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

not to mention the consistent idea that "naturalness" is a "white" thing, which completely eclipses an entire tradition of neo-soul, roots hip-hop, etc. etc. not to mention which a "natural" as a hairstyle is well... like somebody get this author an Erykah Badu album stat

spite some kind of modern virtue

From the Quietus best albums thing, just one sentence

"The RSS B0ys are a quick fuck on a dirty gas station-toilet with some anonymous stranger." Sonja Matuszczyk

Uhh huhhhhhhhh

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-lemmy-and-motorhead-gave-metal-its-umlaut-20151229

this is pretty bad. i'm not sure which is worse on this, the writing or the editorial. on the editorial side, we have a headline about the importance of the umlaut to motorhead which omits the umlaut. on the article side, we have an article about how motorhead brought the umlaut to metal which openly acknowledges that motorhead did not bring the umlaut to metal, but got it from blue oyster cult. also there's this bizarre tangent about amon duul. i'm not sure if browne is actually unaware that umlauts are a standard part of the german language or knows but doesn't care.

Just dropped in to see if that garbage New Inquiry piece had made it. This thread never lets me down.

(Lemmy, a collector of Nazi memorabilia, rarely if ever commented on any connection between that umlaut and Nazi-era use of the dots in say, "Führer.") For Lemmy, the umlaut, like the music and lifestyle he lived until his body couldn't take it anymore, spoke — or pronounced — volumes.

yeah, i got rooked into promulgating the umlaut piece myself... people want more lemmy content right now! A piece on the pictographic history of his mole would likely have tremendous click-through.

that's more of a right-hand-side-of-the-browser affiliate program link

i stand corrected

nazi-era use of the dots

of course after ww2 the decision was made to remove the dots from the word Führer

for a fairer Germany

as someone who has sub-edited not one but two Motorhead-dedicated magazine specials in recent years, the umlaut is the bane of my life.

Let’s be clear on one thing about this record. It isn’t a rap album your average fair-weather hip-hop fan who only listens to what BET and Hot 97 feed them will ever begin to comprehend. In order to fully cognate the textural and lyrical parameters on display, you will have to go back to the likes of Funkadelic’s America Eats Its Young or Brer Soul by Melvin Van Peebles or even Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet to comprehend where this talented young man is coming from. Just as with D’Angelo’s The Black Messiah, To Pimp A Butterfly is exactly the kind of challenging, confrontational truth many Americans been waiting to hear from the black community.

just like The Black Messiah

*just as with The Black Messiah

Offered without comment.

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/life-ruined-says-Daniel-O-Donnell-superfan/story-28465949-detail/story.html

the photographer should have cajoled him into smashing all his memorabilia up for the camera imo

That would have added a frisson of psychopathy which would make the whole thing more believable.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/01/what-past-coachella-lineups-would-look-like-today/

i have no idea what that is for

http://www.digitalthirdcoast.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/fewer-clicks1.png

tried reading that on mobile and got one of those full-page 'download this app to proceed' roadblocks. hisssss

In order to fully cognate the textural and lyrical parameters on display
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr05%2F2013%2F7%2F9%2F19%2Fenhanced-buzz-2038-1373414176-0.jpg&f=1

good lord what is the fucking point of that Coachella poster piece

^^^ btw I've clicked through four pages of it so far :(

You might as well be asking what is the point of Consequence of Sound. There appears to be none.

omg that coachella piece is amazing. the headliners are basically the same. this is like clickhole quality "here's what famous stars would look like if we photoshopped a hat onto them" stuff.

Writer learned who Bowie was via Snapchat a few minutes before getting the assignment

http://www.thefader.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-obituary-essay

idk if i'm going to regret engaging but: where is the evidence of that

doubt someone who'd just heard of Bowie could have turned his bio into such bizarre prose so quickly

Let's commit to transcendent human specificity

can't decide whether that or the SFJ thing is worse

Keeping this out of the lovely Bowie R.I.P. thread but I found this take by Owen Pallett to be so far off the mark and basically insulting, like he was just waiting to drop his edgy, contrarian hot take that makes no sense whether you love weird Bowie or pop Bowie or whatever.

It’s difficult for me to articulate my love of Bowie’s music without coming off as a hater. My engagement with his music began very young, and through my teens I purchased everyone of his albums, read every book on him, including the song-by-song commentaries, the problematic Angie Bowie autobiographies, and more recently, every single post on the Bowie Songs blog.

What I want to say about Bowie is that he was, essentially, a non-musician. He couldn’t play guitar, couldn’t play piano. He was a fair sax player, but I don’t think anybody learned to play the sax because of Diamond Dogs. He was a grating, irritating singer. In the 80s and 90s, when he mellowed out his voice, he became, essentially, a Scott Walker impersonator. He had no talent for writing couplets, his songs were inconsistent and never really fit on the radio. He didn’t write hooks, he wrote only a handful of highly memorable melodies.

So why is he, along with Ornette Coleman, John Cage, and Missy Elliott, my favourite musician of the 20th century? Is he even a musician? His talent was his charisma, his curatorial skills. He was an extremely talented actor and mime. His greatest ever achievement was convincing the world that his work was worthwhile through sheer force of will and panache.

People often debate “what is the best Bowie song”… objectively speaking, Bowie has lots of great songs. “Heroes”, “Rebel Rebel”, “Fame”, “Let’s Dance”. These "good" songs are, in fact, his worst songs. These are the songs that are functional and that you might hear on the radio.

Bowie at his best is when he’s at his most flawed, his most paranoid, his most messed up. The hippie campfire guitar interlude on “Space Oddity”. The opening track on “The Man Who Sold The World”, which was an investigation into Bowie’s own queerness, and its title, “The Width Of A Circle”, referred to the diametrical differences between a vagina and an anus. The ten-minute title track of “Station To Station”, with its paranoid, xenophobic yelps, and his most messed-up lyric ever: “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking that it must be love”. Or his second most messed-up lyric, from “Breaking Glass”: “Don’t look at the carpet / I drew something awful on it.” It’s his most incandescent vocal performance, on “It’s No Game”, where he screams his way through a duet with a Japanese woman doing spoken word. His best moments are challenging, and confound you.

Bowie was the fly in the ointment. All his greatest musical achievements belong to his collaborators, Mick Ronson, Tony Visconti, Mike Garson, Brian Eno, Nile Rodgers, Erdal Kizilcay, Gail Ann Dorsey, Reeves Gabrels, Zach Alford. Bowie was the charisma, the icon, the ego that took their contributions and destroyed them. He turned a lack of musical ability into an asset, he made “musical talent” a liability, he made a stab in the dark beautiful. He was not a creator, he was a destroyer. And he was the best destroyer that ever lived.

Is there a source for that beautiful turd, sir?

An ilxor posted that on fb. Definitely doesn't belong on this thread.

oh right

. He couldn’t play guitar, couldn’t play piano. He was a fair sax player,

All three of these statements are wrong, he was a shit sax player for a start.

Oh it was already attributed.

I think Bowie would be the first to tell you that he needed his collaborators to execute his vision. That's one of the coolest, most modern things about him. Also, as much as he benefitted from the help of others, he was generous with his own talent and celebrity.

lol wtf y'all

Hey this isn't the thread for moaning about other people's opinions

That is a good post and MFB is bad at reading

also it's not published music writing!

sic otm

I read that OP tribute on FB and thought it was great.
That said, I always thought Bowie could play guitar.

I thought the OP post on Facebook was wonderful, and it summed-up an awful lot about Bowie. He's not a musician, not the way Hendrix or someone else like that is. But that's not the point.

He's not a musician, not the way Hendrix or someone else like that is.

Not too many musicians in the world then.

That's an extreme example, obviously. But he doesn't strike me as being a musician the way McCartney is, or Kate Bush, for instance. And I'm talking from a place of complete ignorance because I don't play a note on anything, but his music is often really awkward; his melodies don't seem to flow like (some) other people's do. You see The Beatles being compared to Schubert or whoever for harmonic reasons, but I've never seen anyone talk about Bowie quite like that. It's not that him being a 'non-musician' is a bad thing, or a pejorative, or a criticism, it's yet another part of what made him who he was, and brilliant.

Like Lennon or Dylan maybe? I know what you mean and I know what OP meant but, as I said, he actually could play guitar and piano, and better than he could play sax!

Yeah, Lennon and Dylan I guess, but also Lou Reed, or Iggy Pop, or Mark Hollis, or PJ Harvey; it's a punk thing, isn't it? Anyone can be a pop star, you don't need to be a musician.

And I assumed OP was exaggerating for effect, because, you know, it's emotive prose about a relationship with a hero, not an essay for citation in a journal.