The Mountain Goats

That's why they're called "profiles" and not "exposes".

point taken

i remember some rolling stone article in the 90s where they sort of went into detail abt what a fraud they thought eddie vedder was

fuckin guy doesn't even WEAR flannel.

http://www.field.ca/images/large/mountaingoat_lg.jpg

In fact, profiles of super-cool independent musicians in mass-market consumer magazines almost inevitably turn out to be cringe-inducing, forced exercises in justifying the relevance of an artist that often doesn't really care about being relevant to begin with.

My usual problem with them, actually -- and this applies to some but not all of the pieces in question -- is that they're so often written by people who don't cover music.

That's not inherently a bad thing, depending on who you are. Most of these articles aren't really aimed at people who'd know or care a ton about the artist to begin with -- they're taking well-known figures from the music world and (often) hiring the feature and profile writers already in their address books to introduce those figures to a broader audience. (I have faith that there are plenty of music writers who could produce great magazine-style profiles; I assume they're just not always in the loop of the general-interest publications that run such things.)

But like someone said above, it does often turn into a case of a culture writer sort of parroting received wisdom about the artist in between gushing about how moved they are by the music, and how fascinated they are by the musician. They explain the mythology of the artist in ways that those in the artist's field have already started complicating. They make the artist's "cult-like" status sound like something particularly magical, whereas people who follow such things tend to be aware that the same article could be written about any number of the artist's peers. And in a lot of cases, it can lead to odd bits of misinformation, or semi-misleading emphasis of information, or the taking for granted of claims about music that a music writer would (hopefully) be more curious or critical about.

The one that most got me on this front was the Andrew Bird article, which contained claims like this:

He had lost interest in classical concertos, but he couldn’t relate to the stark, self-consciously simplistic sound of the post-punk scene that flourished in Chicago in the 1990s.

I'm not even sure what this is referring to: Chicago's popular alt-rock bands? the Chicago no-wave hardly anyone listened to? a 90s Chicago that contained no post-rock? This might seem like a nit-pick -- it is, really -- but it's the sort of thing I come across and don't understand why I couldn't be reading the same piece as written by someone who has enough connection with the material to unpack these things ... as opposed to what seems like a magazine guy who just happens to like Andrew Bird a lot:

Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer. His most recent book is “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”

I don't mean this to sound elitist, though I suppose it might technically qualify. It's just that ... I get the sense it's a lot harder for music critics to pitch stories about Hamdan v. Rumsfeld than it is for people to go in the opposite direction, and I'm not sure editors know some of the things that go wrong with the pieces that result.

^^those kind of "exposes" are bullshit imo because yeah it's usually at the level of just that xxp

that goat is stocky

I think he's referring to the post-punk Lounge Ax/Touch & Go scene circa 1999.

Wait, Eazy, you're being sarcastic, right?

um, that's what i assume the writer is referring to

I mean that as early as 2000 he was getting booked by Billions, and the particular music scene he was around at the time was making music that played against the strengths of what he was doing.

(But he was also pretty much part of the Hideout/alt-country world here in Chicago, played at a Doug Sahm tribute at Lounge Ax, and toured with Neko and others around that time, so he wasn't an ostracized guy at all; just didn't fit into what Billions and T&G were championing at the time.)

andrew bird, comfortably splitting the difference between concertos and simplistic chicago post-punk.

I don't understand how it would make sense to posit it as some formative thing that Bird wasn't attracted to the "flourishing" of a small group of Chicago post-punk bands.

xpost - by the way, we're talking about the mid-90s here

Honestly, I'm pretty sure that sentence is the writer's (non-music-jargony) way of referring to the alt-rock at the Metro, which it might make sense for Bird to react to. And I suspect the writer isn't otherwise aware that there was plenty of flourishing of complicated music on non-rock instruments happening in Chicago at exactly that moment. I suspect Andrew Bird told the writer he felt alienated from the rock/punk stuff going on in the city at the time, and the writer then assembled a sentence that made Bird sound, somewhat romantically, like a lone dissenter or misfit in a rock scene. Which makes for nice copy, but doesn't seem like a complete claim at all.

I don't understand how it would make sense to posit it as some formative thing that Bird wasn't attracted to the "flourishing" of a small group of Chicago post-punk bands.

that's not what the writer is saying. the writer is saying (as I read it) Bird wasn't interested in concertos, and he wasn't interested in Tar/Shellac whatever etc etc

Well, a lot of Chicago bands around him were fitting in with the sound of the labels here at the time: so there were Bloodshot bands, Touch & Go bands, and Thrill Jockey bands. What he was doing didn't fit in with those, and he was never on a local label, unlike a lot of his peers at the time.

I dunno, guys: keep in mind that this is a general-interest article written by someone who doesn't appear to write about music.

Que, the sentence is organized to suggest, pretty strongly, that the stark/simplistic "post-punk" that Bird couldn't relate to was somehow the dominant Chicago scene -- that it was the sound that "flourished" in 90s Chicago, leaving Bird somewhat romantically trapped between his concertos and the rock kids.

Now, no matter what we think he's referring to, or what elements of felt truth there might have been in that, we're talking about an era in Chicago where one major thing that was "flourishing" involved like Jim O'Rourke making pop and the Sea and Cake and such, so the suggestion that Andrew Bird was somehow an outcast from the mainstream of the scene seems really odd to me (even before the Bloodshot/Hideout stuff comes into view).

I'd reiterate that this is a non-music journalist in the NYT Magazine -- I really don't know that he himself exactly has Shellac in mind. Like I said, my guess is that a general expression on Bird's part of not being able to relate to some rock scene has just slipped onto the page, making for nice copy, without the writer's thinking: wait, was that the main scene happening at the time? Is anything else missing from this picture?

i think you're totally overthinking it. i think Shellac and the Sea and Cake and Jim O can all fall under post-punk/simplistic label (esp. if you're, as you say, a NY Times writer who doesn't write about music all that much) without too much trouble.

ay yi yi, this thread. Happy Birthday, John! Hahahahahaha!

O'Rourke records are too "stark" for Andrew Bird to relate to???

http://images.nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/mountaingoats090309_3_560.jpg
<3 this pic haha

who is this andrew bird character anyway? someone i should have heard of? (not gonna read the nyt piece.)

hes a squirrel nut zipper

more like andrew turd

is he related to larry bird

he's good, you might like him. violin, loops and experimental vox. i hear the new one is good.

but does he poo clouds?

a quick gis reveals him to be DASHING, even when disheveled.

he does poo clouds, yes. pretty sick.

that goat is stocky

― velko, Monday, March 16, 2009 4:29 PM

like his fanbase ;)

Anyway, though, I'll try not to belabor the one sentence -- I just get this sense, when general-interest writers do these musician profiles, that certain impressions go wrong somewhere in the translation; probably the same way science buffs feel about science articles. (There are other details in the Bird piece that seemed odd to me: some fretting about playing large venues when I'm pretty sure he's played larger; some of the obligatory wrap-up conclusions; little profile details about songwriting process that seem like they'd be true for half of the musicians you talked to, etc.)

i saw a fan go up to oldham with the "you're such a genius" shtick, it was really awkward until the guy asked if he knew where the bathroom was and oldham said "so you really like my music and you gotta take a piss?"

― bnw, Monday, March 16, 2009 4:05 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

I like to think that this fan views oldham as some all-powerful all-knowing oracle who can answer any query at hand

"will, what's the population of guam?"
"will, where will I go when I die?"
"will, where did I park my car?"

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=53098479

Jeremy
Mar 3, 2009 4:05 PM

More like Andrew Turd.

lol

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/MountainGoat08.jpg

nabisco's totally right, btw -- general-interest profiles of musicians often get things slightly or totally wrong. it has been thus forever. right?

mountain goats are pretty amazing looking! wow.

http://https%3A//www.abugames.com/images/products/5thedition/mountaingoat.jpg

http://mtg.windswalk.com/images/set_en/PT/146.jpg

http://mtg.windswalk.com/images/set_en/5E/252.jpg

nabisco's totally right, btw -- general-interest profiles of musicians often get things slightly or totally wrong. it has been thus forever. right?

how about: journalists get things slightly or totally wrong all the time etc etc etc

http://www.irreplaceablewild.org/media/gallery/mountaingoat.jpg

srsly i don't think anyone is disputing the idea that journalists often write inaccurate or biased pieces. for a wide variety of reasons! ignorance or self-indulgence are only two of many possibilities.

i am def gonna get some curry goat for dinner btw.

how about: journalists get things slightly or totally wrong all the time etc etc etc
nah, don't think that's true ... (kidding: yes.)

http://images.nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/mountaingoats090309_3_560.jpghttp://www.huntinglodgesale.com/images/Mountain-Goat-Hunting.jpg

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/03/the_mountain_go.php

How funny, I happen to be an 30yr old obsessed Mountain Goats fan and former Juggalo, the two are not that far apart

Posted by: hanuman at March 3, 2009 2:41 PM

I think what's odd to me about it in these cases is that I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people who could write excellent general-audience profiles of Bird, from a perspective that's maybe more in the music field, most of them probably cheaper than regular NYT Mag contributors -- but that gap doesn't get filled often, does it? Beyond like SFJ and Kelefa and a few newspaper people. It's not that I think music can only be written about my music writers, but it always feels like there's an unnecessary disconnect on this front, a weird lack of bridging between the music realm and the general-audience stuff.

can we all at least agree that without getting into the validity of not of the gawker article that it reads like it was written by a child?