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

Didn't Brandi have an album a couple years ago?

"It may be hard to remember now, but MTV started a national conversation on indie rock."

I think there's a lot to like in that piece, actually, but that the headline (and the author's cosigning of same on Twitter) is pretty sad. like, you can't get anybody to read your piece unless you present it as DID HE REALLY SAY THAT? HE WENT THERE! etc

also, is there any safer piece to write than "the mainstream indie that you hear on NPR? I'm here to tell you it's not actually paradigm-shifting innovative music!"

^^ this was my reaction. we're hanging the death of indie rock on a DIIV album and a Porches album?

though I disagree that there's a lot to like in that piece. i don't think there's a lot of anything in that piece. it feels very thin. which ... whatever. get paid, sir.

yeah i don't think the piece is bad, but i do feel like it could've been written in 2004, 1994 ... maybe even 1984. whenever i start bemoaning the "death of a genre" i just try to remember that there are probably kids who feel the same way about Diiv that i felt about, say, pavement. And back then, there were probably older dudes who thought pavement was super lame / unoriginal / uninspired compared to dino jr and the replacements. and so on...

pavement was always super lame

thanks, older dude

some older dude

all the older dudes
come with the 'tudes...

i love pavement and i hate the 90's! though i was actually kinda happy to see the retro-90's/matador sound make a comeback in the last few years just cuz i like guitars and all the lame young people who were doing really bad DIY synth/electronic/faux horrormovie/goth/chillwave stuff were terrible at it and even terrible guitar playing can sound cool if you are loud enough. built to spill on the other hand were mega-lame. and i can't listen to 90's sonic youth.

I saw some buzz about that MTV indie piece but there's nothing there really. He finds a couple of indie records boring. He likes some other ones. He makes a vague call for more political engagement in the final paragraph. I don't know why people are getting excited about such a safe, bland piece nine years after SFJ's A Paler Shade of White. There's nothing less controversial than saying that indie-rock is too homogenous and cosy in 2016.

i mean.. the complaint that bands (as a whole? i guess?) are making music that you don't find exciting because the like "corporations" want them to or something is...?

(well is played, for one)

"For decades, indie rock bands like Built to Spill, Pavement, and Sonic Youth won critical and fan praise with their clever lyrics and distorted guitars. Those bands and their peers moved into thrilling new styles throughout the 1990s;"

http://www.mtv.com/news/2793656/rip-indie-rock/

― scott seward, Monday, March 14, 2016 4:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This quote is a good reminder of the reducing and flattening power of time. It's like how in 500 years, most people will just picture the faces on Mt. Rushmore as a summary of American history.

you've also apparently just described the concept of Chuck Klosterman's new book (just saw the synopsis on Amazon).

something is bothering me about this whole pile-on by fellow music writers and I think it's this: when I was 23 almost everything "longform" I wrote was garbage or approaching thus. (I've already corrected for the fact that I dislike all my own work; it just genuinely was not good.) Yet my work somehow never became the target of such a mass pile-on, and I don't think it had anything to do with the quality of my work nor much to do with its platform. I suspect it's more because people praise or criticize a piece based on media politics and increasingly politics-politics, which grants certain writers immunity and makes certain writers targets before they ever put a word into a CMS. It was ever thus, but I suspect in whatever "golden age of literary feuds" people might cite to make that point the journalism climate was healthy enough to be less circumspect.

And, like, sure, I understand that people in the field might not want to put themselves in the position of criticizing the broader editorial strategy of a publication that just went on a huge hiring spree, but surely there are better ways to sublimate that urge than to two minutes' subtweet someone far younger than you?

nobody ever criticizes the people they hope to get hired by

Won't somebody think of the children?

when i was 23 i didn't give a shit what cranky old burnouts thought of my writing.

it is very peculiar to me in the first place that MTV.com chose to become grantland redux. My understanding is that some Grantland bigwig is there now and brought along Molly L., pappademus and maybe others whose names I don't know alongside J. Hopper etc, but… longform thumbsuckers from MTV? Yet I don't know what more suitable role for MTV's innuhnet strategy might currently be.

I also have no awareness of their TV programming presently. I worked for MTV.com/ MTV news in 2000/2001, when it still had stranglehold on the youngs TV-wise and were positioning their sites as such, as well as MTV.com, VH1.com being positioned the music sites of record. by that time, Viacom had counted on inexpensive or free labor w/r/t to working at MTV being so desirable for about 15 years. While I do not remember an MTV show making a stir past Jersey Shore —I guess they have Teen mom marathons a lot, and VH1 has the Real Wives shit— the "oh working at MTV is so great that mom and dad can help me with $$$" thing has been over a long time ago. Vice has had that shit for a while.

youth is not a magic shield. you write for the general public, you get a response regardless of your age, people don't avert their eyes and go "well, if they keep writing things i don't like when they're 28, then i'll say something."

katherine has a good point, but it's probably more a problem of the increasing profile and platform and Y A S S S K W E E N importance that major publications are giving young people than sharky, doughy near-40 ilx nerds approaching ready to dive on all young blood

hopper even said to the Huffington Post

MTV has a unique opportunity to build a diverse staff that includes up-and-coming writers, veteran critics and journalists from outside the music space, she said, and bringing in young voices like 20-year-old Hazel Cills challenges "very fixed historic ideas of music criticism."

Well, it's either
A) Old fart ILX dingleberry-picking Single Jukebox dads need to fix their historic ideas of music criticism and mow their lawns instead flapping their snackholes on the internet

or B) Maybe twentysomethings actually need editors

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And, just because i said that snarkily, doesn't mean that that answer isn't A

B) Maybe twentysomethings actually need editors

Good thing Hopper did such a bang-up fuckin' job of editing these kids' crap at The Pitch. Bodes real, real well for MTV.

Old fart ILX dingleberry-picking Single Jukebox dads need to fix their historic ideas of music criticism and mow their lawns instead flapping their snackholes on the internet

how does this expert-texpert-choking-smokers stuff even work as verse

when i was 23 and getting into music writing ilxors clowned my opinions and i either learned from what they were talking about or learned that they could be stupid, depending

if anything serious humans are way more kids gloves-ish with young writers today, because social media means the weird ass people who do attack these writers are often doing so at a whole nother level of shitheadedness that goes well past whatever abuse i suffered here....i.e. sexist creeps & racists going on about cucks, etc. ... i wish there was more constructive criticism tbh

i don't know how old anyone is! if it were on someone's blog i wouldn't have picked on it. it's on a legit site. and i don't think it's the worst or anything. it's just kinda lazy or vague or whatever/nevermind. i just read it and put it here because nobody goes on any other crit thread.

yeah i feel like ILM is badly in need of a rolling discussion thread for recent music writing that isn't framed around WORST EVERRRR hyperbole

i've started GOOD music writing threads before. and on those the crickets hang themselves with nooses they make out of the tumbleweeds drifting by.

but there have been decent rolling threads in the past.

fwiw, the piling on here is really very mild compared to the parade of "yeah, man, this guy really nailed how I feel" i observed on twitter yesterday.

i came here to whine about the piece because Music Twitter seemed solidly supportive of it, tbh

yeah i feel like ILM is badly in need of a rolling discussion thread for recent music writing that isn't framed around WORST EVERRRR hyperbole

it would be overstating the case to say "there isn't any," but there's so little that I feel a thread would probably be too much. the age of instant takes has not made for good music writing.

I tend to praise stuff in band/act threads.

when i was 23 and getting into music writing ilxors clowned my opinions and i either learned from what they were talking about or learned that they could be stupid, depending

tell us more what you've learned in the intervening years

mtv news piece could've stood an edit where the writer got deeper into why x works and y doesn't beyond "[lyric quote]," as it is it feels v anecdotal and relies on a lot of assumed rubrics

prob lost five potential jobs typing that sentence

none of the ideas in that piece hold up to any inspection, and yeah i posted something here because i was surprised how positive people were on it elsewhere and wanted to commiserate in a place where i feel i don't need to pedantically and tediously unpack all the ways it doesn't make sense coupled with sensitively trying to understand where the author is coming from, why they might be pushing their anxieties onto bands that just flitted across their radar, and what real ideas might be hiding in there etc.

and i don't see any percentage in arguing that people shouldn't pick on a piece that's so casually nasty to decent bands -- if you're writing something like that you're begging for pushback, you're clawing your way into the center of the conversation, and you want an expect people to disagree because that's the point. the failure is people aren't disagreeing with the thesis, they're just sort of disassembling the entire edifice of hot take pretending to say something big, so they're not disagreeing on the terms the piece might like. (and i think the people that are agreeing with the piece can't be agreeing with what it actually says, because it just doesn't hold water, but instead they're agreeing with the side of the conversation its staking out, because i mean, is there really a place in the world where you would say "all day every day, its diiv and porches, what is going on where are we going as a society" because those particular bands are so very saturated?)

but yeah, maybe we should have a thread with a more modest title like "rolling picking on other people's writing"

so just as the author of that piece might say "its not those bands, its that they're emblematic of a wave of bands" i'd say "its not this piece, its that its emblematic of a wave of pieces" and i think i'd be on more solid ground tbqh.

On top of everything, Porches are right up there with Hinds as far as the most shitty buzz band music I've heard all year

i saw them live once and felt like the songs were deliberately receding from what could've been hooks and idk i have no time for that in indie rock

it's a lousy piece. i can't tell what it is about.

the title purports to be an expose on wm supremacy in indie rock, yet most of the piece is comparing about a handful of wm indie rock bands.

twice it talks about the successes of pop music in saying important things about issues. it seems like a setup to maybe going into detail on some non-traditionally covered acts. nope.

at one point he starts to talk about women musicians. out of three, two of them are noted for their connections to the wm indie rock bands he was decrying at the start.

so i am left w a piece that complains about the very thing that it is contributing to.

twice it talks about the successes of pop music in saying important things about issues

by this, i mean he literally says "pop music has important things to say" and provides zero examples. yet we hear all about Animal Collective not being as good as Built to Spill

a) if you post in a thread called "OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?" you are also inviting pushback, especially considering the title is a direct question and all
b) I don't know if "lost five potential jobs writing that sentence" is supposed to be sarcasm or not but I'm already on every possible shit list so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
c) my point isn't and never was "don't pick on the young writers!" but that basically no one is able or willing to acknowledge that said picking-on (and praise) of writers selective, how it's selective or why. the only reason I have not ended up in this thread dozens of times is that in some point in my twitch plays writer of a career I said or did the right thing, probably inadvertently.

b) I don't know if "lost five potential jobs writing that sentence" is supposed to be sarcasm or not but I'm already on every possible shit list so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it's totally not sarcasm, just a lot of accumulate frustration

the only reason I have not ended up in this thread dozens of times is that in some point in my twitch plays writer of a career I said or did the right thing, probably inadvertently.

lol i feel this way all the time, or at least am still patiently waiting for this thread to be bumped with something i wrote

anyway did we ever figure out what the worst piece of music writing is

i'm working on it now

rolling really good music reviews (not necessarily positive)

there is still time to reach this goal on that thread:

five responses by 2017

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive)

tell us more what you've learned in the intervening years

― bamcquern, Wednesday, 16 March 2016 03:58 (11 hours ago) Permalink

If you were curious yes you're one of the people whose opinions I've spent a decade plus ignoring

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Morton_Umbrella_Girl.png