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

That Yoko / Alice thing made the rounds on twitter, and while I get that it's tone deaf, I don't have a problem with it necessarily for two reasons: 1. like Οὖτις says above, it's actually a flattering and apt comparison in spite of itself, and 2. while it may be a bullshit and wrong opinion, people are allowed to have those

You do have a problem with, you think it's wrong and bullshit.

omg

The next morning, rumours abounded that Jane Fitz had played a mind-bending techno set at Houghton’s secret stage deep into the small hours; while access last year required a train journey, this year it was reachable by a short walk back through the campsite. Options inside the arena were so good that I never felt the need to work out the hidden spot’s exact location, but Fitz’ performance generated some envy-inducing hype

2. while it may be a bullshit and wrong opinion, people are allowed to have those

― Paul Ponzi, Tuesday, August 28, 2018 3:05 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

referring you back to the thread title

Who is the Yoko ono of acid house?

Or of crunk?

That article is chock full of shitty jazz opinions besides the Alice stuff!

There are some aspects of it I agree with. If I had to pick just one John Coltrane album to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be Crescent, not A Love Supreme and certainly not Ascension or anything after. I also think Hank Mobley doesn't get nearly enough critical love, and was glad to see his name pop up.

John Coltrane really does bring out the worst in people (music writers):

Coltrane enters with a vortex of obsessively involuted streaks of chordal fragments that yield to furious, sound-shredded shrieks and bellows that suggest the will to break through the stuff of harmonic investigation to sheer expressive sound, the swinging patterns of pounding rhythm to shifting biocentric undulations.

From:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/sun-ship-the-complete-session-john-coltranes-musical-documentary

mmm I love a good medium rare streak, the chordal the better!

I was on board until 'biocentric'.

yeah i stayed on a surprising long time, then - wipeout

Should have left it at "the stuff of harmonic investigation," which sounds like a Leonard Cohen line.

I wavered at 'pounding' but 'biocentric' did me in.

I was going to say it's like someone tried to write a review using only Robert Pollard song titles.

go the full lovecraft dude: biofugal undulations

lmao brody!!!!

stick to film crit i guess?

not that i necessarily want him to do that either

a vortex of obsessively hideous streaks of cosmic fragments that yield to furious, squamous shrieks and bellows that suggest the will to break through the stuff of unspeakable investigation to sheer blasphemous sound, the accursed patterns of nameless rhythm to shifting biofugal undulations

(he used primordial in another sentence, to qualify new orleans lol, dude it was like 100 years ago not 500 thousand)

(actually fungoid is better than squamous)

You guys are made of tougher stuff than I am... I bailed at involuted

jazz is tough to write about, what with no lyrics to analyse. But it sure does inspire a lot of writers to try to do 'word jazz'.

I was on board until 'biocentric'.

lol exactly where i got off too (even though i had to double-check the meaning of involuted)

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/nepnqq/gwen-stefani-cultural-appropriation-legacy

Man that writer is in for a real shock when she finds out about Vice

the writing is awful but it's not like they're wrong

tired of takes on appropriation that focus on one individual tho

Sure bindis were a general 90s fashion no?

The harajuku girls side of it ... probably something wrong there. Asian women as props for diva sort of thing.

I dunno. I thought the point of Gwen stefani was at least partly the jouissance of playing dress up in crazy clothes, which feels maybe healthier than Britney in school uniform saying hit me.

I think this article makes it clear that if you try and do a critique of cultural appropriation in crazily exorbitant mixed media pop music entities you'll run into trouble

I couldn’t finish it. Lost the plot somewhere around “it wasn’t until Twitter raised my consciousness...”

Gwen Stefani Has Been Culturally Appropriating For Twenty Years And Now I Kind Of Want To Die

I always want the authors of these pieces to take their logic to its inevitable conclusion. "Gwen Stefani Is Of English And Italian Descent. Here Are The Clothes It Is Acceptable For Her To Wear In Videos And Photo Shoots."

sounds like task better suited to those who vociferously deny the reality of appropriation as a phenomenon or who acknowledge it exists but emphatically declare it to be value-neutral or Not Harmful Actually

I dunno. If there's a problem with what she did, isn't there a hypothetical thing she could have done instead?

wait til she finds out about the Village People

The clickbait trend of re-appraising things that were made in a cultural context very different to this one as Actually Bad Because It Isn't Woke will give this thread material for years to come.

it is a very bad & badly written piece for sure

Was the cultural context of the late 90s/early 00s really that different? It's fair to debate the idea of cultural appropriation or its harmfulness but the ideas were not unfamiliar at that time. xp

it's a terribly written piece, for sure, but the idea that "the context was different" in this circumstance is simply that the criticisms of these moves made by Stefani et al weren't being heard because those who made them were less able to be heard

^^^^

It’s very surreal to hear the “it was a different time” defence wheeled out for stuff that I was alive for, like political correctness was invented 5 years ago or something

(That’s more of a general comment than anything to do w this thing I haven’t read)

fwiw I definitely read criticism of the harajuku girls at the time--quite probably the Salon piece linked in the article

"cultural appropriation" discourse is often a real mess where the reasonable point "sometimes things from a foreign culture are used in a way that doesn't respect the culture, whether that's by misappropriating something of cultural significance (the classic example is native american war bonnets as festival headgear) or just using the foreign as meaningless ornamentation (such as plastering meaningless japanese characters on something for the ~aesthetic~)" is taken to the quite ridiculous extreme of "all mixing and exchange of ideas etc. between cultures is Racist and Bad"

this article is not a very good on the issue as it's just "i learned a while ago that this was bad from twitter" instead of any deeper look at things. i don't think most of its main points are ultimately incorrect though - the harajuku girls have always struck me as a weird and racist concept in the way that they're leaning into stereotypes and mostly just there as decoration?

I think the context is absolutely different from the 90s and early 00s, and social media + clickbait journalism is the big differentiator. You can't pretend that it hasn't changed how media savvy people perceive and react to these things. Generally speaking people knew about the concept of cultural appropriation, sure, but cared less about appearing morally righteous on the internet back then, and there was no Twitter for people to try to create a movement to "cancel" people on for an awkward yet innocently intended stylistic choice. Like, in 2004 being accused of cultural appropriation was maybe enough for people to be like "Oh yeah, that does seem kinda lame. I quite enjoy that song, though" and then moving on with their life. You could essentially have your career derailed if you're accused of it now (see: Lily Allen). So I would say that artists with PR teams are now more aware of this than ever before, and are hyper-conscious of letting anything that could be perceived as cultural appropriation slip through the cracks, lest they too get cancelled on social media, where their target audiences spend most of their time. So yeah, I think it is a different cultural context, and if Gwen Stefani did the Harajuku Girls thing as a Fresh Brand Strategy In 2018 she'd get (rightly) slammed for it, but there's no use in acting like she had the same access to information about cultural appropriation and its impacts that we do in a post-social media world where it's now written about A LOT. Basically, give her a break.

that argument posits that cultural appropriation is bad if it upsets fans and affects sales, rather than its bad because its tasteless and unnecessary

I suspect stefani will be ok

I mean as a white guy from Scotland I don't really have a say on what is/isn't appropriation because I'm not the one who has to live in the shadow of it but it wouldn't take anyone two minutes to look at the harajuku girls and ask "what's going on here?"

which is all really annoying because "what you waiting for?" is a jam

Orientalism was published in 1978

The piece works on this measure of “can you believe we don’t talk about this” and then links to multiple articles where people were talking about it.

Yeah, I think it's the case that:
i) Stefani engaged in crass and largely tasteless use of 'exotic' cultural symbols, which isn't exactly a capital offence but is crass and tasteless.
ii) There is no reason why this should have been hard to realize at the time.
iii) The Wanna Thompson Broadly piece is incredibly dopey.