Simon Reynolds is a gobshite

is "bass line" a style of music too?

(didn't read the article, but i generally like simon's writing btw)

I buy maybe an argument that certain drugs appeal more in certain places and times, and maybe coincide nicely with certain musical trends in those places. But this "X drug makes depressing sounding music because X makes you depressed," stuff is nonsense. People don't immediately start loving reggae the moment they smoke a joint. Let alone start writing it.

lolneurofunk.jpg

I am pretty sure I have never heard any wonky but it has been given attention so disproportionate to amount of actually existing music that it's bound to be hated by many before anyone ever hears any of it.

it's more like prelash these days, not backlash

I buy maybe an argument that certain drugs appeal more in certain places and times, and maybe coincide nicely with certain musical trends in those places. But this "X drug makes depressing sounding music because X makes you depressed," stuff is nonsense. People don't immediately start loving reggae the moment they smoke a joint. Let alone start writing it.

― Mordy, Thursday, 5 March 2009 16:12 (8 minutes ago)

i think the connection in some cases is a lot stronger than that, but i agree with this k piece it's way spurious. people on k are always going to be in the minority in any crowd (and that's a good ting)

lash-foward

i dont know, go on a night out in manchester and leeds and the place is literally dripping with the stuff

this has nothing to do with what hes on about though

wonky= post hyperdub dubstep/idm hiphop crossover

k is really popular now, definitely. no doubt on this, it's prob as popular as ecstasy amongst people in their go out every week all weekend phase.

well at least amongst my friends

wow i had no idea. can you dance much on it?

depends how much you do, theres quite a run in. once you do its a great way to kind of 'lose yourself' on the dancefloor ie trying to ignore the shoreditch funsters around you while prosumer is on

that 'tuck in' quote is almost too good to be true.

Later, of course, many of these young intellectuals would literally destroy their minds by trying to write about the then popular form of disco music known as "rave". Sadly, despite (or perhaps because of) their cleverness, they never grasped that there really is nothing clever to say about music that is designed to be twitched to by people who've taken a drug that makes them want to twitch to music that's been designed to be twitched to by people on that drug.

full article : here

swells having a dig at simon here i wonder ?

He said "young"

no way am i reading anything with that url

"leaving them unfit for anything except working as feature writers for Mojo and Word."

lawl

too wells; didn't read

I think Simon Reynolds may have written the world blurb I have ever read, from the back cover of Owen Hatherley's book on modernist housing estates:

With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism's utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world. --Simon Reynolds, Author of Rip It Up and Start Again - Postpunk 1978-84

"Alarming erudition"? "Verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation"?

i'm so glad you typed up the full thing, i could only remember a couple of phrases here and there! it all makes me wonder whether he knows what any words actually mean

but yeah as i said at the time: only an idiot is ever alarmed by erudition. use another word!

I actually really want to read this book but that's by the bye.

One of the ways ILX has ruined me is that I will always associate the word "svelte" with Jordan Sargent.

ha, why? it's a good word to be associated with, as words go.

"Verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation" - I actually think this is quite a funny image, but it does make Owen H sound like a borderline necro.

xp: Because he described Lil Wayne as such when he was new and ended up on the recieving end of one of the greatest zings in ILX history.

dylannn wrote this on thread MTV News' "Top 10 Hottest MCs in the Game" on board I Love Music on Aug 1, 2007

dudes with gay porn names talkin about lil wayne being "svelte" on a fucking mixtape track are schooling me on the genius of bun b.

the book does sound kind of interesting

i wonder if he was thinking of that one silver jews song

why because it look intersting

"the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism."

riiiiight. suffering from real neglect, that 20th-century modernism.

when he says "prematurely closed case" he doesn't mean suffering from neglect but that everyone's already made up their mind on what 20th century modernism means, what it was for, and how we're going to treat it in the future.

Oddly enough the book is hampered by its aesthetics - it looks so cheaply made, the photographs are horribly rendered, and it has that terrible The Wire habit of capitalising things that don't need capitalising, which is so disruptive to the eye. You do not get the sense that anyone other than Hatherley took the time to proof-read or sub-edit it, which is really weird given how interesting it is and how much a labour of love the whole Zero enterprise seems to be. Also I'd really appreciate an index, which is another thing that I know takes time and effort and galley proofs (i have done one, it was an utter pain) but, um, I really want to know if Hatherley talks about the failures of Fourierist socialism to deal with Fourier's attitudes to sex because I totally think they would be a relevant precedent in chapter three, "revolutionary orgasm problems", and I feel an index would help w/ this given the density of the man's prose.

i mean, here is a funny thing: there is a certain crapness about Zero books which I guess is a sort of ideological shorthand - "this is shoddily made because it stems from the purest motives, you can tell it stems from the purest motives because it's shoddily made". Like fanzines and anarchist pamphlets having to be cut-and-paste even long after the widespread adoption of the laser printer. Unfortunately this is exactly the worst kind of book for this reverse-aesthetic nonsense - or maybe the best! - because it makes you think about, e.g., the "shoddy, prole-stacking Ronan Point tower block" (p12!) and a whole history of people blaming the failure of an idea on the idea itself, rather than looking to the half-hearted execution of that idea.

You'll be pleased to know that "brutalist continuum" is a Googlewhack.

when he says "prematurely closed case" he doesn't mean suffering from neglect but that everyone's already made up their mind on what 20th century modernism means, what it was for, and how we're going to treat it in the future.

well, yes. with the proviso that there was no such thing as a unitary capitalized Modernism: everyone these days seems to be agreed that it was politically progressive, 'radically democratic', A Good Thing, etc. some of it was dedicated to changing the world. but to making it a better place? reynolds is welcome to a world envisaged by wyndham lewis, but include me out.

obviously part of modernism (constructivism) sort of scans as 'left' or utopian. but only in a very 1920s, top-down way. but brecht is a fairly shining example of why one should really back the fuck away from the idea that pre-war modernism, even when left-wing, is something whose passing we should regret.

(i'm mildly creeped out by the way 'utopian' has come to be seen as a A Good Thing in itself. most utopias, free-market or bolshevik (which is hatherley's) are awful.)

er anyway that Reynolds quote is still pretty wack - it makes his whole avuncular patronage of Hatherley et al seem super creepy, I recognise that there is sexual content in the book but the appropriate response to that is not thigh-rubbing "slim and shapely"-style conventional lasciviisms, and by the way "rediscovering... the sexiness of severity" is such a tediously conventional thing, i mean if the visibility of porn aesthetics have taught us anything it is that people find severity sexy, it is possibly the worst way to represent what is quite a clear discussion of the problems of socialism and sexuality.

(xpost)

i love how the word 'continuum' has just ceased to have any meaning for me.

E of C is right - the book is really self-defeatingly sub-Lulu-self-publishing production-wise. Ironically, some of the prose, especially in the conclusion, feels like rambling first draft blog entry too - could have done with a bit more refinement.

Funnily enought, the company behind Zero Books is a wacky new-age crystals'n'meditation outfit. But I do think the imprint is a Good Thing (despite having a few issues with the whole k-Punk archipelago). I'm looking forward to N Power's One-Dimensional Woman.

Owen has a great piece about austerity chic in the new RadPhil mag, incidentally:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=28469

all utopias are awful! that is why we can be reassured by the fact that they do not exist, it is in the name, q.e.d..
(also OH is pretty clear on the existence of Right modernism - i think there's a bit where he talks about Wyndham Lewis being superbly snotty about the italian futurists as technological arrivistes but i can't check it cos - oh! - no index!)

OH pulls out a quote from Ruskin to start with, a quote I did not know but absolutely love:

practical people have a way of saying 'that has been tried, and failed.' Why, of course it failed. Do you suppose everybody ever played off a piece of Right on the eternal piano without striking false notes at first? Failed! - yes, and it will fail fifty times over, depend on it, as long as your fingers are baby's fingers; your business is not to mind your fingers, but to look at the written notes...

For me, I think, this is the thing.

Yes yes austerity chic: I'm worried that being against "austerity chic", being against the way people in the 00s present Modernism graphic-designed into retro acceptability, translates into a sort of against-graphic-design snobbishness, which leads to ugliness, which leads to no-one reading who isn't already of the right sort of tendency. And this is a technique as offputting as the mangled sentences that dear old theory leads itself into, where after a while you suspect that the ruling aesthetic is "this has to be hard to read so you know it's worthwhile."

found that hard to get a grip on. nostalgia for 'benevolent statism' is exactly what i associate his own ish with. am i wrong in that?

i don't know. those posters are creepy. but again, if you self-identify as a bolshevik you don't really get to talk about state brutality/the surveillance society/etc, do you? perhaps the double-standard calls for a little explanation, anyway.

(the tone of rad-phil is always a delight: 'the public execution of jean charles de menezes' is particularly choice.)

xpost

and didn't OH write something recently on the gorgeousness of the new Verso radical thinkers series (they are super gorgeous, if very very similar to penguin great ideas - maybe that's a good thing, they'll blend in, people won't realise they're reading althusser until it's too late, ahahaha)? I suspect I may be inadvertently repeating him by this point.

but i can be rude about zero books where a person published by them cannot - and anyway, realistically, are they any more ugly than routledge? (ans: yes)

xpooosts

do they genuinely self-identify as bolsheviks? good heavens.

fairly sure i've seen OH identify as a bolshevik, yeah. and that is not such a good thing!

OH pulls out a quote from Ruskin to start with, a quote I did not know but absolutely love:

"practical people have a way of saying 'that has been tried, and failed.' Why, of course it failed. Do you suppose everybody ever played off a piece of Right on the eternal piano without striking false notes at first? Failed! - yes, and it will fail fifty times over, depend on it, as long as your fingers are baby's fingers; your business is not to mind your fingers, but to look at the written notes..."

For me, I think, this is the thing.

that's a pretty terrible quote, if we are talking about political utopias. for one thing it reads like social darwinism. i suppose if it's only *your* fingers that are getting bashed then OK.

where are the 'written notes'?

I think I realised my distance from this whole discourse when I really enjoyed John Gray's Black Mass.

(but anyway ruskin's quote could just as easily justify neoliberal revanchism. so laissez-faire didn't work this time and we had a few 'false notes'. well rome wasn't built in a day...)

xpost

lol. i would upset myself if i agreed with john gray.

but probably do sometimes :(

that terrible The Wire habit of capitalising things that don't need capitalising

I really want to start a petition against this or something.