7/31/2003
Thus Quoth
Branford Marsalis
"Every guy who would compare me to Coltrane, I would compare his writing to Hemingway, compare his writing to Faulkner. I'd even tell them that. 'Say, man, I was comparing your work to Faulkner. Man, you've really got a way to go.'"
The Source vs. XXL
"Just when it seemed as though the beef between XXL and the Source was over...XXL set off a new slew of controversy that Elliot Wilson felt compelled to speak on."
By Kem Poston and Ken Gibbs in the Africana.
Bob Mehr writes
re: Jobless in Seattle
"Just wanted to confirm that my missive to the Stranger was an open and well-intended theft of O'Donohue's letter upon his exit from SNL. It was actually a bit of an inside joke for one person in particular but I fully assumed that a large number of folks would get the reference.
"And yes, unfortunately Meltzer's column was canned almost immediately after my departure. That was my one great concern--even though I had long been assured that editorial brass liked his work--in leaving. Too bad, as I was consistently amazed how many people--rock critics and the general public alike--were excited to be able to read him on a regular basis.
"As you know, Richard is busy with a couple books, a volume on aging (Autumn Rhythm) set for publication in the fall, as well as a new novel that's still in the works. Looked for a time as if he was going to finish up a new collection of music pieces along the lines of A Whore Just Like The Rest but that doesn't seem like it's happening the last I spoke to him. However, I wouldn't be surprised if Meltzer's byline turns up on another mini-column, similar to the one at Weekly, in the near future. I'm making an effort for that to happen anyway."
7/30/2003
Bangs in Blender
A welcome second helping of ’70s rock criticism’s druggy bozo savant. By Alexis Petridis in Blender.
Madonna To Produce Movie About Female Rock Critic
Described in this Chart item as a story about a girl in the "music journalism industry." [Scare quotes mine.]
Don't Stop Thinking About Yesterday
From the Rolling Stone archives, Stephen Holden "ushers out the Seventies with a long, melancholy sigh" in his review of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.
[Link courtesy of Christopher O'Connor.]
More About Tate
The concept of Jimi Hendrix. Tony Green reviews Tate's book in the St. Petersburg Times.
7/29/2003
New Hendrix, Prince bios
Deep Purple: Race Matters in New Books on Prince and Hendrix.
[Miles Marshall Lewis reviews new books by Greg Tate and Alex Hahn.]
I Thought We Finished Arguing About This 3 Weeks Ago Dept.
Exile in Whinerville
The hostility flung at Liz Phair's new record is senseless, sexist, and abominably stupid. By Gina Arnold.
[Which I found via this thread on ILM.]
7/28/2003
(M)ore Re(ad)ing
H(ear): Music writing by Carson Arnold.
"H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews and articles written by Carson Arnold. As an independent writer and musician living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share..."
New Blog Alert
Lovers of dance and electronic music--and, more important, fans of excellent writing--will want to check out Philip Sherburne's minima moralia: "music, solipsism, and the occasional sentence fragment." (Which, by the way, is probably the best description I've ever seen of music bloggery.) If you're not already familiar with it, also check out Sherburne's Needle Drops column at Neumu.
DeRogatis Reads, Skims, Pronounces
Rock's current pages few but fruitful. By Jim DeRogatis in the Chicago Sun-Times.
[A roundup of summer-fall reading: New titles by Bangs, Hoskyns, Popoff, et al.]
7/25/2003
Thus Quoth: Special Brit-pop Edition
Steve Mason (the Beta Band), 1999
"There's no point listening to the music press, they're just middle class people with pens."
Liam Gallagher (on the British press), 1997
"Them lot, I think they fancy me. I think they're all gay."
From the pages of Billboard
[Scott Isler writes an interesting letter to Billboard this week (not available online), in response to the magazine's recent Courtney Love feature. I reprint this without either Isler's or Billboard's approval...I figure I better just note that up front.]
"Billboard's new editor-in-chief may not have much music-business experience, but his journalism credentials are impeccable.
"Therefore, it was surprising to read that your front-page Courtney Love interview (July 19), 'at her management's insistence, was conducted via e-mail.'
"Surely, Billboard has more clout than to cave in to a demand like this.
"If not, there are plenty of other things to write about. Your 'exclusive Q & A' only begs the Q: Who wrote the A?"
Scott Isler
Brooklyn, N.Y.
[rockcritics.com would never under any circumstances stoop to publishing an e-mail interview.]
7/24/2003
From the Desk of Steven Ward
Note to Brain Johnson of AC/DC:
Critics going to a show expecting to see my beloved Genesis? Not bloody likely. I wish. Critics hate Genesis!
Except for me and J.D. Considine. (Sorry J.D., I had to out you. Thanks again for those wonderful reviews of my boys in the last Rolling Stone Album Guide.)
Now I'm just going to have to wait for that Tony Banks orchestral CD...
And props to Mike Rutherford. I hear he's writing songs for Christgau's beloved Backstreet Boys.
Me, I still can't dance.
[This will solve all your problems, Steven. Trust me on this one.]
7/23/2003
Thus Quoth...
Brian Johnson, AC/DC, 1982
"Even poor Angus has to take stick a lot of times. Like there was one critic who said, 'Angus Young may be able to play a fucking fantastic solo. But can he do it on an acoustic guitar?' We couldn't fooking believe it! A lot of people who come to the shows are critics who are going to see My Fair Lady or Santana or Genesis. What do THEY know?"
7/22/2003
Robert Christgau writes
...a whole bunch of columns and stuff for the Village Voice.
Richard Riegel writes:
"You probably know this already, but I've just read Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections recently (found a remaindered hardback copy in my neighborhood Goodwill store for $1.) Anyway, on p. 409, Franzen describes mega-wealthy post-Yuppie character Brian Callahan as an arty-obsessive who "ate dinner at Pastis in New York with Schwartz [an "independent filmmaker" in the story] and Greil Marcus [!] or Stephen Malkmus." Whew--now that "Lester Bangs" is turning up as a character in so many books, movies, etc., I guess we should've figured Greil wouldn't be far behind."
[Actually, I don't read, so I didn't in fact know this. But I do know that just this morning Stephen King picked a fight with Jonathan Franzen, and that Stephen King is sort of a rock critic himself who once played in the same band as Greil Marcus, so it all ties in, sort of.]
A Book Very Likely Not At All About Golf
A new Richard Meltzer book, Autumn Rhythm, is coming out in October. According to this report from Future Tense Books, Autumn Rhythm is “about aging, dying, and the crumminess of history." Now someone pick up this man's departed Seattle Weekly column, now!
7/21/2003
J.D. Considine writes:
"Why haven't you heard of Jesse Sublett's The Rock Critic Murders? (See previous post.) Probably because it's not very good, but also because the rock critics mentioned in the title turn out to be tangential to the actual plot, which involves some sort of Austin, TX real estate scam. (I read the book when it came out, and was disappointed enough not to read any of Sublett's subsequent mysteries, if indeed there were any.)"
The Morning Funnies
With Eminem, real musicians get a bum rap. By Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press.
7/18/2003
Thus Quoth...
Peter Buck, 1987
"Byron Coley's just a loser, a third-rate writer, and I just don't give a fuck. It's kind of funny, because we have all these mutual friends, and they're saying, 'What is this with him? What's this about cocaine?! Did you fuck his wife or something?!' I don't know, probably not. I doubt it. Not to the best of my knowledge."
Death, Taxes, and...Britney Spears?
In his rant about the Barney Hoskyns book (see previous post), Phil Freeman does a good job deflating Hoskyns's positing of Britney as the "new Madonna," which I agree is just a superficial and all-too-common comparison. And I'm glad he takes on Hoskyns and Hornby for what they do rather than for what they represent (my main beef with the NYP hatchet job). But I gotta say, Freeman loses me totally with this bizarre, apparently self-evident conclusion: "There will be no surprises on a Britney Spears record, now or in the future. Count on it." And there will be even fewer surprises in music criticism so long as writers keep insisting this is true (and in the process not allowing surprises to sneak in through the door and, well, surprise them). (It might also be worth noting here that as pointless as Britney-Madonna comparisons are, there probably are some real parallels between how both were written about in the early part of their careers. Madonna ended up "surprising" all sorts of folks who similarly wrote her off in the beginning.)
7/17/2003
Phil Freeman weighs in...
On New York Press vs. Hoskyns
Sample: "This review is pretty rabid, but the book it's describing sure does sound like a piece of shit. The question is, could it have been anything else?"
[From his daily blog, Mostly Weird, Some Normal. Until I learn how to properly link to articles halfway down a web page, you'll have to scroll down to July 16 all by yourself.]
Critical Ga Ga
re: For the Love of the Queen: An interview with Daniel Nester
I enjoyed this conversation with the author of God Save My Queen. An excerpt:
"As a writer, there's a side of me that wanted rock critics to like (Queen). Then there's another that can understand why, for instance, Dave Marsh said Queen 'may be the first truly fascist rock band,' a 'shit sandwich' review if there ever was one. I think it has to do with a good amount of player-hating, the need to dis a commercial success; outright homophobia of Freddie Mercury's 'flamboyant' and 'bravura' showmanship..."
[From Kenan Hebert's excellent blog, Gigantic.]
7/16/2003
He's-Not-Kidding-When-He-Says-"Here" Department
Dumb and Garrulous: The Waterloo of rock writing is here. By Mark Ames in New York Press.
[Ostensibly a review of Barney Hoskins's The Sound and the Fury. "Everything about rock journalism...makes me wince. I felt embarrassment for myself because I remembered how much rock journalism once meant to me back in college, when I was looking for my heroes' secrets or making sure I wasn’t missing out on something good." Yawn. But hey, thanks for quoting Greil Marcus in his rockcritics.com exchange. So "embarrassed" you just had to look, right?]
Steven Ward reports...
Metal scribe returns to the pages of rock mag
Geoff Barton, a hard rock and metal writer for the defunct weekly Sounds, first editor of Kerrang!, and the premiere chronicler of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement of the early '80s, is leaving his current News Editor post at Automotive News Europe to work for Classic Rock magazine.
"The whole affair was kick-started by the announcement in March that the London office of Automotive New Europe was being closed and that all activities were being transferred to Oberpfaffenhofen (that's reputedly somewhere near Munich)," Barton told rockcriticsdaily Wednesday.
Barton said he would never consider moving to Germany, David Hasselhoff-mania or not.
An old Kerrang! colleague, Cathy Newson, suggested to Barton that he call Classic Rock Editor-in-Chief Mick Wall (who used to write for Barton back in the early Kerrang! days).
"I finish at Automotive News Europe in August and Mick has asked me to help out in the Classic Rock office once I'm free of my present commitments," Barton said.
Barton has started off his stay at Classic Rock with a new monthly column for the magazine called "Almost Famous." In the column, Barton recalls his old glory days of covering the hard rock and metal beat.
Classic Rock is not online, but can be found at your favourite newsstand. Just look for the July issue with Slippery When Wet-era Jon Bon Jovi on the cover.
(That's right. Jon Bon Jovi. You know you wish you had hair like that.)
[See Steven Ward's interview with Geoff Barton in rockcritics.com.]
In defense of rock criticism...1977 edition
Declining Rock? Carolyn Porter's letter to the New York Review of Books, April 1977.
[You have to pay a hefty online fee to read the piece Porter is responding to--Mark Crispin Miller's review of several rock books released in '76--but his response to her is full of inanities and "anti-intellectual" nonsense.]
[P.S. I wonder what he made of punk?]
Hot for Teacher
Musicians United for Songs In the Classroom, Inc. M.U.S.I.C. is a nonprofit organization promoting the interdisciplinary use of popular music in education.
[There's a lot of great stuff in here. The Links page alone is phenomenal. And the Visual Art Exemplars--"examples of students visual projects"--are pretty terrific too. (This visualization of Springsteen's "Factory" kind of nails it, no?) I'm also curious to read "5th grade student essay about Avril Lavigne's 'Complicated,'" and "10th grade essays about 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light.'" Attention all Editors: recruit!]
Bangs excerpt
When I posted to Random House's Lester Bangs page below (7/9/03), I didn't realize that there was also a (previously unpublished) excerpt.
Drug Punk: From Two Assassinations and a Speedy Retreat into Pastoral Nostalgias.
Classical She Wrote
A Critical Difference, by Anne Midgette (from Andante.com).
"Music criticism was once as all-male as the Vienna Philharmonic. Anne Midgette, the first woman ever to review classical music for The New York Times, explores the stereotypes of women in the audience--and on the aisle."
[Anne Midgette was one of a handful of classical critics interviewed last year in a rockcritics roundtable.]
{Link courtesy of Flaskaland.}
Music Books a Tough Sell
"Much to the dismay of U.S. book publishers, rocking and reading do not necessarily go together." By Chris Morris in Billboard.
[Personally, I never like to rock while I read. Though I don't mind reading while I'm rocking. Weird, huh?]
{Many of this morning's links come courtesy of MusicJournalist.com.}
British magazine headed for U.S.?
"Time Inc. is investigating bringing Uncut, the music-and-movies title published by its British unit, across the Atlantic..." (From Crain's New York Business.)
Punk Planet profiled
A Soldier's Tale, Entertainingly Ugly, by Peter Carlson in the Washington Post.
The Best Eighties Compilation in the World Ever--No, Really
Jukebox Hits of the '80s
[I hope the normally error-prone folks at AMG have the good sense to just allow this collection to live on til infinity--or until the Internet is over (whichever comes first). #12 is my personal favourite, but heads up also to #s 9, 14, 32, 42, and 61.]
(link courtesy of I Love Music.)
7/12/2003
Thus Quoth...
"Journalists from university killed pop music, now we're bringing it back. With 4,000,000 people unemployed, we need to be cheered up."
"We're not trying to sound heavy metal. It's just that metal kids have filtered in, and they seem to get it way more than Village Voice critics, who just kinda stand there."
7/11/2003
Fresh Creem?
Iconic magazines of the '70s try comeback. By L. Wayne Hicks in Denver Business Journal.
Somehow, I missed this well-reported April feature about the upcoming revivals of Creem and National Lampoon. I tend to fall on the side of the naysayers about a new Creem--or rather, on the side of the what's-the-point?-ers--but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to be proven wrong. (It's not like I rush to the 7-11 every month to buy any other music magazine.)
What does pleasantly surprise is the link to creemmedia, which I hadn't looked at in about a year, and which has some things definitely worth checking out, like reprints, cover archives, and the always hilarious Creem profiles. (This one's for Phil.)
It's also great to learn that Robert Matthieu (the man behind the revival) is planning not one, but two book compilations of old Creem material. That's an idea whose time arrived, like, 20 years ago; better late than never, right?
7/10/2003
Thus Quoth...
Patti Smith, 1978:
"Of all the people who have come to interview us, there isn't one I would consider spending the night with."
[Not even Dave Marsh??]
Shut 'Em Down
Music mag Juice goes down the gurgler. By Belinda Tasker in The Courier-Mail
"Music magazine Juice has folded after 10 years, squeezed out of the market after a significant fall in circulation."
PSA: Stuff you need to know about...
Arthur
Read more about Arthur here.
Two links
Courtesy of Barbara Flaska.
1) Appreciating album cover art in an age of downloads. By James Sullivan in SFGate.com.
2) Get Real: Tricia Rose is an author, a hip-hop scholar, a feminist and a prof at UCSC, but more importantly, she cuts to the chase on MTV charades, sexism and the 'unfettered whiteness' of being. By Todd Inoue in Metroactive.com.
[I'm curious to read the profile on Rose; her review of "Ms. Jackson" near the bottom is pretty great.]
7/09/2003
Bangs is back, back again...
Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste.
The official release date for the John Morthland-edited Lester Bangs comp is August 20 (on Random House/Anchor). This is the first (and thus far only) thing I've been able to find online. More to come, surely...(Oh, and Morthland does talk about it some in this interview he did last year in rockcritics.)
Thus Quoth...
Jo Paul Jo, Dread Zeppelin (1990)
"We're gonna do our own rock opera. It's called Albert, and it's about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who wants to play music but can't--so he becomes a rock critic."
Gossip item
"What renowned disseminator of world music's wife was most recently spied at a tropical airport, demanding that the baggage inspectors refrain from wanding, scanning, or x-raying her carry-on bananas?"
[from an anonymous source]
What editors really think of your proposals
"A bigshot editor at a big-deal mag reveals what he thinks when he gets a cold pitch." By Claire Zulkey in mediabistro.
Favourite misreading of a spam-mail today that almost made me instantly hit the 'Reply' button:
"Ashamed of your site?"
Capturing the sound of music
Curtis Stephens's recent attempt to do this is one of the best things on pop music I've read this year. (It's also one of the only "reviews" I can think of that would look nice hung on the wall.)
7/08/2003
New feature in rockcritics.com
All Music Guy, Michael Erlewine, interviewed by Barbara Flaska.
[I might have more to say about this later, but I really love his Englebert Anecdote.]
Nitpicking
re: that Alex Ross New Yorker piece linked to yesterday.
Two parts in this piece really made me pause:
1) "The pioneering rock critics of the sixties, such as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, wanted to mimic the music in their prose, and they had enough style to pull it off."
I'm tired of seeing this point made about Bangs--it's a cliche that's followed him around for years--though it is interesting to see the idea applied to Marcus, who usually takes a lot of flak precisely because his prose doesn't (apparently) "dance" or "rock" or whatever it's supposed to do in order to strike a suitably irreverent or "gonzo" tone. I'm curious, though: is there any field of criticism, other than rock writing, where this is, if not exactly a requirement, then a very good thing? Was Pauline Kael's writing ever favourably or unfavourably compared to Gregg Tolland's camera work or Robert Altman's, er, mise en scene?
2) "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll once described Motown as a 'wholly mechanical style and sound.' The Beatles, by contrast, were hailed as mop-top Beethovens immediately after releasing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.'"
Hold on. The full quote from Joe McEwen and Jim Miller's Motown essay in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (p. 246 in the '79 edition) is: "Motown in its heyday, on the other hand, knew no peers. In the end, it was a wholly mechanical style and sound that roared and purred like a well-tuned Porsche. Contrived, yet explosive, the very epitome of mass-produced pop yet drenched in the black tradition, the Motown hits of the Sixties revolutionized American popular music." The final sentence of that paragraph (and the essay itself) reads: "Aesthetically as well as commercially, Motown's achievement will likely remain unrivaled for years to come." This strikes a somewhat different note about Motown than "wholly mechanical style and sound" implies, though I don't completely blame Ross here (except, perhaps, for laziness). He's actually citing a paper by Portia K. Maultsby, that "dismantled the clichés attached to Motown’s 'hit factory.'" There has certainly been a lot of nonsense written over the years about Motown's lack of "authenticity," but by and large, I don't think rock critics gave it a bum rap, and in fact, many celebrated the very thing Maultsby--and Ross?--too easily claims they disparaged: its assembly-line aesthetic. Which it's stupid to downplay. Just as it's wrong to pretend that Motown doesn't have roots that stretch deeper than that also.
Thus Quoth...
John Lydon, 1980:
"It's easy to sit behind a typewriter and criticize other people's efforts while you're sipping Brandy."
7/07/2003
Link
The Outer Reaches of the Blogosphere: Online Diaries Are Vain, Silly and Essential.
By Martin Turenne in Exclaim!
From the New Yorker
Rock 101: Academia tunes in.
By Alex Ross
Looking forward to reading this 4,640 word article and finding out about the "Timberlake perplex." (Is that like the Truman Doctrine?)
Carole Scott writes:
re: Richard Riegel's Cultivating the Bustle of Anthony DeCurtis (orig. published in rockcritics.com, Oct. 2002)
I like the work of Lester Bangs, but no one is above criticism. That being said:
DeCurtis seems to criticize the writing of Lester Bangs primarily (in the RS article) on the basis of "Bangs didn't like what most of us buy." Who cares whether or not he would have warmed up to rap music? If he doesn't like it, it's his opnion, and that's fine. He also may have portrayed the Beatles as overrated, but not as outright crap, or anything even close to it. If he had thought they stunk, that also would be fine.
Bangs was entertaining, and also informative. What is not entertaining, or informative in any relevant way, is going back and forth on what town DeCurtis grew up in. You lose credibility by printing mistakes, I get that point, but I don't care. It's off the subject, way off.
People still care about the work of Lester Bangs (I suspect) because it is inspiring. Some people just have the knack, I guess. I can't judge DeCurtis apart from his response to Riegel and the article on Bangs. I don't like the criticism in that article because it feels forced, and also seems to use popular sales/opinions as the benchmark for good criticism. If we do use popularity as criteria, it's only fair to use it on DeCurtis, meaning this:
How many people found the original article browsing for "Anthony DeCurtis", and how many for "Lester Bangs"?
[Carole Scott is an Avian Biologist.]
Thus Quoth...
Bob Forster (Thelonius Monster), 1987:
"Robert Hilburn wrote a good review of us in the L.A. Times, and I was really happy. Then I read Chuck Eddy's review of us in Spin--he compared us to the Dead Milkmen in a 'battle of the lame'; they won 'cause they had a hit single, and I was pissed off. But he did say one interesting thing, that I sing like that guy in ALF. I dunno, I'd never watched ALF, so I checked it out and he was right! I sound exactly like the guy in ALF. So in some ways you have to hand it to Chuck Eddy--he can be a very perceptive critic."
New from the Guardian...
"Diamonds carved from rock: Ian MacDonald's erudite pop criticism, collected in The People's Music, always shines a new light on its subject."
Anonymous e-mail...
re: "Books Boring?" (7/4/2003)
"You're dead right about Bookforum. Used to be one of the magazines that I read religiously, that I most actively wanted to write for--as much a reflection of the pop-cult-lit sensibility I call home as the Voice in its prime, or even Artforum was once upon the '90s. Now it's...jeez, who'd want to even pick the thing up? It's really sad, because there isn't anything else like it (that I'm aware of) serving that audience: VLS is quarterly if that, Book mag is pretty terrible, and most of the lit mags that have popped up lately are modeled on Book. I suppose The Believer counts, and I am enjoying no. 4 a lot so far (the piece on the Underground Literary Alliance is really terrific), but it's still tainted with that patented Dave Eggers smarm I'm growing to loathe (and not in a backlashy kind of way, either--I quite enjoyed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and that, oddly, they seem to be (trying to) rail/ing against.
7/05/2003
Thus Quoth...
Matt Groening, 1993:
"I inherited a column called 'Sound Mix' in the Los Angeles Reader and soon found I was digging myself into the horribleness of rock 'n' roll writing. I would write about marginal groups that never sold any records. I would review a band called Grandpa Becomes a Fungus and then go to their little dungeons the following weekend, and it was the same five people as the week before, cowering while the ceiling leaked on them."
James Blount writes:
re: liz fair numbers
Apparently Liz Phair actually sold about 4,000 less copies than Whitechocolatespaceegg (which didn't sell nearly as much as Exile or Whipsmart, although I don't know their first week numbers). Considering 1) the amount of press; 2) the fact that she's apparently got a quasi-hit right now (according to Billboard--scroll down) (though my little sisters assure me it's nowhere near as big a hit as "Supernova" was); and (most important) 3) this is sorta her major label debut--i.e., the first release where she's Capital marketing's responsibility instead of Matador marketing's responsibility (whatcha wanna bet Liz Phair publicity budget this year trumps the entire Matador roster?), I'd say prognosis: not good (barring the extremely unlikely event that she's developed some touring chops and the apparently unlikely event that there's a really irresistable, great, sellable single--better than "Malibu" even--on there). And yeah, the "Malibu" shoutout was foreshadowing: the last record I can remember the Voice music section going all roundtable on was Celebrity Skin.
7/04/2003
Who is the Mystery Critic?
"RCA presented this plaque to a rock critic who helped boost its sales above 1,000,000 copies (platinum). Rare item. A real collectible for Elvis fans."
Letter from Tom Sawyer
Greil vs. Lucinda
"Thanks for the alert on Marcus in City Pages. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to him--the last Salon column was in February, I think. By the way, I was almost going to drop you a line after that column about his comments on Lucinda Williams. [Note: You may need a "day pass" at Salon to read this.] Isn't his hostility to her almost verging on pathological now? I just thought his mimicking of her accent was way out of line--if you tried something like that with a black performer, you'd be accused of racism, no question, but presumably it's OK to make personal attacks on whites. Strange that he never found the accents of so much punk singing equally affected."
[Editor's note: I welcome reader response to anything on this site or anything taking place in the world of criticism, but I'll only post comments with your permission.]
From the Desk of Steven Ward...
Movie writer rediscovers rock critic self
Glenn Kenny may be more well known as a movie writer for Premiere, but his old days of writing rockcrit for Musician and the Village Voice 20 years ago obviously has him yearning for yesteryear. In Disappointed White Men, Kenny (I think) makes a successful case that Steely Dan and Fountains of Wayne are the same band.
"Both bands are largely identified by their songwriting-team frontmen--Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (who on the new album employ such a consistent track-to-track array of sidemen that you may think they're a real group again), FOW's Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger (aided and abetted for a second time here by guitarist Jody Porter and drummer Brian Young, neither of whom should interpret my perspective as a judgment on their "realness," band-membership-wise)--and isn't it interesting that, like Rodgers and Hart and Lennon and McCartney, these teams consist of a Jew and a non-Jew? (Yes, I know--but can you deny Lennon's virtual Jewishness?) Both teams are masters of the sort of subtle songwriting irony many of us used to enjoy before irony got confused with sarcasm and was subsequently pronounced decadent if not dead."
(Sidenote: Kenny is a confirmed art rock/progrock geek. Former Voice Music Editor Joe Levy once quipped that Kenny should be editing a Robert Wyatt newsletter. And Kenny's last Village Voice review before this one? The Slapp Happy reunion album from 1998!)
[Welcome to rockcritics daily, Steven--nice to have you along for the ride!]
Fresh off the wire...
All's Phair in music biz, by David Bauder, Associated Press
"The first time Liz Phair pooled her allowance money to buy a record, years before she became an indie rock queen, she bought 'Saturday Night' by the bubblegum band Bay City Rollers. That's worth remembering now that the 36-year-old singer has set off an extraordinary debate in the rock world simply by making a disc designed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible."
Perhaps it's just me, but this strikes me as a hilariously naive paragraph, from the suggestion that Phair's new CD is "designed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible" (the word "simply" in that sentence also unnerves) to the implicitly stated idea that only now can you hear bubblegum--and by extension, "pop"--in her music.
[Two sideline questions: 1) Did Hole's Celebrity Skin garner even a third of the attention that Liz Phair is? (Wasn't it a really similar sort of move?) 2) Did you know that "L-I-Z P-H-A-I-R" actually works when sung to the tune of "Saturday Night"?]
s woods
Books boring? Er, yes, actually
Banks Knows His Books: Quarterly Gets New Editor and Makeover. "Press Clips" by Cynthia Cotts in the Village Voice.
Subject: 37-year old Eric Banks's makeover of Bookforum, literary companion to Artforum.
Myself, I'm not convinced that Bookforum's new direction is something to celebrate. My own impressions, based on a lunch-time perusal of the latest issue:
Cotts's piece confirms my suspicions: "Under [previous Editor] Hultkrans, Calhoun [an agent] explains, Bookforum had 'more of a pop sensibility and an unnecessary preoccupation with first-time fiction, which was not appropriate for a magazine of this stature.'" Blah.
s woods
Trivial Pursuit makers throw "facts" out the window
Arts & Entertainment Question: "What annoying song title did teen trio Hanson put in people's minds in 1997?"
Answer: "Mmmbop"
[From Trivial Pursuit's "Millennium Edition."]
7/03/2003
Do music critics affect record sales?
# 27 with a bullet.
[A glib conjecture, to be sure, but has Liz ever had a view of the Top 50 before? The Top 100 even?]
Rarely, indeed...
Mike Bell in the Calgary Sun reviewing Electric Six:
"The album features limp disco metal with a poorly realized Urge Overkill complex and a truly terrible sense of ha-ha.
"Or does it?
"Surely there's something more.
"The British seem to love it--and they're rarely wrong about anything."
His Boy Lollipop
"Blow pop: Like an all-day sucker, upstart rock mag Lollipop keeps on going. Crack the hardcore surface, and you’ll find publisher Scott Hefflon at the not-so-soft center." [Profile of Lollipop editor, by Camille Dodero in the Phoenix.com].
Sample: "Every day, he wakes up and starts working. He stays up until 4 or 5 a.m. working. He wakes up the next day and works some more. Typically, he puts in between 60 and 80 hours a week working on the magazine."
[Hmm, sounds familiar. Actually, it doesn't. Not in the slightest.]
The original Mojo-Navigator
1966-67 (issues 1 - 13) and featuring Greg Shaw; now online in PDF format. Particularly great for those of us who've never actually seen an issue of this, which, if I'm not mistaken, is a San Francisco precursor of sorts to Rolling Stone. This comes courtesy of The Rock and Roll Report: Miscellaneous Ramblings From the Rock and Roll Ether, great new blog, straight outta Montreal.
Spogga Spogga Hey!
The Spogga saga: A twisted tale of identity theft. By Bob Gulla in the Providence Phoenix.
[Courtesy of Steven Ward. cf. also Lester Bangs's interview with Jimi Hendrix.]
Everything must go: More music mags get the axe
7/02/2003
(Don't) Ask the Angels
Saw Charlie's Angels 2: Rise of the Machines at the drive-in the other night, and it was nice to have at least two things confirmed:
1) The critics are all right.
2) The lead singer of Electric Six is every bit as terrible as I thought. (Too bad, 'cause he has a guitar riff to go.)
Jobless in Seattle
Bob Mehr, former Music Editor of the Seattle Weekly, sets the record straight about his departure in a letter to The Stranger. (Original item by Nancy Drew here.)
* Postscript 1: In response to this post, an anonymous reader wrote:
"FYI: the closing line from Bob Mehr's letter to the Seattle Weekly ('And anyone who suggests otherwise is, to steal a phrase from Louisa May Alcott, a lying cunt') is stolen from Michael O'Donoghue, who wrote as much in a letter involving one of his departures from SNL way back when. I'm sure Mehr assumed anyone who knew the comment would know where it was from."
* Postscript 2: So is it true that Meltzer's out of a column now?
Bob Mehr, former Music Editor of the Seattle Weekly, sets the record straight about his departure in a letter to The Stranger. (Original item by Nancy Drew here.)
* Postscript 1: In response to this post, an anonymous reader wrote:
"FYI: the closing line from Bob Mehr's letter to the Seattle Weekly ('And anyone who suggests otherwise is, to steal a phrase from Louisa May Alcott, a lying cunt') is stolen from Michael O'Donoghue, who wrote as much in a letter involving one of his departures from SNL way back when. I'm sure Mehr assumed anyone who knew the comment would know where it was from."
* Postscript 2: So is it true that Meltzer's out of a column now?
Say what?
"Creem trundled on through the late seventies and into the eighties, but by publishing articles about bands like the Smiths and Simply Red, it left its revolutionary roots behind. Some might find a link between the MC5 and Madonna, but it's tenuous at best."
[Alan Niester on the revival of Creem; from the Globe and Mail.]
"Steely Dan's career started self-indulgently in the 70s, and they outdid themselves in the pretension department with each subsequent album. 'Do It Again,' 'Reeling In the Years,' and 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' may just be the reason punk was born."
[Brent Raynor reviewing Everything Must Go in Now.]
Liz Phair's W.H.C. (White Hot Critiques)
Some I Love Music threads on the subject:
[So does Liz Phair merit so much attention?? I haven't heard the album yet, so you tell me.]
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What's Going On in Here?
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For ages now, my friend Bryce, who set up the template for rockcritics oh so long ago, has been telling me to revamp the site, make it more user-friendly, easier to update, etc. I don't think a blog is exactly what he had in mind, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
Anyway, think of this as a continuation of what's already going on at rockcritics--only more spontaneous and instantaneous (which means I can now upload stuff from work; which means more, more, more!), and with room for commentary also. That's where you will come in. Hope this works.
Scott Woods
