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

the same guy did this article
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/donald-trump-sex-pistol/497528/

Haha so the prog thing's not even the worst thing he's written

Parker's Rollins biog from the 90s was good. Not read/won't read these two pieces.

guys is everett true okay

Look at the way he looks. Not so much a rock star as an exercise in hair conditioner. Dave Grohl is shit. How many times do I need to say this before you start listening? Hey, why not start listening? Just cos you’ve only heard a handful of songs in your life does not mean that no alternatives exist. Dave Grohl is shit. Do not be scared of the crowd. Has it not occurred to you that the crowd can be wrong sometimes? Dave Grohl is shit. The idea of listening to his music drives me to extremes of nothing. Dave Grohl is shit. Shout it from the tops of buses and shout it from street corners. He is dreary, whiny, derivative, needless, grey. Dave Grohl is shit. He makes Chris Martin sound like Beyoncé. Flaunt the bump/don’t flaunt the bump/FLAUNT THE BUMP! He makes Ed Sheeran shine with an inner fire. He puts Theresa May into perspective.

Everett True has not been ok for a long time but he's not wrong about Dave Grohl, he's just right for the usual tediously wrong aging POONK reasons

it's just... deeply not good, even by the rock-bottom expectation that has long come from seeing his byline on anything

say what you like about the tenets of Trueism, dude, at least it's an ethos

sort of

a bathos mebbes

no but he's a terrible man, the kind of terrible man who's trying really hard to be the worst kind of 17 year-old, which is a terrible, terrible look

"the kids, i am down with them" insists 'bad boy' of music writing everett true (73)

http://dis.images.s3.amazonaws.com/104433.jpeg

this isn't the worst thing ever, and they do a REALLY good job of making the whole experience sound tedious and boring. like an anti-hunter thompson or something. like rock & roll = a trip to the department of motor vehicles. which, to me, is appropriate given the band. also, there are, like, two sentences devoted to the music played. which also seems appropriate somehow.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/phish-feature

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/wjjknm/taylor-swift-needs-to-sit-this-year-out?utm_source=vicefbdk
^^this reads like parody but I'm afraid it's sincere

yeah that would be an amazing clickhole article

Came here to post that insipid Taylor Swift piece.

this reflexive criticism of any political piece just for being political is an incredibly bad look

ozzi is a terrible writer

this reflexive criticism of any political piece just for being political is an incredibly bad look

Post a political piece by an intelligent writer with a cogent point and we'll see how it goes.

this reflexive criticism of any political piece just for being political is an incredibly bad look

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Tuesday, September 5, 2017 8:08 AM (one hour ago)

there's no way you read the article

This is one of the worst examples of the "I think everyone is talking about this too much so here are another 2000 words on why I don't care about it" school of pop culture hot takes so far. Beyond any of the unfair assumptions made, I really have no idea why the writer can't just not listen to Taylor Swift.

because other artists don't draw in as many eyeballs

feel like taylor is going to be subject to a particularly nasty version of the 'i don't want to cover this but GOD, i have to in order to earn out my paltry fee, so let me demonstrate how above all of it i am' nihilism that makes so much online reading worthless

idk if i'd characterize it as "omg i don't want to write about taylor swift but she's sooooo bad that i have to" as much as it seems a lazy assemblage/simulation of already existing thinkpieces and twitter threads without containing any of its own ideas which leads to rich communicative passages such as

Even when unintentional, Swift can't get out of the way of her own pettiness. As many quickly pointed out, Reputation's launch date is set for the death anniversary of Kanye West's late mother. (A label rep claimed this was a coincidence.) And even when Swift (or presumably someone on her publicity team) first tweeted the link to the video for "Look What You Made Me Do" during the MTV VMAs, it was done while the mother of Heather Heyer, a woman killed by a vehicular attack while protesting white supremacists in Charlottesville, was speaking on stage. While likely unintentional, the unfortunate timing is emblematic of how utterly detached from the world Swift is.

could be unintentional, who knows

Even when unintentional, Swift can't get out of the way of her own pettiness. As many quickly pointed out, Reputation's launch date is set for the death anniversary of Kanye West's late mother. (

This is execrable, lazy thinking.

"As many quickly pointed out, Donald Trump is the president."

so petty that people put any other petty thing they can think of on her

That graf's amazing combo of concern trolling, performative wokeness and aggregating Tweets is really a perfect example of Noisey's garbage editorial vision and Vice's vampric greed. So glad the CEO could brag about double-stuffing interns for the greater good of calling out Taylor Swift for coincidences.

And even when Swift (or presumably someone on her publicity team) first tweeted the link to the video for "Look What You Made Me Do" during the MTV VMAs, it was done while the mother of Heather Heyer, a woman killed by a vehicular attack while protesting white supremacists in Charlottesville, was speaking on stage. While likely unintentional, the unfortunate timing is emblematic of how utterly detached from the world Swift is.

JFC

are we sure this isn't satire?

this song was popular when bad things happened, i'm angry

I did in fact read the article, and a) this is nowhere near "the worst piece of music writing ever," on either an argumentative or prose level; it's certainly no worse than the Ringer piece everyone loves and b) I really don't see "Taylor Swift's album campaign does not read the room in 2017" as an unreasonable conclusion, whether you agree or not. as far as it being an uniquely bad pop culture hot take, this is sort of like pulling a needle from a haystack and proclaiming it the worst needle ever because you don't like the pincushion it came from.`

as far as the VMA scheduling, I'm pretty sure the scheduling is off (I wrote up the VMAs, and the next section in my notes is on Shawn Mendes).

that said I didn't pay attention to or time this particular tweet, so giving it the benefit of the doubt: whether it was intentional to time your video blast at the same time Susan Bro is speaking, it (again, benefit of the doubt) *still happened that way*, and given that brands operate in an attention economy (people criticize brands all the time for not pulling their scheduled tweets when shit is happening), I don't see how it's off-limits to note this fact.

(and this is *assuming* it's unintentional; I can completely see a label person going "well, we can't post this while Katy Perry is onstage because that'll be interpreted as part of the feud, and we can't post this during Alessia Cara because we want to set up a collaboration..." and scheduling it during the non-musical portion of the broadcast. this is an industry where Instagram follows and unfollows are intentional, eyeballs during a broadcast more than meet that bar)

katherine, what was one thing you learned from that article that you didn't know before? a particular insight that impressed you?

i mean it's not the worst music writing ever but like probably none of the pieces in this thread qualify for that. maybe one of the essays about the tyranny of poptimism

I'm a pop critic, I'm not the target audience or the person who is going to learn things from it, so you really don't need to give me an Accelerated Reader quiz, thanks

because as brad pointed out, the piece is really just a roundup of other people's takes on the matter and is pretty much devoid of insight or original thought. but maybe there's something i missed!

the fact that the presumed target audience is not going to have an encyclopedic, up-to-the-minute knowledge of Taylor Swift Takes?

taylor swift is hitler's wet dream seemed somewhat original to the piece but maybe he was paraphrasing daily stormer xp

I would have left that part out but by now the ship has sailed on "the internet cosplay nazis are trolling you, do not take them seriously"

i really don't think it's unreasonable to ask that if someone wants me to read their thoughts on an issue that they actually have something to say

Ehhhhh... I mean, I have zero interest in reading anything about Taylor Swift and haven't read this particular piece so I can't directly comment on it, but the idea that every piece about a famous person must have unique insight or else it is 100% worthless is built on the assumption that the audience is reading every single thing written about the subject, which strikes me as unreasonable at best. (I feel like I'm just restating katherine's core point here, which is its own irony.)

DJP is right; you're only tired of seeing "this piece again" if you've seen all the other ones.

it's not the worst music writing ever but like probably none of the pieces in this thread qualify for that

Yeah I interpret the thread topic as "post examples of bad music writing here," not literally the worst piece ever. It's likely that the actual worst piece ever has, in fact, been posted here. And so the thread could theoretically be locked. However, no one agrees on which one it is, so people keep posting other candidates.

then that person should get a job regurgitating news stories, not writing analysis

are our standards really this low?

xp

Mine aren't, which is one of the reasons why I didn't read the piece in the first place.

you don't need to read it, djp. i read it for you.

it is perfectly in keeping with the trump era though. because it reads like a little kid wrote it. #everythingishighschool

the worst piece of music writing ever was probably written in the '60s.

Wrestling Demons. Professionally, that is. Personally, she remains cloaked in a brooding sadness, all the more achingly impenetrable because she rarely talks about it—except when she sings. "I'm gonna make a gospel record," she told Mahalia Jackson not long ago, "and tell Jesus I cannot bear these burdens alone."

What one of these burdens might be came out last year when Aretha's husband, Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta's Regency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the first such incident. White, 37, a former dabbler in Detroit real estate and a street-corner wheeler-dealer, has come a long way since he married Aretha and took over the management of her career. Sighs Mahalia Jackson: "I don't think she's happy. Somebody else is making her sing the blues." But Aretha says nothing, and others can only speculate on the significance of her singing lyrics like these:

etc.

that's from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,841340,00.html

IT SEEMS somewhat appropriate that Aretha should have been playing the scene in the movie in a restaurant since she definitely admits to an interest in cooking — which brings us conveniently back to the peach cobbler mentioned earlier. My only comment is that if she ever decides to give up her singing career, she can open a chain of soul food restaurants in a minute and become a millionaire all over again! "Yes, I like switchin' in the kitchen! It's relaxing and it's creative. I have my own special dishes — banana pudding, home made ice cream, barbecue ribs, hams, quiche. And we've been growing our own fresh vegetables in the garden. I've been learning the art of French cooking and I've already done some Indonesian and Viennese dishes — so I'm not doing too bad, right?"

Right — after two helpings of peach cobbler — the verdict is guilty: Aretha knows what to do with the pots and pans!

She confesses that her preoccupation with the kitchen hasn't helped her waistline but "I don't want to go back to being quite as thin as I got a few years back. It was great from some perspectives — like going to dress stores and buying exactly what I wanted off the rack — but to me, it wasn't quite the weight I wanted. However, now I'm on the other side of it and I do want to lose a few pounds! I've been pretty good with my diet so I know that what I need to do is exercise more. You know, do some more swimming and playing tennis."

this is from 1980.

i can cut and paste more.