new york times' kelefeh sanneh on the white stripes, get behind me satan and retro-rock

well, jeez, i guess we better not talk about it then.

Of course we Brits despise celebrity as part of our make-up. 'Build 'em up, knock 'em down' is the national motto. Everyone of us has a tabloid hack within.

xp2- I have a Whammy pedal. I care.

haha, I was thinking that part of the problem here might be trying to make the White Stripes seem important. (I like the White Stripes a whole lot, fwiw, but I have a hard time seeing them as much more than a nice little band.)

I will take that challenge with KS's own words:

Only a few years ago, it was a mild shock not only to hear so many young bands sounding so old-fashioned, but that some started to succeed with it. The 2001 release of the Strokes' galvanizing debut album, combined with high profile attention for the band, further publicized a garage-rock boom that seemed like a sharp (and sometimes shrill) reaction to a mutating musical world. Like many other bands, the Strokes' retro juggernaut was a strike against turntables and keyboards, rap-rock and electronica. And if the band sounded a bit like their favorite late-1970's punk forebears, that was part of the point: they were digging in their heels.

Of all the bands that gained wider attention then, none dug in harder than the White Stripes, the Detroit duo that staked out a position on the extreme wing of retro.

Rewrote the first three sentences to provide a bit of context without adding too much. Left the fourth sentence as is, tweaked the first sentence of the next paragraph to make it seem less like the White Stripes came out in the *wake* of the Strokes, which 'emerged' doesn't entirely make clear.

If one is going for the big picture in the first place, I tend to think one should do it full bore.

Anyway, now I'm nit-picking the nit-pickers. Later

How adding the phrases

"but that some started to succeed with it"
"combined with high profile attention for the band, further publicized"
"Like many other bands"

adds any context is honestly beyond me.

"Unable to escape rock 'n' roll history, the White Stripes decided to rearrange it instead" is the most vomit-inducing line I've read in a long, long time.

This ain't his best piece, sure. It makes some dubious claims, OK. But writing for a general audience really is different than writing for a niche audience, and I don't see why that should be a controversial point.

"but that some started to succeed with it"
"combined with high profile attention for the band, further publicized"
"Like many other bands"

adds any context is honestly beyond me.

-- bugged out (bu...), June 4th, 2005."

"Like many other bands" is the most important addition, and gets to the root of the problem with the article, IMHO.

"From Gap commercials (where you can find the 18-year-old Joss Stone belting out the half-century-old "Night Time Is the Right Time") to indie record shops, rock 'n' roll nostalgia is everywhere."

This reminds me of something you'd read in "Teen Beat", or the hamfisted "Beatlemania" articles of yesteryear..."Those lovable mop-tops the Strokes are sweeping the nation with their smart suits and devil-may-care attitude!"

don weiner OTM on "Unable to escape..." line. Reminds me of the ham-fisted first drafts of Philosophy 1001 thesis statements I used to have to deal with back when I was a peer writing advisor. "Now the White Stripes are trying something trickier: they're trying to change the past." reminds me of the conclusions that would inevitably follow. Lazy, deadline filling writing from someone with nothing to say...

JSBX and about a zillion other post-punk acts have dug deep into some sort of strict aesthetic before Jack White got the idea

He's not just saying the White Stripes dug into a strict aesthetic in general. He's saying it was an aesthetic that was strict about mimicking the past.

This is the same storyline given to Wilco or Radiohead when they were busy reinventing rock-n-roll in cleverer and strange ways.

No it isn't. Everyone hailed Wilco and Radiohead for their futurism. Precisely the opposite.

x-post:
"This is the same storyline given to Wilco or Radiohead when they were busy reinventing rock-n-roll in cleverer and strange ways.

No it isn't. Everyone hailed Wilco and Radiohead for their futurism. Precisely the opposite.

-- bugged out (bu...)"

Please explain this refutation more clearly...particularly use of "everyone", the application of futurism to Wilco, and the reason "futurism" and "reinventing (X) in cleverer and strange ways" are opposing viewpoints, rather than differing interpretations.

Granted. Like I said, I don't think this is that bad -- it makes me want to hear the record, which is sort of its main objective -- but yeah, true.

Everyone=majority of media outlets.

futurism/Wilco=everyone going on about the computers on that last album but one, which was the one they got all the hype for.

the opposing viewpoints are futurism, which Wilco and Radiohead were hailed for, and retroism, which the Strokes and White Stripes were hailed for

OK, prof?

Because of these statements:

"Of all the bands that emerged then, none dug in harder than the White Stripes"

"they were rock 'n' roll's greatest primitivists"

rilly good thinkpieces are rare and few between and usually absolutely don't fit the requirements for any major non-music publication.

the odd thing is that i have a hard time reading stuff like this coz i just gloss over it too quick, as compared to more "specialized" stuff.

i've noticed this more generally too -- like popular histories are tougher going for me than the denser but more specific academic stuff, etc.

it's like i don't notice simple claims anymore unless the writing is all about "showing" that backs them up. otherwise i just sorta filter thru them. & also ideas about say, the "state" of retro-rock or etc. just go through the same mental band-filter coz i don't think it's worth having an opinion, almost?

I understand you disagree with Sanneh's evaluation of the White Stripes. He, however, at least argues why he likes them so much. You however, just keep saying that you don't think they're very good, and he's wrong about them. And without any argument as to why you hold your opinion, I could really care less about it.

He could have just said what I think of this record, which is that it's a psychedelic time-shifting masterpiece!! A much more focused way of encapsulating the past/future thing. Reminds me of a mushroom trip I had in college -- wondering what lay ahead in academia's wake while longing to be 8 years old watching Yaz's last game for the Sox with my Dad; the memory was crystal clear and poignant, even while I was also freaking out about the present. If you just report on the record and not play harvard boy, the evidence is there that Jack is experiencing something similar; the choice of arrangement tells me that.

The reasons why I don't think the WS are very good (from what I've heard, anyway - and I do like the new single) are that I don't think the songwriting seems all that great, the singing doesn't seem all that great (and is actually annoying at times) and I don't know about the personality being projected. I could mention tons of garage bands I like more - those ones I mentioned from the early '90s way upthread were all greater, I think.

I am inherently suspicious of them though.

How about a pair of pink sidewinders
And a bright orange pair of pants?
"You could really be a Beau Brummel baby
If you just give it half a chance.
Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers,
You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers."
Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways
It's still rock and roll to me

What's the matter with the crowd I'm seeing?
"Don't you know that they're out of touch?"
Should I try to be a straight `A' student?
"If you are then you think too much.
Don't you know about the new fashion honey?
All you need are looks and a whole lotta money."
It's the next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways
It's still rock and roll to me

Everybody's talkin' 'bout the new sound
Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me

no. neo soul gets it too, hip hop artists like edan and ugly ducking get it too, even annie and richard x get it.

"What about funk revivalism within hip-hop"

if hip hop was a genre flooded with bands playing retro-styled funk then you might have a point, but er, they sampled funk and made it into a new genre called hip hop or rap music, so its not quite the same thing.

but you get groups like sharon jones, breakestra and the ilk on the modern funk scene who are just like the funk versions of all those detroit bands playing garage rock and bar room blues like its 1970 all over again.

"or the huge debt that the supposedly groundbreaking dance music of the '90s owes to the electronic music of the '70s and '80s?"

not the same. how on earth do goldie, aphex twin, matmos, or junior boys or any of those guys sound like kraftwerk, eno or whoever? thats just lazy. theyre all electronic, but matmos doesnt sound like kraftwerk or whoever does he? this is like people who say kid a wasnt doing anything new cos eno already did low, but they sound nothing alike.

-- Tim Ellison (timelliso...) (webmail), June 4th, 2005 2:15 AM. (Tim Ellison) (later) (link)

The videos?

You think journalists at many other, hundreds of other, dailies in the US of A don't listen to or are aware of a broad range of music?
Well they do and they did for a long time. And some are ignoramuses but you can't come close to painting them all with a statistical mean or a broad stroke.

They often just don't have the luxury of blowing a page of musings the size of a NYT piece on their opinions and derivations of pop musical field equations. Even when they do get half that volume by lucky chance, it doesn't hit the wire, if it does at all, with the same agency name oomph.

Look, this thread, like all the threads on Sanneh, or other pieces cited from the Times "pop music" which always hits around page 25 on Sunday recently on ILM, are a product of the lickspittle brigade. The White Stripes are hardly the only band that reinvests and reinvents "retro." They're only the one of literally a hundred, at least, I bet, under the microscope of a big daily newspaper.

I get a record or two a month from nobodies, old and young, who are doing the same thing, often better, sometimes equal, frequently worse but without the infrastructure resource to lift the art higher.

What makes you tyros and boneheads so cocksure that a byline in the New York Times and the wherewithal to do 40 or more column inches after massage by a layered team of editors confers excellence?

People with Pulitzers under their belts and appearances regularly on the front page of this paper in hard news analysis have been publicly thrown down as rubbish in the last couple years. You think features writing is immune?

I enjoy reading Sanneh. He frequently appears to be either winging it or from a different planet with regards to things I know something about, like many Times writers, but always eloquent, like all Times writers who go through the editorial process. This piece, published last Sunday, wasn't one of the stronger things. But by pure weight of paper its printed on, a valid measurement if you're into finding the volume under the curve through physical calculus, it bowls over anything done by newspaper writers at any other paper in the country on the same day.