Simon Reynolds - C or D

there's not much diff between paraphrase and quote, i just added the fact that i'm damned if someone who lives in new york is going to tell me what the 'voice' -- singular, ie 'unitary' -- of the uk streets is. how have i twisted anything?

Don't you agree (or not) that saying 'Please don't comment on what Mick Jagger means in "Under My Thumb' or "Some Girls', that's just how Brit rockers speak would be wrong also. Yea, it's a delicate and compllicated thing that needs to be written creatively and thoughtfully, but ignoring it does not seem the same to me as the Matos example upthread of not writing in a review of a punk cd--the guitars are loud.

outside of london i've just been on like a and b roads. "the voice of the streets" in shropshire is sheeps bleating.

"Whereas the true post-Punk spirit manifested today would involve miscegenating Indie-Rock with Grime or Crunk."-Reynold in the Frieze piece

I think on threads in the past, people have discussed the failures of '80s and 90s American rap-rock, and the playing out of the liberal guilt thing among other Anglo musicians who sub-consciously or consciously avoid trying to incorporate current Black pop for fear of being derided aesthetically as phony and insincere.

If anything, the problem is that issue isn't covered enough by most writers, who can never say anything specific about the language/violent imagery/sexism in a hip hop track or album beyond the fact that it exists. As if it's all the same. As if they have mental censors which, when the rapper swears, translates what they hear into a neutral announcement "The rapper used a filthy swear word at this point in the track".

I think the depressing notion here is that everyone is supposed to assume that sexism and extreme physical violence will appear on every single hip hop album; that if you buy a rap album, you're basically asking to hear it. You could argue that its offensiveness is, like say a bass solo, not in itself inflammatory enough to deserve mention. But that's based on both a personal desensitization to violence (sexual or otherwise) and an acceptance of its inescapability in the genre.

Uh no, I read that because it came in second on the P&J that invalidated the comparison, not that it was a stupid comparison in the first place.

x-post - Well the discrepancy he address is in the placing in the P&J poll - my point was more that I think Simon actually mischaracterises Arrested Development's success as being a debacle of left-wing groupthink - it was that in part perhaps, but people were also genuinely loving at least the big singles (the best modern day reference point for Arrested Development is surely Outkast?!?!?) - anyway it's a pretty minor point and all, I was just thinking that, even though I agree with Simon in preferring Public Enemy to Arrested Development, I still hear the latter more than the former these days. Which is why the whole "will this still be important in ten years" argument is always the least effective a critic can draw on - because who the fuck really knows what people in ten years will think and do we really want to give them that much power over us?

Anthony I hope you meant this to be as funny as it is.

- jme, 'final boss'

From Amnesty International 2004:
Since the beginning of April 2004, 190 children have been recruited to fight, according to information provided by UNICEF. This brings the number of verified cases this year to 330.

Many of these children have been forcibly abducted from public places or their homes. Some of the new recruits are as young as fourteen.

The Tamil Tigers are also increasingly re-recruiting former child soldiers by force. In one case in May, four children who had left the Tamil Tigers were taken away from their homes in the middle of the night. Their families say they were violently assaulted when they tried to intervene.

In another case, Tamil Tigers set fire to a house in Sinnathatumunai, eastern Sri Lanka, and broke down the doors of nine others.

In the eastern Vaharai area, relatives were beaten with wooden sticks when they tried to stop their children being taken away. In one instance a woman was knocked unconscious, and another was cut on the face. Both needed medical treatment.

"The Tamil Tigers leadership must issue orders to its cadres to stop these violent and intimidating tactics immediately," said Amnesty International. "It should stick to its earlier commitments to stop the recruitment and use of child soldiers. Children in its ranks should be returned to their homes and not face the threat of re-recruitment."

Last year over 1,200 children were enlisted as soldiers, but in June 2003 the Tamil Tigers promised to stop using children in a joint agreement, Action Plan for Children affected by War. "

By the way they are still recruiting child soldiers.

Also, I 'd like to ask shouldn't people who are writing positive reviews of songs that are sexist, racist, homophobic or whatever have to justify why they think anyone else should waste their time listening to them despite that?

"I must admit when I wrote that bit in the Frieze piece about rhythmically inert Britbands and referenced “whoever’s on the cover of NME this week” I had Arctic Monkeys in mind, I just assumed from what I’d read that they’d be just another nowt-going-on-in-t'-rhythm-section indie-rock combo, fronted by an excessively cocky Northern lad singer, drawing an ever-more insular set of quintessentially English sources. On this occasion, though, the inbreeding has paid off: the family tree is narrow (Jam, Smiths, Oasis, Libertines, etc ), but for once the result isn’t an enfeebled poodle, it’s a mighty attack dog spliced out of the most potent and poignant genes of their ancestors. The drummer and bassist are uncommonly dynamic and flexible, several cuts above the Brit norm--just listen to the way they switch, on “Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…” from Sabbath-style “heavy” dynamics to punk-funk that casually out-grooves Franz Ferdinand. Unlike Oasis, who were really like Carducci's "electric busking", singalong-plus-riffalong but dead-below-the-waist, Arctic Monkeys make physically involving music."

"Nowadays it’s harder to see where are the vanguardist bastions on behalf of which one would launch one's volleys of indignation and disgust. Not dance music, which give or take a handful of peripheral innovators like Villalobos, has for the last half-decade or so been recycling its own history as assiduously as rock has. Hip hop and R&B are puttering along at a snail’s pace; there is a definite “same old shit in shiny new cans" syndrome at play, except the cans aren’t that startlingly novel either. E.g., I love Lil Wayne’s “Fireman” but lyrically it’s the same bleeding metaphor that Cash Money were caning 7 years back (Hot Boys, we on fire etc) while the sonix are sorta gloomcore-meets-crunk, recalling the Goth-tronica of the Horrorist, himself always on a kinda retro tip."

The streets are full of so many people. I have said this before. They all think and talk in different ways. For SR to claim to know 'the voice of the British street' is absurd - for he still lives, as far as I know, in America. (That he went to Oxford is not relevant - for that is in Britain, and has many streets; I have enjoyed walking down some of them.) But for anyone to claim it would be fairly absurd. I am indoors now - shortly I will be on the street. Then, I will be part of The British Street. I don't suppose that the records SR is pushing will say much about that experience. And there will be many other people out on the streets, all having other experiences. It would be foolish to say that some record or genre represented all that. Let it represent the particular thing it represents, perhaps. But the life of the British street is too diverse, too manifold, to be that thing.

"If Morley was the original Popist, then Hoskyns was the original nu-rockist: one week writing about Black Flag, the next Donna Summer, the week after some anthology of Lost Soul from the early Seventies, the week after that some NYC postdisco electrofunk 12 inches, the week after that the Blue Orchids… but never as mere generalism , always with an underlying vision-quest and value-scheme somehow connecting these seemingly disparate or even incompatible sounds."

I find it astonishing what opinions and positions people ascribe to SR, especially after looking at the articles that provoked these judgements!

And it's interesting that Simon says he couldn't choose between Morley and Hoskins (although it's implied he'd come down on Hoskins' side now) - both writers' critical visions were so attractive.

It's like, to be really interesting, an either/or option has to be one that you want to be plus/and, one that inspires you to look for some point of nexus or mediation. The choice b/w Hoskins and Morley strikes me as more compelling than the choice b/w Reynolds and Petridish because with the latter I know immediately which side I'd choose, it's not an open question.

What is the job of the critic then?

I guess at a base level it is to invent choices out of nothing, to say, "you could get this or you could get that, so get this cos it's better". And, similarly, to point to mediation points that unite oppositions ("what the very different [x] and [y] share is a certain [z]").

So we can immediately identify even in this most basic description of the critic's task a sort of endless back & forth between drawing and dissolving lines in the sand, between dividing something into 2 and reuniting 2 things into 1.

It would appear that, for Simon, the trick is to keep things divided, but to recognise that this very division is the source of both sides' power (i.e. what unites is the line which both sides rub up against)?

But it seems difficult to to practically distinguish this approach from what he might call weak-minded ecumenical listening - by which I mean, how do you know just from looking at a person's "most played" list in iTunes whether they're either/or-worshippers or Uniting Church congegration-members? And how do we rejuvenate music criticism in the sense of turning the latter into the former?

Funnily enough, the Morley/Hoskyns opposition reminded me how I could never choose between Reynolds and Roberts when reading MM c.88...

I think SR's line about "nu-pop" - that it's like if New Pop had never got beyond Dollar - is on the money.

perhaps this is all part of simons problem at the minute, a sort of veering rudderlessness, a recognition that if street based scenes come and go, with flashes of inspiration, ephemeral bursts of creativity and excitement, but then flicker or mutate, that, if you are a critic, or an outsider, you have to be like a moth, moving flame to flame. its only possible, really be 'part' of one scene, possibly two, if in quick and related succession, after that, you are a dilettante, chasing after the next flame

i suppose for a long time, simons been able to stretch the rave aesthetic out, into hip hop and dancehall, as one long extended sonic archipilego (and, ironically, away from house and techno music itself), but really, i think, over time, its become a more and more tenuous join the dots affair, or flame to flame

i think coming to terms with that, places you in this new category hes dreamed up, this nu-rockist position, this position of the moth. a position that wants to take account of the links between all these genres, mapping them onto some kind of web, where context, and location, and position matter, as they do in street musics, rather than the purely "ooh shiny!" magpie pick'n'mix of the popist

I do not mean to ascribe to SR views that he doesn't hold. I just think that people, in general, should not talk about 'the street' in that exclusive way. Anyway, the people who really spend their whole lives on the street, rather than inside buildings, are homeless. Presumably when SR or anyone else says 'the voice of the British street' they are not primarily thinking of homeless people.

I have just decided that the voice of the British street is 'Another Day In Paradise'.

I don't mean to distract from the perhaps interesting discussion of Morley, rock and other things.