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

first album was absolutely massive in the US iyrc

I still like them a lot. III is really underrated as coked-out weirdo pop record. Also you can still hear their influence in lots of herky-jerky, neurotic-sounding, nasally-voiced songwriters (like, say, Ezra Furman, who I don't think was alive when the s/t Femmes album was released)

i heard the 2nd album first. college radio station i listened to played country death song a lot. i played that album a ton in 1984. quickly bought the first album after that. played that a ton. then never really listened to them again.

they were a band

https://medium.com/@sfj/why-i-liked-david-turners-de-la-soul-piece-9d69360ee66e#.3n70h3fu2

wtf is this horseshit

is this piece what was in those trucks

recent events aside, strip-fiend jones is basically right, there's more than a little "you will agree with critical consensus or SHUT THE FUCK UP FOREVER" to this protracted-beyond-its-hours discussion, and if an editor forced me to listen to, I don't know, [insert critically acclaimed canonical rock record that I hate] then I would likely react the same way.

which is something that shouldn't happen, because the role of an editor is in part to make their writers' (and publication's) prose look as good as possible -- and is something that won't happen, because it's me and I have no #personal #brand to #leverage, and no one's invested in the bag of sweet potato chips on my desk ("desk") right now -- but something that happens.

Really liked the SFJ piece tbh

he's right that people reacting negatively to this piece bc "it's a classic record!" are wrong but idk that seems an obvious point that is now a 10 minute read

as opposed to the 60-minute read of the past week in this thread

I enjoyed those 10 minutes?

well my issues were about the form it took rather than dude's opinion on the record

but i really enjoyed the violent femmes tangent

Each of those 60 minutes started a band.

sfj's prose style has evolved into rock critic mark kozelek lately and it especially bugs me here

I genuinely don't understand why editors don't routinely ask themselves, if not during line edits then during commissioning, "will this piece make my writer and/or publication look bad unnecessarily? if so, what can I do to prevent or at least mitigate that?"

feel like it's more that editors are routinely asking themselves "will this piece get people all riled up?" and if the answer is yes, hit publish!

so much of that piece seemed intended to make people cry millennial

There's a short-termism at work at bad outlets, where "will we look bad?" is subservient to "will this get lots of clicks and go viral?". Also this piece is not really going to hurt MTV's brand. Also there is no real investment beyond time when clicking on a weblink - it's not like someone's goung to say, "I got burned there, never going to pay to read something like that again". xps

I understand how it works. What I don't understand is how little cognitive dissonance people register in simultaneously thinking "I want to support/promote/mentor this writer so they can be successful" and "I am either actively undermining this writer or undermining them via inaction."

I am guessing those undertaking the latter either aren't really interested in the former or are kind of dense.

when MTV publishes a "scathing" takedown of an artist that it'll need to curry favor with come vma booking time then maybe it'll have a point beyond "lol we got the olds to rageclick on a piece about another bunch of olds, guess that saved us from the traffic ax for another month"

(note that two weeks ago all the salty tweets that an MTV account posted about Ciara were deleted once she complained. Ciara doesn't exactly have Beyoncé-level power on an individual level but pissing her off could have wider reverberations. and those were tweets, ffs!)

I think the first Violent Femmes lp was pretty popular over here. certainly seemed to be something taht a lot of people on the camp 5 years ago could agree on. I think that included a lot of Brits too. JUst think it was a bit of a slightly alternative lp that wasn't overly dangerous so appealed to a wide amount of people. I don't remember too much free jazz in the sound yet, do think that hearing the Modern lovers after them I could hear a lot of ML influence. & VF always reminded me of the MLs once I'd heard them.

Slightly surprised to hear that Mick harvey was familiar enough with their work to do impromptu sets of their songs though.

The editor who commissioned the De La piece was bad at her last job, and based on this evidence, she hasn't gotten any better now that she's transitioned to MTV. (Basically, if you're good already, she won't make your piece any worse, but if you're a writer who needs help, you're out of luck.) There might at least be an additional layer of copy editing at MTV, though, because while the De La piece was poorly reasoned and poorly written, it was at least missing the spelling and punctuation errors that were such a hallmark of The Pitch.

Obviously a lot has likely changed since then but back when MTV Hive was active there was definitely both line and copy editing in place.

Music and cultural "taste" is backed up with correct arguments and facts, not "digging".

― Banaka™ (banaka)

"feel like it's more that editors are routinely asking themselves "will this piece get people all riled up?" and if the answer is yes, hit publish!"

wait, this is just dawning on you...

it just seems, on the balance, bad that every time a piece critical of an artist or album comes out, it's likely to provoke a huge cross-media shitstorm.

(much of the non-music-critic response to this piece wasn't about the writing or the editing, it was about the scandal and outrage that a person could dislike an album not designated for dislike.)

No

xp

k

ha, was responding to scott's delightful "this is just now dawning on you" comment.

"We were years away from hip-hop authenticity wars."

dude lived in new york. in the 80's.

"Rap fans were still trying to get people to stop making fun of rap,"

in new york. in the 80's!

"I was generally in favor of rap becoming as user-unfriendly as the work of downtown types like Christian Marclay, who seemed to be referenced every time somebody had to write about rap."

it's true, every time you read about rap in the 80's you had to read about christian marclay. ??????????????????

"Everything rap or hip-hop (the name was still a toss-up at stores) was of interest to me."

It's true, I was there too. Nobody knew what to call rap in record stores in new york. some people called it the wicketty diggity doo.

i don't remember anyone thinking de la soul were weird or fucked up back then. teenagers loved them. and not because they were fucked up.

when MTV publishes a "scathing" takedown of an artist that it'll need to curry favor with come vma booking time then maybe it'll have a point beyond "lol we got the olds to rageclick on a piece about another bunch of olds, guess that saved us from the traffic ax for another month"

this

its like lame writing gave birth to even more lame writing. thanks, MTV! and thanks for the endless coverage of the madchester scene on 120 minutes. we had to go directly from the mission u.k. years to the ned's atomic dust bin years? sheesh....

De La were interviewed about the piece and gave some good answers (they're less riled up about it than everybody else). Also the interview touches on the Kendrick/Chance comparisons mentioned upthread. Good read

http://observer.com/2016/06/buffoon-mind-state-de-la-soul-and-the-killing-of-sacred-cows/

First album since 2004, of course they'd be circumspect

we had to go directly from the mission u.k. years to the ned's atomic dust bin years?

Admittedly I am biased.

one of the cool things about living in the (daisy age) future is that the observer response piece includes a youtube of the whole 3 feet high album so who gives a fuck about bad or badly written reviews as long as they link your name right.

you had a big poster of dave kendall on your wall when you were studying maths at uni, admit it, ned.

x-post

Horrible thought, what do you take me for. 'Studying maths' indeed.

my number one piece of advice for aspiring music writers is probably "take calculus, you'll regret not doing so"

*2gether voice* I know my calculus

i feel like all the cultural baggage being dredged up over this piece is secondary to the main lesson, which is that if you write with contempt for your audience and your subject, you're probably gonna get that contempt returned back in your direction by one or the other. if david was naive about anything, it's his weird surprise about this piece causing such a predictable shitstorm.

agreed.

i think 95% of the racial, generational, musical and critical arguments are all distractions from the basic fact that jessica didn't do her job and now one of her writers is getting eaten alive on the internet

yup

i think 95% of the racial, generational, musical and critical arguments are all distractions from the basic fact that jessica didn't do her job and now one of her writers is getting eaten alive on the internet

Pretty funny to watch the writer do the "lol, fuck you old white people" dance on Twitter, meanwhile the editor who threw him to the wolves is a middle-aged white mom.