15 November 2006
IT'S PRONOUNCED "RIF" (THE SECOND F IS SILENT)
I Was Meant For The Stage
Apropos nada (oh who am I kidding), I'm bummed a) how squeamish people get when a brother draws some blood writing-wise, b) how unwilling people are to think hey maybe there's a reason this brother's drawing more than the fair liter, c) how wtf that we're totally fine with one dude masquerading as a dead baby (cf. "Leslie Anne Levine") but lolocaust livid with another masquerading as Indie Rock Naysayer (cf. "Taynted Love").
Part of the outrage has to do with context--indie rock and dead babies pretty much go hand in hand so whatevs, whereas the only quote acceptable quote printable forms of alt weekly music writing are straightlaced buy-it-or-not consumer guide semi-crit and just-buy-this-already music puff pieces, with pretty much nothing in between--which means part of the outrage has do with expectations, i.e. stick to the facts, make no mistakes, never think too hard. I wonder if the Voice music section was still called RIFFS whether people would take this piece a little more face-value, i.e. an overreaching, dangerously veeringly ad hominem and totally cough visceral rant and the best written piece the section's run since the last Blogwash, and whether said people would take a sec to think about why they like/love the Decemberists, to participate in a dialogue that rarely happens anymore in this Everything Is Everything, Everything Is Good blackhole that music quote criticism's become.
Definition and exclusion are legit mechanisms of articulating one's tastes, so at the end of the day, the piece and the comments that follow it exist to say that no artist can put himself out there for praise without being subject to indifference and disdain too. Plus, no performance is ever not manufactured--and fuck, no person is ever not performing, be it playing nice on the phone with the T-Mobile rep to get the rebate you forgot to send in or not taking the extra five seconds in front of a stall to shake off a pee droplet because the guy next to you might think that's weird. And so a writer performs, sometimes with a certain goal in mind, sometimes not, hate it or love it or who gives a fuck it. And just like I'm glad we have songs about black guys selling drugs, I'm happy somebody jumped on this grenade of sorts and played the unabashed Decemberist basher. Too much artificial "getting it" these days, too much figuring thing X out and moving on to thing Y, not enough dialogue about whether we actually like the stuff to begin with.
22 RIFFS
// posted by NBS @ 8:00 AM 
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I'm with ya that criticism needs to get all mad at itself more often. I mean, Stanley Crouch gets in fights about hard bop! and you can't even lindyhop to that shit, let alone mosh with big sweaty dudes. As for Ott, he needs to call out specific people so that really dumb shit ends up in print. I'm with him on the Decemberists, but the last blogwash thing about the Hold Steady struck me as so odd that I wrote 3000 words with footnotes about it
oh yeah and Ott sucks for hating on Deerhoof. think you're with me on that.
oh yeah and Ott sucks for hating on Deerhoof. think you're with me on that.
It's my guess that if it were anyone other than Ott, the piece would've gotten a different reception among critics. But as you've suggested, criticism has become something of a taboo now that we're living in rockism's McCarthy era.
I don't even know the Decembersits, but that article is fucking awful, and hey you're not a fucking awful wrtier so you probably know this.
Minr issue: It's not actually making any propositions except that Caucasians shouldn't write or listen to sad songs, and the rest is just a bunch of schoolyard insults. Not even schoolyard insults about music or culture.
Major issue: After reading the article I have no idea why the Decemberists suck, except that it has something to do with the new ritualistic practice of naming Wes Anderson the source of all war, rape and famine -- you can trade The Decemberists for pretty much anything and keep the article as is, a mass-produced dump of every hipster-on-hipster cliche ever invented, not only hypocritical and vain but very, very lazy.
So lazy that this anthology of uber-zeitgeisty, cool, shiny, and yes, pretty damn effective and occasionally-scathingly-correct-in-their-original-context cliches actually kind of give the feeling that the guy who wrote it didn't so much write but moved large chunks of language around (rather than moving small or medium chunks of language around like all writing).
Or: "X, instead of being a good family magazine hack, has become a bad Expressionist. He appeals to Man, God, the Spirit, Goodness, Chaos; and out of such big words he squeezes his sophisticated sentences. He could not possibly do so, were he to imagine the totality of their meaning, or at least grasp their utter unimaginability... he had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms."
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Minr issue: It's not actually making any propositions except that Caucasians shouldn't write or listen to sad songs, and the rest is just a bunch of schoolyard insults. Not even schoolyard insults about music or culture.
Major issue: After reading the article I have no idea why the Decemberists suck, except that it has something to do with the new ritualistic practice of naming Wes Anderson the source of all war, rape and famine -- you can trade The Decemberists for pretty much anything and keep the article as is, a mass-produced dump of every hipster-on-hipster cliche ever invented, not only hypocritical and vain but very, very lazy.
So lazy that this anthology of uber-zeitgeisty, cool, shiny, and yes, pretty damn effective and occasionally-scathingly-correct-in-their-original-context cliches actually kind of give the feeling that the guy who wrote it didn't so much write but moved large chunks of language around (rather than moving small or medium chunks of language around like all writing).
Or: "X, instead of being a good family magazine hack, has become a bad Expressionist. He appeals to Man, God, the Spirit, Goodness, Chaos; and out of such big words he squeezes his sophisticated sentences. He could not possibly do so, were he to imagine the totality of their meaning, or at least grasp their utter unimaginability... he had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms."
# posted by 
: 9:03 PM
: 9:03 PM << Home
