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

had never heard of this dude before. took a gander at his wikipedia page. jesus christ

Oh yeah he's a bit of a piece of work.

In his book The indispensable composers, critic Anthony Tommasini wrote about how, when he was a composition student in the early 70s, anything that wasn't twelve-tone composition was looked down upon by his peers as outmoded or pandering. Are there similar "rules" in academic music now, or have post-modernism and other cultural shifts opened up the field?

This bugs me too, musical traditionalists/conservatives keep railing against a 100 year old idiom no one writes in anymore. Schoenberg really bothers these people in a way that I can’t completely eliminate anti-Semitism as a motivating factor.

Halfway there, the climate at institutions varies a lot and someone who studies with Moor Mother at CalArts will probably have a different experience than someone who studies with Ferneyhough at Stanford but it would be hard for me to overstate how far I think the overall academic composition climate is from some kind of serialist or modernist hegemony. (NB there are also programmes like SUNY Purchase, which produced Regina Spektor and Mitski, among others.) I taught at a progressive New England liberal arts college for a few years and supervised a lot of hip-hop, EDM, indie rock, etc projects. The thing is that I suspect that for the McWhorters of the world, ANY modernist presence would be too much.

Fwiw, in this piece, Tommasini (who afaik never majored in composition) considers the other side wrt even the 50s-early 70s: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-midcentury-serialists-the-bullies-or-the-besieged.html?pagewanted=all . I can share the Straus article he mentions if there is interest. His own recollections btw are based on a few anecdotes from one institution. I'm also not sure being looked down on by one's peers constitutes a 'rule'.

You're right about his major, he studied piano.

musical traditionalists/conservatives keep railing against a 100 year old idiom no one writes in anymore

There are a lot of political "scholars" who have apparently only ever observed three elections: Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1992.

Almost read that guy's The Language Hoax once, but something made me think better of it.

I read Doing Our Own Thing. It was...OK. The actual linguistic stuff was interesting, but when he let himself slip too far into social prescriptiveness it got silly. (But no sillier than David Foster Wallace's essay on AAVE.)

Can we also take a moment to marvel at this passage?

there are warehouses full of sophisticated and complex, but easily lovable, classical music, some we don’t hear because of an association with ignominious regimes.

As Mauceri writes, “Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin had stylistic demands that would give an official sound to their regimes.” In all three of their countries, “they silenced non-tonal and 12-tone music along with anything that might be considered experimental.” In Italy, music in the grand opera tradition à la Verdi was embraced by officialdom, but later tainted by association. In Russia, explains Mauceri, Stalin dictated a policy favoring “Socialist Realism — music that was defiantly not experimental.” The renowned composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich walked a fine line “between approbation and annihilation.” Lesser-known composers such as Dmitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturian and others are now performed very little. (In the gabby, showstopping song “Tschaikowsky” from the 1941 Broadway musical “Lady in the Dark,” a long list of Russian composers, many of whom we’ve hardly heard from, are rattled off.)

Mauceri writes: “As the generations have passed, a source of these aesthetic judgments — the racial policies of the Nazis and the Fascists and the war against Soviet Communism — has been forgotten, and postwar aesthetic conclusions have been accepted as objective. And after having removed so much music and so many composers from our lives, what have we gotten in return?”

If I understand correctly, the argument is i) we don't get to hear composers like Orff, Verdi, and the "lesser known" Khatchaturian (composer of this obscurity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Dance) and are overwhelmed with 12-tone music ii) the reason is cancel culture iii) because of these composers' associations with fascist and Stalinist regimes iv) (which got a lot wrong but basically had the right take on classical music, since they endorsed these 'beautiful' composers and silenced 'ugly' music). (Tbc McWhorther doesn't say we should go as far as state repression; he's just concerned about the current dominance of atonality and the repression of beauty.) Every step of that is incredible.

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an aesthetic.

Has there been any large-scale attempt to "cancel" Wagner (more recently than Nietzsche)?

The Met went all in on Wagner during the pandemic:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/gig-alerts/episodes/wagner-week-nightly-met-opera-streams

https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met-opera-streams/week-30/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/arts/music/met-opera-meistersinger-wagner.html

Dave Edmunds would like a word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpqYU3Nzbts

Twelve Tone good, Two Tone better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEPfSWk0Lsw

Has there been any large-scale attempt to "cancel" Wagner (more recently than Nietzsche)?

Ross has written about how right after WW2, there was a deliberate effort in Europe, especially in West Germany under the occupation US military government, to suppress some of the Romantic/post-Romantic Germanic music loved by the Nazis and promote avant-garde music that challenged that tradition as well as Jewish composers, so e.g. the Darmstadt school got some covert funding from the US military early on. As far as I know, though, there was no comparable attempt made in North America, where Hitler's and Mussolini's faves have always had a wide audience (as far as classical audiences go) and concert hall presence.

This is all bringing to mind a long ago Concert in the Park I was at which was interrupted in mid-performance– on the 4th of July? before the 1812 Overture? – by a stage invader who said a few words before he was escorted off the stage that I remember as “Wagner, I miss you.” This in protest of the perceived under-programming of his favorite composer.

Found it! https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/28/arts/music-parks-series-opens-with-bang.html

”When he first came on stage, I was in shock,'' said John Nelson, the conductor. ''But there was nothing harmful about him.'' ''He kept shouting, 'Herr Richard Wagner, where are you?''' said Charles Rex, the associate concertmaster, who contributed some impressively lush, secure violin solos to ''Scheherazade'' - and who repeated the final pages with aplomb after Mr. Aybar had been removed.

Also note the ad for Edie, by Jean Stein. #onethread

Feel like "Herr Richard Wagner, where are you?" is the new "tell that to your new leader, Sting!"

The whole piece reminded me of taking my grandmother to a contemporary art exhibition when I was 14, and having her say “I don’t understand why people don’t make beautiful things any more.” The woman was a member of the Communist Party for thirty years and didn’t under shit about art.

How can anyone expect a bootlicker like McWhorter to be any better? He might be the worst of the Times columnists afaic, up there with the conservative white dude crue.

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an aesthetic.

This reminds me of that old Guy Tavares interview

https://www.music-news.com/news/UK/148730/Morrissey-remains-centrestage-as-he-turns-63

What a god amongst us all....

This week - 22nd May, to be precise – music legend Morrissey will be celebrating his 63rd birthday. It's almost inconceivable to staunch critics that the artist has been able to remain so revered, relevant and respected for so long. In the somewhat fickle world of entertainment, to attain the kind of longevity Morrissey has, is an almost impossible feat. Impossible for some, clearly not for the singer himself, who has been releasing music for four decades and who continues to draw vast crowds in the live aren

😬

a big scoop for music-news.com

Imagine releasing music and touring in your early sixties. Never been done.

Morrissey's dedication to music is only surpassed by his devotion to racism

It would be hard for even his most stubborn opponents to deny Morrissey possesses that extra “something” - that unique charisma and energy that keeps generations of music-lovers queueing at the barriers. Morrissey fills arenas, theatre stages and festival line-ups around the world, even after 40 years in the business. Looking back to those heady days of The Smiths, where his

etc

he fills festival line-ups

Did Morrissey write this?

Morrissey was a popular racist and he still is

My mama don't play no Moz
I saw her when she turned him off

To many, the Chili Peppers have always been synonymous with sexy time. Flea’s bass has always felt primal, like a playful slap on the ass during passionate lovemaking

i mean if you think of how the band envisions themselves . . . probably not completely missing the mark.

but yeah, gross. no.

The band’s history of accusations of sexual harassment of young women in the music industry makes that gross.

oof, you're right. even grosser.

(unless maybe the writer is just the smartest guy in the room and that's their way of drawing attention to the band's collective creepiness)

oh my, curious to see how workshop's "Meiguiweisheng Xiang" was received on release (it's a curious & very successful piece of CAN worship albeit a little more querulous & fey) i stumbled across this on allmusic
"While Workshop is similar to other indie-rock attempts at trip-hop (Broadcast, Portishead), the sub-par vocals and anemic production values sink the album."
erm...

I'm still dying of gross from that Chili Peppers review.

Dig around in the context and biography behind a famously ambiguous and opaque song until you can find a vague snippet to support a tenuous reading in the service of half-assed fashionable politics, avoid looking at the content of the work itself closely enough that it might challenge your fantasy, profit (not really).

6.
Nirvana: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)
As much as anything, it was a breakup song. “Who will be the king and queen of the outcasted teens?” Kurt Cobain asked in a discarded lyric from an early draft of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” One of his biographers is pretty sure he was talking about Tobi Vail, the “over-bored” and “self-assured” riot grrrl vanguardist. The two of them had had a brief romance, which she ended, and Cobain responded in the manner of so many thwarted, sensitive young men, turning rejection into a synecdoche for the oppressions of life writ large. He filled up his journal with violent fantasies and weird drawings. His friends started to worry. And somewhere in this burst of energy, Cobain wrote the perfect pop song.

A denial, a denial, a denial. It hangs over “Teen Spirit” like bad weather. Call it the teenage boy’s blues—a young dude’s awakening to the fact that he is caught in the crosswinds of, like, the whole system, man, that panders to him, that fires his imagination, and then constrains him, tells him to chill. Very often it’s sex being denied. Sometimes it’s a car, which is just sex at one remove. Maybe it’s money or a fix. Whatever their subject, the teenage boy’s blues have been the very stuff of pop music since around the time Chuck Berry went motorvatin’ after that Coupe DeVille. The result has been a great deal of regrettable pop songs, but on occasion there have been transcendent exceptions, like the lead single off of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Above all it rips, even still, from that first Gap Band flam to the last, exhausted denial. It’s got a screamy part and a soft part, and right at the point where you expect the song to fuzz out and go totally to shit, there’s a crisp guitar solo that restates the vocal melody from the verse, almost as if Cobain were satirizing himself and having a damn good time of it.

Well, he probably was, right? Self-doubt is everything in “Teen Spirit.” The song famously stands outside itself, mocking its own postures, hating its own apathy and irresolution, anthemic in its insistence on being unanthemic: “Oh well, whatever, never mind.” I remember the girls in middle school who had Cobain’s photo taped up in their lockers and thinking how funny it was that they were treating this king of the outcasts like something they'd clipped out of Tiger Beat. But of course they were the ones who were actually seeing Cobain clearly—that underneath all the marketing and self-mythology and fraying cardigans there was a true pop idol, beautiful, androgynous, too wounded to be threatening, a troubadour of their uncertainty. He sang as if he were owed something. That’s the teenage boy’s blues. In the next breath he wondered if he was worthy of any of it. That’s a blues for everyone else. –Tommy Craggs

I remember the girls in middle school who had Cobain’s photo taped up in their lockers and thinking how funny it was that they were treating this king of the outcasts like something they'd clipped out of Tiger Beat. But of course they were the ones who were actually seeing Cobain clearly—that underneath all the marketing and self-mythology and fraying cardigans there was a true pop idol, beautiful, androgynous, too wounded to be threatening, a troubadour of their uncertainty.

He was a good-looking rock star, it's not that complicated...

yeah that is awful wtf

Sometimes I see a vague resemblance between Kurt and a 1970ish James Taylor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0FJUVo-BaM

Must be the sweater

kurt was way hotter imo

that's bcz he was beautiful, androgynous, too wounded to be threatening, a troubadour of our uncertainty

not even joking

I swear, something about this song produces the absolute direst music writing

well, a key line is "here we are, entertain us"

‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a Men’s Rights anthem, and that’s okay

treasure trove of lol terrible writing in here (alongside some not-terrible writing)

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/musicians-on-their-favorite-albums-of-the-90s/