rolls eyes

from this: "There's an entire Arch Snarky Commenter persona people now rush to adopt, in which they read things on the Internet and then compete to most effectively roll their eyes at it."

one thing music critics really struggle with is writing about music, and this has been one of the primary beefs we at the writemare have had with them. when they "like" an album, all they can talk about is a lead singer's life story, her "backstory" in the language of our television age. more than anything else, what gets evaluated is whether or not a particular artist or band should be making music.

it's my thinking that most listeners and fans don't hear music in this way. people who like having their self-image fed back to them watch movies. people listen to music because it sounds good to them.

critics aren't different, i don't think, at least not at first. what happens is that sooner or later they have to write six paragraphs about an album they like, and have to scramble because, for the most part, they never acquired a vocabulary capable of describing music. if you don't know what words to use in order to describe and discuss music meaningfully, you will inevitably revert to talking about people.

so i proudly roll my eyes at the above-linked column, in which nitsuh abebe discusses discussions of identity as they relate to music and musicians. "We like to imagine that the sounds [musicians are] making are some raw, uncalculated outpouring of the soul inside." i know you do.

i like writing music that makes me smile. when i was 11 years old, i didn't want to be like jimi hendrix, i wanted to play like jimi hendrix (fail, btw). like most musicians, i don't practice my soul, i practice my instrument. i can practically feel abebe's eyes rolling.

we are all john milton now

from a pitchfork "poptimist" column that i don't care to link to:

"Consumerism makes Miltons of us all."

this from a writer who actually BOASTS about having forgotten all but a single line of Paradise Lost.

listen, Tom Ewing (hopefully he's got a google alert on his own name), consumerism makes us many things: petty, forgetful, arrogant, judgmental, blind to the suffering of others, alienated, furious, etc. but not, i repeat NOT, divinely inspired poets.

by the by, work and this one pretty dame have prevented me from blogging recently. also weed. fortunately nobody cares.

anyway, how's your biblical epic coming along? mine's okay, i guess.

everything's gone

hi. i just wrote a column about minimalism without mentioning a single minimalist. i end up calling an idea john cage came up with "enoid" (an adjective meaning as or pertaining to eno). then i talk about facebook and apps for a while. i'm not sure if i've listened to steve reich or terry riley.

i say things like this: "Pop, for instance, is becoming more iterative."

i ask questions like this: "Why is this sound here instead of not?"

i began this whole thing with an anecdote about a bar with exposed pipes. i'm most likely a suburban twat, so this struck me as a very provocative decision.

i eat pieces of shit for breakfast.

without comment, for now

from the top 100 songs of the year, which i have been left off of, AGAIN:

"One of the dominant sounds of independent music in the past few years has been 60s girl-group pop swathed in a cocoon of distortion."

much to say about this one, but let it soak in first.

shall i complain?

i propose that pitchfork shrink it's year-end best albums list back down to 20, or maybe even 10. wavvves, gil scott-heron, the national, four tet, sufjan stevens... there's plenty of fluff to choose from.

just to waste a little more of your time, i also think they should go back to a simple 1 to 5 star rating system. in their current system, a 7.4 essentially means the album is 74% good. the absurdity of this system is only magnified when something is deemed 100% good, further so when they don't really bother to write about the music or even relevant context. kanye's record is, of course, The Best Of The Year.

here's just one example of this kind of sloppy writing, in the paragraph about Girls' EP, which I will excerpt in its entirety to pad my own meager sunday post:

"Girls' 2009 debut, Album, was an instant classic, a blast of dizzy, wounded love from a band with an immediate, innate grasp of all things guitar-pop. But frontman Christopher Owens has had a rough life, and people with rough lives have a sad tendency to flame out early. It's easy to imagine Album being Girls' one great statement before the demons that helped Owens write his songs drowned his voice completely. So it's a great relief to hear Broken Dreams Club, a clear indication that this band is in it for the long haul. Broken Dreams Club comes from the same aesthetic universe as Album, but it's relaxed to the point of languor. Old-school Nashville pedal steel and crisp Cotton Club horns find their way in, and a warm oldies-radio vibe pervades. But we're still dealing with despair and hopelessness, and Owens still expresses this stuff in the most simple and direct terms possible: 'When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew it from the very start/ When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew that you would break my heart.' At the center of it all sits 'Carolina', a lazy sprawl that takes the band's own 'Hellhole Ratrace' to a more peaceful place." --Tom Breihan

breihan, you fucking twit, go back and edit this part: "people with rough lives have a sad tendency to flame out early." please, compensated music blogger, tell me more about people with rough lives and their sad tendencies. it is tragic how so many of them die after releasing one guitar-pop record.

but i digress, and i also count one fucking sentence about music in that whole abortion of a blurb. the rest has more of a Behind The Music voice-over feel to it.

The Broken Dreams Club EP has six songs. how the fuck do you write 210 words about six songs, and only find time to mention one of them? as a matter of fact, how the fuck is the teaser EP for this guy's sophomore full-length the 22nd best album of the year?

the list this year has a little player embedded under each album's name, where you can press play to hear a 20-second clip from one some on the record. there's also a link that says "buy mp3". lulz.

finally, i'd like to register how upset i am at the pornification of joanna newsom, shown here doing a harp-tease for a blurry neil patrick harris. give it a rest, assholes.

o hai blog!

a man is a protagonist. or, at least, he sees himself that way. we watch a lot of television. sometimes we read books, but mostly we just watch tv. either way, nearly all the stories we come across concern male protagonists as they struggle for things.

the sheer volume of these stories with which we have interacted has more or less driven most of us men insane. our lives become an unpleasant symptom of the stories we consume. the protagonist struggles against things and against people, but our struggle is, above all, to be the protagonist -- to become the hero of our own story.

as i said, this is insanity. the world is not a stage. every element of fiction is carefully crafted by people to make the whole thing meaningful. life is, well, not like that.

Pitchfork and the Perfect 10.0

I'm going to skip a lot of bullshit and just say it: Nowhere in this rambling 12 paragraph essay does Ryan Dombal really talk music.

Yes, he mentions Aphex Twin or Gil-Scott Heron sampling, but that pretty much sums up his exploration of the music portion of the record.

I get it. Hip hop is a difficult beast to critique in any era. In the 90's you had dusty drumbeats that were five or six combined samples of a snare from one record, a ride cymbal from another, all played expertly and rarely quantized. In the 80's it was either the tinny bap of the Linn drum machine or the pure sine wave of an 808.

Hip hop has a tendency to sound homogeneous in a popular context. Today it's the skittering 16th note hi-hat beats, the INCESSANT auto-tuning, and a Southern style of rapping that champions simplicity of hook over actual narrative skill. So tell me why and how Kanye's record has achieved perfection.

Martial drums? Lurking synths? Is that it? Is the music exuberant, sad or angry? Is it in minor or major keys? Is it minimalist or maximalist? How are his recordings different than, say, the work of his contemporaries? Has he gone beyond his contemporaries? If so, how? How is the mix? How is the track order?

Although I understand the need to provide cultural context, I don't want to read an article about his Twitter hijinks. If you give a record a perfect 10, tell me why. You write music reviews for a website that rates them from 0-10. Outside of comparing Kanye to Michael Jackson ad infinitum, I see no actual reason this album receives a 10. It has samples, yes, and drum beats, and clever rhymes, but somehow it is, "...a blast of surreal pop excess that few artists are capable of creating, or even willing to attempt."

Is the rating based on Kanye's sheer braggadocio? Are these reviews even based on music anymore? Does it even matter? Does anyone actually need music reviews when you can preview or steal the music and judge for yourself? Based on this article that crudely places image over content, I would say good riddance.

I like Kanye's music a lot and I enjoy reading about it. I am a nerd. I just can't understand how one writes a biography of an artist's career between records, sticks in some lyrical excerpts that are completely out of context without the music or surrounding lyrics, casts him as a misunderstood genius, and calls it a music review.

Also, I think the true question is thus:

How does Kanye's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" stand up against Pitchfork's last completely insane perfect 10.0, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Death's "Source Tags and Codes?"