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

basically never funny

seriously

uh i like sports

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/criq.12001/full

I die each time I hear this sound: Getting dumped and the pop song

I don't know whether to copy-paste this whole thing or just highlights but fyi it starts with Nick Hornby

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Other songs are angrier, raging against the dumper, but still indicative of a dumpee with a profoundly unhealed heart. ‘Damn your love, damn your lies’, sings Stevie Nicks on Fleetwood Mac's ‘The Chain’ (1977). ‘Song for the Dumped’ (1997) by Ben Folds Five, similarly bitter, is dominated by its chorus:

Well fuck you too
Give me my money back
Give me my money back
You bitch
I want my money back
(And don't forget to give me back my black T-shirt)
Wrathful, obsessing over infuriating details, the song is directed at the dumper but dedicated (it's ‘Song for the Dumped’, after all) to the mass of the similarly dumped. I understand, the dumped call back; what a bitch! Other angry songs rail against the ex's new lover. ‘There are two people here’, Todd Trainer of post-hardcore band Shellac screams in their 2000 song ‘Prayer to God’, ‘and I want you to kill them’. The song aims its rage mostly at the new guy: ‘Fucking kill him, fucking kill him/ Kill him already, kill him’ is the refrain, cathartic and angry and totally heartbroken. These are songs for wallowing in and for shouting along to.

The angry song turned inside out becomes the I'm moving on song: singing as hopeful self-help. These songs often accompany a montage of post-dumping recuperation in a certain kind of rom-com. After being dumped yet again, Bridget Jones, for example, declares that ‘This time […] I choose vodka, and Chaka Khan’.[41] These are songs to rally to, summon your friends to, to help you forget you were ever in love in the first place. The apotheosis of the I'm moving on song is, of course, Gloria Gaynor's ‘I Will Survive’ (1978). Gaynor's lover ‘tried to hurt me with goodbye’. ‘It took all the strength I had not to fall apart’, she sings. ‘Kept tryin’ hard to mend the pieces of my broken heart’. But after ‘oh so many nights just feeling sorry for myself’ she started to think about ‘how you did me wrong’: she ‘grew strong’, and blossomed into the heroine of a disco classic.

Our appetite for these songs shows no signs of waning; in fact, we seem to need these songs more and more. A recent study analysing trends in pop music over the last fifty years has concluded that songs are getting sadder: slower, longer, more often in a minor key.[49] The lyrics have become ‘more self-focused and negative’, and the music ‘sadder-sounding and more emotionally ambiguous’, wrote the article's authors, a psychologist and a sociologist.[50] We have more misery in music than ever before. The sad song, the ‘dump’ that Nicholas Udall used in the sixteenth century to describe a heavy heart, has come back to life in the brokenhearted pop song.

It was pop music that both reflected and created the experience of the 1950s adolescent, and continues to score our romantic lives. The teenager arrived at the same time as the idea of being dumped, and the adolescent dating practices of the mid century have endured: the term ‘going steady’ may not be used these days but the model of having more than one serious relationship is the Western norm. We assume the experience, the relationship, will be repeated: and if there are to be multiple such relationships they necessarily have to end, perhaps in graceless break-up by dumping.

In its intensity, but also its disposability, the pop song reflects this string of heartbreaks that we all expect to have. And yet, for all its swooning brokenheartedness, pop retains the ideal of the one true love. In its happier moments pop music promises that the cycle of falling in love and falling out of it again will eventually end, that there'll be a happy ever after. At the end of High Fidelity, Rob is back with his girlfriend Laura. He's decided to commit to the woman he loves, and it seems as though his days of being dumped are over. He begins to compile a mixtape for her: a profoundly adolescent gesture, but at least the tape is ‘full of stuff she's heard of, and full of stuff she'd play’.[51] In the film version, we get to listen in to one of the tracks on the tape: Stevie Wonder's ‘I Believe’ (1972), a song that bemoans lost love (‘Life began, then was done’) at the same time as it hopes that this new relationship will be one to last. ‘I believe’, sings Stevie, ‘when I fall in love this time it will be for ever.’ That ‘this time’ may contain within it the hint of a ‘next time’, but pop music remains endlessly, repetitively hopeful that ‘this time’ it's going to work out. If not, though, we'll press play once more and do it, all of it, all over again.

xpost
i couldn't even read the annotated version.

I keep on meaning to start a blog for the free mag 'Brighton Unsigned'. If you think you've seen bad writing, I'm afraid you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Do provide a sample.

Seriously, it is amazing.

Hope Rudd was up next to play another solo artist to carry on the chilled theme from Newsham but she wasn't something that was quite expected. With the help of new fangled equipment at her feet, all of a sudden, what she was playing on the guitar was still playing and she was playing a different riff. With the sound of more than one person playing and the sight of one person is something that took a bit of getting used to. However, it was done brilliantly. It turns out that when a riff was played, it was temporarily recorded to harmonize with what was being played currently. Hope wasn't short of confidence either: coming across as a happy soul, she shares a few jokes and stories behind some of her songs, showing her willingness to involve the audience to be with her.

I transcribed that myself but it is entirely as printed. Sic sic sic.

Is that a google translation?

The bassist from Attack Attack! used a loop pedal, huh?

Thomp, where did you come across that article? Is that what a typical critical studies grad student (surely not a professor) is like?

I honestly get so much joy out of that review - she has a magic box! Oh my god!

That review is amazing. I am glad the reviewer got over her shock in time to "be with" the artist.

Or his shock

Our local paper would often cover my club/gig nights in their listings but always always ALWAYS wrote the name of the night as "Rouge" instead of "Rogue", even when they were quoting an email that I'd sent them. Bloody journalists.

Mooge Rouge

"I distinctly heard the sound of strings and yet no string players were on stage, merely a man pressing the keys on his new fangled magic piano. Naturally I fainted with shock but, upon being revived by smelling salts, I was able to appreciate his cunning application of electrickery."

emil.y I am still back on that first sentence of the excerpt you transcribed and will probably be staying there until after Christmas

thanking u emil.y that is just some mind-expanding stuff. The palpable struggle!

Thomp, where did you come across that article? Is that what a typical critical studies grad student (surely not a professor) is like?

I came across it because I just turned down my Ph.D. place and now I am temping for the publisher /:

Katherine Hunt is completing her PhD at the London Consortium on the invention and reception of change-ringing in seventeenth-century England. She is a reviews editor for Critical Quarterly and a founding editor of Teller, a magazine of stories.

Sorry about the Ph.D. (though maybe for the best?). I guess if you are a reviews editor your payment is getting an article published?

More excerpts from Brighton Unsigned please! Please please please

the invention and reception of change-ringing in seventeenth-century England.

Interested

posts v much in etc

From that ancient Limp Bizkit site: http://niggab.tripod.com/review.html

so then towards the end of the set, fred goes, "i gotta take a shit right now," and he gets up on the toilet and lethal makes this fart noise and a cardboard cut out of posh spice pops up out of the toilet. fred goes "how many of you like the spice girls?" and like everyone boos. then he goes "how many of you girls would like to beat the fuck out of the spice girls?" and you hear like this huge feminine roar. then he says "how many of you fellas would like a blowjob from the spice girls?" ive never heard so many men cry out in my life. except for that one time in al's mom's bedroom. but anyway, then he goes, "well i just want to flush this bitch cos the spice girls suck!" and there is this huge roar of approval.

Oh the nostalgia.

feel like its been a loooooong time since someone posted something on the good music writing thread. or was that thread locked and buried. r.i.p.

further proof that the late 90s had the highest shit to good music ratio. FUIUD.

imo that ratio just rises every year, as more and more music is made all the time

it's all about shit listening vs good listening imo

ive never heard so many men cry out in my life. except for that one time in al's mom's bedroom.

lol @ zadie smith

I am addressing this to my fellow Britons in particular. Fellow Britons! Those of you, that is, who were fortunate enough to take the first generation of the amphetamine ecstasy and yet experience none of the adverse, occasionally lethal reactions we now know others suffered—yes, for you people I have a question. Was that joy?

I am especially interested to hear from anyone who happened to be in the Fabric club, near the old Smithfield meat market, on a night sometime in the year 1999 (I’m sorry I can’t be more specific) when the DJ mixed “Can I Kick It?” and then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into the deep house track he had been seeming to play exclusively for the previous four hours. I myself was wandering out of the cavernous unisex (!) toilets wishing I could find my friend Sarah, or if not her, my friend Warren, or if not him, anyone who would take pity on a girl who had taken and was about to come up on ecstasy who had lost everyone and everything, including her handbag. I stumbled back into the fray.

Most of the men were topless, and most of the women, like me, wore strange aprons, fashionable at the time, that covered just the front of one’s torso, and only remained decent by means of a few weak-looking strings tied in dainty bows behind. I pushed through this crowd of sweaty bare backs, despairing, wondering where in a super club one might bed down for the night (the stairs? the fire exit?). But everything I tried to look at quickly shattered and arranged itself in a series of patterned fragments, as if I were living in a kaleidoscope. Where was I trying to get to anyway? There was no longer any “bar” or “chill-out zone”—there was only dance floor. All was dance floor. Everybody danced. I stood still, oppressed on all sides by dancing, quite sure I was about to go out of my mind.

Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.

idk much about her but everything of hers that I have read is completely embarrassing

LOL where did that piece run?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/joy/

wow

longest "Missed Connections" ad ever

i like that bellows portrait at least

The New Yorker piece she wrote about Joni Mitchell was even worse.

blessed Q-Tip!

And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was.

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/28505/thumbs/s-HITCHENS-WATERBOARDED-large.jpg

lool

Glad we mentioned her incomprehensible Joni article. I held it in front of a mirror and it still made no sense.

I want her to explain Dave Brubeck's use of meter to me

Ah yes, Q-Tip--blessed Q-tip! And his dog, who plays upon the fife! And Ali, the mussulman!

human Q-Tip

Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self.

Surprise! His mouth is above his mustache!

...and a round little belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly...