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

all that quote needed was a comparison to Greta Van Fleet singer

https://louderthanwar.com/swans-albert-hall-manchester-live-review/

author is a "creative music writer" and this reads like a sixth-form assignment

Eh, at least she tried something. An editor could have helped her but I doubt that site has one.

Guess I just shouldn’t click on music writing anymore, b/c holy shit: https://thebaffler.com/latest/california-gothic-marzoni

I think the author of that is a return nominee to this thread?

The Baffler living up to its name

The urban fog that has trailed shibboleths of progress to the Pacific Rim hovers over a reflection in once-clear water that looks final in its murkiness: finding the barbarisms of modernity exacerbated and multiplied on the outer cusp of the American continent, settled under the false assurance of beginning anew, we can no longer dispute that the monsters are us.

In his neo-noir western, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson diagnoses mastery of the Occidental frontier as an Oedipal struggle between Christianity and capitalism, while statutory rapist Roman Polanski reimagines, in Chinatown, super engineer William Mulholland’s irrigation of the desert by means of the Los Angeles Aqueduct as an incest fantasy (a prevalent subgenre of the Gothic and noir) wherein the archetypal small-business owner, private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), uncovers the extent to which developers have fucked the local citizenry, their own offspring not excepted, for eons to come—and as Nicholson’s 1990 sequel, The Two Jakes, attests, boy, will they fuck again.

I honestly don’t think it’s meant to be “read”… how could it be(??)

https://www.stereogum.com/2233806/alice-cooper-new-album-keanu-reeves-trans-issues/interviews/weve-got-a-file-on-you/

why would anyone think asking alice cooper for his opinions on trans people is a good idea at all, just inviting him to say something bigoted. most charitably this just seems like total naivety from the interviewer hoping that he might say something positive based on comments from nearly 50 years ago? but even in the best case that does pretty much nothing for anyone and otherwise they're just letting him spew hate

Because that approach generates clicks?

most charitably this just seems like total naivety from the interviewer hoping that he might say something positive based on comments from nearly 50 years ago?

Based on the interviewer's previous work, that's my guess as to what happened. She mostly writes about contemporary pop music, in a cheerleading style. I've interviewed Cooper; he's a genuinely nice guy. I have no reason to believe he holds any hostility toward trans people. But he's also a befuddled old man who really shouldn't be asked what he thinks about things that his 75-year-old cable-news-addled mind is not prepared to process.

Cooper is clearly transphobic and also closeted in some sense and I won't elaborate but it's a highly relevant question even though his answers will inevitably be disappointing

it's worth it if only to have him on record as a case study for later generations to learn from

the LDR piece just sort of washed over me in a haze without leaving much of anything behind so it compliments her music very well

I'll take the baffler's music coverage over jacobin's any day

I don't care enough about LDR to read that piece, but going to the Baffler for "music writing" is a category error. I agree that first sentence Lavator quoted is impenetrable, but the incest point in the second is interesting imo

The LDR piece isn't as bad as it could have been. It's somewhat impenetrable, but once you pull it apart (I've been reading Albert Murray lately, so I'm in practice with untangling people's prose) there are some good observations.

Based on the interviewer's previous work, that's my guess as to what happened. She mostly writes about contemporary pop music, in a cheerleading style. I've interviewed Cooper; he's a genuinely nice guy. I have no reason to believe he holds any hostility toward trans people. But he's also a befuddled old man who really shouldn't be asked what he thinks about things that his 75-year-old cable-news-addled mind is not prepared to process.

― read-only (unperson)

look it's not the interviewer's fault for cooper saying bigoted shit, it's alice cooper's fault for being (apparently, i'm not going to read the article because i have enough transphobia in my life thank you very much) a fuckin' bigot

look it's not the interviewer's fault for cooper saying bigoted shit, it's alice cooper's fault for being (apparently, i'm not going to read the article because i have enough transphobia in my life thank you very much) a fuckin' bigot

Absolutely. Re-reading the interview, it's actually worse than it seemed yesterday. At first I thought it was just a confused but well-meaning take best responded to with "oh, bless your heart, grandpa," but re-reading it, he sounds hostile and insane, like someone who's been pouring Fox News into his eyeballs for a decade or more. (And I bet it got a lot of play in the UK, because there are some very fucked-up comments on the article now that read like they're ported over from the Daily Mail or something.)

lana thing has a college paper problem where it can't quote someone without giving a gloss of their career or invoke noir without explaining that california is the terminus of manifest destiny (as is traditional my own state doesn't count because it's not where the movie industry is) and that william holden is dead at the beginning of sunset boulevard, but otherwise it's on the right track about lana, a rare thing

this from alice cooper--

I’m not going to tell a seven-year-old boy, ‘Go put a dress on because maybe you’re a girl,’ and he’s going, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a boy.'

--reminded me of rick perlstein's pointing out that everything in the deer hunter is a specific memory from the war with the roles compulsively reversed

The California "mythos" somehow fries some ppl's brains for some reason, I'm not sure why (IMOM, that was one of the issues with Ann Powers' notorious LDR piece, which otherwise & of course was much more readable than the Baffler thing – which I'm impressed some of you have been able to penetrate to get to whatever its "point" is).

*IMO (though that reminds me, I should call my mother...)

The California "mythos" somehow fries some ppl's brains for some reason, I'm not sure why (IMOM, that was one of the issues with Ann Powers' notorious LDR piece, which otherwise & of course was much more readable than the Baffler thing – which I'm impressed some of you have been able to penetrate to get to whatever its "point" is).

in the interviewer's defense, they do try to give him several off ramps and he just keeps digging

xp Nah, those people probably sucked to begin with. Respectfully disagree!

in the interviewer's defense, they do try to give him several off ramps and he just keeps digging

yeah they're tossing him a softball and he sounds like "oh good, I, Alice, am now ready to share my thoughts on gender conformity"

I keep coming back to “you perform under the name Alice Cooper, how are you so bad at this”

seriously my dude Alice. this is an easy one for you

Especially when the original question was "Here's some really progressive shit you said 50 years ago — do you still stand by that?" and all he had to do was say, "Absolutely! Now about my new album..."

i'm just shocked that a born-again christian could be in any way hostile to queer people! it's so out of character!

If it's any comfort, most of these people will soon be dead.

look it's not the interviewer's fault for cooper saying bigoted shit, it's alice cooper's fault for being (apparently, i'm not going to read the article because i have enough transphobia in my life thank you very much) a fuckin' bigot

this would be the case if cooper had brought it up unprompted, but he was explicitly asked about it and really didn't need to be.

In a 1974 interview with SPEC, you gave really forward-thinking responses to questions about sexuality and gender. You said “In the future, everyone will be bisexual,” and you accurately defined pansexuality, among other things. You also said, “Lots of men who perform wear make-up – that’s a theatrical tradition, it has nothing to do with sexuality.”

Recently some of your “theatrical” rock peers have commented about gender identity, with Paul Stanley and Dee Snider calling gender-affirming care for kids a “sad and dangerous fad.”

As someone who played around with gender expectations early on, do you have any thoughts on what some of your contemporaries have said before they walked those comments back?

this is the full question! explicitly inviting the possibility of him saying some wildly bigoted shit by mentioning some other 70s hard rockers who recently did that. i'm objecting to the interviewer thinking it was a worthwhile question to ask at all and just treating us as an object of debate without any real consideration. there is absolutely no reason to think that alice cooper would have something interesting or insightful to say about trans healthcare for kids, and even just trying to get him to weigh in on trans issues is stupid and unnecessary.

I think it’s reasonably worth asking, but not worth printing when the answer sucks shit

is it worth the news cycle of outing another old man’s hate-filled bullshit at the cost of printing hate-filled bullshit?

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/transphobia-in-music/always-the-topic-rarely-the-voice-transphobic-rock-stars

This article belongs in this thread imo, not as an example of “bad music writing” (it is the opposite), but bc bad music writing is its target

Good piece. Shame about the capitalization error in the author bio:

Niko Stratis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in outlets like SPIN, Bitch, Autostraddle, Catapult and more. Her work primarily focuses on culture, the 1990s, queer/trans topics and as often as possible where all those ideas intersect. Niko lives in downtown Toronto with her fiancé and their dog and 2 cats. She is a cancer.

Ha I thought it was an intentional joke on Niko’s end tbh

Literally LOL’ing (as a July baby myself)

Always better to go with Cancerian or Moon Child

This isn't the worst of anything, but I thought it was kind of funny how the writer seizes on some mindless complaints (which I'll take his word on their numbering in the "hundreds") and refutes them point-by-point: https://variety.com/2023/music/news/olvia-rodrigo-short-album-guts-running-time-1235698333/

(the tweets he quotes are pretty amusing – “So basically an EP")

this is the full question! explicitly inviting the possibility of him saying some wildly bigoted shit by mentioning some other 70s hard rockers who recently did that. i'm objecting to the interviewer thinking it was a worthwhile question to ask at all and just treating us as an object of debate without any real consideration. there is absolutely no reason to think that alice cooper would have something interesting or insightful to say about trans healthcare for kids, and even just trying to get him to weigh in on trans issues is stupid and unnecessary.

― ufo, Thursday, August 24, 2023 8:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think it’s reasonably worth asking, but not worth printing when the answer sucks shit

is it worth the news cycle of outing another old man’s hate-filled bullshit at the cost of printing hate-filled bullshit?

― mh, Friday, August 25, 2023 9:39 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

AGAIN: clicks! they want them!

I don't really think anyone is confused about that Evan. Maybe just wondering how many ad pennies is worth selling your soul for

ah, then yeah I don't think they believe goading old rockers into saying embarrassing/hateful/ignorant shit is really giving them any pause in light of the traffic it brings

the worst thing is, by publishing his answer, it's just a negative despairing thing to put into the world. it's going to make folks who are trans feel helpless, make them feel worse, it'll do the same for their allies, and make the opposition feel emboldened by yet another major figure coming out as an absolute moron on the subject. i can see the argument for exposing the bigotry, but idk if it does anything but add to the shit pile of dumbfuckery.

thanks for sharing that Niko Stratis piece, fgti!

I’m sorry but what the hell is this

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison

He said he'd kill for Taylor Swift tickets, we thought it was a euphemism

No body no crime

Will that turn all the Swifties into prison abolitionists or will they want more people in prison in order to facilitate their discovery of the Swift?

Afraid it may make aspiring writers consider murder as a way into The New Yorker.