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

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

racist trash

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

taking a break from ilx

Wesley Morris is black but y’all knew that right?

TIL Little Richard wasn’t a Westerner. Top notch musicological analysis right there.

Also, there has never been any folk music in the West ever. It’s all classical from Charlemagne onwards.

Anyway, stay in your lane, race x, and you too, race y. Gotta work those God-given genes.

I mean, there is a lot of interest to be said about white appropriation of black musical styles and affects, and it has been said so many times, in so many more nuanced and sophisticated ways that show so much more actual understanding of music.

I do think the piece is a little more nuanced than those excerpts suggest, although it's certainly not without its flaws. It actually has a lot more music-historical depth than what I would usually expect in an outlet like this. Tbh, it's only a few misplaced terms away from something you might get in a intro-level popular music/American music course. He's simplifying and generalizing historical Euro-American vs African-American musico-aesthetic priorities to tell his story, and doing so clumsily at times, but it's not worthless in terms of helping to explain the unique development of American popular music. Most of the essay is about how these things ended up being fused and interacting. He does discuss e.g. Motown (and soft rock/yacht rock) as musics that synthesize elements of these traditions. And he does refer to the Irish folk influence on the actual composition of 19th century minstrel songs, which isn't invalid. xp

So, right, there's much better out there but I don't think it's the worst introduction to this history for a lay audience in an outlet that's not primarily focused on music.

Today is my day to defend the indefensible, apparently.

barely-veiled essentialist thinking about race and music is, like, everywhere in highbrow cultural writing -- like, yeah, that might be a particularly egregious example, but you're lying to yourself if you think you haven't also seen it in some of the more erudite tomes in the 'good books about music' thread, npr recommendations + essays from more generalist newspaper writers whose ears perk up every time they notice that someone who wrote a recent top 40 hit is scandinavian

(I have no idea what he means by 'chromatic-chord harmony', though, I have to say. I mean, I DO know what 'chromatic harmony' means to me but blues and jazz are filled with it.)

i have skimmed the essay, but not read it carefully; it seems like what he's got going on is an effort to trade in race-essentialist terms in order to narrate a critical history that's aimed ultimately at somehow articulating 'the contradictions' in that history from the perspective of the present day and for the benefit of the present day, landing on a certain tone of impossible optimism after all too many episodes of knowingness about the ironies of the past. comes off as kind of chronologically chaotic and tonally discombobulated, and you have to grant him an awful lot on the way many passing judgments are expressed in order to help the structure maintain enough rigidity to make it from start to finish. eh.

seems like a lot of its problems come from its being 'good writing'.

That's fair imo.

Finally some people brave enough to take down the 1619 Project

I recently spent a few days with my 88 yr old father, whose house is full of copies of The Oldie, a monthly "humorous" UK magazine aimed at old people. It recently introduced a music column by Rachel Johnson, the socialite sister of the current Prime Minister. It is bad. I don't think it's available online, so you will have to take my word for the awfulness of her recent piece about The Clash and the teenage love for Sandinista she shared with Boris.

https://www.theoldie.co.uk/article/feel-the-byrne

Is this my beautiful house? Is this my beautiful life? What are we doing here? Search me, guv! We’re all on a Road to Nowhere. Both sides of the Atlantic.

I was there. I’d fly almost anywhere – sorry, Greta – to see it again.

back when i was on-staff at the wire it shared a publisher with the oldie

from a fawning interview with Chris Blackwell:

As I watch the gentle, tall, lean man chew his salad, composed with greens from his own farm, and patiently answer questions he must have replied to thousands of times, I can only sit back and marvel.

He has led a charmed life, he has brought pleasure to millions, he lives a modest life on his island in the sun, and this, he says, is his secret to his success.

‘Stay with what you love.’

Ya mon. Irie.

HE LIVES A MODEST LIFE ON HIS ISLAND

it's a starter island

Ya mon.

https://donnacwrites.substack.com/p/on-jack-harlows-sudden-success

“You’re not always going to make fire, you have to go through making that weaker stuff before you’re gonna get the fire,” Jack told me in January 2018. At the time, the statement was a revelation for me, someone who is so set on perfection from jump. Only later would I realize every talk with Jack is an opportunity to learn about myself.

"Years later, as I pulled back the hood of my robe, and put the challice to my lips, I wondered if maybe I was a little TOO devoted to him"