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

iirc amanda marcotte was one of the ppl who thought democrats should root for trump b/c he'd be easier to beat in november

fwiw I loved "Rio" inordinately then, and I love it inordinately now

every day is Rio day

the central thesis of *people ruin everything* is, as always, on the money though.

Amanda Marcotte‏ @AmandaMarcotte Feb 16
The notion that there’s any meaningful difference between Perez and Ellison was created by drama addicts stoking their martyr complexes.

Amanda Marcotte‏ @AmandaMarcotte Feb 16
It's honestly dumber than people who used to make New Order v. Joy Division a thing. THEY ARE THE SAME BAND GET OVER YOURSELVES.

C+ trolling

Amanda Marcotte‏ @AmandaMarcotte Feb 16
It's honestly dumber than people who used to make New Order v. Joy Division a thing. THEY ARE THE SAME BAND GET OVER YOURSELVES.

― salthigh, Tuesday, May 30, 2017 2:54 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true tbh

Curti Bros

xpost

Alfred I'm shocked, SHOCKED

lukewarm takes, delivered regularly, to your door

also, calling a feminist writer a Trump voter is pretty ...

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Tuesday, May 30, 2017 2:25 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

iirc amanda marcotte was one of the ppl who thought democrats should root for trump b/c he'd be easier to beat in november

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, May 30, 2017 2:45 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, yes she was, and then proceeded to blame not campaigning in wisconsin, having the wrong candidate for this time and virtually every other legitimate hilldog campaign problem on bernie bros

i honestly don't know if marcotte is a troll who believes in next to nothing a la amanda palmer or if she actually /is/ as milquetoast a liberal as one could possibly be, but it hardly matters because she sounds like a fucking idiot

why are there so many public trolls named amanda ;_;

take my hand, I'll make you understand

confirmation bias imo

2 is too many

I WANNA DO A LITTLE STRUT
AS YOU WIGGLE YOUR FIRM BUTT

AMANDA

Sorry, wrong thread.

gross

o_O

Little known Beatles tune

i have been harassed in this fashion since the late '80s :-/

You'll hate the Boston thread, then!

if it's full of sexist jokes at the expense of amandas, i already do

not sure in what world responding to someone's comment about jerks sharing their first name being disheartening with actual harassment is a good idea

i don't want to derail this thread but i do wish to express that amanda jokes are gross and not funny like say video gaaaaaaaames jokes

xxpost:

This world, in which the comment was blatantly not aimed at the person whining about harrassment and was merely riffing on a thread which has been on this forum for... ooh, four years now and has offended absolutely nobody. But then, this is ILX where people, bless 'em, always get oversensitive, so... y'know, business as usual!

(If anyone hasn't read that thread, it's basically everyone taking the piss out of the Boston song 'Amanda' ... I appreciate it may not be funny if you're actually called Amanda, but I assume that most people on the planet with that name who recognise the song actually realise the song isn't directly about them.)

things like the 100th "poptimism is bad and ruining music, writing and everything" piece

yeah, everybody knows

get back to fuckin ilb morbsitronics lol isnt there a matt harvey incident to write about

The Marcotte article wasn't that bad.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a5/f5/21/a5f52196ef344a9bda47c56b17b4e62b.jpg

The Marcotte article wasn't that bad.

― Treeship, Tuesday, May 30, 2017 10:38 PM

neither is Sean Spicer imo

Her argument is rooted in a bunch of weird assumptions about what music is considered "girly" and what's "masculine" but she's on the right track. The Beatles had to die as a pop group in order to attain immortality in the canon. And a lot of the "experimentation" in Sgt Pepper's feels tacked on and annoying and the album succeeds,
in the end, on the strength of its songs, just like With the Beatles. And finally, there is something gross about the way the Beatles' original fans, mostly young women, were pushed aside and mocked.

Also she's right that disco was an underappreciated comet from the future.

marcotte is such a bad and irritating and incompetent writer that she can express an argument i agree with in such a shitty way that i start to wonder if i'm wrong

i find it annoying when ppl dismiss the beatles' early music as kid stuff or bubblegum pop or whatever but the contrarian argument that their later music was "pretentious" is just as unfair

and trying to draw a direct line from sgt pepper to homophobic attacks on disco is just a classic salon-style clickbait argument of the worst kind, completely unfounded and gross

Yeah. I mean, the most offensive aspect of the piece was the idea that "girls" prefer more accessible music you can dance to while "men," especially "nerds," like "difficult music.

This binary is kind of radically offensive and its the basis of her argument, so I guess the piece is, technically, "bad." But there is also a shred of something that is kind of true there as well.

Shred of truth wrt the Beatles' career trajectory, the politics of taste, hidden sexism in people's skepticism of pop and dance music, etc.

Not with regard to how she uncritically accepts many of the assumptions she should be critiquing.

the entire gist of the argument is stolen from a book that does it much, much better:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Beatles-Destroyed-Rock-Roll/dp/019975697X

Amanda Marcotte's arguments seems kind of similar one Robert Elms used to make, about how Sgt. Pepper's was the moment everything went wrong for rock music - but Elms's essentialism was regarding race rather than gender, iirc he said something like late period Beatles took the 'blackness' out of rock music. but the way Elms frames it is that it's pre-sgt.pepper's rock that is 'authentic' and 'real' etc and the sgt.pepper's that represents a shift to stuff that's plastic and shallow

But he adds: "I just think they are either childlike and simple or rather leaden and pompous - one or the other all the time."
Theirs is a sanitised and anaemic version of American blues-inspired rock and roll, he complains.
"For me they turned something that was once sexy and raw and had roots, into something that was totally soulless, playground sing-along music."

I don't think they were taking blackness out as much as putting whiteness (Englishness) in. Which is appropriate, given their own rather pale complexions. Indeed, one could argue that it is morally preferable to continued appropriation of black American forms.

Hence the music-hallish Mr. Kite and 64 (plus I guess Octopus's Garden, Yellow Sub, Mustard)

I don't think they were taking blackness out as much as putting whiteness (Englishness) in.

Which wasn't exactly novel in 1967.

Of course not, but negging the Beatles for sounding *less* like Chuck Berry for a few minutes is kinda ridic

Exactly, nobody was sounding like Chuck Berry in 1967, and that wasn't down to Sgt. Pepper.

the way the Beatles' original fans, mostly young women, were a pushed aside and mocked politely asked what they thought of the new direction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-keBliZndQ

i imagine some Rolling Stone articles did this but i don't think it was widespread. maybe in print rock crit which hasn't been relevant in decades. this feels like fighting an argument a few people had 40 years ago.

Would love to hear a compilation of the music that Otis Redding made towards the end of 67 under the influence of Sgt Pepper etc.
See what adding the blackness back into it would be like.

I heard that George Clinton recorded a full cover of the lp, so would love to hear taht too.
Is the Booker T & The Ms set Mclemore avenue a set of covers of the lp or Beatles in general or what?

That Elms quote is a great example of the *other* school of rockist thought i.e. music should come from the gut/soul, none of this pretentious art-school nonsense for me thanks! I don't think that's Marcotte's stance though, despite the bits about danceability.

xp Or maybe a set of covers of Abbey rd.

All of the songs on McLemore Avenue are from Abbey Road, hence the alb title and the cover shot:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Mclemoreavenue_album.jpg/220px-Mclemoreavenue_album.jpg