new york times' kelefeh sanneh on the white stripes, get behind me satan and retro-rock

I understand you disagree with Sanneh's evaluation of the White Stripes. He, however, at least argues why he likes them so much. You however, just keep saying that you don't think they're very good, and he's wrong about them. And without any argument as to why you hold your opinion, I could really care less about it.

He could have just said what I think of this record, which is that it's a psychedelic time-shifting masterpiece!! A much more focused way of encapsulating the past/future thing. Reminds me of a mushroom trip I had in college -- wondering what lay ahead in academia's wake while longing to be 8 years old watching Yaz's last game for the Sox with my Dad; the memory was crystal clear and poignant, even while I was also freaking out about the present. If you just report on the record and not play harvard boy, the evidence is there that Jack is experiencing something similar; the choice of arrangement tells me that.

The reasons why I don't think the WS are very good (from what I've heard, anyway - and I do like the new single) are that I don't think the songwriting seems all that great, the singing doesn't seem all that great (and is actually annoying at times) and I don't know about the personality being projected. I could mention tons of garage bands I like more - those ones I mentioned from the early '90s way upthread were all greater, I think.

I am inherently suspicious of them though.

How about a pair of pink sidewinders
And a bright orange pair of pants?
"You could really be a Beau Brummel baby
If you just give it half a chance.
Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers,
You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers."
Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways
It's still rock and roll to me

What's the matter with the crowd I'm seeing?
"Don't you know that they're out of touch?"
Should I try to be a straight `A' student?
"If you are then you think too much.
Don't you know about the new fashion honey?
All you need are looks and a whole lotta money."
It's the next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways
It's still rock and roll to me

Everybody's talkin' 'bout the new sound
Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me

no. neo soul gets it too, hip hop artists like edan and ugly ducking get it too, even annie and richard x get it.

"What about funk revivalism within hip-hop"

if hip hop was a genre flooded with bands playing retro-styled funk then you might have a point, but er, they sampled funk and made it into a new genre called hip hop or rap music, so its not quite the same thing.

but you get groups like sharon jones, breakestra and the ilk on the modern funk scene who are just like the funk versions of all those detroit bands playing garage rock and bar room blues like its 1970 all over again.

"or the huge debt that the supposedly groundbreaking dance music of the '90s owes to the electronic music of the '70s and '80s?"

not the same. how on earth do goldie, aphex twin, matmos, or junior boys or any of those guys sound like kraftwerk, eno or whoever? thats just lazy. theyre all electronic, but matmos doesnt sound like kraftwerk or whoever does he? this is like people who say kid a wasnt doing anything new cos eno already did low, but they sound nothing alike.

-- Tim Ellison (timelliso...) (webmail), June 4th, 2005 2:15 AM. (Tim Ellison) (later) (link)

The videos?

You think journalists at many other, hundreds of other, dailies in the US of A don't listen to or are aware of a broad range of music?
Well they do and they did for a long time. And some are ignoramuses but you can't come close to painting them all with a statistical mean or a broad stroke.

They often just don't have the luxury of blowing a page of musings the size of a NYT piece on their opinions and derivations of pop musical field equations. Even when they do get half that volume by lucky chance, it doesn't hit the wire, if it does at all, with the same agency name oomph.

Look, this thread, like all the threads on Sanneh, or other pieces cited from the Times "pop music" which always hits around page 25 on Sunday recently on ILM, are a product of the lickspittle brigade. The White Stripes are hardly the only band that reinvests and reinvents "retro." They're only the one of literally a hundred, at least, I bet, under the microscope of a big daily newspaper.

I get a record or two a month from nobodies, old and young, who are doing the same thing, often better, sometimes equal, frequently worse but without the infrastructure resource to lift the art higher.

What makes you tyros and boneheads so cocksure that a byline in the New York Times and the wherewithal to do 40 or more column inches after massage by a layered team of editors confers excellence?

People with Pulitzers under their belts and appearances regularly on the front page of this paper in hard news analysis have been publicly thrown down as rubbish in the last couple years. You think features writing is immune?

I enjoy reading Sanneh. He frequently appears to be either winging it or from a different planet with regards to things I know something about, like many Times writers, but always eloquent, like all Times writers who go through the editorial process. This piece, published last Sunday, wasn't one of the stronger things. But by pure weight of paper its printed on, a valid measurement if you're into finding the volume under the curve through physical calculus, it bowls over anything done by newspaper writers at any other paper in the country on the same day.

As for K.'s writing, all newspapers are middle-brow, and as such the piece doesn't deviate far from the norm. Except, of course, per the above: trying to intellectualize a band that just doesn't support the ol' firing of the synapses.

(I'd take it all back if the above image were the actual album cover.)

I'm sorry this is bullshit. Sonzala (#1) was furious at how houston was covered by MTV and (#2) is not an idiot.

hahahaha! i heart keith harris. he's been writing such great stuff for da voice.

"Well, shit—who wouldn't marry Kenny Chesney instead? A laid-back little fella, he'll wash if you dry, sniffle proudly at your daughter's graduation, whisk you off to Tim and Faith's beach house for the weekend. Sure, one Amstel Light too many can instigate a 4 a.m. Billy Joel sing-along with his Lambda Chi bros, but at least he won't sulk Saturday night away in the attic alphabetizing Blind Blake wax cylinders by gas lamp. And any juniorette Joan Rivers who refuses to condone a Stetson at the altar should check Jack White's latest promo glossies. You'd prefer your groom decked out like a Hasidic Johnny Depp piloting the TARDIS to 19th-century Spain?"

I guess I don't have a problem about what he's saying about the new album, but the pretext and historical perspective is pretty wacked.

Not at all! I do it too. It's no more absurd than any number of other ways of spending time. The absurdity is part of what I enjoy.

I was thinking more of certain scenes that tried to slavishly imitiate acid house or detroit techno. Or west coast '90s rap songs that used Parliament loops. Sure, it's incredibly lazy to call that stuff retro which was my whole point. It's equally lazy to dismiss the Strokes or White Stripes as being retro. The term retro is mildly descriptive at best but it doesn't work as a criticism.

For example, I think Lenny Kravitz sucks but not simply because he's retro. It would be hypocritical of my to criticize him in those terms since I love for example Stereolab who is even more ridiculously retro.

As a criticism, the term retro is just a lazy shorthand that stands in for the old biases for originality and authenticity. It's a way to criticize music you don't like by implying that it's not doing anything innovative or that the artists and fans are merely playing with a nostalgiac pose. But my point is that these standards are not applied consistently. Another artist with an equally retrograde sensibility will be given a pass if the critic likes his music.

Adding rapping to p-funk tracks (as well as turning them into, you know, three minute pop songs) is a huge difference. Obviously its all relative but I think its entirely reasonable to use the words "retro" in some situations.

I dont think he uses "retro" as a pejorative at all! You're reading a lot more into what he's saying than he actually wrote.

(I dont think its ks's best article by far - he's much more at home with hip-hop, pop, etc....i didnt like his slint piece much either - but I think he made some good points, even if he also made some rather broad generalizations)

i mean, the search for antecedents is one of the favorite forms of critical one-upmanship but it could go on forever and in this case i think sort of misses the point.

Re Amateurist's point: perhaps the article is understandably focused on the US, but if we're talking about bands/movements with "nationwide, not-just-college-radio-type exposure" based around "selfconscious retro-ism" then surely the model for this is Britpop??

But yeah, The Strokes are part of a different "movement"...

well, all of the bands I listed above had nationwide, not-jus-college-radio type exposure, actually. and i'm still not sure anybody has explained what the strokes are retro *to* -- they don't sound like a '60s garage band, they don't sound like the velvet underground, they don't sound like television, they don't sound like the cars; basically, the one band they really sound like is, um, the strokes. and yes, they do *draw* on those influences, but not more than, say, black crowes/urge overkill/local h/everclear/weezer/buck cherry/oasis/etc drew on allman brothers/bad company/elvis costello/cars/ac-dc/t. rex/beatles/etc. which is to say, if the strokes are "retro," i still really don't understand how those (quite popular) '90s bands were *not* retro. unless you're just talking clothes and haircuts (though, as i recall, urge overkill and the dandy warhols kinda dressed in period garb, and so did the black crowes, though obviously the perioid was different). strokes do what rock bands pretty much *always* do -- they recombine influences that have already existed. (which is also what hip-hop acts sampling old funk records under '70s-style soul vocals and daft punk mimicking eurodisco and kenny chesney shuffling mellencamp/petty/buffet and the killers mixing up duran/gang of four/"queen bittch" etc. do, obviously. i'm not sure i see a difference - they're all retro, or they're all not.) and though i really don't want to dissect kelefah''s piece--it' really doesn't bother me all that much, and he can be a great writer in ways unheard of among daily paper critics--i do think his main point here is to put forward the idea that white stripes suddenly came up with this idea that you can recombine different parts of old sounds into a new sound. and my quesion is: who *doesn''t* do that? so yeah, as he says. maybe it IS time to retire the term 'retro-rock'" (assuming anybody actually uses that term in the first place -- isn't it sort of a straw man? though maybe i just talk to and read different people than k does). but it''s not time to retire it because of the new white stripes LP (which, as somebody above said, sounds good, and pretty much the same as their other albums, on which they recombined old influences as well; i'm glad kelefah loves it, but they never sounded particularly purist to me) it's time to retire the phrase because it really never meant all that much in the first place!

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