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

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...

yeah that sentence, wtf. is this guy meant to be some elaborate mr. potato head? xpost

i like those aprons.

that zadie smith article is just beyond words. the most guardian paragraph i've ever read.

I have to say I can’t remember these aprons.

i find it hard to believe the records before nirvana/q-tip were "deep house"

unless it was laurent garnier.

but it was probably fatboy slim, right?

She was almost certainly at the so-called 'Muscle Mary' gay night (going on her description) whose music policy bore little resemblance to Fabric's usual Friday and Saturday night fare. I never saw any evidence of it whatsoever but the club certainly had the reputation of being a bit grope-y at the weekend. The Muscle Mary night was OK but my gay friends saw it as being a bit body fascistic - which it probably was given how prevalent this was in London gay clubbing pre-Pop Starz etc, especially for them to single it out. I think I had strangers referring to me as a fucking mess at this night, which was cool, as it's only what I'd get in straight clubs in the same area.

Anyone with any sense went out clubbing in Brixton.

<old man talk/>

I have to say I can’t remember these aprons.

what she's describing is a backless top with a string tie, they were very popular going-out-clothes in the late 90s, the 'classic' one would be made of shiny gold-coloured material.

If that's the case, it would have been DTPM in its final re-incarnation, which IMO wasn't a patch on its stint at The End - it felt snootier, more limiting. (It wasn't pre-Popstarz, though; that's been around since 1995.) I have a vivid memory of gurning to Deep Dish, and a stranger asking if I was having a nasty turn, ahem.

Anyhow, I quite like the Zadie Smith piece! I had a similar moment at Pacha in 1995: lost, alienated and fucked up, not feeling the music, then being rescued by the unexpected entry of a recognisably human element. (In my case: four hours of Jon Pleased Wimmin followed by, of all things, "Live Forever".)

Yeah, I thought that as soon as I wrote it, I meant more the effect that Pop Starz had on gay clubbing in London, which I'm sure you remember was a predictably cliched experience for the most part until the turn of the century. Pop Starz was such a big deal that it had almost as much of an influence on straight, student-y clubs as it did on gay clubs imho.