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

and then ideally you roll with that. and the next one. and the next one.

le guin novel that originally came with a tape of original new age folk in a made-up language is really good though if you ever see it.

― scott seward, Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa what

i love how so many musicians on my facebook preface a link with: I USUALLY HATE ALL MUSIC REVIEWS BUT...

and then they link to something where they, themselves, are mentioned.

and then the first comment will be: THAT WAS SURPRISINGLY NOT HORRIBLE.

granted this is just a small sampling but it seems like there is a lot of animosity out there. and maybe my facebook is skewed toward old cranks and noise musicians but there is little love for the online rockcrit standard - sooooo much pitchfork hate - and even lots of hate for stuff like the wire. maybe people always hated the wire, i have no idea. and most of the links - like i mentioned earlier - are of the GET A LOAD OF THIS MORON - variety. not a lot of love in the room. so maybe perpetua does find insightful tumblr stuff every day, but the average person doesn't seem filled with wonder at the state of discourse. (again, my small crowd and the people they know, etc, not a proper cross-section. maybe its different elsewhere.)

there is a lot of nerd rage out there against critics in general, across all forms of media. Genre movie nerds DESPISE film critics with a knee-jerk venom that gets really depressing to me.

i do get some of that too, scott. and yeah, mostly from folks who own shops or are in bands or etc. otherwise my feed seems evenly split between people who couldn't care less about any of this shit, and rock critics discussing some twitter feud or dumb article or some other thing where they might as well be speaking esperanto.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/pop_singer_samantha_fox_reviews_the_fall_1986

"whoa what"

original edition of Always Coming Home came with a tape of folk music and poetry. (sadly, though i love le guin, that book a little too new age-y earth mother-y for me. i don't think i ever even read the whole thing. cool concept though. lots of illustrations too of tribal stuff/customs/etc.)

see, i love sam fox reviews! would read all day. and she's right too.

i'll be honest, i much prefer to read musicians talking about music than any rockcrit these days. i always kinda want to subscribe to the wire JUST for their jukebox feature. its my favorite part of decibel too when they get a band to listen to songs blind. i love mojo's stuff like that. i love Q&A's with musicians. long interviews about music. that is the stuff for me. i almost always learn more. they're more illuminating even when filled with the usual prejudices and blindspots. there will always be music writers i like, but watching artists interact with art (same goes with filmmakers on film, writers on writing) is my preferred brand of criticism.

totally agree. Quietus should do an antho of their pick 13 pieces, love that shit so much.

Artists on other artists are totally untrustworthy in a certain sense but that's part of why it's so rewarding to read.

I mean it's not true of all artists, for instance Brahms was able to look at just about all music around and preceding him with great insight, but Debussy, if you read all his writings on music you'd think no one worthwhile had ever composed except for a scant few oddball choices.

and i love that.

dusted site does that listed thing. those are really good. haven't looked at that site in forever. should check out new ones.

for some reason i ended up with all these back issues of Performing Songwriter magazine and i was just gonna throw them into the store but i ended up keeping them in the back to read. they're great! long q&a's with people you never see interviewed. i mean, a lot of them are people i don't even listen to, but i love reading them anyway. even their record reviews are pretty good. i mean they'll interview j.d. souther and mavis staples and darryl hall and chrissie hynde and tony visconti in the same issue. love it.

The "MUSIC WRITING SUX FUK PITCHFORK" etc. attitude seems to come mostly from non-pro musicians. It's a perennial complaint, the people who're most excited about a blerb are the squeakiest wheels about how this or that Institution is ruining everything.

BUT this isn't meant to be a dis toward so-called "amateurs"-- I have the opposite opinion and think amateur musicians have made good decisions in life--

If you are to consider that maybe this animosity toward Music Writing is coming from people who just aren't covered by anybody (or covered very effectively), might it not suggest a paucity in local coverage?

I mean it makes me sad whenever WGW is like "you don't know how many fucking promo copies are on my desk right now" bc my favourite columns this year were those "Yes in my backyard" things

scott, think I agree w/you regarding most music writers doing that until something better comes along. I think even *I* did this, but the better thing to come along was me growing up and realizing I just wanted to make music and not write.

However, imo that's not the main reason why music criticism might not "matter". To me, it's because people who read about music aren't looking for a discourse on anything, they're either using reviews as filters to find new music, or they just want to know what's cool in general, to fill some inner quota of current events (ha, in much the same way I read CNN). Also, I notice a lot of writers who seem to write because they want *their* voice out there as a content generator, rather than because they feel any great desire to service a community w/info or analysis. And really, that's not news. People are people, they do things out of self-interest.

Music criticism (or any criticism of the arts) is by my guess pretty low on the totem poll of journalistic career ambition, lower still for literary career ambition. It's often a gateway for writers, much as their reviews are gateways for readers. I don't mean to suggest that all the writing is bad or unimportant, but sheesh, it seems a lot of it is unnecessary beyond the "here is an item you should be interested in" way, even to the people writing/reading it.

i feel like the best mindset for musicians is "do what you're passionate about, try to find and audience but don't get angry or lose motivation when the one you find isn't especially large or lucrative" and critics could probably do well with that as a motto too

Pipe dreams imo

some dude OTM here I think. The problem isn's that criticism doesn't matter, it's its that a larger and larger group of people don't find it matters to them. Meh. If writing about music is something you want to do, is the art you want to make, then make it, let it matter to those it matters to (even if that might be a small group of fellow music writers.)

editors, plz give Samantha Fox a regular column.

she used to have a whole page

give her a magazine then

maybe i'm just getting further inside the bubble but it kinda feels to me like there's a lot of good energy in the music writing world at the moment? obviously as a profession and as a medium there are some unfortunate economic and cultural trends afoot, but in terms of people getting riled up about what they're listening to and what other people are writing, and the amount of interaction on twitter/tumblr/etc. that is actually substantial conversation or argument and not just shallow networking.

Yeah, obviously The Collapse of the Monoculture as well as the entities that used to allow writers to eke a decent living has had consequences, but the climate feels simultaneously more AND less insular. Thanks to the interwebs, we can comment on each other's FB, Twitter, Tumblr; conversations take place which couldn't fifteen years ago. On the other hand I'm more aware than ever at how small the rockcrit/music writing community is. It was small in 1995 and 1983 too but now that we're forced to engage in what is essentially niche marketing the chances of any supra-cultural impact are slim.

A Day Without Rain [Reprise, 2001]
Pondering the fate of post-September 11 pop, everyone predicted what they already wished for--Slipknot undone, Britney in hiding. What happened instead was the unthinkable--sales of Enya's first album since 1995 spiked 10 months after release. (And she thought that movie where Charlize Theron fucked Keanu Reeves and died of cancer was a promotional coup!) Two years in the making with the artiste playing every synthesizer, the 11 songs here last a resounding 34 minutes and represent a significant downsizing of her New Age exoticism since 1988's breakthrough, Watermark--it's goopier, more simplistic. Yanni is Tchaikovsky by comparison, Sarah McLachlan Ella Fitzgerald, treacle Smithfield ham. Right, whatever gets folks through the night. But Enya's the kind of artist who makes you think, if this piffle got them through it, how dark could their night have been? Like Master P or Michael Bolton only worse, she tests one's faith in democracy itself. D-

Assholy in the last two sentences, but no, it's not the worst music writing ever, esp. compared to many other specimens submitted.

Assholy vs her fans, that is

oh, c'mon, that's funny!

Zingers on target up the last couple couple sentences (a little too much stage blood there), and "treacle Smithfield ham" is a great punchline for the comparisons, maybe he shoulda quit there? Brevity is the soul of wit, but I guess he wanted to emphasize the fact that he was really really upset!!

So pretty funny after all--tell us how you really feel, 'gau.

how terrible that he wrote a bad review of an Enya record.

writers should justify easy target hatchet jobs by bringing their A game, not by sneering bravely at a fanbase that is almost definitely not reading it

A- game in this case.

christgau doesn't even seem to like records he says are A- so that's appropriate

i mean it really is perhaps the most useless rating system in all of music writing

It's more accurate to say he doesn't much like his B+'s and especially his B's. Getting awarded the latter means you should crawl back into your mother's womb.

like i said, most useless rating system in all of music writing

Better just to ignore the grades and read the comments---but the later thing, when he awards icons of bombs etc, with no comments--now *that* is the most useless rating system, far as I'm concerned.

i thought he was dropping bombs in the style of Funkmaster Flex

it's da bomb

I'd like to think so! Like it even better if he just spewed keyboard graffiti all over his hated ones; (!#)))>\d1-->fuk I know some of yall are more creative w it

In my line of work only deans get to decree whether anything is neither here nor there

(thanks guys. a novel! by me! you are all so nice <3)

wouldn't a single bomb imply it being THE bomb, though

"productionally"? ...yes, terrible piece of writing.

Samantha Fox reviews The Fall, 1986.

http://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/37735076264sam1.jpg

what's wrong with that?

Mark Smith doesn't yodel on that song
It doesn't rip off a Peter Gunn guitar bit
She listens to half a song then moans about a different band
The Smiths are not this "sort of group" when this sort is The Fall
The Smiths lyric is wrong
"I heard one the other while"

The Smiths lyric is wrong

I am just going to type all of the Wire's '2012 Rewind' issue in here. Particularly though Tony Herrington's bit about the diaspora of African-American archetype invoked in DJ Spinn's 'Teklife 2'.