January 2010
I didn't know what a balaclava was until I...
desnoise:
agrammar:
And here’s the weird response: a good number of educated, middle-class people, people who know what a balaclava is, people who might blog about going on vacation or heading to a Richard Serra exhibit, take a big step back.
I agree with a lot of what’s said in Nitsuh’s post— as always… Nitsuh OTM is basically my mantra— but this subject heading is true.
I had never heard of...
x-why
maura:
today i had a dude whose laptop was covered in stickers for things like “social media week” MANSPLAIN something to me! in person, no less! on the topic “how to use twitter properly,” of all things!!! i refrained from pulling the old “don’t you internet-know who i am” card, because it really wasn’t worth the effort. but i was kind of fascinated by the differences between the reaction...
airgordon:
ittookseconds:
Five minutes and...
Hearting Mike Barthel is not enough in this... →
maura:
“V*****e W*****d’s whole “appropriation” thing is a marketing technique. They are deliberately baiting you. If what you want is for them to not be successful, you should stop talking about them.”
There is more! Go read it!
The time is clearly right for me to realise my long-held dream of making an album of Kipling poems set to Balinese Gamelan! The live shows will feature monocles.
“The next person who tells me the US has no class system will be forced to read...”
– https://twitter.com/dorianlynskey (via rocketsandrayguns)
I may be reblogging this a lot.
1987 →
A little introduction to the next few years on my Popular project - designed, to borrow a phrase from comics, as “a great jumping on point for new readers”.
(And partly, I admit, to refresh and express my own enthusiasm after a couple of moribund years in pop time.)
Axe Cop →
dyfl:
Written by a five-year-old. Drawn by a twenty-nine-year-old. This is certainly amazing. (Via Craig)
Best Music Scribing Awards 2009 →
Jason Gross’ annual look at the state of the music writing nation. If I live to be 100 I will never know why he insists on the horrible word “scribing” in these pieces but they’re always good for turning up a few gems. And this year he leads off with a comprehensive, very interesting look at quite how bad - or in some cases, how not actually bad - things have got for the...
Free publicity: who do we help? →
There are lots of good points in this (much-tweeted) Anil Dash piece, though it works better when he’s criticising people for a willingness to disengage too easily, rather than when he’s criticising them for a willingness to engage.
The 4 Big Myths Of Profile Pictures →
One of the many things in life I am incredibly grateful for is that I met my wife before the Internet so I have never had to think about “success factors in profile pictures” with anything other than academic interest.
And as such, this is in fact really interesting: a breakdown by OK Cupid of what works for generating contacts and conversations in terms of profile picture content, posture, how...
Noon until noon again
Two facts:
1. “The Boy With The Arab Strab” is the best Belle And Sebastian song.
2. I am drunk enough to have retyped EVERY WORD in this post. (though not enough to catch “strab” oh well!)
But 1 is true! Or what else?
Soft Drums!
They’re back!! I’ve heard lots of soft, muffled, paddy* synth drums on pop records just lately, for that nebulous cusp-of-the-80s/90s vibe.
- The new Hot Chip album has ‘em! GOOD!
- So does the Hurts single! NOT SO GOOD!
- So does Alicia Keys’ “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart”, in fact the whole production on that sounds deliberately submerged like...
Politics 97 →
Amazing! (ht Tracer Hand)
make it stop
And then after a few more beers: “Oh yeah, her? That’s M.I.A. No, not ‘Mia.’ She’s Sri Lankan—Sri Lankan, that’s what I said. Well, I guess it would be electronica—yeah, like that guy Brian Eno, sort of. Most people now wouldn’t say that, though. She’s on Interscope, which is a part of Universal, which, right, is about as far away from indie as you can possibly get. But you know what’s weird? She...
The Death Of Indie →
Feeble grope around current pop culture from Paste Magazine, which tilts at a couple of relevant questions but is basically hidebound by an inability to see the present except through the frames that made sense in the past. Made a great deal worse by i. the painfully self-important framing device of Time’s 1966 “Death Of God” essay and ii. a ghastly extended sequence in which...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-24) →
Spoon (13)
2000F & J Kamata (2)
Vampire Weekend (2)
Minnie Riperton (1)
Kirk Lake (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“In an environment where access to music was through specialist gatekeepers –...”
– Tom Ewing’s review of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” does not mention Arrested Development, but does offer some interesting thoughts on genre. (via perpetua)
Thanks for the reblog! I am almost entirely illiterate when it comes to popular TV so this is one of those connections I like finding out...
Watchkatstevens:
Hot Chip - One Life Stand.
Hot Chip are at a constant disadvantage in my eyes due to the singer dude’s insufferably weedy voice and his resemblance to my old Physics teacher (who had a similarly weedy voice and looked like he spent as little time outdoors as possible).
However The Chip do produce perfectly watchable videos - this particular one would have been much better if they’d...
Another lacuna
I have never heard - or more likely can’t remember hearing - a Postal Service track. I wonder if I can keep this up until I have to review Wol City for Popular.
The Man Who Sold The World →
Been having a very enjoyable catch-up on the “Bowiesongs” blog, which has been examining his strange, apocalyptic The Man Who Sold The World album with typical sure footing. I’ve always found TMWSTW heavy going - though some of this is a memory of my struggle with it as a teenage Bowie head, when I was convinced that some seriously Profound And Important Shit was going down in...
sleepssundays asked: What's the least-Tom-Ewing-y music you genuinely love? Spoon's airly un-Tom-Ewing-y but I want something weirder and more unpop than that.
I have one of those ask things now. (I have them for blackbeard and ittookseconds too fwiw).
Nick Hornby on "Kid A" →
I was hoping this was online! Nick Hornby’s review of “Kid A” is legendarily terrible and misguided, and even if you don’t like the record - I surely don’t very much - it’s a wipeout. His basic argument is: “experimental records are a con job, and this isn’t even very experimental”. Points for honesty, I guess!
But I’m reblogging this...
“As “critics,” we get added the bonus of an easy-bake depth model. “Yeah, it...”
– From Matt LeMay’s excellent essay A Totally Sincere and Heartfelt Look Back at 2009 on the MBV group site. (via perpetua) (I swapped Matt P’s quote for my fav’rit though!)
The only thing I’d kind of annotate here - cos I’m not even sure Matt LM would disagree - is the...
the last long thing on genre, "indie," and...
agrammar:
When I was a small child, I got “weird pop” from the new-wave on the radio, a whole candy-colored jumble of weirdness. When I was an adolescent, I got it from watching the first pop explosion of hip-hop on Yo! MTV Raps. Through my teens and early twenties, I got endless amounts of “weird pop” out of indie. At the beginning of this century, I got more “weird pop” vibes out of the r&b...
Does Being A Bit Obtuse Make For Better Music? →
My Guardian column. This is a little bit outside my comfort zone, in that it’s about indie rock, and American indie rock at that!
Life Lessons 2.0
On an episode of Third And Bird I watched with my three year old last night, each of the three young birds in the show had written a song for some kind of bird variety performance, but only one could be performed. Was this the set-up for a moral about difficult choices, or waiting your turn, or managing disappointment? No! For the birds instead got together and created A MASH-UP. Hurrah!
Comments
Just a note to say I’m getting comments on this blog but can’t currently access them to post replies. I will try and remember to reinstall the comments system in the morning and/or change the design (which I’m sick of anyway) and then I can reply to a couple of things.
To be of use
I am coming to the end of the annual “argue all day about Pazz and Jop” day and it’s been as entertaining as ever, thank you all.
One point that I don’t think has been made though is about the use value of critically acclaimed records. What is, say, Bitte Orca meant for? How is it designed to be used? It CAN be used for an awful lot of things but which are most common?
...
“There is at least one critic in my circles who I know would rep for Shakira and...”
– - Nitsuh.
I hope this isn’t me! Not because I haven’t entertained a base prejudice against Of Montreal but because I think I’ve been fair enough not to state it anywhere more than a handful of people might actually read it. Anyway, I’ll bite (awoo): what OM songs should I be...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
rocketsandrayguns:
Why would anyone expect anything other than consensus, especially as professional critics become more and more digitally connected? In fact, I’d assume the more talk of audience fragmentation, the more consensus we’d get from career critics. If critical fragmentation matched audience fragmentation, wouldn’t that only support the perception that music critics are now obsolete?...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
desnoise:
I’m not sure soccer is a perfect comparison here, though. I’d go back to politics— Chuck was quoted not too long ago talking favorably about what music Sarah Palin likes, after all. In Williamsburg, supporting Sarah Palin might make you contrarian. But in a bigger context, it means you’re supporting what a lot of very powerful interests would prefer you to support. Obviously, this...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
desnoise:
perpetua:
This is an extraordinarily depressing essay by former Voice editor/professional contrarian Chuck Eddy. It’s like a guy who used to be principal of a high school getting really angry about the outcome of his old school’s student council election.
Deep, deep inside the rockcrit bubble here. Is the idea that indie vocals are bad actually contrary to the prevailing opinion...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
perpetua:
This is an extraordinarily depressing essay by former Voice editor/professional contrarian Chuck Eddy. It’s like a guy who used to be principal of a high school getting really angry about the outcome of his old school’s student council election.
The idea of Chuck’s I found interesting is that there’s a kind of default aesthetic at any one time - the stodgy U2-loving rock...
OK, one more P&J link and then I will stop. (Until... →
maura:
The Album Similarity Index, in which you get to see which records were likely to appear on the same ballot.
• Correlated pairs include: Dinosaur Jr. and Built To Spill (alt-rock elder statesmen); The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Camera Obscura (tweevenge); The Dead Weather and Pearl Jam and The Black Crowes (torch-passing?); PJ Harvey and John Parish and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis...
1993
1993 in Britain was the apex of scene-a-week genremaking by the music press: history focuses now on the proto-Britpop stuff (because it ‘won’ and because it was pretty good) but at the time that wasn’t such a sure thing at all and there was a forest of other stuff going on.* Such as!
New wave of new wave - reputationally poor punkiness, aggressive and political (SMASH, These...
Spoon - Transference →
They get very cerebral in arranging their material, but every clever move is entirely in the service of maximizing physical impact and gut-level response. These are not simply recordings of a top-notch rock quartet playing in a room; this is art built to hit precise emotional marks with an impressive balance of off-the-cuff improvisation and rigid discipline.
This - from Matt Perpetua’s...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-17) →
Yeasayer (11)
Vampire Weekend (11)
Eon (3)
Lady GaGa (2)
Raymond Scott (2)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is...”
– danah boyd’s angry reaction to Facebook’s anti-privacy move is a must read.
Part of the whole problem, I think - or at least why Mark Zuckerberg’s statements on it come across so weirdly - is that he’s been globally famous since his early 20s. So his personal experience of...
“If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its...”
– Arthur Lubow, “Making Art Out of an Encounter,” NYT
I would phrase it as “anything can be art if somebody says it is,” but the point at the end is the important thing.
(via barthel)
I would add - especially if the “somebody says” stipulation is true - that “is being art good for...
