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

pretty much all music "opinion" writing these days is presenting totally obvious, self-evident things as "revelations" because social justice

yeah the number of "if you don't like this / do like this, your politics are wrong" articles is really depressing but since the default mode of writing about music is now "this is how I felt as I listened," it's natural that this is what we'd get

it's definitely what you get when blogging = journalism.

or "journalism".

i don't really know what you call the awl. awl-ful!

webblogzine or whatever.

what i found more striking was that i think i've read five profiles of newsom from this album cycle, all of them by men, and all of them identical (1. something about unicorns 2. her songs are complicated 3. she was in inherent vice)

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Tuesday, October 27, 2015 8:27 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I spent €8 on Uncut to read a dreadful feature that went on about the 'constellation of birthmarks' (read: freckles) on her face, and hit all these other marks mentioned above.

Apologies if an ILMer wrote this but shit like this make me pray for asteroids

http://thequietus.com/articles/19113-carly-rae-jepsen-emotion-best-record-2015-olafur-eliasson-drake

i don't really know what you call the awl. awl-ful!

webblogzine or whatever.

― scott seward, Wednesday, 28 October 2015 02:28 (2 days ago) Permalink

For a while it seemed like they were trying to distinguish themselves as sort of "above the fray", not too clickbaity, perhaps a little more literate than most sites, but not with articles like that.

all you really need to know right here about that carly ray review:

"As with the briefcase in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction..."

If an ILMer wrote that you should be even less apologetic

Heh, probably.

The Quietus are usually pretty good generally though which is why it's always a bit odd when they drop the ball so heavily

New winner.

http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/10-of-the-best-debut-albums-of-2015

painful stuff.
makes the bojack horseman takeover issue look like a masterclass in subtlety.

It didn't have "sponsored post" on it at first. It had a byline. Of a writer who took to Twitter to angrily deny he had anything to do with it.

Viet Cong is not a noise band

Clearly that's the issue here.

tbh i'd rather have my advertorial hilariously clunky like that than anything more insidious (or worse journalists repping brands in non-advertorial copy)

found out about the late of the pier frontman's record from this. the system works! listening to it now, though - perhaps it doesn't

ha, that is only one article from a four part series

You’d think we’d run out of battery or grind to a halt. But two hours in and we were still at 71%. The system is designed to handle multi-tasking by balancing memory and processor resources efficiently. So we carried on, gliding from tab to tab like Sleaford Mods on a pub crawl. Juiced up and eager to keep the party going.

http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-5-best-collaborations-of-2015

this is surely someone who has been lumbered with an unenviable writing assignment and intentionally making it as corny as possible to maintain some personal dignity?

Amazing.

"Getting a job done has never been so lolz."

I was just coming to post that.

Hefty.

is it a joke? a conceptual prank of some kind? institutional critique about the advertorial fate of journalism today?

this has the same earnest tone as the clean bandit cortana adverts, which were not done in jest

it has the feel of something which has been rewritten in spite after a request for amendments

Canadian trio Badbadnotgood bring their intricate jazz flex to the philosophical whims of Wu-Tang wordsmith Ghostface Killah

Kind of wondering if these pieces were even written by anyone internally at all, they have the feeling of being at the very least heavily rewritten by some Microsoft marketing hack.

Exactly what I thought Matt

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vsmmztyf1rvjt2vo1_500.gif

http://thenewswheel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tumblr_m7vsmmztyf1rvjt2vo2_500.gif

https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/an-in-depth-textual-analysis-of-cajmeres-percolator

http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/will-butler-arcade-fire-talks-grimes-art-angels/

I just keep wondering if the funkiness is justified.

vs.

It’s like Grimes herself sings — I think — on “Flesh Without Blood”: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each/I do not think that they will sing to me/We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

i feel like music writing hits new lows every few days lately

Nah. It's like Grimes herself sings, "Your Highness, no ; things there are bad as ever ; Men pass their time in so much wretchedness, That I, in sooth, have not the heart to plague them."

Wow I didn't even realize it was the Arcade Fire guy.

Prince is obviously a fine touchstone for talking about Grimes. “Can’t you see the enemy just isn’t me tonight?” she sings on “Butterfly,” and then sings about butterflies, possibly as a metaphor, though possibly as literally about butterflies. Classic Prince move — talking about himself, and the public view of him, but also just making freakin’ dance music, and also speaking his own religious language, and also talking about, I don’t know, gun violence? And trying to get in your pants if you want, baby, but is that really me uhh, oh reality is a, mmm, tikky tikky tikky tikky burntz burntz burntz.

^ ???

hustlebonescominoutmy says "Hey Will. Everyone on the internet is mocking this review"

With Bob Marley, it was listening to the Congos in my twenties that made me realize what a crazy, beautiful world I was missing out on in reggae.

every sentence is embarrassing

I did not realise until today that Win and Will Butler were two different people. Anyway, whoever wrote this, it's shit.

i dunno, I feel like I don't see enough whining from rock bores about how they're trying their hardest to like pop music, dammit

they won a grammy hence what do they know about music anyways

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34801885

The good news is that, in their hearts, people are aware of this. All who have had the experience of teaching music appreciation know it to be so. The first step is to introduce the precious commodity of silence, so that your students are listening with open ears to the cosmos, and are beginning to forget their addictive pleasures. Then you play to them the things that you love. They will be bewildered at first. After all, how can this old geezer sit still for 50 minutes listening to something that hasn't got a beat or a tune? Then you discuss the things that they love. Had they noticed, for example, that Lady Gaga in "Poker Face" stays for most of the tune on one note? Is that real melody? After a while they will see that they have in fact been making judgments all along - it is just that they were making the wrong ones. When Metallica appeared at the 2014 Glastonbury festival there was a wake-up moment of this kind - the recognition that these guys, unlike so many who had performed there, actually had something to say. Yes, there are distinctions of quality, even in the realm of pop.

Roger Scruton is a famous buffoon tbf

I'm assuming that the dude who wrote that is ignorant of a lot of contemporary vocal music that is built upon man-made sound-effects and drones.

In 2009, Scruton wrote and presented the BBC2 documentary Why Beauty Matters,[17] in which he argued that beauty should be restored to its traditional position in art, architecture and music. In an article for The American Spectator subsequent to the programme's broadcast, Scruton claimed he had received "more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, 'Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said'".[18] In an Intelligence Squared debate in March 2009,[19] held at the Royal Geographical Society, Scruton (seconding historian David Starkey) proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty" by holding an image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus next to an image of the British supermodel Kate Moss, to demonstrate how British perceptions of beauty had declined to the "level of our crudest appetites and our basest needs".[20]

ah I see, he's a knob

exactly

finally someone to defend the value of metallica

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/573718.stm