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

The Saving Country Music guy is just Neill Jameson (Decibel's go-to essayist for incoherent anti-Antifa grumblings and other "defenses" of "keeping" "metal" "dangerous") in a cowboy hat.

So Tracey Thorn complained about a review on Twitter:

A 55 year old wife and mother. God the more I think about it the crosser I'm getting. 55 year old husband and father. I'm trying to imagine it as a description in an album review. Nope. Can't do it.

— Tracey Thorn (@tracey_thorn) April 13, 2018

And I figured it was probably just some random UK jagoff. Turns out it was King Jagoff, typing with his dick again:

Tracey Thorn: Record (Merge) Calm, deliberate, undemonstrative, Thorn is a singer some find magical and others prosaic. I've always tended other, but when a 55-year-old wife and mother claims she's recorded "nine feminist bangers," I pay attention.

Is this a "dog walking on its hind legs" situation for him? "She's old and married with a kid...but she says she's a feminist! This is a job for Christgau, The Dean of American Women's Studies Rock Critics!"

In four other songs, decent but fundamentally clueless guys mess with various women's lives, while two others evoke a motherhood you assume is autobiographical

Do you? I don't, any more than I assume George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher has really murdered all those people.

*face palm*

And this one comes exactly one week after his Amy Rigby review. He's on a real roll.

Rigby's response, in part (the whole thing is worth reading):

All I know is that it was fine when he’d conjecture about me as a single mother, my work, my songs, hell even my breasts. It was fine cause I was hungry then – I wanted what ever any critic would say about me as long as it felt sort of like a compliment.

But I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t want his praise that feels like a put down. I don’t want him talking about me in terms of my first husband who, bless his heart I have not been married to for twenty years. I don’t want him praising while panning and damning my partner, my husband, by saying he’s kept me too busy to do much work on music when he’s done nothing but encourage me to work. I don’t want him dismissing my hardworking husband for taking the easy way and living on the past when he’s done nothing but try to outrun the past.

I don’t want his readers thinking something’s a rave review when it feels hurtful and personal and dismissive.

I think Christgau’s issue (one of them) often is writing positive reviews that feel like condescending pats on the head and when they’re aimed at women they feel just really paternalistic and the winking asides and mild caveats come off as even insults. And he still can’t write about women without regarding them as equals (he’d say otherwise and then pause to be dazzled by their looks or juggling of the domestic chores with music-making.)

Christgau’s reviews seem largely worthless even just on the basic level of talking about the music (never mind the issues discussed above). I’ve never understood why he has such a rep.

That Amy Rigby piece is terrific, btw

change my comment above to *disregarding them

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348047913l/341633.jpg

Although Artificial Intelligence's sleeve notes had insisted that the new electronica "cannot be described as soulless or machine made," what's most interesting about Autechre's work is the absence of heart and humanity, the way that the listener's impulse to forge an emotional connection simply ricochet's off the impenetrable, gmonic surfaces of their sound. At times you can't help wonder if the "aut" in their name stands for autism; listening, the mind's eye conjures up a vision of two small boys surrounded by techno toys, lost in a preverbal world of chromatics, texture and contour.

20-year-old music criticism in problematic attitudes to autism shocker

The Impenetrable Gnomic Surfaces is the name of my Autechre tribute band btw.

jeezus fucking christ

This is why I only write for Consumer Reports now

almost certain that it does stand for autism and that sean autechre is proudly autistic

yours, someone w/ mild autism

the only problem with that bit of writing is that autechre DOES contain emotion and feeling, but u neurotypicals don't get it I guess

hold me closer
neurodancer

This Scottish newspaper employs some good arts writers, but its op-ed section is a joke...

http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16169683.Brian_Beacom__Pulitzer_music_prize_judges_deserve_a_rap_on_the_knuckles/

That might be the worst piece of music writing ever.

Jesus christ

some excellent Scruton-ising there, it's a load of (c)rap, innit?

all I see there is a campaign to give Limmy a Pulitzer, everything else was just padding

I imagine Brian Bee Cum is about to have a slaughter in his menchies

High and low culture? Who is right when you recall Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature last year, which caused a stooshie. “Lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed,” may have acutely summed up man’s sexual imaginations but doesn’t quite compare with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

This is something of a self-own, considering that lyric could literally be a line of Steinbeck dialogue...

I'd ask if anyone had any bets on how many previous music Pulitzer winners Beacom has listened to but you can't really bet on a certainty.

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/album-review-jason-aldeans-rearview-town/

should be easy to see why this review is both poorly written and reprehensible (i don't buy his excuses in the comments.)

this dude

including in some songs these strange feminine (or synthesized) sighs and calls like something you would hear in the soundtrack of a 90’s-era war strategy RPG or 1st-person shooter game

what, like warcraft? is jason aldean going zug-zug

the zerg queen doing background vocals

best phrase...

Among other fair criticisms...

...in which he critiques his own critique, and judges it to be a good, fair critique.

new jason aldean single right here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU

There are a lot of provocative statements in here:
http://www.vulture.com/2018/05/rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-artists-ranked-from-best-to-worst.html

lots of discussion about that on the Pitchfork thread but it belongs here in the HOF

ctrl f trump

she really tried it

https://uproxx.com/music/taylor-swift-reputation-tour-legacy/amp/

Taylor Swift is my culture. Surely, I already knew that to some degree, but I never realized it more than when Reputation dropped late last fall. Unexpectedly in Norway that weekend, I was covering a small European music festival — or, I was supposed to be covering it. Friday morning, attendees kept attempting to communicate with me while I sat ensconced in puffy, pink Beats headphones I couldn’t bring myself to remove, wrapped up in the world of Reptuation.

"Waaahhh! I wrote a piece of sponsored content disguised as a personal essay and people called me an asshole for it - I'm just like Taylor Swift!"

That piece is better if you approach it as a satire of Taylor Swift's writing. i.e., making huge melodramatic emotional narratives out of small personal events that no one else should really give a shit about.

i feel like writing about "small personal events that no one else should really give a shit about" describes a lot of good songwriting, but i'm not sure what that even means really so

@triggercut the author is not that self aware, trust

eric: cf. Annie Dillard: "Write not about what you love most, but about what you alone love at all."

in fact just keep a private journal because nobody else is going to seek out your opinions on the new tram cops record

otm

but i guess they have to submit some type of work to get paid

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/pusha-t-the-story-of-adidon/

what's so bad about that?

"My favorite way to listen to music is out in the world — walking to the grocery store or uphill to class, one earbud in and the other free to hear birds calling and insects buzzing."

this lede is outrageous

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-are-nashvilles-brightest-stars-touring-with-the-survivors-of-one-direction/2018/06/25/6d547f80-7890-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html?utm_term=.5c9342f325e2

Ooph

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/zm8dve/the-saxophones-unlikely-journey-out-of-meme-hell

woof

idgi