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

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.

I don't mind Zadie Smith too much either. A lot of shit vented at her seems to be based on her age, gender and race, and in turn what this says about the social class of her readers, rather than her ability to write. (She's a fantastic prose stylist if not too hot on plot but she's clearly leagues ahead of most of her contemporaries.)

I'm sure she'd be the first to admit that she doesn't really give a fuck if she's mistaken hi-energy for deep house.

I was watching 'Stigma' - a short made for TV, ghost story originally aired by the BBC in 1975, released as part of the amazing BFI Ghost Stories For Christmas box set recently - and only just managed to internalise my rage that the 12-year-old female character was sitting in her room listening to Their Satanic Majesties' Request by the Stones. "But it's just so unbelievable that she would be doing this!" I fumed to myself, oblivious that it was simply a plot device and no one - who isn't mad - gives a shit about this stuff.

I wouldn't be so forgiving about the Joni Mitchell piece however.

I'm sure she'd be the first to admit that she doesn't really give a fuck if she's mistaken hi-energy for deep house.

it's all just music in the end really.

Her first two novels and her first essay collection have moments (I liked the essay about Obama and the English language), which made the Mitchell one all the more cloddish.

XP: Ha ha ha!

to be fair, a LOT of novelists can make you cringe when they write about music. even when characters in a novel talk about music it can make me cringe. music is funny like that. what makes me cringe in novels is when the music talk is obviously in the writer's voice and not the character's voice. sometimes its REALLY obviously just a way to talk about stuff they like.

totally otm

Yep. All the music talk in George Pelecanos books is like that. Totally intrusive and artificial.

What are the best chapters on music from novels? The stuff from American Psycho springs to mind.

But that works because it's played as absurd. There's quite a bit of straight writing about music in fiction that reads very similar.

Anyway I think all us music writers should start petitioning fiction editors to let us have a crack at short story writing. Tit for tat, right?

my dad reads this mystery guy john sandford and he was telling me about one of his books where the hero spends the entire novel thinking of the best 100 songs to put on an ipod. they don't make mysteries like they used to...(my dad thought it wss cool though.) (mystery/suspense guys are always throwing in the names of blues/jazz people they like. especially newer singers who they feel should get more recognition or something.)

http://richardlaymonkills88710.yuku.com/topic/1561/t/List-of-top-100-songs-from-John-Sanford-s-quot-Broken-Prey.html