Sasha Frere-Jones: Really?????

xpost!

"my dad" isn't a random "I am young!" stand-in for "age" there, it's my actual dad the english professor who thinks free verse has ruined poetry

i put xpost in there to clarify i wasn't responding to your post above it, you know

i could have just has easily linked to the "fuck this guy" post

I think the bigger issue is that SASHA keeps on race-coding this shit in unproductive ways. "Rap isn't as good" is not the same thing as "rap isn't as BLACK." Well, as much as this paragraph could actually mean that (it's insinuated but not stated):

"The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs."

But I do think there's a slight misreading of Sasha's thesis here, which seems to be more this:

"hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms."

I mean, I don't think this is 100% untrue, there's an impulse or something there, but he doesn't explore it in a very interesting or thoughtful way, starting with the second sentence. I guess he thinks "organic audience" means something self-evident that I'm not understanding (is this those STREETS that teh rappers are always going on about??), or why absorbing new styles is "horizontal" while finding a niche audience is "vertical," or why these things seem mutually exclusive, or or or...

also john, if your goal on sfj-hate threads is to have us respond productively, calling out the inconsistencies of haters is probably less effective in doing so than if you read the piece yourself and productively engaged with it - admitted flaws, pointed out what you liked, etc.

anthony you could always just say "john I refuse to let you post to this thread w/o being a total dick to you," it'd save you some effort

(I mean the real issue, I suspect, is that words like "avant-garde" and "time-keeper" are more useless than usual in pop at the moment; it's not something that's changed in hip-hop but something that's changed in, e.g., how pop music quantified, sold, etc. but then he'd be writing a boring "music is fragmenting!" think piece that not as many people would link to.)

wtg j0hn for shifting the power dynamics by using "undergrad" as an insult

anthony you could always just say "john I refuse to let you post to this thread w/o being a total dick to you," it'd save you some effort

not sure if it was my reaffirmation of the xpost or the acknowledgment that you don't actually talk much about the pieces themselves so much as the nature of people's complaints on these threads that brought this out, but it wasn't my intent to cross a line.

I think we're giving undergrads too much credit here, btw. The pejorative "grad student" would probably be better. xpost

i used to think sasha was a bright guy. i don't know anymore. or maybe he's still a bright guy, but its not coming through in pieces like this last one. hoo boy. i swear i read stuff like that and all i hear is: "i liked the rap when it went like this. now it goes like this. and i don't like it." in dana carvey's old man character voice.

― scott seward, Saturday, October 24, 2009 11:50 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

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"The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs."

to my non-musician ears, racial politics aside, this is a crock. hip-hop's blues-based swing????

(That Sasha piece is an A- by undergrad standards! Has a thesis and well-stated/organized evidence, but evidence doesn't seem to fully support thesis. It would just get a lot of comments in the margins and like a 2-page caveat response at the end talking about why he has to be careful on future papers.)

j0hn i'm sorry that we're dumping on a guy you know IRL to some degree, but honestly i had a lot of respect for him as a critic 5-10 years ago that has been substantially diminished mainly by the trifecta of the "DJ Shadow and minstrelsy" piece, the "Arcade Fire and miscegenation" piece, and now this one. if you'd like to put up a rigorous defense of any of those articles and why they're well thought out arguments and not at all easy to poke holes in, go for it, but if you're willing admit that they're extremely problematic maybe you should let those of us who don't know him have at it.

wtg j0hn for shifting the power dynamics by using "undergrad" as an insult

I'm glad somebody appreciates my work

(some dude: yeah no I mean seriously I'm not actually that into what he's saying, it's the weird timbre of the response that's interesting to me, and this is kind of always the case with "stuff like this" i.e. critics in high positions making broad claims - note that da croupier's xgau singles poll isn't "best" but "which is the WORST" - there's this to-me-really-odd kill-the-king impulse that I'd assume most people had grown out of. it's impossible to get anybody to accept that I'm interested in this as a music fan & reader of these pieces rather than as the recipient of a lovely press-kit-pullable new yorker article five years ago, but that's actually not where I'm coming from, but try telling that to da croupier, who has faithfully come at me every time I've joined an sfj clusterfuck thread since 2005.)

i think the problem with the internet is its easy to read a friar's roast as a teabagger's party. and i made that poll the worst because i was more curious what people's least favorite xgau quirk was than what people's most favorite old-school hip-hop joint was.

and since you went there, i'll just note that you were the one that "productively engaged" me on the subject back in 2005. my request for full disclosure was pretty clearly a defensive gesture if you go back.

one of the things i like about the kid sister album is how much euro-ness there is on it. it works perfectly next to the southern/u.s./chicago juke beats and sounds on it. (i'd love to play sasha some of my favorite nu-beat-derived hip-house and technorap tracks from the 80's. american stuff soaked in german and belgian flavors. guess he's not a big miami bass fan. there was some straight-up teutonic shit coming out of florida way back when. i mean was electro blues-based??? so weird. ain't nothing more american or funky or hip hop than european robots with bad accents.)

sorry to belabor a point but here's a helpful link to jess noting "john and mr. que's weird pile-up" on my ass for hating on the miscegenation piece. you're welcome, ilx drama fans.

I don't know if calling it a kill-the-king impulse is right -- people who care about music can be pretty savage when a great or important band makes a bad record, and even though among a lot of people on this board there might be issues of decorum or professional courtesy at stake, at its root I don't see why people who care about music criticism shouldn't be just as rough when a great or important critic writes a bad piece or takes a questionable position.

i didn't even think it was that rough! worst is just in all-caps to make clear i'm asking for "i'll be missing you" vs. "kim" than "that's the joint" vs. "rock box."

to-me-really-odd kill-the-king impulse

are you really shocked that when a particular critic gets a really well-regarded forum with a wide audience to write for and proceeds to make weird, lazy, and/or intellectually dishonest points people get pretty frustrated?

no, but you know me, kind of permanently naive, I am really shocked that the weapons chosen to combat these weird, lazy and/or intellectually dishonest points are themselves quite weird, lazy and/or intellectually dishonest

resisting urge to faithfully come at you

lol noted

The thing that strikes me odd about the Sasha Frere-Jones piece is he starts off with this seemingly well-thought out thesis about how he has seen the end and he will tell us of the mind fires that led him to this belief, but he ends up somewhere so muddled talking about Freddie Gibbs (who is righteous, so I'm a lot more willing to let SFJ ride this train than I would normally be), basically saying, in short, "Hip-hop is dead because this Jay-Z record is okay, oh but there's this Raekwon record, and this Freddie Gibbs dude, he is the real." Or, to appropriate John: Why The New Yorker Sometimes Reads Like an Undergrad's Blog.

xp i dunno i mean it just feels like we all agree--like other than that one thing the das racist guy said i'm not sure what you are objecting to

btw i just listened to that freddie gibbs mixtape and i'd say it's the slightest bit boring

at this point I'm just killing time until the saw vi showing tbh

anthony should i not go to this movie btw

i just can't believe that there are already six saw movies.

i'm not anthony but i don't like movies like that so i say no

yeah but in this one evidently the villains are HMO dudes

also I only & exclusively like horror movies & dislike all the other movies so when there's one in the theaters I feel like I need to support the scene

the saw movies are creating a view askew universe for horror geeks w/poor taste

up until a couple years ago i never even noticed violence in movies and now i really hate it

i'm busy selling tapes. thus, i have all the time in the world. dude in my store is buying kool g rap, pharcyde, fight, omen, and sacrifice cassettes. sacrifice and kool g rap combo kinda awesome in my book.

i checked out of the series half-way through Saw IV when I learned I was supposed to remember the first and last names of characters from previous sequels. Would like to think they'd just drop the byzantine plot by now for torture traps nothing but torture traps but I can't say.

i did enjoy paranormal activity if you haven't seen that yet

i've only seen the first saw movie and i'm a huge horror fan. i'd better catch up. i liked the first one.

Would like to think they'd just drop the byzantine plot by now for torture traps nothing but torture traps but I can't say.

Apparently they are still mining backstory. Which, how much can there be.

I only saw lol SAW the first one, didn't really see a need to see any sequels before now but the ad campaign for the new one is getting to me. btw I spent most of this week listening to 4,5,6 that there is a solid album imo

dude in my store also bought vhs copies of jailbait babysitter and young einstein.

Was it Sasha Frere-Jones?

he might have been in disguise.

also bummed that despite making millions upon millions they've hired COSTAS MANDYLOR as the new jigsaw.

puttin on shoes and socks now but should I know who costas mandaylor is? you gotta admit as screen names go it's got a lot to recommend it

his main claim to fame was playing the cute bailiff on picket fences. kind of guy who does 5-week stints on CW dramas, should not be playing the chosen heir of a nefariously brutal vigilante.

at least if Saw VI is playing in 1,000s of screens. He'd be fine for the SyFy original movie, maybe