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

A colleague sent me a Business Insider link today, and it’s a “BI Prime” story (behind paywall) – which means he must actually subscribe(!?)

lol

I mean, it's Business Insider

paid content articles are going to be a rich vein for literary analysis in about three years

Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande teamed up for "Rain On Me," an upbeat dance track where each singer takes a turn with a verse. They also sing together on some of the choruses. https://t.co/eap8R2kl0p

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) May 23, 2020

(the tweet, dunno about the article)

"Both wear eye makeup."

reminds me of NAME RELEVANT SONG FROM ANTI THAT MATCHES DESCRIPTION

Ladies and gentlemen, I rarely post articles in this thread. But today I found a piece of work that I feel is truly, truly exceptional. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/mark-words-lets-rock-way-extinction-2578080?fbclid=IwAR0JEbEYNsElq4MpZYShemmOw6LLkiDsOTTNI7EWf7We8i4tgYcALV5F08w

Made it to this point, couldn't go any further:

The fact is, whatever you think of their music, Coldplay put on one of the most spectacular, un-beige, bed-shitting live shows on the planet, a tornado of colour and excitement that makes a Beyonce show look like Milkfloat Karaoke.

Assuming it goes on in this manner and is confirmed to be parody by the end.

even without a pandemic going on i don't know if i'd attend a bed-shitting live show

Holy shit, this article

Does the bedshitting provide natural, renewable electricity to power the instruments

"un-beige bed shitting" suggests the blueberries went bad

And if our efforts to save the planet fail? I’d rather spend my last few decades of habitable planet rocking out to retina-exploding 5D live shows, thank you very much. At least I’ll end up saluting my desert mutant warlord with a whole bunch of euphoric nights behind me and a wrist full of flashing neon bracelets.

"At least I'll have my memories of Coldplay concerts when the environmental apocalypse comes" is one hell of a thesis statement

xp: lol I may have had similar posting motivation there

it's strange to me that he invokes maroon 5 as the sort of cultural decay that would justify complete nuclear annihilation, and yet for some reason coldplay is the band whose shows must go on even if the price is total environmental catastrophe. like, if you just squint hard enough

5. Bring on the day, says I, when all human culture is obliterated by ecological apocalypse and rebuilt by the brave few who were intelligent enough to keep their Strokes records off-Cloud and live up a hill.

I guarantee (and counting myself among them) no one who owns a physical copy of a Strokes album is going to survive the apocalypse.

sure but even so that’s probably the nicest conceivable way you could criticize that horrible sentence

When you go to Bartertown, the Strokes cds are the first thing they will confiscate

at first they came for the maroon 5 CDs, and i said nothing

Oh it's Mark Beaumont, I should've guessed - he was always a terrible writer.

Also just want to point out that the column is called "Mark My Words"

Xxxpost budo - you don't see "says I" dropped into a sentence everyday

A Moment With Beaumont

xp says you

Sez who?

Also just want to point out that the column is called "Mark My Words"

It's actually "Mark, My Words" which is even more 😱

"Heavens! I kill you know ;-)"

omg that thread

"Heavens! Bring on the day, says I, when all human culture is obliterated by ecological apocalypse and rebuilt by the brave few who were intelligent enough to keep their Strokes records off-Cloud and live up a hill. ;-)"

haha sorry! the comma really makes it next level

Mark, my Spotify playlists, let me show you them

"At least I'll have my memories of Coldplay concerts when the environmental apocalypse comes" is one hell of a thesis statement

Apologies if this is mentioned in the article (I'm not reading it), but I'm reminded that Chris Martin said the following in 2005:

”I think Radiohead are better than us,” says Martin of his group, which includes guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion. ”They’ve pushed themselves further. Them and U2 are tough to catch up with. But my mission is to beat those bands out of town. When the world ends in 200 years, it’d be nice to have it be ‘Oh, yeah, and the best band was Coldplay.’”

(I'm not reading the article because my brain apparently retains 15-year-old EW blurbs, and so I need to be very careful what I put into it.)

Don't deny yourself

Read it!!

I feel swindled. That piece was partially tongue-in-cheek and just too predictable to rise to the inverted heights of 'Neil Young's Lonely Quest to Save Music'.

do you guys remember when Coldplay first appeared and the hook that every writer threw their hat on was that Chris Martin did this weird thing that appealed to American Christiany types where he would talk about being a virgin?

sorry, maybe that he was a virgin until the *omg* ripe old age of 22 and still relatively chaste, as if he was untouched by the vile rock sex cult

vile rock sex cult

think I saw them supporting Zodiac Mindwarp back in '92

It's hard to call this the "worst" piece of music writing given that the writing itself is good, but it's bad

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html

I mean, for all of its writing quality, it's basically "White people be drivin like this, black people be drivin like this" the music essay

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

Ah right, the only kind of white western music is classical music, which as we all know is based on "chromatic-chord harmony" and "clean timbre of voice and instrument." Whereas "black music" is raw and free and noisy and btw improvisation.

As though there are no european folk musics, as though there's no improvisation in any kind of european music, as though there's no black music that sounds "clean" or polished. No such thing as appalachian ballads or irish music or klezmir or romani folk music, no such thing as duke ellington or art tatum or west african master drummers. White people music like this, black people music like this.

and the not-so-covert divide being expressed is White = intellect and aesthetics, Black = instinct and emotion, i.e. pretty much restating centuries-old racist paradigms.

yup

The visceral stank of Etta James

I find myself wanting to object to every single sentence in those two paragraphs you posted.

trash