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

burn it

le guin novel that originally came with a tape of original new age folk in a made-up language is really good though if you ever see it.

it even says A ROCK & ROLL MYSTERY on the cover. worst genre ever.

for people who hate music and reading

anywayyyyyyy......

http://www.npr.org/blogs/bestmusic2012/2012/12/26/168097407/what-happened-to-music-writing-this-year

I always wanted to read one of those lord iffy boatrace books by bruce dickenson of iron maiden

and my immediate response to maura's thing is: what happened this year? what about all those other years?

i'd gladly write an overview of "all those other years" if asked

see, i was gonna point that out in the spirit of equal time: musicians often write horrible novels.

x-post

Can that genre be worse than sudoku/crossword mysteries? Probably.

rock 'n' roll mystery = Inherent Vice, more or less

i'm just cranky when it comes to music writing. and it makes me sad that this thread and threads like them are bumped waaaaaaaay more than any good music writing threads on here.

wait, cat mysteries might be the worst.

Do you have a lord iffy boatrace book skot? If so I would buy it

i'm just cranky when it comes to music writing. and it makes me sad that this thread and threads like them are bumped waaaaaaaay more than any good music writing threads on here.

i bumped the thread for great music writing just a few hours ago and yet everyone INCLUDING YOU, SCOTT!, prefers to be in here

but i blame myself too cuz when i read a horrible rockcrit thing what do i do first? link to it here, probably. which is fun for a minute and might have been instructive at some point but you could kinda do it every day of the week if you wanted to.

(i really liked that article maura)

sorry lex! i'll check it out. just got home from work. been shoveling snow.

(thank you)

has anyone read any mick farren books? sci-fi stuff, right? maybe those are good. kinky friedman, i read one of his once. not bad.

i bumped the thread for great music writing just a few hours ago and yet everyone INCLUDING YOU, SCOTT!, prefers to be in here

I just read the beginning of that piece because I was surprised it wasn't Maura's NPR piece and I really, really hated it

Maura's NPR piece is super rad

has anyone read any mick farren books? sci-fi stuff, right? maybe those are good. kinky friedman, i read one of his once. not bad.

I read one of Mick Farren's vampire books, it was okay

the only good music writing is on ilm

god help us all

Really excellent piece by Maura.

The only thing i wished for was a mention of the rise of the kind of outrageously inept listicle we keep coming back to on this thread. EG the Village Voice jazz thing with Brubeck his insane rhythms fly at u face. It functions the same way as the contrarian/provocative listicle (ppl will click to get pissed off cuz ppl sorta like getting pissed off) except the provocation here is the abysmal quality of the writing itself. There's no way the VV didn't know what was gonna happen with that jazz thing and they sure got their clicks out of it.

it seemed like a signal moment to me

there were a whole bunch of things in this month's wire that were pretty awful

visit from the goon squad, though, enh

Moorcock was great at putting pop music in his sci-fi

http://perpetua.tumblr.com/post/38971850406/critical-discoursin-in-the-social-media-era

Don't know if this is too short to be considered, but it is pretty laughable and lacking self-awareness.

well consider the source

I always wanted to read a moorcock book because of his blue oyster cult association

Inherent Vice rules so hard

his book starring Hawkwind is better in theory than in practice, unfortunately (I blame his cowriter tbh)

http://www.book-owski.com/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/product_images/1287417239-thetimeofthehawklords.jpg

nice

the bits where Hawkwind is rockin-to-save-the-universe are pretty entertaining tbh, it's the rest of the book (plot, characterization, prose, etc.) that fails miserably

Rankin always seemed to be applying to be editor of Mojo between the lines.

Peter Robinson had one mystery where the victim was a writer for Mojo.

I guess there are also The CosbyCosloy Mysteries.

Maura that was a great and depressing article

I always wanted to read one of those lord iffy boatrace books by bruce dickenson of iron maiden

clumsy Tom Sharpe pastiche with extra scatology iirc

I can get behind Christopher Brookmyre having a 40-something Glaswegian grandmother accidentally wandering into a Twilight Singers gig at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut and through the power of Dulli realising her domestic life is terrible and she should become a two-fisted international merc

lol dulli is powerful, but i'm not sure it's in quite that way

clumsy Tom Sharpe pastiche with extra scatology iirc

so recommended?

I didn't read A Visit From The Goon Squad as a "rock novel", certainly not in the usual (horrible) sense. The outsider guy tips into a moment of mass acclaim, oneness for the goodness' sake, but once in, it will all gradually be different, he will be digested in history and memories like everything else, whether or not he actually cares to try to cultivate his peak-niche as a bum Dylan or super-Jandek or whatever. He and his audience shall be released for a New York minute and some afterglow, but other characters' manipulations are crucial. It's hardly a purist thing, from the view we're offered.

time for maura to write a novel imo

I agree!

Mick Farren's The Texts of Festival was a satire: like when the Shogun banished Westerners, and then centuries later, they came back and discovered the crypto-Christians, who had secretly practiced the rituals of their converted ancestors, but no longer knew what the words meant. In Farren's novel, the ancient Rock Gods are worshiped, especially via the legacy of the Woodstock Album (memorized, handed down): the Fish Cheer is a sacred mystery, etc. Seemed good at the time, but overall he was better as a musician.

Maybe the reason people spend more time on the bad music writing thread than the good one is that it is easier to agree on what is bad, kind of an "I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers" kind of thing.

also thought the article maura linked to about gawker and linkbait was good.

OK, just clicked through to the observer article she linked, thanks.

i would buy a maura novel