha

The US published version of Rip It Up is shorter than the Brit published version. Someone wrote on amazon.com:

Three chapters have been cut in their entirety and portions of other chapters have been cut or shortened. In total, the US version of the book is nearly 200 pages shorter.

― curmudgeon, Monday, June 13, 2011 11:09 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

ARGH fuck you publishers

Wow what a joke.

There's at least a chapter missing from the us version of Energy Flash (generation ecstasy), right?

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

Kurt Anderson on retro culture. I haven't read this yet. Wonder if he refers to Reynolds book?

IIRC, no.

That article was rough. Pointless musing and avoiding any question of technology and its relationship to art. Ugh. (not to mention writing something like this and not mentioning Retromania seems a little goofy (though I might be playing up Retromania's impact)).

New book

http://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/

a book about glam rock and art pop - 1970s mostly - but also tracking its echoes and reflections through the 80s, 90s and into the 21st Century - footnotes to follow here soon

Is there any differences between Generation Ecstasy and the later re-prints of Energy Flash other than a few less extra chapters at the end? My local library's only got Generation Ecstasy in stock right now

Seems to be some pretty exhaustive info on the Energy Flash blog

http://energyflashinfohype.blogspot.co.uk/

My Twitter feed is nothing but 'conceptronica' jokes

I don't get why "conceptronica" has blown up as a meme, it's clearly just a placeholder portmanteau for a very easy-to-define approach

Have missed most of the "live" broadcast but...

https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/simon-reynolds-9th-april-2024

Music journalist and writer Simon Reynolds shares an hour of music featured in his first book in eight years, "Futuromania", which explores the vanguardist electronic music which prefigured the pop of the future

LIVE TRACKLIST

14:54
HOLLY HERNDON
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

14:50
JAMES BLAKE
If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

14:47
CHIEF KEEF
On the Corner

...

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2024/04/futuromania-out-today.html

New book Futuromania is out today in the UK

getting delivered tomorrow. i'm excited but i can't stop thinking from the premise it feels sorta lowkey for a sr book? or maybe i just want it to start earlier than the 70s. the blurb:

"Starting with an extraordinary chapter on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, taking in illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk, and arguing for Auto-Tune as the defining sound of 21st century pop, Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now."

ofc i expect to really get into it anyway. and his autotune piece for pitchfork from a few years back already feels classic.

A lot of it is remixes or director’s cuts of previously published articles, which explains the more contemporary focus. The ‘reacting in real time’ aspect was important this time apparently. There is an all new chapter at the end though that aims to tie the threads together and provide a counterpoint to Retromania.