rockcritics daily (phase 1)

2/27/2004

RELATIVELY NEW BLOG ALERT

Beardblog: From the creators of Beard magazine, a Scottish publication devoted to music, arts and facial hair.

[With a Feb 23 post on 'rockism.']

link posted by RCD 11:52 AM

P&J COLUMN

Pazz attack.

Mark Jenkins's "What Goes On" column from Washington City Paper.

Read it, it's interesting, sort of. But, um, kindly ~~expletive deleted, signed John Ashcroft~~ with this thought, please:

"I'm one of the 224 voters who skipped submitting a Top 10 singles list, and I'd guess that most people who did vote in the category did so from force of habit more than conviction. Singles literally don't exist any more, and the notion of 'emphasis tracks' is too vague to be meaningful."

link posted by RCD 10:17 AM

2/25/2004

FROM THE DESK OF STEVEN WARD

GARRY BUSHELL ONLINE

Garry Bushell is a pulp fiction novelist and TV critic today. He once wrote about punk, hard rock and metal for the English weekly Sounds and Kerrang!

link posted by RCD 11:00 AM

REVIEW OF THE WEEK

Celebrity, Skinned
America's sweetheart Courtney Love: Dead at 40?

Report of Los Angeles County Coroner's Department...

By Matthew Wilder in City Pages.

Strange and hilarious ("The decedent then bewildered Mr. Perez by telling him that she could 'get [him] a meeting with Cameron Crowe if he wanted it' and then cupped his genitals in what he described as a 'needy' fashion. Mr. Perez left and reported the cupping to the desk clerk."). It only loses its shape briefly (lapses into a "record review") in the anecdote about the Strokes, but otherwise holds it til the end. And ends with a bang.

link posted by RCD 8:56 AM

2/24/2004

SPIN ON THE WANE

Memo Pad: Spin Scratched...The Finer Things in Life...

"Is this Spin’s last stand? The music magazine’s transformation into the fanzine of the Seventies rock-redux movement has done nothing to slow its three-year slide in ad pages..."

[Courtesy of MusicJournalist.com.]

link posted by RCD 10:36 PM

HIP-HOP FEMINISM

Black feminist discusses book.

Interview with Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down.

"'As a black woman and a feminist, I listen to the music with a willingness to see past the machismo in order to be clear about what I am really dealing with,' Morgan said. 'When brothers can talk so cavalier about killing each other, and then reveal that that they have no expectation to see their 21st birthday, that is straight-up depression masquerading as machismo.'"

By RaShonda Harris, Daily Mississippian

(More about Morgan's book here.)
[Link courtesy of Barbara Flaska.]

link posted by RCD 1:38 PM

MORE BLOG ALERTS, HOLD THE UMLAUT

Via Jeff Chang's blog, ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for: the Blogship, a virtual community of hip-hop bloggers, with posted updates. Man, I've got some updating to do on the links page.

link posted by RCD 12:49 PM

Nü BLOG ALERTS

jane dark's sugarhigh!

Sample: "...all too often, folks here in the floating world (which is, after all, saturated with the seduction of anonymity) will call down the lightning on alleged villains without quite saying who the villains are--a particularly noxious cowardice when it's obviously about protecting potentially profitable relationships ('All editors are jackasses! Except for everyone who might read this. I didn't mean you. Call me!')"

Two thoughts about this. First, I'm probably guilty myself, though maybe not precisely (or not only) for that reason. There are editors I've wanted to call jackasses but what usually holds me back isn't so much the promise of jobs that aren't going to come my way anyway, but rather, fear of forever lapsing into the sour-grapes voice, which is hard to avoid at the best of times as is. (Maybe this is just another falsehood on my behalf, though; damn right I'm sour, so maybe I should say so...and what, watch the 2 or 3 remaining readers of this blog drop like flies?) Second, I think this is all a bit easier said than done anyway (how many years was it before Meltzer went public with his complaints?), and I look forward to hearing Dark take on all his potential employers sometime soon. Sugar: mmmmm.

[P.S. After posting this, I recall that just last week I deleted a former employer's name--an actual longtime job provider for me (not a publication)--from a blog entry, mainly for fear that I desperately could not afford at this point in my life to jeopardize a glowing reference from these people. I was hardly shedding them in a bad light or anything, it just seemed like naming them was unnecessary--and you know how corporations are about brand name protection and all. Does this mean I'm spineless scum?]

bangSheet, Kurt Hernon's blogging sidekick ("the somewhat miserable meanderings of a rotten modern rockwrite") to his bangSheet 'zine. Features a link to Kurt's piece, 2003 Rock Reading Roundup: The Good, the Bad, and the just So-So. Warning: Hornby love in full effect: "A series of amazingly terrific essays about some songs that really matter to Hornby wind up reminding one just how lousy music journalism is these days--this, unlike mainstream music writing, is passionate, personal stuff."

Speechless.

link posted by RCD 10:53 AM

2/22/2004

PERMALINKS...BACK?

Thanks to Jeff and Jack for permalink advice. I think they work now...

link posted by RCD 3:24 PM

2/20/2004

JENKINS VS CHANG

Old and in the Groove: Mark Jenkins takes on Jeff Chang in his "What Goes On" column in Washington City Paper. (And fires a few darts at Tracks while he's at it.)

Jeff Chang in zentronix responds in kind ("So to clarify one last time, motherfuckers, here's how you read Jeff Motherfucking Chang...")(!).

link posted by RCD 9:04 PM

WHERE MY PERMALINKS AT?

A couple of people, wanting to link to the gallery below, have rightly pointed out that I'm lacking in permalinks. I stupidly took the code for this out when I started this blog because I didn't understand what they were supposed to do and I didn't like how they looked. I'll try and get them back. Does anyone, preferably with experience in Blogger, know the code I need to insert them in here? And if I insert the code now will it automatically work for all previous posts? (I'll figure this out eventually on my own, I suppose, but quick and easy "blogging for dummies" sort of advice would be warmly appreciated.)

link posted by RCD 8:57 PM

A GALLERY OF 'ROCKISM'

ERRONEOUS, BIZARRE, AND OCCASIONALLY ILLUMINATING
USES OF TODAY'S NUMBER-ONE-WITH-A-BULLET
BUZZWORD

I was thinking at one point of starting a regular feature here called "Word Nerd." I doubt I'll ever bother, but this is more or less what I had in mind. Pick a word (or a concept) in heavy circulation in rock criticism right now, and basically try to arrive at an understanding (or a heightened sense of misunderstanding as the case may be) by cataloging its usage, via--what else--Google. The 25-year old UK-bred epithet, "Rockism"/"rockist" seemed like a good place to start, for it is, apparently, all the rage again. Bloggers and chat groups have been going at it for some time now, and I've even spotted it recently in two local dailies, indicating perhaps that "rockist" is now Officially a Word. (Granted, in both instances it was surrounded by double-quotation marks, so there are still bridges to cross.) For rockist-related discussions, there's a whole category of them at I Love Music.

Disclaimers

Out of nearly 3,000 Google returns, I probably went through something like 80 or 90. This is a long post, but it's by no means definitive. Terribly "rockist" way to spend an evening, nonetheless.

Except for a few specific arguments, these aren't posted in any order. (Upcoming "Word Nerd" feature: "Linearity." How passe!)

Bear in mind that some of these quotes are older, and I can only imagine how I might feel if someone quoted something I said last week. I quote not to mock (well, okay, on occasion...), but to present a survey. Read it in that spirit. And then feel free to mock.

One comment: "Rockism" is often applied where "rock" will suffice. Downsizing word editors take note.

A bottle of Tylenol can't hurt.

> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

"Now, anyone who applies such mathematical precision to that most organic of acts is quite clearly gonna have the necessary hoo-hah to create truly tricksy and complicated and ass-wiggling beats, wouldn't you say? And that is what these Rockist, Fonda 500 types do not understand. They cannot comprehend the complex magic that can be woven from samples and rhythms and voice. They cannot cope with anything more intricate than a thudding 4/4 beat overlaid with that most cumbersome and dreary of instruments, the guitar."
--Miss Amp/Drowned in Sound/Review of Gold Chains

"Our cultural understanding of popular music is funneled through a mostly rockist intelligentsia. This is a crew always more interested in words and sociology than they are in music. They will always have more room in their hearts and their histories for a Joe Strummer than a Maurice Gibb. Jeff Miers, writing in the Buffalo News, summed up the differences (though he wasn't thinking of Gibb, still alive when he wrote) thus: 'Good pop is about craft, about the ability to create a hook, to reach the masses by creating musical dialogue within the vernacular. Rock 'n' roll needs to be good pop, but it is also something more. Pop is a product; rock 'n' roll, when it's done right, sprays blood on the tracks, offers a snapshot of deeply felt beliefs.'"
--Brian Doherty/"Death Before Disco"

"On his new creation, Chris again breaks away from the tight rockism of his early recordings, presenting captivating melodies, moving emotional lyrics and timeless examples of classic songwriting at it's best."
--Writer unknown/Forced Exposure/Chris Cacavas review

1) "Women, like blacks, have traditionally occupied delineated roles in the music. One of these is [the] female song interpreter, like Linda Ronstadt or, better, Linda Thompson. There is no real male parallel for this; since the rockist imperative of the singer-songwriter was created, with the exception of oddities like Luther Vandross and this or that songwriting star who had a parallel career as a song interpreter (Rod Stewart, Bryan Ferry), there have been no major male rock figures whom we revere simply for their voices. Sometimes, male song interpreters become subsumed in bands with another member who writes the songs. But that's just an example of how men can be forced to deal with the constraints of rockism as well."

2) "[Lauryn Hill] actually makes interesting and sophisticated points on her records. Her complex take on stardom and betrayal and jealously in 'Lost Ones,' for example, avoids sounding unkind or arrogant through a classic rockist move--delaying the (killer) chorus for a good two minutes. When it finally hits, and the built-up melodic tension of the song is released, she at once silences and proves her point."
--Bill Wyman/Slate/"Between Rockism and a Hard Place"

3) "Bill, you identify your myopia correctly as rockism--male rockism, to be precise. That's why I think we should remove the term and rubric of rock from the debate--it really doesn't fit Lauryn and Lucinda anyway. Let's be postrock, and talk about music--not 'women's music,' but the ways in which a growing number of diverse artists are using music to express themselves, maybe in ways women have never been able to express themselves before."
--Evelyn McDonnell/Slate/"Mick is the Female Mick" (response to Wyman above)

"...the big problem is clearly those who still cling to the guitar as to a rotting totem. It is one of a variety of tools with which you make music. It is very useful. It does not have a monopoly on the truth. The Cult of Unplugged is the logical conclusion of rockism, and of its fear of music's true potential. Leave them their acoustics and their sweat, and kiss the sky."
--Alex Sarll/Varsity Online/Catatonia review

"This vision is an end result (or way out) of the 'rockism' debate that raged through the U.K. music press in the early '80s. Near as a body could tell from here, rockism wasn't just liking Yes and the Allman Brothers--it was liking London Calling. It was taking the music seriously, investing any belief at all not just in its self-sufficiency, which is always worth challenging, but in its capacity to change lives or express truth. Rarely was it noted how blatantly the terms of this debate favored the growing nationalism/anti-Americanism of U.K. taste. Irony, distance, and the pose have been the secret of British rock since the Beatles and the Stones, partly because that's the European way and partly because rock wasn't originally British music--having absorbed its usages secondhand, Brits who made too much of their authenticity generally looked like fools. This polarity was reversed briefly around 1976--American punk was an unabashed art pose, while the British variant carried the banner of class struggle. But when the Sex Pistols failed to usher in the millennium, lifelong skeptics who'd let their guard down for a historical moment vowed that they wouldn't get fooled again. Hence, Dave Rimmer's unauthorized Culture Club bio, Like Punk Never Happened, a key '80s rockbook that's almost unknown here. Hence, 'rockism'--and rock versus pop."
--Robert Christgau/"Decade: Rockism Faces the World"

"Earlier generations of black youth (beboppers or Motowners) never fell for this okey-doke. Common’s 'I Used to Love H.E.R.' (always wack opportunism to me) is discussed by Sidney: 'That song reminds me of us. Hiphop was so real. Remember the first time you heard ‘The Bridge is Over,’ ‘Bonita Applebaum,’ ‘Paul Revere'!' No respectable hiphop editor would uphold such a troika. Brown Sugar reflects the hateful rock-crit tendency toward elitism--speciously validating hiphopism like rockism. Affection for pop can be ideologically great--open and inclusive--while hiphopism is ideologically insular, fascistic. Besides, it’s not 'hiphop' black people love, it's rhythm, melody and honesty--the same thing all people like about pop music expressions whether country, punk or metal."
--Armond White/New York Press/Review of movie Brown Sugar

1) "Anti-rockism was very much in the air, north of the border: The Associates's Billy Mackenzie declared 'I've always hated the rock thing' and pledged his allegiance to disco and film soundtracks. Fire Engines played 15 minute sets and released a mini-album of 'background music for action people' called Lubricate Your Living Room. Orange Juice fused Velvet Underground with Chic and projected an image of fey naivete ('worldliness keep away from me', sang Edwyn Collins)."

2) "The record's packaging--a metal canister containing three 12 inch singles--was PiL's one major feat of anti-rockism, successfully deconstructing 'the album' and encouraging the listener to listen to tracks in any order; the 12 inch's improved sound quality plunged listeners into the spacious, bass-intensified aesthetics of dub and disco."
--Simon Reynolds/Independents Day: post-punk 1979-81

"There follows a succession of little masterpieces, every one of which chills the bone. Phil Young's 'Science and Industry,' 'The Artist Speaks' and 'The Splendour That Was Rome,' such enticing promises for what lay ahead. Maddalena Fagandini's '1960 Interval Signal,' the piece most likely to have inspired the letter quoted above, an extraordinarily addictive rhythmic incantation from an era of excitement and technological mystique surrounding broadcasting (this stuff sounded every bit as 'alien' and 'other' in Macmillan's Britain as the best rock'n'roll, and the ignorance of this fact is one of the many malign influences of Rockism)."
--Robin Carmody/Structures and New Worlds: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

"Thank goodness for the In Betweeners. For all us old foges still wary of this newfangled 'electronic music,' it's nice to have a few bands here and there to hold our hand while we wade into the shallow end with our water wings on. To lead those of us with terminal rockism towards the flickering LCD monitor glow, it's necessary to have a few artists that will meet us halfway, mixing in safe, comfortable, 'actual' instruments to make us feel at home before hitting us with the subliminal digital trickery."
--Rob Mitchum/Pitchfork/Midwest Product review

"The now-complete toppling of the empire of beat-matching DJs by scenester rockist DJs. Very democratic, that. Resist the tyranny of beats-per-minute! The next revolution: the rock 'n' roll liberation of the Gayborhood."
--Joey Sweeney/Philadelphia Weekly/"25 More Good (or at least reassuring) Things About...Philly Art and Music..."

"Most white critics over 25 grew up immersed in rock, so we demand rock's values be upheld even in hip-hop--not only musically, but its myth of the rebel poet who creates all his own music, plays it on his own axe--and never makes decisions for commercial reasons... Yet rock never really worked like that. No form of pop music has. Most of it was always made with behind-the-scenes studio help--the Beatles had George Martin, Nirvana had Butch Vig--and they were trying to make hits. Yet it generated music that's venerated now. And it's culturally specific--it's one thing to play the underdog by spurning a suburban background and another to be a black kid coming out of that community, for instance. So 'rockism' is mild compared with some other names you could give it."
-- Carl Wilson/Globe & Mail/Prince Paul preview.

"What these directions and ideas suggest is that [Paddy] Casey, as on his first album, won't be readily pinned down into David Gray territory. But the material ricochets off too many walls. And 'All In a Day' goes the whole Bowie-guitar rock and lifts a line from 'Heroes.' ... Whether his voice is up to such rockism is another matter. Frankly, it's not."
--Graham Reid/New Zealand Herald/Review of Paddy Casey

"Four lads with instruments, will travel straight out of the 916 area code, and into your hydroponic stereo with their first release of new noise that lies somewhere between melodic rockism, the second episode of Twin Peaks, and Tommy Lee’s Methods of Mayhem. Are you ready to rock? This is a wonderfully diverse release from one of the most talented acts out of Sacto since Tesla got big off a fucking cover song."
--Brad Oates/the Heckler/Review of Eightfourseven

"Maybe it’s the intrepid eclecticism. Maybe it’s because Essex Green really sound like a band onstage. On that midsummer evening at the Seaport they tackled the new songs with real aplomb, mixing tweeness and rockism so successfully that I never missed the orchestrations. And that’s something."
--Dann Baker/The Brooklyn Rail/Essex Green review

"But even if the film [24 Hour Party People] presented a rockist view of the music, two of the evening's DJs didn't--both Cox and Moby reached way into their acid-house back catalog, digging out gems like Jay Dee's 'Plastic Dreams' (1993), Nitzer Ebb's 'Let Your Body Learn' (1987), and Moby's own anthems 'Go' (1991) and 'Feeling So Real' (1994)."
--Tricia Romano/Village Voice/"Bye Bye Brownies"

"Anyone familiar with riot grrrl-ism will immediately notice striking similarities to it in Kleenex/Liliput's music. The child-like charm and lack of pretention, the loose, free-spirited presentation, the nonsense-lyrics and exuberant chants, the very embodiment of the term 'rock ditty'--it's all here in a slim, proto-riot grrl package. What's different is the Germanic heft Liliput adds to the equation. There's a nagging sense of Kraut-Rockism that I somehow can't shake. I'm also fond of the unorthodox instrumentation in Liliput's music. A violin here and a saxophone there not only lend an air of experimentalism and novelty, they help to dispel the otherwise unavoidable monotony of four dozen sub-three-minute rock hit-and-runs."
--Noah Wane/Splendid/Kleenex/Liliput review

"Many of the best exponents of American roots music have been punks at heart without attaching themselves to anything self-consciously hyphenated. And when hybrids did accentuate the punk imagery, whether it was rockabilly and swamp rock reconfiguring the punk sneer as greaseball country-rockism or the cartoonishness of 'cowpunk,' the results have often veered toward the embarrassing, but it was the obviousness of the punk and country visual and musical signifiers that penetrated journalists' short attention span."
--Chris Wodskou/Exclaim!/The End of No Depression

"Snotty guy backed with girl harmonies a la B-52's, drummer who (in coolest move of year thus far) drops stick and plays remainder of song with foot pedal beater and a surprising knack for gorgeous slow numbers ('Nerdy Girl' was it?) made this a kick-ass case study in primal decontructionist rockism. "
--Greg Heller/BAM Magazine/Dealership review

"Primarily this is due to the fact that Indicator Dogs have their own schtick, not wearing their influences prominently. It's kind of hard to put a finger on, but there's certainly elements of Helmet's economic riffery, Shihad's Churn-era aggression and Pantera's balls-out rockism."
--Gavin Bertram/Real Groove/Review of Indicator Dogs

"Licht gets a chance to stretch out a bit more on Witchcraft; while his expansive sorties dexterously fuse free-improv atonality and hammer-down rockism, the songs' connective tissue is a bit too frail to sustain the recurrent tension."
--David Sprague/Trouser Press/Love Child review

"Few critics complain about the Jackson 5's 'I Want You Back,' but for every Motown encomium, there are a hundred complaints about the virus of 'synthetic teen pop' and 'bubblegum.' Pop critics call it 'rockism,' and the (very) short version of the attack goes like this: Pop music isn't made by people, but by bands of hired guns on assembly lines, working to rationalized standards established by technocratic committees maximizing shareholder investment. The emphasis of pop songs is on transitory physical pleasures, instead of the eternal truths that rock protects. Pop is also consumed by lots of women and kids, and what do they know? "
--Sasha Frere-Jones/Slate/Justin Timberlake essay

"The argument is at times straw man (there might be less pop-culture phobic music critics than the New Yorker's), and I think that rockism is also based in things other than fear/hatred of teenage girls. But the critique is right: rock fans often forget that production and the mass produced product of the record/CD does a lot to sublimate the spontaneity of live performance into an emotional, cathecting whole (am I getting my Freud all mixed up here?). And the line separating that kind of creative whole from producer-and studio-crafted pop music is arbitrary."
--Left Center Leftblog/On Sasha Frere-Jones's Timberlake piece

"...it's kind of fun to see Sasha acting as a pop missionary among the rockist heathens. I do kind of agree, though, with the poster on ILM who said that Sasha was using rockist criteria against rockism--surely, although it's interesting to know that Justin writes his own melodies, it doesn't and can't affect the value of the music from a pop perspective, otherwise you are giving rockists permission to despise Britney and tATu and all the other good pop performers who don't write their own material."
--I Feel Love blog entry

"Something about this local mod-rock trio sticks with us where most of the others blur together. Could be the way the singer's woozy, smeary emotional pleas meet up with the band's adept free-range pop-rockism in a way that brings to mind prime Afghan Whigs or maybe Tommy Keene on a bender."
--Baltimore City Paper/Blurb for Vulgaria

"This one's as American as apple pie (with shards of glass baked in). A grueling mash-up of jazz, country, gospel and marches, sullied at times by annoying rockism. Here's a game: have a shot of whiskey every time you hear the words 'drunk,' 'remorse,' 'Jesus' or 'Satan.''
--Rupert Bottenberg/Montreal Mirror/Review of Firewater

"That said, the album has LJ's usual flaws--silly lyrics, flat rockism, a refusal to challenge themselves vocally (although Jill Cunniff's apparently taking opera lessons) and some clumsy grooves, inexcusable on Debby Harry's cameo track ('Fantastic Fabulous'). Still, it has its moments, like the Cream-thiefin' cosmophonica of 'Space Diva,' and there's simply no getting past LJ's maximum womanicity. Goddamn."
--Rupert Bottenberg/Montreal Mirror/Luscious Jackson review

"Drive-By Truckers are ex-punk, hard-rock pussy-boys who knock down doors, throw open the windows and let the funk out. While they're not above lost cause myth-mongering and rockism, their chords cut right through their own hot air. There's always a musical bridge out of their bombast. Their own entrance on Opera defines a certain kind of quintessentially American daring. Talk about young lions. These guitar cats let their Gibsons ROAR."
--Benj DeMott/First of the Month/Drive-By Truckers review

"Roger Winslet is the most unlikely-looking front man since Ian Dury. With his unfashionable haircut and glasses, the former actor looks like a market trader on karaoke night. But for Bidgie Reef and the Gas, it's all part of their bid for rock immortality. Winslet's asides are brief--'This is about the movie business,' or 'You'll see what a sad old bastard I am'--and the lyrics sound similarly bitter, but bloody hell, the band really rocks. It's the the Blockheads formula (but more rockist): ugly geezer plus red-hot band."
--John L Walters/the Guardian/Review of Bidgie Reef and the Gas/Barcode Trio

1) "He [Freddie Mercury] turns a glittering eye to me and says, 'Ah, I’m not supposed to talk to you!' and in this we strike up a conversation, Freddie seems to be an affable man. Short cropped hair and a tidy moustache suit him more than the rockist mops he once sported, and with his slightly curious diction--almost clipped Latin--he could have been a Brazilian diplomat."

2) "['Another One Bites the Dust'] is an amazing piece of rockist funk, their biggest worldwide seller, and the one that got them black radio play..."
--David Quantick/NME/Interview with Queen, 1986

"In 1994, The Cult's eponymous last album showed that Billy Duffy and Ian Astbury were beginning to distance themselves from the stadium-friendly rockism into which they'd lapsed by the early '90s. Six years later, after a stint with the Holy Barbarians, Astbury has released his first solo effort, Spirit\Light\Speed, which attests to an even more marked musical evolution."
--Wilson Neate/Westnet.com/Review of Ian Astbury

"Also must echo Nick's remarks on playing live. Please, no. There's nothing more delibidinizing and destructive to Pop than 'performing live': the revenge of Rockism? Course TOTP [Top of the Pops] is forced down this route by the increasing popularity of 24 hr music channels in the search for a Unique Selling Point. Funnily enough, I remember Pete Waterman saying he would never let one of his acts play live on TV - because of mixing. He spends days getting it right on the record--TV sound engineers throw a mix together in half an hour that any way will sound shit when broadcast."
--mark k-punk/"Clash to Clash"

"[Godspeed Black Emperor] are keen to bump up against the contradictions of the music biz in an uncompromising fashion, taking a stand in liner notes, letters to the editor, or etching their slogans onto the celluloid screened at their live shows. This in one sense trades in a rockist tradition of connecting the everyday struggle with creative struggle. It's also part of that elusive discourse of the rock star/band genius, he/she/they who transcend their circumstance because there is 'something' inside them, a deep-rooted desire, that compels them to."
--Geoff Stahl/PopMatters/Godspeed You Black Emperor review

"For good reason, the rockist vision is often attacked as Euro, male chauvinist, and so forth--as an aestheticization of the will to dominance. Yet oddly enough, while rockism continues to define metal and fuels many of the new male country singers, two of its bulwarks these days are rap (pardon me, hip hop) and the former Amerindie subculture still sometimes labeled alternative, both of which reject or redefine virtuosity while championing their own modes of rugged mastery. As so often happens in countercultures, it's like hippie all over again: in order to combat the ruling class, the media, the powers that be, the establishment, the man, both rappers and alternative rockers lay claim to an individualistic ethos they believe has been homogenized out of existence. Big on authenticity and creative control, they carry the rockist flag. But not without misgivings. Reluctant to cross over yet desperate to get paid, reliving African trickster and griot traditions as they act out against absent fathers, forced by the forces of censure and censorship to front about how literal they are, rappers suffer ugly doubts about their own autonomy. And the indie guys, who reject rockist ideology while embodying its aesthetic, don't have it so simple either. They'd be confused about gender privilege even if their girlfriends didn't hock them about it."
--Robert Christgau/Playing To Win: Pazz & Jop's Fifth (or Sixth) Year of the Woman

"The Roots do not represent a 'saved' hip hop. They represent hip hop hopelessly compromised by rockist values. Perhaps the Roots are the best possible outcome of this scenario--they don’t make horrible music, although much of it is bland and boring. It’s safe: despite a reputation for experimentation, The Roots never push hip hop to its limits. They merely show how hip hop can easily conform to Rolling Stone’s version of valid music."
--Gavin Mueller/Stylus/Really Real: Authenticity and Hip Hop

"Of course, 'young people'--however one defines the term--have also actively resisted the wholesale appropriation of their subcultures. Sometimes this has involved distancing themselves from 'adulterated' discourses such as, precisely, rock. (Hence the pejorative epithet 'rockist.') In other cases, it has involved a complex process of re-appropriation of the popular-cultural terrain. (Witness the revival of swing and lounge or 'martini' music.)"
--Robert Miklitsch/Rock 'N' Theory: Autobiography, Cultural Studies, and the 'Death of Rock'

"The rockists inadvertently got it right when they called teen pop 'disposable,' but it doesn't ring true as a damnation of the music so much as it does as a damnation of the machine, what HR departments call 'churn.' The music's not the problem, the marketing is, and once the oversaturation wears thin and the PR folks have run out of ideas they simply give up on the act. Pop stars get downsized, too, just like all your friends."
--Nate Patrin/Hipster Detritus/"2003: It Kinda Stunk"

"Presently competing for the same listening audience as stadium electronica like the Prodigy, Bush charms rockist holdovers with these strained attempts at significance. News flash: High-school boys want to be told what to do ('Breathe in/breathe out'), and lines like 'I walk--['woke'?] ['work'?]--away from my machine' can prompt weeks of mental gear-grind. Sure, drum 'n' bass can get relentlessly dark, but nothing titillates your inner-kiddie quicker than a lyric like 'there's no sex in your violence.'"
--Laura Sinagra/City Pages/Bush: Deconstructed review

"[Stephen] Davis feels it was absolutely vital to tell the tale of the boys from Boston--Steve Tyler, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton--who were legendary boozers and drug abusers for much of their career until getting clean and sober in the late 1980s. 'I think Rockism is like Romanticism,' Davis says. 'It's an artistic movement that needs to be chronicled. After I did the Zeppelin book, I thought there needed to be a history of the hard rock movement in America.'"
--Kerry Diotte/Walk this Way

"(In R&B and rap, the terms of art go like this: The 'song' refers to everything sung, and the 'track' refers to the music and beats. On Survivor, the producers provided the latter by mail to Beyoncé, who wrote and recorded all of the former with the ladies, rarely the twain meeting. This may reinforce rockists' prejudice that Destiny’s Child will not make their Music >From Big Pink, but I respectfully submit that the shortcomings of postal songwriting are no more severe than the shortcomings of introspective studio hibernation. And nobody ever backed it up to 'The Weight.')"
--Sasha Frere-Jones/L.A. Weekly/Destiny's Child review

"Here is the larger problem: According to Frere-Jones' logic, it follows that in not liking Destiny's Child I must be a racist, a sexist and--heavens to Bootsy!--a 'rockist.' So it’s really come to this. By not concurring with his high regard for some trio of waxed, bikinied En Vogue clones, by not adoring Destiny's Child as he does, I have instantly become a racist-sexist-fascist-imperialist. (If I were to tell him that that sort of irresponsible race-and sex-identity politicking sounds like the more strident critics who write for the grandpa of all free big-city weeklies, does that make me a Village Voice–ist too?)"
--Tim Merrill's letter to the LA Weekly

"'Theme From Sparta FC' I wasn't sure about at first but it gets under your skin pretty quick. Despite being about the utter waste of life that is football, it's pretty funny--and weren't the Spartans all queer? 'Come on have a bet, we live on blood--we are Sparta FC'--it's like punk without the earnest beery rockism."
--Steve Thrower/The Real New Fall Album, Formerly Country on the Click

"The dilemma at hand is Rolling Stone's identity crisis as of 2002. They're clearly latching on to the rock-as-fashion-statement idea that the pop world has embraced for the past two or three years, and they're going us one worse--they're subscribing to the tiresomely juvenile belief in (not merely rock but) RAWK, the notion that everything RAWKS and is BADASS and that if we wanna legitimize youth-oriented pop music and hip-hop we've gotta see it through the dusty old rock lens. This is rockism at its purest. And for a specifically rock-through-rock-lens magazine (i.e. what RS used to be), that's fine. But if RS is going to expand its definition of 'rock' to make room for contemporary chartpop, it shouldn't intentionally confuse the sort of thing Britney does with the sort of thing Joan Jett does. It only makes both parties look silly."
--Jody Beth Rosen/freezing to death in the nuclear bunker

"So give Sgt. Pepper bonus points for history, for the gestalt, but if you do, take some of those points away for the lesser songs that make up the gestalt...But what about the production? I'll revert to rockism here and just note briefly that I'm not convinced 'great production' was a positive contribution to rock and roll history. 'Talk Talk' by the Music Machine sounds pretty crappy, but I'd rather listen to it a hundred times in a row than listen to 'Fixing a Hole' twice. New Day Rising sounds like garbage compared to Sgt. Pepper, but it's a far greater album..."
--Steve Rubio's Online Life

"Medeski Martin and Wood can jazz with the best of them. They can rock with the best of them. They can funk, groove, vamp, comp, squeeze the little trigger on the toy raygun, do whatever it takes--with the best of them. Pick a track at random, and you're sure to find a rockism that fails to offend the jazz purist, and a subtle melodic nuance that can shake the paint off the walls, no Marshall required. And in an era of machine-generated dance music, they've produced a groove more powerful than any amount of jiggled quantizing and late nights in front of a computer monitor could ever produce."
--Lips Fresno/Ink 19/Medeski Martin and Wood review

"Hip-hop journalism is nowhere near as bad as the state of music journalism, which apparently is still stuck in the same old racist, rockist canon-making. Geezus, it feels like the late 80s and we're fighting to have women and people of color included in the curriculum all over again."
--Jeff Chang/zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric

"The rock disc of the year. Craig Finn is one of local punk's last damaged poets, and this crew of artsy intellectuals threw down an increasingly rare case for riveting rockism on their sophomore effort. Best served along with either the Rank Strangers' Target (Veto) or Calvin Krime's Dress for the Future (Amphetamine Reptile)."
--Simon Peter Groebner/City Pages/Review of Lifter Puller

"Look, you can learn from history: Every single time someone plays the 'real musician' card, they're wrong. They're ideologically hobbled and behind the times. They're attacking remarkable music, and defending shit because it replicates the rockist aesthetics that trace back to Clapton Is God etc. Indeed, I think analysis reveals that Boomers are the nightmare from which we cannot awaken, but that's another column."
--Jane Dark/Village Voice/"Keeping Up With the Jones"

"Dark seems to argue that we need to choose teenpop over Alicia Keys (Keys, you see, is behind-the-times enough to actually play the piano). Why does Dark place 'Britney in the same aesthetic bin as the Clash' (I assume that Dark means the 'good' bin)? Because, 'in the aesthetic marketplace' she believes we cannot free ourselves from the 'dialectic' between 'rockist aesthetics' and fresh contemporary music. Dogmatists such as Dark work to shrivel the world into binary arrangements--good and evil, with us or against us, musicianship versus non-musicianship--even if such haphazard categorizing forces us to accept, say, a Britney Spears. Isn't it possible to choose not to take sides? To enjoy Jay-Z and Hendrix, Nirvana and Mingus, the Coup and Stravinsky? I do, and that's answer enough."
--Darin Strauss letter to the Village Voice

"With its rapturous orchestration and wall-of-sound wink to girl groups, No Exit's revealingly named single 'Maria' knocked the Offspring's 'Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)'--a rockist slam defending turf against guitar-free hip-hop hordes and wiggers who dare cross over--from the No. 1 spot on the U.K. charts."
--Donna Gaines/Village Voice/Blondie review

"Every song is thick with textures and little sonic motifs. 'Mofo,' for instance, is credited to four separate mixers, including Howie B. (the avant beatmeister signed to U.K.'s Mo' Wax label), Alan Moulder (partly responsible for the guitar vortexes of My Bloody Valentine), and Steve Osborne (half of post-house DJ Paul Oakenfeld's Perfecto team), who dress it in layers of hard techno and industrial noise so that even Larry Mullen's live drum performance sounds almost machine-like. Of course, that the band has been bragging to the press about how the drum track is 'real' and not programmed only shows how rockist they still are."
--Will Hermes/City Pages/The Importance of Being Earnest (U2)

"...as history shows time and again, an ideology's point of greatest strength typically precedes the fall. The cycles shift, and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody started to renew the anti-pop critique; if a new and improved rockism didn't rear up from some quarter."
--Simon Reynolds/ blissblog

"The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not substituted. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. Rockism and Whiteboyism were the determination of a people who had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived of that for other people's convenience."
--John Stuart Mill/The Principles of Political Economy

link posted by RCD 12:09 PM

HOT TICKET

2004 EMP Pop Conference, April 15 - 18, 2004. ("This Magic Moment: Capturing the Spirit and Impact of Music.")

2004 Pop Conference Panels.

2004 Bios and Abstracts.

link posted by RCD 9:58 AM

FANZINE GUY

Interview With Jersey Beat Founder/Publisher Jim Testa.

By Anne Freeman in MusicDish Industry e-Journal.

link posted by RCD 9:51 AM

2/19/2004

WANTED IN TWELVE STATES

[From here via here.]

link posted by RCD 11:14 PM

2/18/2004

ALTERNATIVE PRESS HAS A CEO?!

Almost Famous:
How Mike Shea built Alternative Press from a Cleveland fanzine into a national punk-rock powerhouse.

BY Kevin Hoffman in CleveScene.com.

[Just in, thanks to weisblogg (ret.), haven't read it. It's long.]

link posted by RCD 9:11 PM

NOT WHAT'S MEANT BY QUOTING 'LIBERALLY'

EXHIBIT A: This review of Martin Gordon's Baboon in the Basement by Matt Cibula in PopMatters.
>>>Sample: "Martin Gordon, who has been in and around the music business for more than 30 years (Sparks, John's Children, Jet, Radio Stars, Mira, session work with everyone from Blur to Boy George to Asha Bhosle to Kylie Minogue), has finally made his first solo album, and it's great and fun and stooooopid and intelligent and everything that makes music good."

EXHIBIT B: This review of Baboon in the Basement, uncredited, in Amazon.com.
>>>Sample: "Martin Gordon, who has been in and around the music business for more than 30 years (Sparks, John's Children, Jet, Radio Stars, Mira, session work with everyone from Blur to Boy George to Asha Bhosle to Kylie Minogue), has finally made his first solo album, and it's great and fun and stooooopid and intelligent and everything that makes music good."

EXHIBIT C: This review of Baboon in the Basement, again uncredited, in CD Universe.
>>>Sample: "Martin Gordon, who has been in and around the music business for more than 30 years (Sparks, John's Children, Jet, Radio Stars, Mira, session work with everyone from Blur to Boy George to Asha Bhosle to Kylie Minogue), has finally made his first solo album, and it's great and fun and stooooopid and intelligent and everything that makes music good."

The full back-story for this is at Flaskaland.

Oddly enough, I resisted earlier this week, linking to this story ("Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers") about various well-known authors being caught in the act of "anonymously" posting glowing reviews of their own books on Amazon. An interesting story, harmless enough (I mean, it's Amazon, right?), no consequences on anyone else or their work. Matt's well-traveled review is a somewhat different story.

"Every new technology necessitates a new war."

link posted by RCD 8:46 PM

2/17/2004

E-MAIL SUBJECT LINE OF THE DAY

"hi im a 33 year old avid music fan with a passion for opinions about rock pop around today. please could u point me in the write direction as to where i would start in music reviews etc . thnk u ; [name]; uk"

Nothing in the actual body of the e-mail. I'm usually good about responding to legitimate inquiries from strangers but sometimes I don't even know where to begin.

My favourite type of weird e-mails--if indeed "favourite" is the right word--are those prefaced with, "I really enjoy your site and would love to contribute something to it." Nice--thanks. And then, the kicker: "Would you be interested in a live review of [insert unknown band name], a local alternative group who are starting to receive a lot of attention in the [insert city I've never heard of] area." Or, "I have an interview from 1997 that I did with the bass player from the Michael Schenker Group. I would love it if you would consider publishing this. Love your site, by the way!" I'm citing these from memory; I really need to collate and put them into a book or something.

This all reminds me of working at the customer service desk at [insert name of large multi-chain record store] a few years ago, where someone started what was dubbed "the funny file"--a folder filled with really inane or odd or completely off-the-mark resumes. Yeah, I know, just another example of smug record store employees with superiority complexes, but really, it was harmless, comic relief as far as these things go, and a good deal of the ones we derided (in retrospect this actually seems kind of sad) were either in the "totally overqualified" or "totally full of shit" category: folks with PHDs in Marketing, Chemical Engineering undergrads, a salesman with 25+ years of on-the-road sales experience including a long list of honours and certificates, and one guy who claimed to be the "president" of a "major label" in a "foreign country" (for real). And then there were the "multi-media" gimmick CVs, like the blank CDR with the person's information hand-printed with a thin marker around the blank disc so you had to turn the thing in front of you in order to read about his experience behind the counter at Druxy's (photocopied colour jewel case photo included). One wiseguy, who actually listed "comedian" as one of his gigs, did a paste-up job on fancy paper featuring doctored photos of him standing around with famous musicians. But most heartbreaking of all was the, um, crazy old street dweller who wandered into the store every single day so his appearance was more or less obligatory and unobtrusive (though not in the eyes of security, who duly followed him around) until one morning he came up to the desk and loudly asked for a pen and a piece of scrap paper. I obliged him, and he quickly and illegibly scribbled out his name and phone number. Handing it back to me he commented, "If you're ever looking for help, I'm in the area."

[I write all this in between my own useless cracks at a cover letter this morning. Normal business will later resume.]

link posted by RCD 9:39 AM

2/15/2004

RE-DIRECT YOURSELF

Addendum to Feb 10 posting. Kandia Crazy Horse's Hot Voodoo blog is now here.

link posted by RCD 9:37 AM

2/13/2004

LARRY NAGER VS THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER

The Day the Music Critic Died.

Firing at The Enquirer prompts lawsuit.

By Lew Moores in Cincinnati CityBeat.

[No time to read or comment now, but this looks good. Thanks to Ron Brown for the link.]

link posted by RCD 3:40 PM

ULTIMATE BLOG SEARCH ENGINE

Technorati: Web Services for Bloggers (mentioned by "MW" in one of the comments boxes) is fantastic.

Definition: "Technorati is a conversation engine. It tells you what's being said, right now, about every blog or site that has something to say--and says it so well that others point to them. Search for the 'cosmos' of any page, and Technorati lists every other page that has linked to it in the past 24 hours, ranked by freshness or authority. It shows the contextual text surrounding the inbound link, its age, and other helpful facts. There isn't another search engine like it." (In other words, type a keyword in their search engine, and a long list of blog links pop up.)

Stats

1,680,840 weblogs watched.

86,765,778 active links.

230,084,746 links tracked.

Note: This appears to be a Beta version.

link posted by RCD 10:38 AM

CARTER-CASH CLAN BIG WINNERS IN COUNTRY MUSIC CRITICS POLL; HIP-HOP MAKES SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT DENT

Nashville Scene's Country Music Critics Poll.

The 4th Annual country music equivalent of the Voice poll, with:

Lead essay by Geoffrey Himes.

Several topical essays (see their sidebar).

A long list of voters, many of them P&Jers themselves. ("90 music writers from North America and Europe.")

A page of voter comments.

Excellent reading. Will we see more micro-Pazz & Jops of this nature over the next few years? i.e., a Hip-Hop Critics Poll? Interestingly, hip-hop infiltrates the proceedings: David Banner (deservedly) edges into the Top 30 Singles list with 55 points (not votes) for "Cadillac on 22s," and Bubba Sparxxx's name pops up in the comments.

[Link courtesy of Thomas Inskeep's blog, Oh, Manchester....]

link posted by RCD 10:00 AM

2/12/2004

WILL ANYONE BUT AGING BRIT-POPPERS LIKE MYSELF CARE? DEPT.

Q strikes low note with music fans.

By Owen Gibson in the Guardian. (Courtesy of Musicjournalist.com.)

"Q, which has gone through three editors in the past two years and saw its ABC figures slashed in 2002 when it was discovered that giveaway bulk copies were being counted at full price, suffered a further drop to 161,634...

"Meanwhile, sales of Uncut, which covers classic films and music, have soared 22% in the past year to 111,167 partly thanks to a series of free covermounted CDs. Mojo, aimed at a similar audience, also recorded a more modest rise of 4% in the past year to 104,437."

link posted by RCD 7:41 PM

MEA CULPA

I think I misrepresented Nate's ILM thread below by assigning it too quickly to the category of "race." It touches on the subject--perhaps inevitably--but there are persuasive arguments in there suggesting that that's off the mark entirely. (Good thing I checked back in for a quick scan. I never have the time to properly read these massive threads.) Anyway, my apologies, Nate!

link posted by RCD 2:57 PM

P&J EXTRAS

I figured bloggers would be all over Pazz & Jop '03, but in fact they may just be all over Pazz & Jop '03 (waiting for the thing to come out is the hard part, no?). Or maybe they're all working on their game plans now and will spring forth with addendums and arguments in the weeks to come (who said blogggers were an impulsive bunch?).

A couple interesting points have been raised, though, in regards to--can you handle this? of course you can, it's stuff that comes up every year--sex and race. [[Oops--see post above.]]

It was pointed out on the Girl Group Message Board (not sure if I'm supposed to be linking to that still as it's a private board) that 95 women voted in the poll, out of 732. No one, to my knowledge, has done anything with this statistic or tried to find out why or asked any women who voted or didn't vote why they think this is so. Either a lot of women who were invited chose not to vote, or not that many women were invited in the first place. If it's the latter, it could be a reflection of how many women are actually writing music criticism these days (and are visible in the eyes of Pazz & Jop). Feel free to dig around or add a comment or lambaste this site for being part of the problem and not the solution.

In this I Love Music thread--controversially titled, "P&J 2003: Tokenism-a-go-go (WARNING: Outkast content)"--Nate Patrin provides a "list of Pazz & Jop Ballots that included Outkast as their only representation of hip-hop in their albums or singles lists--at least as far as the ones that included Speakerboxxx/The Love Below." I clued into this thing way too late (at least 15 minutes after it started) to follow it closely, but it set off a bit of a hail storm, and if you have a few hours...

Related in some ways to the above: comments from Jeff Chang, though scroll up a bit after reading them as he virtually disowns (or anyway, negates) his own post!

Also, here's Christgau on NPR--a short segment. To listen, scroll down to "New Music Picks." (Warning: AC/DC content.)

Feel free to comment on anything Pazz & Jop related in the box. (Or send me an email if you want me to post something.)

link posted by RCD 1:01 PM

2/11/2004

P&J TABULATION ERRORS

ROY KASTEN WRITES:

I noticed a pretty significant tabulation error in this year's Pazz & Jop poll. Joe Henry's Tiny Voices (which I picked as my number one album) gets ranked twice, apparently because some voters identified it as an Anti- release, while others said it was Epitaph. Getting ranked twice wouldn't be such a bad thing for Joe, save that doing so splits the total votes he received and drops his ultimate poll position:

#118: Joe Henry, Tiny Voices (Anti-) 110 (9)

#255: Joe Henry, Tiny Voices (Epitaph) 46 (4)

If you combine the two entries (and if my math is correct), Tiny Voices cracks the Hot 100 at #82.

[FOLLOWUP E-MAIL]

Hmm...another album I voted for got screwed over. I don't have time to scrutinize the whole Voice list, but I wouldn't be surprised if other folks found similar errors.

Patty Loveless appears twice on the poll, thus messing with her final ranking:

#220: Patty Loveless, On Your Way Home (Sony) 56 (6)

#908: Patti Loveless, On Your Way Home (Epic) 11 (2)

link posted by RCD 8:59 PM

MARCUS TRASHES DENBY

In the latest edition of his "Real Life Rock Top 10" column, Greil Marcus trounces New Yorker critic, David Denby: "On those rare occasions when he assays an argument, it's indisputable that nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity." Specifically, this is a pan of Denby's "Living in America" piece in a January issue of the New Yorker (never saw it), though Marcus also spills invective over a piece Denby wrote last fall on Pauline Kael. I did read that one (no link, unfortunately) and liked it; it didn't alter how I feel about that "witch" as a writer.

Alternate words for "dolorous" here.

link posted by RCD 9:54 AM

TIMES MUSIC CRITIC IN PORN SHOCKER!

Red faces at Times over blue film star.

[Scroll halfway down page to read item.]

"Editors at the New York Times were were, um, taken aback when they learned that music critic Neil Strauss was ghost-writing [Jenna] Jameson's memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Actually, says a source, 'They went insane.'"

From New York Daily News's "Daily Dish & Gossip."

link posted by RCD 8:51 AM

2/10/2004

MORE LINKS PAGE UPDATES

Kandia Crazy Horse's new blog is called Hot Voodoo.

Phil Freeman now writes a column called 'PDF File' at Bagatellan. (See Loving Big Brother and Denying the Existence of "Now".)

link posted by RCD 10:53 PM

CRITICAL MINUTIAE, 2003 ED.

glenn mcdonald presents his annual Pazz & Jop Critical Alignment Ratings.

"Here are the voters in the 2003 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, ranked according to the average number of other voters who voted for each of their album picks."

(Including archived versions of previous years.)

Brought to you by The War Against Silence.

link posted by RCD 9:00 PM

BLOGS UPDATED

Went on a blog rampage this morning (you can spend a whole day doing this, once you start going through other people's recommendations) and have updated the links page with the following (some of these are newish, some have been around for ages; all of them are ones I've just discovered):

bloggedy blog (Andrew Careaga)

tinyluckygenius (Jessica Hopper)

Lynne d Johnson:: Diary

Said the Gramophone (Sean Michaels)

Enthusiastic But Mediocre (Edward O)

three*two*warszawa (Mark Pytlik)

pop (all nipple) (Aaron Wherry)

Zoilus (Carl Wilson)

Can someone tell me what "::" means? Everywhere I look these days, it's two colons side by side. I don't get it.

link posted by RCD 9:41 AM

2/09/2004

IN FURTHER SEARCH OF ROBERT JOHNSON

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

"A new book--Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues--takes issue with the devil-haunted bluesman of legend. Anthony Heilbut applauds the attempt to judge Johnson on his own terms."

From the Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 2004 (thanks to Rock's Backpages for reprinting this).

Sample: "Wald knows that, by contextualizing Johnson, he risks demystifying--and even demoting--him. So be it. If we end up valuing Johnson less, we acquire a greater purchase on musical history."

More info on Wald's book here.

link posted by RCD 9:41 AM

2/08/2004

EMINEM-GATE?

Feud between Eminem and The Source magazine wounds on both sides.

By Nekesa Mumbi Moody in the Associated Press (here reprinted in Michigan News--bogus ID required).

Sample: "David Mays remains undeterred, fashioning himself and Benzino as the Woodward and Bernstein of hip-hop journalism, taking on people like Eminem instead of Richard Nixon.

"'For many, many months, the Washington Post was criticized, made to look like fools--people said they lost all their credibility,' Mays says. 'And in the end, the truth came out, and they were vindicated, and their credibility skyrocketed. That's an inspirational story to me, because I believe that's the same path that we're on.'"

link posted by RCD 11:33 AM

2/07/2004

BERLIOZ MARKED FOR DEATH

Good find at the library today: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time, by Nicolas Slonimsky (the link also names Peter Schickele as a co-editor; presumably I borrowed an earlier edition). As someone suggests in that Amazon page, it's a bit hard to swallow the book's premise--laid out flatly in the introduction--that "objections leveled at every musical innovator are all derived from the same psychological inhibition, which may be described as Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar." Some of the passages the editor(s) tracks down are too strong (as writing, I mean) and too well-thought out to be dismissed or explained away so swiftly, but regardless, the book (from which I liberally quote below--hope that's cool...) is an enlightening window into a world not as unlike ours (I mean this so-called community of--yeah, right--"us") as we might sometimes like to think...perhaps? Incidentally, I received an e-mail tonight from someone who's never written to me before asking, "When did the genre of writing we call 'rock criticism' begin?" The earliest passage below is from 1843 (and I've still only perused the book).

(Mention must also be made of Slonimsky's "Invecticon," a back-of-the-book "index of vituperative, perjorative, and deprecatory words and phrases." From "anemic" to "miscellaneous rubbish" to "sniveling pessimism," each with matching page references. Neat, huh?)

> > > > > > >

"Turn your eyes to any one composition that bears the name of Liszt, if you are unlucky enough to have such a thing on your pianoforte, and answer frankly, if it contains one bar of genuine music. Composition indeed!--decomposition is the proper word for such hateful fungi, which choke up and poison the fertile plains of harmony, threatening the world of drought."
--Musical World, London, 1855

"Liszt's orchestral music is an insult to art. It is gaudy musical harlotry, savage and incoherent bellowings."
--Boston Gazette, 1872

"[Wagner's] Siegfried was abominable. Not a trace of coherent melodies. It would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of these hideous discords. My ears buzzed from these abortions of chords, if one can still call them such. The opening of the third act made enough noise to split the ears. The whole crap could be reduced to 100 measures, for it is always the same thing, and always equally tedious."
--Richard Strauss in a letter to Ludwig Thuille, 1879

"If there exists anywhere in the world a stranger concatenation of meaninglessly ugly sounds and distored rhythms than Mr. Copland's Piano Concerto, Boston has been spared it. Since there must be a bit of jazz in all American music nowadays, Mr. Copland has his measures in that view, but as one young man in the audience remarked, 'No dance-hall would tolerate jazz of such utter badness.'"
--Warren Storey Smith, Boston Post, 1927

"We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard!"
--Keynote, New York, 1885

"There are sounds and lamentations in the air, that is, if there were any air, which there is not, for mere tune is left out of this miscalled symphony."
--Boston Record, review of Sibelius's Symphony No. 4, 1913

"There are some of the most bitter harmonies and progressions that we have ever heard, a mixture of musical quassia and wormwood, which suggests that the composer is dissatisfied about something--and, so, probably, are the general public. Many went into the corridor to get a little air, the first obtainable since the beginning of the program."
--Louis Elson, Boston Daily Advertiser, 1914

"Overture to King Lear by Berlioz, mere rubbish and rot. Shakesperean overtures by galvanized anthropoid Parisians are becoming a nuisance."
--Geroge Templeton Strong's Diary, 1864

"Berlioz, musically speaking, is a lunatic; a classical composer only in Paris, the great city of quacks. His music is simply and undisguisedly nonsense. He is a kind of orchestral Liszt, than which I could name nothing more intensely disagreeable."
--Dramatic and Musical Review, London, 1843

"The third movement ends with what the programme calls 'the sinking of the sun--a distant roll of thunder--solitude--silence.' The thunder is well imitated, and the silence is delicious."
--Review of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony in an unidentified New York newspaper, 1868

"...For the rest of [The Love for Three Oranges], Mr. Prokofiev might well have loaded up a shotgun with several thousand notes of varying lengths and discharged them against the side of a blank wall."
--Edward Moore, Chicago Tribune, 1921

"The modern tendency being not to enjoy music, but to break one's head over it, the next symphonies of Richard Strauss ought to be named the Twilight of the Idols, Human All-Too Human, and How to Philosophize With a Hammer."
--Eduard Hanslick, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1899

"As a kind of drug, no doubt Scriabin's music has a certain significance, but it is wholly superfluous. We already have cocaine, morphine, hashish, heroin, anhalonium, and innumerable similar productions, to say nothing of alcohol. Surely that is enough."
--Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, London, 1924

"Ravel's Bolero I submit as the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetrated in the history of music. From the beginning to the end of its 339 measures it is simply the incredible repetition of the same rhythm...and above it the blatant recurrence of an overwhelmingly vulgar cabaret tune that is little removed, in every essential of character, from the wail of an obstreperous back-alley cat...Although Ravel's official biography does not mention it, I feel sure that at the age of three he swallowed a musical snuff-box, and at nine he must have been frightened by a bear."
--Edward Robinson, The American Mercury, 1932

"This typewriter cannot find similes for the bestial racket."
--Eric De Lamarter, Inter-Ocean, Chicago, 1913--on Schoenberg

"After hearing Varese's Ionization, I am anxious that you should examine my composition scored for two stoves and a kitchen sink. I've named it Concussion Symphony, descriptive of the disintegration of an Irish potato under the influence of a powerful atomizer."
--Postcard signed by 'Iona Lotta Bunk,' received by Nicolas Slonimsky after his performance of Ionization at the Hollywood Bowl, 1933

"Varese's Hyperprism reminded us of election night, a menagerie or two and a catastrophe in a boiler factory."
--Olin Downes, New York Herald, 1924

"Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor was played in Vienna for the first time; the faces of the listeners almost expressed the wish that it should also be the last time...It belongs to the category of suicidal compositions, which kill themselves by their merciless length."
--Eduard Hanslick, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1899

link posted by RCD 11:45 PM

2/06/2004

WEEKEND READING PROJECT

The Vagaries of Contemporary Rock Crit.

By Brandon Heckman in Gapers Block.

[Woah! Where to find a pull quote amidst 5,000 words??]

link posted by RCD 2:11 PM

2/04/2004

WRITING ABOUT MUSIC IS LIKE DANCING ABOUT PEPSI

Cat got my tongue lately (and my brain and other body parts too), so this will have to suffice as content. Smartest thing I've posted/stolen all year? (Found it here.)

link posted by RCD 10:14 AM

2/02/2004

SUSAN WHITALL WRITES:

I was amused to read the lengthy "explanation" by Richard Riegel [see "Answers to the Super-Challenge," Jan 5/04] of who succeeded Lester Bangs as managing editor of Creem Magazine. Richard, God love him, worked as a freelance writer for Creem out of Cincinnati. Richard still writes too long. I remember him coming to Detroit one time for a visit, but he never worked for us full-time.

First of all, Lester was never "managing editor." He didn't want such a bourgeois title, and absolutely did not want to have to do any of the paperwork that went along with it--there was a monthly budget, and the head editor had to make sure everybody got paid. Lester's title was "Senior Editor" and I don't have to explain his importance to the magazine--everybody who worked with him at Creem, in Detroit--Dave Marsh, Jaan Uhelszki, Robert Duncan--knows what he did, and how we all fit together as editors. Wayne Robins and then Robert Duncan did a lot of the administrative work that a managing editor does, and in fact Duncan had the title after Wayne did; then when Duncan left for New York (shortly before Lester), much of that fell to me. But our publisher Barry Kramer felt I was too young and too female to take the top slot, so Bill Gubbins was hired after editing an FTD newsletter.

He lasted a very short while. Barry realized I was doing the job anyway, so he made me editor.

Oh, and Billy Altman was record review editor out of New York, he succeeded Lester in that role, and did a bang-up job. He didn't have time for, nor was he anywhere near Detroit to have that much input into the rest of the magazine.

P.S. Like Lester, I didn't like the term "managing editor" either, but not because I didn't want all the paperwork and drudgery that went with it, I just preferred the more elegant "editor" on top of the staffbox, so I took that as my title for the next seven years.

After I left, Dave DiMartino succeeded me and revived the word "managing" for his title--Dave was always one for overkill.

link posted by RCD 10:50 PM

CLASSROOM JURY

Under eights v middle eights.

"Jack Black tears up the timetable and the classroom with his riffs in School Of Rock. But what do real kids think of classic guitar anthems, asks Johnny Dee." [From the Guardian.]

link posted by RCD 9:21 PM

SCOTT WOODS SUBMITS

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

By Derek Phillips in Glorious Noise.

[Nothing like someone shouting "Freebird!" to pull a person out of early retirement...]

link posted by RCD 4:30 PM

PARTY ANNOUNCEMENT: ATTENTION NEW YORKERS

Palgrave / St. Martin's Press, The FADER Magazine and The Black Rock Coalition present:

A special event to celebrate the release of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock and Roll edited by Kandia Crazy Horse--a new book featuring essays, photos, and original interviews with artists such as Slash from Guns n Roses, Lenny Kravitz, and Vernon Reid from Living Colour.

"What a terrific book! As exciting as it is valuable, Rip It Up is the most uniquely satisfying volume on music my eyes (and heart) have seen in YEARS."
-- Richard Meltzer author of _A Whore Just Like the Rest

Live Performances:
Chocolate Genius
Suffrajet
Tamar-Kali
Apollo Heights

And to congratulate the writers and contributors:
* Greg Tate * Barney Hoskyns * Paul Gilroy * Andy Gill * Dalton Jones * Vivien Goldman * Bill Millar * Mike Ladd * Darryl Jennifer (Bad Brains) * Sacha Jenkins * Lorraine O'Grady * Jennifer Rice * Lester Bangs (well) * Barry Walters * Mark Anthony Neal * Vernon Reid (Living Colour) * Harry Allen * Darrell McNeill * Lenny Kravitz * Knox Robinson * Jon Caramanica * Amy Linden

Tuesday February 3, 2004, Doors 7/Show at 8

CBGBs, 315 Bowery (at Bleeker St)

$10 cover at the door

link posted by RCD 12:21 PM