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

are you saying there was as much noise in the machine, say, 50 or 100 years ago as there is today?

let me rephrase: are you saying today's noise is comparable to the noise 50 or 100 years ago?

static up in those hills

https://www.hometownsource.com/morrison_county_record/opinion/west-what-is-the-dumbest-song-ever/article_4f8dc4da-f0b9-11eb-b36c-3f39e888ef68.html

If that is bad music writing, I don't want to see good.

More reviews of 60-year-old novelty songs by retired editors of Minnesota community papers plz

Perhaps you will enjoy the follow-up column.

The shout-out to “critical race theory” really situates the dude in a milieu.

I would happily dance to a song called "Critical Race Theory" (I'm imagining Gang of Four styles) but I respect the views of those who would find it difficult.

With 10 minutes and a notepad, I could probably work up a critical race theory parody of Supertramp's "Logical Song."

I believe they're still accepting submissions for the ilx comp.

Maybe comp 9 should be devoted to dancing to critical race theory?

Bonded by a shared love of Eighties hardcore and Nineties hip-hop, the creators of @boredapeyc make more than NFTs— they built an immersive, fantastical world. See how Bored Ape Yacht Club took over the internet, and how the founders envision their future. https://t.co/708BlWQGEq pic.twitter.com/XQ00Ijmjsp

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) November 1, 2021

‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?”

“Bored Ape Yacht Club,” folks

There is a universe in which they have taken over the internet apparently

Any universe I’m welcome to

If you like Gorillaz as much as Toad the Wet Sprocket, then you’ll love…

trashbat.co.ck

Immersive! Fantastical! Morally Corrupt!

It's broadcast media, so I don't know whether it qualifies for this thread, but there is a current BBC series on 80s music written and presented by GQ editor and biographer of David Cameron Dylan Jones that is just terrible.

So I guess the Express is some kind of britisher garbagepaper, but even our garbagepapers are better than this:

https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/1530552/Richard-Cole-dead-death-Led-Zeppelin-tour-manager-Robert-Plant-instagram-tribute-news

Richard Cole dead: Led Zeppelin tour manager dies as Robert Plant praises his 'bravery'
RICHARD COLE, former Led Zeppelin tour manager, has died aged 75.
By MELANIE KAIDAN
17:17, Thu, Dec 2, 2021 | UPDATED: 17:53, Thu, Dec 2, 2021

Richard Cole, best known for his work as Led Zeppelin’s tour manager, has died aged 75, one month before his birthday. The London-born music manager worked with legendary rock band Led Zeppelin from 1968 to 1980.

He also worked with other music giants including Eric Clapton, Black Sabbath, Lita Ford, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Led Zeppelin’s lead singer and lyricist, Robert Plant, paid an emotional tribute to his late tour manager:

In view of his 615,000 Instagram followers, the singer referred to Richard as “brave to the end”.

He wrote: “Farewell Ricardo...

“Sadly no more tall tales... brave to the end.”

The candid caption was accompanied by a photograph of the pair laughing.

Robert received an outpouring of messages of support from fans on the social media platform.

_sha_nizzle typed: “Very sorry to read this..

“May he rest in peace.”

groupieplant added: “It can't be!

“I do not believe.”

_bella_jenn_ said: “Condolences for your loss. R.I.P. Richard”

That's it. That's the article.

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to _sha_nizzle

groupieplant

.

"hope he's on the 'stairway to heaven'" added _zep_mom_9456

Heh

Surprised Plant only has 615,000 Instagram followers (seems low)

surprised he has that many! i bet whatever the led zep insta is has far more

Zep has 1.4 million followers. But does Plant post a lot? Pete Townshend only has just under 68,000 Instagram followers, but rarely posts more than once every few months. (But he has the best handle: @yaggerdang)

Hot off the heels of her successful comeback album, I'm in Love, Evelyn "Champagne" King was in her commercial prime when Get Loose hit stores in 1982. One of the earliest R&B/funk female vocalists to use the music video medium (for 1981's "I'm in Love"), she was frequently on airwaves in the early '80s with songs found here like "Love Come Down" and "Betcha She Don't Love You." The romantic lyrics and celestial keyboard layerings against a steady funk beat on "Love Come Down" were expertly layed down by Kashif, who would become a prominent R&B producer and artist in his own right. His stamp is also on many of the album's other cuts, though Morrie Brown is the album's actual producer. "Betcha" is another unique number -- a down-paced dancefloor ditty with a rock-friendly chorus and vocal arrangement. Meanwhile the title track is a colorful up-tempo number that hearkens back slightly to 1977's "Shame." Equally appealing are the refined "Back to Love" and "I'm Just Warmin' Up," the album's soothing closer. King sounds fresh and stylish throughout, making Get Loose one of her strongest efforts.

layed

(the review is fine btw. just . . . "layed" lol)

this song fucks... LITERALLY

expertly even

John McWhorter bravely takes on the cultural elites of 1920s Vienna: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/opinion/classical-music.html

"Audiences have resisted Dvorak’s call for American classical music to flourish based on our own homegrown substrate, Native American and, especially, Black music"

Guess how many Native American or Black composers he goes on to at least name-check:

— Will Mason (@willmasonmusic) April 26, 2022

That was horrible, my god.

Anyone can Op-Ed

Got all I needed from Darcy James Argue’s tweet.

Taste aside, it's very weird for a few reasons: he seems to associate all 'ugly' classical music with the 12-tone method, which is just one specific system of pitch organization and not a terribly fashionable one, nor even the basis of all atonal music. He writes as if 12-tone music enjoys some kind of hegemony in classical music venues, unsupported by any evidence other than something he sang in choir 30 years ago, which is so far removed from the reality of concert programming in the US as to seem insane. He uses an approx 70yo quote from Boulez, ignoring Boulez's own subsequent development, which includes conducting a lot of the standard orchestral repertoire. And there is a total refusal to even engage with the intentions of 'ugly' music composers, just assuming some objective and highly reactionary standard of beauty. Linking Schoenberg's Variations, hardly an incomprehensible piece, and saying "hardly the William Tell Overture" is mind-boggling.

Even "Native American and Black music", to which he pays no more than lip service, is not always 'beautiful' in the same way as the William Tell Overture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTg6rZJCu4

"I like pretty classical! And show tunes!" would have been the basis for a perfectly fine essay all on its own if he didn't have to build himself a strawman to beat up first. Hell, he could have gone in a really interesting direction by talking about how ideas pioneered by serialists and other mid-century avant-gardists were borrowed by Hollywood for the soundtracks to sci-fi and horror movies. But no, he had to make the dumbest, knee-jerk, shorthand rhetorical leaps available, ones that just make him seem like he hasn't listened to any forward-looking composed music made since the 1950s. I'd love to sit him down with some of Anna Thorvaldsdottir's CDs, for example. That shit is weird, forbidding, and beautiful, but having to think about it would probably break his brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZYVymFmL88

i used to try to listen to his language podcast occasionally but had to stop bc half the time he would just end up talking about musicals & playing endless clips of crappy forgotten broadway junk. he should hook up with the "punk rock is bullshit" guy aka bean dad and they can do a substack about how only normal regular stuff is good.

had never heard of this dude before. took a gander at his wikipedia page. jesus christ

Oh yeah he's a bit of a piece of work.

In his book The indispensable composers, critic Anthony Tommasini wrote about how, when he was a composition student in the early 70s, anything that wasn't twelve-tone composition was looked down upon by his peers as outmoded or pandering. Are there similar "rules" in academic music now, or have post-modernism and other cultural shifts opened up the field?

This bugs me too, musical traditionalists/conservatives keep railing against a 100 year old idiom no one writes in anymore. Schoenberg really bothers these people in a way that I can’t completely eliminate anti-Semitism as a motivating factor.

Halfway there, the climate at institutions varies a lot and someone who studies with Moor Mother at CalArts will probably have a different experience than someone who studies with Ferneyhough at Stanford but it would be hard for me to overstate how far I think the overall academic composition climate is from some kind of serialist or modernist hegemony. (NB there are also programmes like SUNY Purchase, which produced Regina Spektor and Mitski, among others.) I taught at a progressive New England liberal arts college for a few years and supervised a lot of hip-hop, EDM, indie rock, etc projects. The thing is that I suspect that for the McWhorters of the world, ANY modernist presence would be too much.

Fwiw, in this piece, Tommasini (who afaik never majored in composition) considers the other side wrt even the 50s-early 70s: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-midcentury-serialists-the-bullies-or-the-besieged.html?pagewanted=all . I can share the Straus article he mentions if there is interest. His own recollections btw are based on a few anecdotes from one institution. I'm also not sure being looked down on by one's peers constitutes a 'rule'.