Records About Which I Actually Believed This
I first heard this strange track on a mixtape long ago. It’s very simple - a monologue from a film set to some music. It’s creepy and corny and affecting too. Lana Del Rey’s music made me think of it.
on the other hand aesthetics where you can’t quite conceptualise it or work out what’s happeing can be even better…. this is an excellent record, or at least I think it might be.
The Folkes Brothers - “Oh Carolina”: From 1960, a foundation stone of Jamaican pop I’d never heard before doing the research for this - I love the way the wild drumming on this just completely drowns the song.
I really really like / am a sucker for someone turning up with a well-worked-through aesthetic: they always seem obvious after the fact but the fact that you end up groping at combinatorial lists of influences, algebraic descriptions etc suggests . Whether this aesthetic sustains itself beyond a song, over an album or career or w/ever - honestly I don’t really care, that’s not the achievement. Not everyone’s going to be Bryan Ferry. I wish Bryan Ferry would stop being Bryan Ferry sometimes. It doesn’t mean Bryan Ferry wasn’t his best composition.
It happens in comics sometimes - one reason I like Grant Morrison is he’s good at this. Something like KLARION THE WITCH BOY - that mix of a 40something guy’s memories of creepy code-approved horror comix and a 40something’s perceptions of hypersensitive emo kids, plus Fraser Irving’s watercolour gothic look: you struggle to describe it but as soon as you read it you GOT it.
Of course you could say what made ‘Bryan Ferry’ is that it hatched in the context of a band pushing it in different directions, making the nascent Ferry-thing adapt to the environment of “Grey Lagoons” et al. I think it reached fuller potential after that, though - even if I’m not quite prepared to say that Roxy Music’s flaw is that you actually had to listen to them.
Lana Del Rey: Born to Die | Album Reviews | Pitchfork (via desnoise)
Today in weirdly personal album zings you’d never use for a man*. (And I mean “today in,” damn it; there’s one in every single review, and it’s starting to get uncomfortably telling. Yes, I’m still working on my piece….)
* Alright, I did my “research,” by which I mean I googled “site:pitchfork.com fake orgasm.” Google thinks I’m a perv now. I’d do more extensive research but I’m not going to be late to work because I spent too much time googling the word “orgasm.” Anyway, I came up with two results:
- The Rapture’s Luke, in which the comparison is a compliment at best and a neutral descriptor at worst.
- Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” which isn’t an insult because that’s actually what happened in the song.
(via katherinestasaph)
The music equivalent of a fake orgasm is a fake orgasm on a record which fails to spark rumours it’s a real one.
Let the market decide. Vote with your dollars. Poor people shouldn’t be overweight. If minorities just worked harder. You can be sexist against men too. Just go to college. Just pay for college. Work harder. Just write. Just make stuff. Minorities can be racist too. Your accusation of sexism is itself sexist. Hack the planet.
I have had it up to literally here with techno-tard libertarian free market geek assholes. The comments on this Boing Boing story about MLK Day and unpacking your privilege knapsack made me stop reading Boing Boing. Finally. I know — what took so long. It only took two comments for someone to deny the conceptual basis of privilege, which is privilege. The comments did not get any higher-minded from there. I’m sick of Coulton’s liberal cronies making faux-racist jokes all the time (looking at you Maximum Fun podcasts). I’m sick of all this enlightened techno-liberal white male bullshit. I’m sick of it all. It’s the same game, white male exceptionalism, but the players have just swapped jerseys.
(via bmichael)
I thought for one utopian moment that it was the quoted commentary by mikkipedia that had got 5K+ notes, not the original “make good stuff” sentiment.
(Source: neil-gaiman)
“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/doll-protesters-problem-russian-police
Preach preach preach.
I’d also say that if you love all of the same stuff ten years from now (or maybe it’d be better to say, if all the same stuff occupies the same place in your heart/mind/life ten years from now), you may want to think about whether that’s healthy.
It is the absolute worst attitude to have as a pop-culture critic. I cannot think of anything more counterproductive than to worry about those sorts of things. What kind of insecure writer actually worries about what future music crits will think? Whatever consensus opinions the critical community holds today will be questioned and reassessed tomorrow. There’s absolutely no point in kvetching over what people in the future will think because they’re probably going to think contemporary critics are misinformed old fogies no matter what we blog about.
What advantage would “being right” offer anyway? It’s not like I read music reviews from 10 years ago and think “aww yeah, those guys were SO RIGHT about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” GONNA TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND HIGH FIVE THEM ALL.
“Stop worrying about being right” is a very good bit of critical advice IMO.
(Source: marathonpacks)
Seems like acts play much bigger/more shows relative to record sales now. Could be substitution or just live sales not going down in same way, not sure which.
A couple of years ago I read an Economist piece on the music biz which pointed out that while live music revenues were on the up, this growth could be almost entirely explained by a very rapid rise in ticket prices rather than an expansion of the audience for shows, which hadn’t declined but wasn’t growing fast either. The biz itself tends to paint live music as a growth area in general - and the economic (& I daresay moral) virtues of shows are one of the few areas pirates and pirate-hunters agree on - so this report was a surprising bit of cold water. How right it was I don’t know.
