Favourite Pieces Of Music Writing

This is just terrific. From 1957:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,862551,00.html

"umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns"

"the sickly orange-juice tastes of musical illiterates"

!!!

that's brilliant

and the writer doesn't even get a credit?!

Howard Phillips Lovecraft?

just got reminded of this piece (i think i first read it in a de capo) by slate's longform thing:

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus?printable=true

always loved that piece. my fave part:

Belief and nonbelief are two giant planets, the orbits of which don't touch. Everything about Christianity can be justified within the context of Christian belief. That is, if you accept its terms. Once you do, your belief starts modifying the data (in ways that are themselves defensible, see?), until eventually the data begin to reinforce belief. The precise moment of illogic can never be isolated and may not exist. Like holding a magnifying glass at arm's length and bringing it toward your eye: Things are upside down, they're upside down, they're right side up. What lay between? If there was something, it passed too quickly to be observed. This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it—many were—it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping into a circle, one that closes with you inside. If this seems to imply that no apostate was ever a true Christian and that therefore, I was never one, I think I'd stand by both of those statements. Doesn't the fact that I can't write about my old friends without an apologetic tone just show that I never deserved to be one of them?

he's the best. in the u.s. there are none better. at what he does.

nobody even comes close.

He just wrote a good essay on Cuba.

link? i'm up for reading a good essay on Cuba.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/where-is-cuba-going.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www

Uh, I thought that Cuba article meandered and ultimately did not say too much new and insightful (I got bored with it and may have missed something. Although admittedly I was trying to read it after having finished the David Carr interview with Neil Young in the same issue, so maybe I need to give it another shot).

i didn't finish the cuba thing either. will finish later. though yeah not my fave thing by him. i read the neil young thing the other day and thought it was really boring. neil is kinda boring.

I liked it a bunch, especially the interaction between him and the in-laws.

Yeah, seemed like a good collection of illustrative anecdotes; I also liked his description of wondering what his daughter would think of being Cuban and what that would mean for difference between them.

I suppose I can't separate my feelings from it.

How dare you be Cuban. (Loved your blog response to it.)

aw thanks!

he kinda blamed cuban exiles in miami for inadvertently keeping castro in power, no? the whole thing is ridiculous. this country is ridiculous.

no, the family stuff was good, and if you have roots there i can definitely see it being illuminating. i just don't think its his strongest piece. and it DOES meander and ramble.

link to blog here, als.

http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/our-men-in-havana/

Nice.

The photos of Cuba in the NY Times piece were gorgeous.

^^^ yes

As long as we're talking Cuba -- and this has to do with music too!

http://gawker.com/5943543/the-punks-on-g-street-tracking-cubas-rebellious-youth-50-years-after-the-revolution

http://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/38958539772/one-direction-little-things-did-you-know-that

what i love best about this is her mastery of the tone of mingled disgust and desire and delight, of hyperbolic ambivalence, WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN, #everythingisembarrassing: it's a language i've only seen women use, on tumblr (and before that, a little, on livejournal). I've heard it spoken a bit but only by people already familiar with the internet use. That feeling of being personally affronted by your own reactions - whether to a song, a band, a person - of being aghast at yourself and overjoyed by it, of something that requires high-flown and/or extreme description that's simultaneously 100% serious and 100% facetious.

a language in which you can describe a person as wearing "gravely upsetting tank tops"! a language in which it is possible to express the fact that a song that you kind of despise is precisely the song that affects you the most.

yeah isabel's one of my favorite writers, i wish she did it professionally or regularly in some capacity. whenever she tries it's just O_O

this piece on pfork from years ago has turned into something fairly influential on the direction of my music interests ever since, and by proxy my life.

shoutout to nitsuh. i know they used to post here. definitely one of the best pieces i've ever read.