Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won't Hold - August 16th

my goodness imagine what Brian Eno did to Talking Heads!

lol

What I hear so far is a producer stealing the voice of people better than she is so that she’ll still be appearing In the fashion pages when they’re no longer competition.

this is incredibly gross

Tina Weymouth stuck around and got in some excellent digs at Byrne and Eno, Janet should have stayed and done the same.

the yoko ono bullshit about Clark is lame. Another producer with another band comes on board and changes the sound and they wind up sparking their creativity. Or maybe it's a poor match. whatever the case, the band's agency remains. In this case she's brainwashed them and oh no the expensive accessorizing.

That sneaky Annie Clark, how dare she bring any of her own musical personality to the table

ve always found ILM's collective pants-wetting over this band totally mystifying

What a perfect metaphor to use for a female band, can I borrow it? Thanks!

The other Janet Weiss would have had something to say about that.

Greil Marcus is such a weirdo.

I looked up my first ilx post from 2002 because of that ilx anniversary thread and was a tad confused why I was a bit mean about him. Now I am remembering.

worst movie of the year

Greil like to call a lot of female musicians frauds

the NYT piece winking at materialism and fashion labels feels weird with this all-female group, idk

and it's not exactly a stretch to say they were pretty consistently against that kind of thing on album after album

oh noes a band figuring out how to sell/stream albums in the 2010s has to rethink its strategy!

i think it's a fair point to question for a band who were once pretty well defined by something other than strategizing market success

i just don't think coming up with a band image is really similar...even if they credit some people who also happen to own a fashion line.

also i guess i never thought of S-K's feminism as being against idk wearing certain types of clothes or crafting a consistent aesthetic. i'm really not sure what the extraneous bullshit surrounding this is supposed to signify. i just don't believe a male band would catch the same flak.

y'all are treating the marketing of the album as if it were commensurate with how it was created. The album might suck! But all you dudes are getting weird on me.

and I'll repeat: in the last three weeks it's been dudes who have this precious idea of what S-K should sound like.

I wanna go on record saying having read that Marcus blurb, I thought it was subtly sexist and paternalistic. I don’t know if we’re in a place as a culture to have a conversation about why but I feel it’s important to say it. It’s what I feel and I think it warrants expression.

I am trying to figure out his issue with Annie Clark being a "fraud". So laughably cringetake.

Brownstein has been pretty styley for awhile now. This shouldn't be surprising.

xp lol

xpost maybe because the women who aged with SK can also afford to wear better clothes now and take an interest in clothes/image as another facet of expression/art.

"I don’t know if we’re in a place as a culture to have a conversation about why but I feel it’s important to say it. It’s what I feel and I think it warrants expression" :) lol

I love Annie Clark, I think all of her albums are excellent and she's a wonderful songwriter, producer, guitarist, and one of my favorite people in music. But I meant the interjections about her disliking the lyrics and trying to get them to change them...it just comes across a bit weird in that write up.

as an artistic criticism 'fraud' is usually directed at someone whose work has garnered praise and might be credited to be superficially attractive or even convincing but fundamentally does not have the substance or claim to innovation that real/serious art ought to have. i don't really know marcus' sense for the sort of music st vincent got established behind, but if i had to guess i would say it's not even in his ballpark, so it would not be a surprise if he were hostile to it. or maybe he's not fond of her david byrne association?

does marcus hate byrne?

i have no idea, maybe he likes him but disliked her careering off him

anyway, I will say I like the songs from this album more than anything off the Woods which I find unlistenable (last album was great). So maybe AC did a great job here. Maybe Janet felt sidelined; it sounds like it, just from how pally they are in that write up. But that write up could be from a very biased angle. Who the fuck knows. I don't think Janet cares now. I'm going to see Quasi. I'll probably still go see SK.

the write-up seems biased to present something specific. it seems like it needed a bit of controversy and it tries to find it in side comments and fashion choices and album credits, in lieu of anything actually scandalous.

That’s how the NY Times often works, they come up with an “angle” and then write a piece to reflect it.

i just don't think coming up with a band image is really similar...even if they credit some people who also happen to own a fashion line.

also i guess i never thought of S-K's feminism as being against idk wearing certain types of clothes or crafting a consistent aesthetic. i'm really not sure what the extraneous bullshit surrounding this is supposed to signify. i just don't believe a male band would catch the same flak.

― omar little, Monday, August 5, 2019 9:05 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't disagree, but Brownstein talks explicitly about coming up with a new band image and using fashion. Mentioning clothes in the context of the piece and CB's comments makes sense. Greil's take is obviously idiotic and grounded in stale Boomer Yoko resentment. as someone pointed out upthread, the dynamic between S-K and AC sounds very similar to Eno and the Talking Heads on Remain in Light. whether or not this new S-K album is Remain in Light is beside the point.

any band that slogged it out playing houses and dives and sleeping on floors only to break up bc of ill communication and exhaustion has every right to come back 10 years later when their fanbase has grown and their legacy has been solidified and they can perform for huge crowds. it's great and should not be looked down on, even if it's just a cash grab. they deserve the cash. it's a bonus imo that they're making new music, and Alfred otm they're trying something new, cool.

also just noticed I had an old zing draft at the top of my last post. for the record, "the worst movie of the year" is The Souvenir.

I was imagining a documentary in which greil Marcus just bashes on female musicians for 90 minutes

flappy is awesome until he realized he was obv wrong about The Souvenir.

"for the record, "the worst movie of the year" is The Souvenir."

that's what my east coast best best friend assures me everyone he knows is saying, makes me think I will really like it

I am encouraged to revisit it- or one of Hogg's previous films- after seeing how many ppl here & elsewhere loved it.
xp

off topic, but just saw that Archipelago is on the Criterion Channel

and Amazon

LOL

2. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy (Sub Pop) If a smooth croon with perfectly rounded syllables from a penitent wandering through our valleys of error is what you’re looking for, this is for you. Of course there’s an out: Father John Misty is a persona, one of those people, like St. Vincent, who you’re supposed to know is really Annie Clark, who perform as—who perform as artists of such pretentiousness you couldn’t possibly figure out how to talk to them. “Uh Ms., ah, Saint—” No, there’s no way to address a saint: to be a saint you have to be dead. “Father—Father John”—already, you’ve ceded all authority, even if the Lone Pilgrim says you can call him Josh Tillman. Such characters allow themselves to appear as if touched by God, which is what they’re selling, and laugh at you if you’re so square not to know who they really are: to join their club.

Wait til this guy finds out about Robert Zimmermann

that's a blurb more in need of kerosene than anything I've read in Pitchfork in the last decade

You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy
You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy
You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray
You may call me anything but no matter what you say

Still, you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, or it may be Lorde

you can call her queen bee

Went to track down that Greil Marcus comment, and the first thing on his site is a defense of Al Franken in which he accuses Jeet Heer of virtue signaling. Not interested.

even "virtue signaling" is out of date lol

hey wait...did anyone else read that NYT piece like St. Vincent was now a part of SK?

Does she drum?

xp Yeah, it sounds like exactly the same dynamic as Eno & the TH on Remain in Light. Not uncommon.

Byrne delivers an interesting semi-dis of Eno in the Sand in the Vaseline liner notes.

something about Eno "wasn't really writing the material"?

I think in the case of TH it was an issue of Eno getting writing credit, aka money. Let's see how SK is credited, but SK not bringing in TH money.