Sasha Frere-Jones: Really?????

xp

Well, I first encountered the chords of Elvis Costello's music when I was a young fancy studying boys.

The important thing is: How many rap albums does Lerche own?

sasha frere jones gets on my nerves sometimes

― surm, Friday, September 11, 2009 2:29 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

u aint like that new piece or what

i think he was trolling ilx poster deej by not mentioning the big rapping elephant in the room tbh

When you got funky albums by Neko Case and St. Vincent in your top 10 who needs hiphop. They clearly took lessons from the SFJ article on white folks and rhythm from a few years back. Ugh.

Note the substitution of a major second in place of a conventional tonic in the chord structure (in the case of a µ major, B natural for an A natural in the right hand). Of course, this chord can be built on each of the twelve root pitches found in most western music. Some of our more harmonically sophisticated readers may know this chord by one of several other names such as "deus de musica (1st expansion)", "major triad avec neoplastic distension", or "'M' Lords Consonance". Used only sporadically in most contemporary popular music, we have found this little honey to be a sine qua non in almost every song we have written to date. All the members of Steely Dan, past and present, have come to believe, as we do, that the luminous, mystic quality of the µ major chord is capable of greatly enriching the musical vocabulary of our otherwise discordant era. Virtually any piano owner can experience this sonority in the privacy of his or her own home if she or he is willing to take the trouble, when confronted with a major triad, to come down on the keyboard with his or her thumb just slightly to the right of where it would normally land. Once you become accustomed to this wholesome harmonic mindbath, you'll soon find yourself sneaking seconds into minor seventh chords and stacking fourths like a Hindemith gone haywire in Harlem.

i think he was trolling ilx poster deej by not mentioning the big rapping elephant in the room tbh

― i got nothin (deej), Tuesday, October 20, 2009 3:55 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i would like to think you're kidding when you say you're personally being trolled if someone not on this board fails to mention gucci mane in something, but at this point i don't even know anymore

classic first posts: Sasha Frere-Jones' Radiohead review

xp. to be fair some dude I believe deej is referring to Fat Joe

was talking about the triple c's album al & im offended at yr assumption

Jesus christ, that "fancy chord" thing is egregious - what would we think of a book critic who wrote about the "big word club"?

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,660,000 for big word literary analysis

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

lol @ fagen

words are hard xp

that myers reader's manifesto piece is one of the dumbest things ever written by anyone

I thought this thread had been revived because of this:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/10/26/091026crmu_music_frerejones

3000 new posts before quittin time is the o/u

pretty sure that is the reason deej revived this thread

Myers piece reminds me of Dale Peck but without the zings. I like close reading but he gets high on his own pedantry, his sacred cow-slaying, his evident beef with the critical establishment. You can pick apart McCarthy and DeLillo all you like but you can't say it's objectively bad prose when you seem to miss the whole point of it. I know that DeLillo's dialogue is phony, that McCarthy's prose is sometimes an end in itself which obscures rather than reveals - that's part of why I like them. They only "fail" according to Myer's false definitions.

That said, did Michiko Kakutani really call DeLillo "laugh-out-loud funny"? I can't imagine anyone genuinely lolling at a DeLillo line. Maybe a wry smile.

Regarding SFJ, I don't mind the piece but I can now add "Fancy Chords" to "Sophisti-pop" as a sure sign I should avoid the music in question. Steely Dan AND Elvis Costello? Yick.

White Noise is a lol riot.

Great Jones Street brings lols too

It's a bit of a bugbear of mine. Wry, amusing novels are routinely described as "hilarious" on the jacket as if nothing less will do. There are many gradations of funny that don't need to be oversold. But I guess "made me smirk knowingly" doesn't blurb as well.

i chuckled. once.

"bursts with that sort of dry wit that'll make you wonder if the shit you laugh at is actually pretty fucking juvenile tbqf"

^^^ would read

I need to write a book worthy of such a blurb.

I'll be the only person to agree with Myers. Sick of reading lit fiction that takes it upon itself to obfuscate. Lit crit establishment needs taking apart, since it's the most corrupt of all crit establishments: friends reviewing friends; writers refusing to say bad words about heroic figures (as Amis admitted after Updike died: crucial line in his panning of posthumous clunker: "This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive"). I suspect there's a link between endless critical indulgence and endless literary self-indulgence.

The silliness of that piece, though, is that there are tons of books published each year that fit Myers qualifications for correctness in literature. He seems to be mad that writers he doesn't like are getting attention from critics he doesn't like.

Kinda agree with significant parts of the Myers, and I think he sounds like a Dale Peck who actually knows what the hell he's talking about- but, while I'm glad someone else agrees with me that Paul Auster is a terrible writer, I think he just misses the point of McCarthy's style, and probably Delillo's (who I haven't read enough of). The whole thing seems undercut by a kind of paranoid, me-against-the-cultural-East-Coast-elites-cue-scary-music ethos the makes wish I disagreed with his tastes more than I do. That said, the best parts, as they often are in these kinds of things, are where he picks up on the awful, cliché-ridden prose of aforementioned "Lit crit establishment" types, a fish in the barrel target if there ever was one, but one in terrible need of frequent, harsh drubbings. What really hurts the piece though is that as he's raking writers over the coals for their overly flashy prose, I find my interest flagging because Myer's own writing is a little too dry and "workman like."

This kind of thing needs either relish (Dale Peck) or generosity (James Wood) and Myers has neither. He's also too scattershot - McCarthy and DeLillo are too different from each other (let alone Auster or Proulx) to yield any kind of coherent argument. And like Mumbles says, the self-aggrandising "Only I have the balls to challenge the pointy heads" tone galls pretty quickly.

the second anybody sees the scarequotes around "literary" in the first line is the last second anybody has any excuse for taking that guy & his reactionary & also politically v. v. v. suspect shit seriously

I'd be interested to see a UK version of this piece. Not aware enough of US lit crit to know whether the big problem with the UK – that the lit crit establishment and the lit writing estabishment are, by and large, the same people, resulting in outright corruption of the critical process - is the same across the Atlantic.

for example

t has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

fuckin despise this dude and hope he starves to death tbh

I remember reading the piece when it first ran and goin "oh great, my Dad has a job writing for the Atlantic now, soon we'll hear how free verse has ruined poetry"

John, why is it "reactionary" and "politically vvv suspect" to think that the lit crit establishment have got their heads up their arses? Surely the reactionary line is to accept that what is dictated to be literature must in and of itself be literature?

Or are you saying that he is reactionary because he is demanding content over form? In which case, would someone be reactionary for - to pick an example not entirely at random - preferring to listen to narrative songs based on personal experience, played on acoustic guitars, instead of wonky dubstep?

ok, one, false claim, I didn't say he's "reactionary to think that the lit rit establishment have got their heads up their asses." he's reactionary because clearly what he means throughout the piece is "ahh for the good old days when there was only one way to write & it was mainly done by my kinda ppl" (vide his conclusions w/his big-upping on Mervyn fucking Peake"

also CAN YOU FUCKING PEOPLE ALSO PLEASE LEARN TO LEAVE MY FUCKING DAY JOB AT THE DOOR PLEASE, also? instead of being fucking assholes in every discussion I try to join? thanking you. alternately, send me a precis on everything you do in your own life so I can be a bore and drag that in every time you speak.

swear to fuckin God it is the weakest fucking shit the way some of you guys pull this shit every fucking time instead of actually formulating an argt.

J0hn, apologies: couldn't work out at the time I was writing my post which part of his argument you were decrying as reactionary. And was referring to listeners, rather than players of music.

yep, as a former acoustic gtr. droning bore, i too must take issue with your constant unwarranted taunts, ithappens.

it's really only the beginning of what's wrong with that piece though which is a triumph of hyperconservative grandpa-ing - take for example

This one works beautifully, and with none of the "evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today.

which is just ultimate strawman dance party, or from the beginning of the same graf

Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English.

lol really herr myers? tell that to THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. tell it to Melville, whom you attempt to champion elsewhere in your essay when in fact the Myerses of Melville's day were exactly the dudes keeping Melville down.

and so on. sorry to get all lit up but I remember when this piece ran and being especially pissed because when he dismisses some writers I don't like, I totally feel this guy, but then I realize he's being dishonest; all he really means, to quote my favorite ilx post in recent memory, is "I remember it were all fields around here"

Er. there are no constant taunts: that's the first time I've ever replied to J0hn, or mentioned acoustic guitars, and I apologised immediately. I think you must be confusing me with someone else.

*shakes fist*

not even a big deal ithappens I'm just hypersensitive 1) generally and 2) to the idea that because I'm a singer-songwriter I'm somehow a champion of the form, when y'know I listen to more metal & ambient than dudes who sound like me/whom I sound like etc

God that fuckin piece is the worst thing ever

it the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing.

oh cool I'll just throw this copy of Ulysses in the garbage then you reactionary prick

This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE

off to Fox News w/you Mr Myers

ok I'll stop now

"This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE"

Okay, take out cultural elite - which is an idiot phrase to use - and that's a commonplace of critical reaction, and especially in music blog criticism, where the inability to enjoy certain acts does appear to mark the listener out as a cretin. Not an uncommon trend on some threads round here. With books, it took me years to convince myself it was okay not to finish them if I was bored - precisely because of the reactions Myers writes about. Though maybe that suggests more that I was unsure of my own opinions than anything else. But, yes, "cultural elite" would certainly take us into Fox News territory if prefaced by "liberal".

i blame jaymc for all of this.

it's the same thing. it means, "anybody who says he likes this must be lying, he can't like this thing that I'm ridiculing!" myers should be left outside overnight in Chicago in January imo

guilty lulz at the bowie-piece clowning in this thread.

xpost But most people don't act like they're throwing bombs. They're all "I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell it straight, the new McCartney is not as good as the Beatles."

derogatis is not a terrible journalistic although he's obviously a terrible music critic

he mostly seems (rightfully though perhaps hyperbolically) resentful at frere-jones's lack of basic professionalism... his inability (or unwillingness) to be a journalist.

the weird thing is dero kicking frere-jones for his lack of "wit"--i don't think anything dero has written has risen to the level of "wit." frere-jones is a mediocre critic but i have, on occasion, gleaned a minor insight from his writing, while dero's "criticism" has mostly inspired me to wish i had banged my head against a desk instead.

er, i meant to write "journalist" rather than "journalistic". sorry.

this is one of those kerfuffles that makes me think that there should be a moritorium on middle aged white dudes writing about rock music.

I mean, while this particular kerfuffle about middle aged white male expense accounts is going on, this is also going on, and has absolutely no traction on ILM. Sleeve and Katherine seem uninterested, which surprises me about this much (fingers held a tiny little bit apart). But anyway, back to the middle aged white guys.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/zulu-nation-apologizes-to-alleged-afrika-bambaataa-abuse-victims-20160601

Why not link to the Bambaata thread where you were talking about it?

It didn't get any traction. I think we all agree that allegations that SFJ tried to expense a strip club trip are more important. And I think the search function still works.

what the fuck do sleeve and katherine have to do with it?

Nothing.

You're a shitstain

Let's just get back to the Jim Derogatis article. I hear he really takes SFJ down. I want to hear more about that.

Then why did you pass-agg call out sleeve on the Bambaataa thread, instead of discussing anything yourself?

That was quite a Bill O'Reilly move
Congrats dlp

I don't think anyone knows what thread you're referring to, as it's uninteresting. Whereas SFJ's misdeeds are major news. Can we please just get back to discussing this important issue. I hear he tried to expense a trip to a strip club.

dnftt

Why are you talking about Afrika Bambaataa instead of global warming

Why are we talking about anything except SFJ and a strip club. I hear that his writing wasn't up to snuff. And I can't think of any other important stories breaking right this moment in the music business.

Are you his publicist or what

Not one single other important story relating to the music business.

"Why are we talking about anything except SFJ and a strip club."

we are talking about that here. cuz we are on the SFJ thread. and we eat our own.

Maybe we should stop doing that.

Do you understand what a message board is?

xp can't believe you're dignifying this thread by posting on it. you're clearly part of the problem

"Maybe we should stop doing that."

you can! and you can go give that other story traction. on another thread.

I think it makes more sense just to post here for posterity when the first mention about that other minor story (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Daily News, Vibe, Billboard, Spin) gets referenced on ILM. Anyway, back to important ILM business. I hear that SFJ wrote a bad article about David Bowie.

go away

don't listen to brimstead. make the exact same point two dozen more times, I hear somebody will totally give you an award if you stick to your guns on this one

makes even more sense to post here for post-here-ity

I think it makes more sense just to post here for posterity when the first mention about that other minor story (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Daily News, Vibe, Billboard, Spin) gets referenced on ILM.

Which other minor story are you waiting to get its first mention on ILM?

i for one am INCENSED that nobody is talking about afrika bambaataa's abuse of teenaged boys in a thread devoted to... a music critic from the Los Angeles Times.

(the only reason i glance at DLP's posts is because for a split second i think they are by DJP.)

also, it's VERY IMPORTANT that we talk about VERY IMPORTANT THINGS like afrika bambaataa's abuse of teenaged boys because how else are important social problems going to be solved if we don't TALK ABOUT THEM ON AN INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD? if we talk about OTHER THINGS on this INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD then logically we are not talking about OTHER-OTHER VERY IMPORTANT THINGS that would be solved forever if we just TALKED ABOUT THEM.

DLP's got my back.

oh sorry, the thread skipped a bunch of posts and i see this has all been addressed with due sarcasm and dismissiveness. carry on.