Simon Reynolds is a gobshite

lol but not really sure how playing a harp and wearing flower lady clothes and smiling sweetly in press photos inverts anything all that much...?

xp to Merdeyeux

erm, instrumental virtuosity and epic ambition as traditionally 'masculine' traits, playing against her own femininity, as well as their codification as masculine? YEAH.

(while playing for lols I do pretty much [kinda] believe my point here. In some sense. A bit.)

Is instrumental virtuosity a traditionally masculine trait? Harp's a pretty feminine instrument, yes?

Gender is irrelevant to this and what is all important is whether or not you sound like you're not wearing shoes.

How could Lindstrom hit his effects pedals if he wasn't wearing shoes?

OH WAIT

http://www.last.fm/music/Lindstr%C3%B8m+and+Christabelle/+images/36957863

FOOTFAIL

post fail

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/37619821/Lindstrm+and+Christabelle+press.png

I don't think any press shot of the 00s has disgusted and horrified me more than that picture of Fleet Foxes where one of them is wearing Crocs.

OMG, no! crocs != barefoot, we're back to our beardosignifyer

Crocs are a new gateway drug to disgusting barefooted hippydom.

But my *mum* wears crocs!

But wait... she also lives in Rural Vermont, which is also clearly a hippie signifier according to that article. We might be onto something. My mum is also a priest, which inverts traditional gender roles. Perhaps MY MUM is the secret intersection set of Joanna Newsom, Beardo, and disgusting barefoot hipsters hippies.

I envy you. to be able to blame your mum for killing the music must satisfy all sorts of subconscious needs.

If I were a man, there'd be something satisfyingly Freudian about that.

Freud's theories only apply to men? Or their mothers?

http://www.croatianworld.net/Letters/Gobshite.jpg

i feel a bit sorry for SR at the moment, he is obv not really OTM from anyones perspective these days, but does seem to be getting regular kickings from all over the place. prob overdue really, makes a change from everyone being so over deferential, just weird to see people who were prob his disciples not so long ago suddenly eagerly sticking the boot in, and SR not really bothering to defend himself.

the thing i don't get: what's lindstrom doing with my mum's old sofa?

lolololol that freeway song is fucking AMAZING. love that guy.

man i wanna high-five the whole concept of beards right now! damn!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2490/4116265866_45beba8198_b.jpg

I'm digging my beard. Could care less about "free/freak folk". I like The VU and synthesizers.

i'm a synth-folk fan.

SIMON REYNOLDS MADE ME GO BEARDO!!!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2730/4115270731_1c957e1e1d_o.jpg

I should get that on a t-shirt or something.

Ohhhhhhhhhhboy

http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/8463/liv1232535046simonreyno.jpg

TractorTrailer
26 Nov 2009, 1:52PM

Speech DaBelle, Scroobious Pip, Akira The Don?

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/share/HipHopBlogAlert-473x450.png

... seriously, if you can find any more informed commentary on hip hop in the uk broadsheet press, please do let me know ... ?

that chart is great tho.

rap has been a desperately unmemorable procession of cookie-cutter ballers – Jim Jones, Gucci Mane, Yung Doc, Soulja Boy, Lil Boosie, Gummi Bares – whose lyrics trudge a hedonic treadmill of bling and booty, punctuated by the occasional inane dance-craze.

fuck this guy seriously

Barely creating a ripple in the larger pop culture, undie rap is probably pretty content with its niche, a haven of "quality" in a mercenary world

except of course when these guys end up producing for g-unit -- oh but then they're no longer undie so i guess that doesnt count as 'making a ripple'

i mean what a load of bullshit.

YOU ARE OLD. get over it, it happens to everyone

this reminds me of talking to tom ewing about celine dion's book. Tom was like (paraphrased) "he goes through all these mental gymnastics trying to understand what people are getting out of celine dion -- why not just ask them??"

part of this is just from ppl who've been waiting for rap music to 'die' for ages, & now that nothing is selling except old ppl music, they're jumping up & telling us its dead. & 'luckily' for them, there's no accurate way of measuring, u know, popularity or social interest in music right now.

The worst part is there are elements of what hes saying that are true -- i think that creatively there are aspects of hip hop that are totally dull -- but he buries it by trying to make this huge fucking statement out of it, basing his ability to dismiss huge swaths of the music on his 'credibility' as a music writer (note: NOT journalist, even with one quote he managed to pull). It's unbearably egotistical.

does he not notice all that shit he praises from the early 00s:

This seven-year-long surge was largely but not exclusively driven by the Dirty South: cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Houston; producers like Timbaland, Neptunes, Mannie Fresh, Lil Jon, and Mr Collipark; MCs like Ludacris, Missy Elliott, Three 6 Mafia, Clipse, Ying Yang Twins, and those Cash Money hot boys Juvenile, BG and Lil Wayne. But the rest of the US played its part, from the Ruff Ryders family (DMX, the Lox, Eve, plus producer Swizz Beatz) through Ja Rule and Nelly, to the Dre/Eminem/50 Cent axis.

almost all of that shit is the same as

And, for these last three or four years, rap has been a desperately unmemorable procession of cookie-cutter ballers – Jim Jones, Gucci Mane, Yung Doc, Soulja Boy, Lil Boosie, Gummi Bares – whose lyrics trudge a hedonic treadmill of bling and booty, punctuated by the occasional inane dance-craze.

i mean, fucking new orleans is where they coined 'bling bling'. When he started talking about how great all this shit was for using hoover rave effects or whatever, acting like the condescending lecturer to all those 'pretentious' underground rap fans who wanted to hear other shit, they were pointing out "but they're just talking abuot bling & booty ..."

it would be hilarious if all these critics werent buying into it.

& the laziest part -- what music are ppl listening to instead? If rap isnt still creative -- if im crazy for thinking that gucci is just as creative of a rapper as anyone in fucking ruff ryders -- then what music is so important right now? hypnogogic pop? for the most part that 'genre' is straight easy listening. dubstep is basically idm. where is the 'fresh ideas' from those dudes? if you take the long view like he's doing w/ hip-hop here, none of that shit is so amazingly super fresh & original either.

i remember miccio saying basically the same thing when noise like this started being made in the 1st place ... that if booty & bling is such an issue for you, why NOW instead of, you know, anytime in the last 2 decades?

otm, the answer's probably bcuz we're a month from the end of the decade, rap happens to not sound exactly like it did six years ago, and lazy writers need a boring ass narrative for everything

it reminds me of in blissout when he talks about how 'smart' 'high' art takes its ideas from popular art, the idea that populist art rarely takes its concepts from the art school artistes ... & his only example of the 'exception that proves the rule' is when he mentions the bomb squad getting ideas from 'my life in the bush of ghosts' ... because naturally, the bomb squad, being black & playing for rap fans, couldnt possibly be 'high art'

im sorry but fans of gucci & soulja boy see this stuff as being fresh in its context. i know lots of them! they exist, & they have reasons for liking it, & those reasons arent any less-justifiable than the cultural critics of the new yorker & the guardian.

musically a bunch of the rappers hes talking about are doing new & interesting creative shit but because its going in a different direction than his pet narrative about the early part of the decade hes got to shit on it for the narrowest reasons, reasons that also perfectly apply to the rap music he's celebrating -- hypocritical garbage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carpenter

The original beardo?

Deej I agree with you about this article, but I think that it's not controversial to contrast The Bomb Squad and My Life in The Bush Of Ghosts on popular/high art terms.

I think there are a bunch of problems with this piece obv:

- the self-interested copy of any aging rap artist/producer who's aiming for crossover appeal (Timbaland, Jay-Z etc.) on the limitations/boringness of rap has zero credibility in a discussion like this, any reference to Coldplay or Radiohead only compounds this.
- SR possibly thinks that simply dismissing new rappers with a "blah blah blah... all the same..." wave of the hand strengthens the effect he's trying to create, but it's strategically misguided; I think there is an argument to say that, e.g., Southern rap production has become quite comfortable with itself by and large, but by not addressing specifics at all he's unable to establish even a more limited claim of this sort (let alone the sort of argument he's actually making). More generally, I'd say "lol u old' is such a spot-on criticism with so many instances of this kind of argument that the fact that it's not definitively correct in each case doesn't mean it's not a rebuttable presumption - this kind of argument needs to be made in a much more nuanced manner; compare/contrast when he started complaining (correctly) about drum & bass stagnating in the late nineties, where he neatly skewered the production approach of each of the main sub-sets.
- I think underneath it all he's trying to say "if rap isn't on the bleeding edge anymore, that's not such an awful or shameful thing - nothing else is on the bleeding edge anymore" but he doesn't get it across clearly enough, such that he's leaving wide open the assumption that he thinks something else is still futuristic and exciting and etc (dubstep? hypnagogic pop? I sincerely hope he doesn't think so for either, and I'd be very surprised if he did actually).

btw tim i made a more reasoned & less off the cuff argument elsewhere lol

any sort of argument is way more than this piece deserves tbh

it's just so embarrassingly attention whorey. i don't see that there's any debate to be had about it

deej: any chance you could copy that over here?

I still haven't figured out wtf hypnagogic pop is

brian eno and david byrne are pretty dim.

Has anyone outside of ILM even used the phrase hypnagogic pop?

i think simon has some good points in there buried in his need to write something 'important' about rap music. Its kind of gratingly egotistical, in my opinion -- i guess he thinks this is the way he prefers his writing, that ppl take brave stands instead of worrying about nuance or whatever. I mean, there's no doubt Simon R has been a pretty big influence on the way I think about music (& related egotism). & I know this piece is designed to inspire, you know, actual passionate argument or whatever. & in that case its doing its job, because I find it pretty unbearable. Not that I've ever really enjoyed his meditations on rap music, pretty much ever --

but i think ultimately these piece is a huge failure in some ways, particularly his unwillingness to engage with current music -- and no, i dont think current rap requires any more engagement than it did a decade ago, in terms of how it sounds (that said theres an argument to be made about it working in less wide-ranging ways certainly), although in terms of channels & access -- the lack of TRL, or a monoculture, the increasing niche-ification of music listening, but also the increasing awareness we have of lots of boring rap music, the huge amount of chaff out there w/out the charts to at least give us some wheat to orient around -- it probably does require a little research. maybe a journalist concerned with these issues could ask people what they think, to rely on multiple sources instead of his own instincts about music & his need to be first on the block to declare the beginnings & ends of musical movements ....

The biggest thing is his inability to damn current rap in a meaningful way. Accusing its stars of rapping about "bling and booty" while talking about hip-hop's peak being three-six mafia, ruff ryders & cash money?? Does he lack that much self-awareness? Back when he saw himself enlightening people who were dismissing mainstream rap in favor of backpack shit -- self included here -- we were like "but ... this stuff is all about bling & booty." Hes one of the people who made me question that, albeit indirectly (scottpl was another! as were ... high school & college parties, haha). & I realized there was a lot more going on.

but now he's doing the same thing ... how is soulja boy so much worse than j-kwon?? "tipsy" is a great song, but "turn my swag on" was just as fresh & novel & different (although it didnt reference the rave songs of his post-youth so...). Gucci Mane is certainly as good/better a rapper than most of the dudes on ruff ryders or hypnotized minds ... and those are classic groups who've recorded some of my favorite music.

the problem as i see it is he's never really engaged with rap music AS RAP MUSIC. the idea that how people rap actually matters -- what personas they inhabit, how they use their lyrics, why millions of rap fans out there bother memorizing what rappers are saying, not just what they're saying but how they say it ... i've never once seen him write about that stuff. its always, "showing the influences of rave" & big picture shit. I've always found that 'forest for the trees' argument shortsighted when people's understanding of the forest is at tree-level. sometimes understanding music involves acknowledging that maybe your perspective just might be more of an issue than you realize.

i think at some level what pisses me off most about this is that i feel like i spent a lot of time defending ppl like SR's interpretations of rap music to rap fans i knew -- not literally like "you should check this guy Simon Reynolds" but in the sense that, like, I think outsider perspectives -- as in perspectives from ppl who dont consider themselves 'heads' -- can be hugely insightful & certainly powerfully impacted the way i listen to rap. & while i didnt read much simon wrote on rap himself -- like i said above, ive never really dug his actual writing on the form -- his ideas filtered down to me in other ways -- paying attention to ground level to signal a scene's movement, looking at the internal dynamics of a scene to understand whats going on, the dynamics of genres interacting w/ each other broadly, & through writers like tim & scott pl who obviously learned a lot from simon. its not so much that im annoyed by sr not giving a shit about rap any more -- im more annoyed by it being a signpost for a broader trend, signals to all the alt weekly editors & etc. that we can go back to just caring about wu tang & occasional cool kids type shit -- that i find kind of frustrating. maybe im being ridic cuz lots of that writing on rap was pretty awful anyway??

i dunno i still feel like this 'matters' but also like im wasting my time

btw lol @ this
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/share/HipHopBlogAlert-473x450.png