Posts tagged "criticism"

Blue Lines Revisited: The Oasis Moment

cureforbedbugs:

tomewing:

ajohnny replied to your quote: “[Oasis] ruined British music and they ruined…
what does this even mean though? the first part I can gather, but the second?
Fair point! It has a kind of emotional resonance because I remember going from a devoted reader of the UK press to…

Didn’t Radiohead ruin British music writing (again) the next year, tho? And then American music writing? And probably a bunch of other countries’ music writing? (I mean Radiohead ruined MY writing for a few years!)

Man, you’re acting like Brent DiCrescenzo never penned the words:

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It’s an album of sparking paradox. It’s cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it’s clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can’t wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.

(Actually kinda serious. Vulgar rococo is far better than so many other approaches to music crit.)

19
criticism music
Jun 18

katherinestasaph asked: For me the key line in that is "Even more telling than the artists who get this cosign are the talented artists in the same ballpark who don’t - who tend to be the ones without influential PRs, canny positioning or contacts."

This line of argument really seems of limited use to me. There are thousands — millions — of great unheard artists out there that would benefit if they had a record deal, or a nicely shot video, or a smart PR rep working them, and theoretically every bad artist who has those resources is denying them to the unheard ones who don’t. But the music business isn’t a meritocracy and pointing out that you consider Jai Paul’s marketing to be gauche doesn’t re-apportion those resources. And Lex wasn’t, say, using the space at The Quietus to shine a light on those “talented artists in the same ballpark.”[*] He was trying to make media criticism do the work of musical criticism (note his original Tumblr post: “I go in on worthless hypescam Jai Paul,” with the unnamed poorly performing journalists only an afterthought). 

I mean, I get the what about the artists you aren’t paying attention to? line when a writer is failing to tell a story properly due to such omission — for instance, articles about gay-positive rap that start and end with Macklemore — but there are untold quantities of new music out there. The idea that if only people would stop writing about Jai Paul they would select their subjects on the basis of merit seems extremely dubious.

*EDIT: Katherine responds

I mean, accusing Lex of “not shining a light on those talented artists in the same ballpark” is kind of ridiculous. I can’t think of many writers who do this more.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. And Lex has previously done exactly the thing I said he didn’t do here — I recall during the period where indie R&B was a hyped thing he wrote a “here are R&B acts you should check out” article that was well-written and valuable, for instance. 

3
question time music criticism
Apr 19

The Quietus | Opinion | Black Sky Thinking | Jai Paul: A Scam To Feed The Internet Sausage Machine

tomewing:

alexmacpherson:

In which I go in on worthless hypescam Jai Paul and his terrible music (and throw shade at lots of music journalists).

I missed this important news story on holiday. Still, there’s always D4ft Pvnk.

I think JP’s music is rubbish too, but even if it wasn’t the jigsaw piece approach to marketing which is so ubiquitous across pop culture is a real joy-killer for me. (And yet obviously I feed it by clicking on news sites, Twitter links et al) Down with F4 culture! No wait, there’s new posts on my dashboard…

I really don’t get this new (?) thing in music journalism of reviewing marketing campaigns — and no, I haven’t got around to reading that exposé of Justin’s 20/20 Experience — but the end result really seems like a nouveau form of “he doesn’t even write his own songs!” The aim always seems to be to prove the music is bad not because it sounds bad or isn’t enjoyable but because the process by which it reaches the listener is inauthentic. To which: who gives a shit?

(I also dislike it because it seems real inside baseball writing. If you’re a music journo receiving tons of PR emails in your inbox and watching your RSS feed fill up with breathless coverage of the same thing, your reaction is probably roll-eyes-at-the-hype, but if you’re not actually one of that very select group of people, you probably barely notice the existence of this kind of thing.)

I mean, check this out from the above:

Not so much a bewitching patchwork of samples as a My First Textiles home kit gone horribly wrong, it traded entirely on positioning: a KCi & JoJo sample here, a Jennifer Paige cover there, look! His taste is just like ours, with his admiration of ’90s pop and R&B! What a fascinating musical magpie of the internet generation! Aren’t we all fascinating musical magpies in 2013! How zeitgeisty, how very…now! Let’s give him a round of applause for being so similar to us!

Someone tried to fool very smart music journalist Alex Macpherson into thinking well of Jai Paul, but please notice that very smart music journalist Alex Macpherson saw right through their plot! What phonies these people are and how authentic v.s.m.j Alex Macpherson is for not being taken in by their phoniness!

I mean I don’t even remember what Jai Paul sounds like. (When did he first briefly matter? 2011? I dunno.) But I’m not exactly desperate for a new way to declare that certain artists aren’t real or to dismiss their fans as dupes. 

EDIT: And I do appreciate the value of media criticism. But this isn’t media criticism — the coverage is a (very) peripheral target. 

26
music criticism
Apr 19

Like a good journalist he described what he saw, a talent many critics lack. Young writers learn later that describing the thing itself will often reveal your attitude towards it, making the stating of opinions redundant.
Alfred Soto, “Roger Ebert — RIP,” Humanizing the Vacuum, April 4, 2013
5
criticism writing
Apr 05

Top ten moments in Rob Sheffield’s review of Taylor Swift’s Red Tour show in Newark, NJ.

One thing white, male, middle class critics (like me) like to do when we review shows attended by people who aren’t white, or male, or middle-class is to get anthropological. How weird it is to be out among the natives, we say. Let me describe for you their customs.

I can’t promise I haven’t used this trick. (In fact, I’m almost certain I have.) And I’ll defend it to a point: part of a show is the audience, and so often the audience should be a part of the review — and I hope I remember that fact when the audience is mostly people like me as well as when it’s people not like me. Anyway, this critical tic becomes particularly pronounced when the show is attended by a large audience of pre-teen girls. That’s when your average white male scribe can barely remember to mention the act on stage, so intent is he on describing how the audience responds to it. I guess the thinking is that an adult man can’t possibly understand something made for little girls, so an honest reviewer should attempt to communicate the experiences he witnesses rather than the show he sees.

Rob Sheffield does do the anthropological thing in his review of Taylor Swift’s Red Tour Newark show, but

  1. …at least he also takes the performer seriously and spends time discussing her.
  2. The headline: “Her Amps Go Up to 22”
  3. “Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone’s game.”
  4. “‘Hi, I’m Taylor,’ she said by way of an introduction. ‘I write songs about my feelings. I’m told I have a lot of feelings.’”
  5. “For most of them, Taylor is the first girl they’ve seen play a guitar, a signifier that cannot be denied.”
  6. “She also explained to the younger fans what a 12-string guitar is. ‘It has twice as many strings as a regular guitar. So that’s your math for the night.’ Educational!”
  7. “On her last tour, she took the stage to Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’; this time it was Lenny Kravitz’s version of ‘American Woman,’ a neat contrast.”
  8. “…’22’ got a breakdance and a snippet of the ‘Paid in Full’ beat…”
  9. “Seeing Taylor onstage now is just like seeing Morrissey in 1992 – that same level of total commitment, total fan fervor, total connection between audience and performer.”
  10. I’m pretty sad I won’t get to see Taylor while I’m in America but hopefully she’ll come back to Australia soon?
12
music criticism taylor swift top ten
Mar 30

Various girls of her creation

tress-fess (via isabelthespy):

Speak Now is such an interesting album to me because a lot of the narrators are, like, straight-up terrible and ~crazy~ girls, just blatantly and in a way that can be nothing but intentional, and, like, conceptually, thinking about Taylor Swift the writer, Taylor Swift the Real Girl, and Taylor Swift the White Dress Surprise Face Public Figure we or she or someone has her turned into, thinking about those together, I don’t know, it just makes this album and its irrefutably girly nastiness so fascinating to me. The stalker ex in “Speak Now” who ruins a wedding (the whole song is chirpier than Taylor’s usual voice, grating if you’re not too busy being charmed to death by the lash-fluttering wickedness. she’s shocked she was uninvited? she’s mocking the dress and She Gets The Guy!? What? but, also, yes yes yes!!!)  and the petty girl-hate of “Better Than Revenge” are the big examples but a kind of gum-smacking audaciousness permeates the whole album (in the best way)) and yet, they all really, really work? They’re really great? I really like “Better Than Revenge” and like, you can probably fuck off about slut-shaming, maybe, because vintage dresses really don’t give you dignity, you know, that’s not a lie. (I am kidding about “fuck off about slut-shaming,” but not about loving that song and not wanting to hear about why I should not.) I’m not sure what my point here was, other than that I like and appreciate all of those songs, and not in spite of the terribleness Taylor has chosen to endow the various girls of her creation with, but because of it.

I like this a lot, both because Heinous Bitch Taylor Is One Of My Favorite Taylors but mostly because people so rarely acknowledge that Taylor is an author who makes deliberate creative choices and makes works that, in the way all works do, get born into the world and become independent entities separate from the woman who created them. And it’s absurd that people don’t recognize this because Taylor has always identified from the very youthful beginning of her career as a songwriter and specifically a country songwriter, that is, someone who tells stylized stories to communicate emotional experiences that aren’t exclusively personal: so, in the tradition of the grand Nashville machine, but also, like, Hayes/Porter and Holland/Dozier/Holland and Rogers and Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein et. al. But people — both fans and, even more so, detractors — want to treat Taylor as someone who can do nothing but spew helplessly her personal life into the public sphere: not a creator but a conduit.

Or, qua Erika:

[M]en are allowed authorship in a way women aren’t, the choices men make when they write are treated as choices, but the choices women make when they write are so often treated as flaws. Or just the only thing they are able to do. How often does anyone ever think that when women write, it is a way for them to create a world that they control?

Taylor isn’t allowed to be a sophisticated storyteller the way male songwriters are; she’s not allowed in her music to blend the fictional and the real or to create worlds that can simultaneously exist and not-exist; we react to her music by insisting that everything she says is only her blank reflection of real life. (Rappers are treated this way as well, and to some extent so too are other African American artists, which is why people have such trouble understanding the interplay between performance and authenticity in hip-hop; see also Erin Aubry Kaplan and John McWhorter commenting on Arthur Spears.)

And this is why I’m extremely uninterested in discussions of Taylor’s dating life and how it manifests itself in her music; I see the obsession with it to be a denial of her creative agency as a songwriter. Like Ed said:

People get too caught up in who Taylor Swift sings about, and ignore what she sings about. For instance, “Dear John” is as much about teenage naïvety as it is about John Mayer, but good luck getting a thinkpiece green-lit about that.

And, I mean, I know Taylor encourages discussion of who-X-song-is-about through hints and demurrals, and whether that’s for her own commercial or personal reasons, I can’t dismiss entirely the purpose of this kind of exegesis. But confining criticism of her work to tabloid talmudics is terribly limiting.

(Source: bunnypunx)

138
music taylor swift gender criticism
Feb 01

Punk, pop, and politics

hardcorefornerds:

More fundamentally, what’s the purpose of poptimism? I like it if encourages me to broaden my tastes, or challenge existing definitions and categorisations of music. But I don’t like it if it encourages a total relativism between all forms of making and thinking about music, because in the absence of its own social utopia, that is essentially handing victory over to the commercial, chauvinistic machine of popular music. Put another way, what is important about things like punk and DIY is not so much their actual processes (and we know they can easily become corrupted and exclusionary without constant challenge) as the vision they give that people can do things differently and make their own change. And without that kind of vision, what is there to celebrate?

girlboymusic:

Uhhh except lol at the idea that other forms of music e.g. punk aren’t chauvinistic machines, that they can be as easy or easier to enter (for a maker OR for a fan) as pop music, and that pop music has never given anyone the idea that “people can do things differently and make their own change”?

What Erika said, but there’s an especially intriguing gap between how open and welcoming punk/DIY folks think their communities are and how everyone else perceives them. This is particularly accentuated for marginalised social groups — albeit complicated because of the simultaneous success some members of those groups have had in carving out their own spaces in those genres — but it can apply to anyone really. Those scenes can be really cliquish and alienating if you don’t have the requisite background knowledge, social connections, or even basic understanding of how information within the community is disseminated.

It’s something I talked about here:

I don’t generally value authenticity, but I understand it in its punk conception: as a fealty to one’s self, to one’s place, and to one’s community. Meanwhile, punk’s wariness of conformity has generally manifested itself in an embrace of the aesthetic of various inner urban artistic and youth-oriented subcultures … One option was to fake it: buy the right clothes, listen to the right records, move to the right neighborhoods, and eventually become part of a community sufficiently socially peripheral as to be called punk. I’m sure many kids did this, and found it deeply satisfying.

Pop, on the other hand, benefits from the emancipatory potential of capitalism. It’s much easier to join a community when entry is cheap — money instead of knowledge and connections. (As I’ve said before, Hot Topic is good for punk because it democratizes it.) 

None of which is to say that pop is better than punk or that they should even be set at odds. (Punk is pop.) But a grand myth in punk that is difficult for its adherents to understand is that it isn’t as welcoming to everyone as they found it to be. (I suppose a grand myth of pop is that its pluralism is always inclusive?)

(Source: gaysagainstgaga)

35
music pop criticism
Dec 30

Tom Haverford is at the vanguard of Tumblr music critic disputes. (Everyone remember that episode where he had strong opinions vis-a-vis Grimes vs. Charli XCX?)

Tom Haverford is at the vanguard of Tumblr music critic disputes.

(Everyone remember that episode where he had strong opinions vis-a-vis Grimes vs. Charli XCX?)

(Source: )

25129
criticism music television parks and rec
Dec 30

the-metres-gained:

scarfy:

lindsaur-gor:

sewverycunty:

scottfriday:

bringtheruckuss:

themattsmith:

l3fan-o-rama:

luckyshirt:

Miley Cyrus - Jolene

Hold up.

Miley Cyrus can… sing…?

I’ve said this a couple times- Miley Cyrus is going to make an album in about 5 years that’s going to blow us all away.

I’d be thrilled with Miley Cyrus making legitimately good music. It’s about time for pop music to stop sucking again. I think that’s how pop music works, it’s cycles though crappy decades and great decades. 

WOW.

WOW.


I keep saying that there is no dearth of talent in pop music but nobody believes me! They all need to release country albums (real country, not like that weird crossover stuff) to prove it.

^^ Agreed. This is just lovely. Dolly would be proud.

Um. Wow?

I really hope Miley Cyrus doesn’t ever feel the need to go all “authentic” and make boringly proficient music like this. (Careers of whom nobody needs to replicate: Mandy Moore.) We don’t need to wait for Cyrus to blow us away with amazing pop; “See You Again” and “Party in the U.S.A.” have already happened, as has the half-incredible Breakout.

P.S. to music writers: we think rockism is dead but to most people it’s just common sense. 

11316
music criticism pop
Dec 27

Yes, I still maintain that complaining about other people’s year end lists is the definition of useless (especially when it comes to aggregated lists), but <sweetie belle>oh, come on!</sweetie belle>

Yes, I still maintain that complaining about other people’s year end lists is the definition of useless (especially when it comes to aggregated lists), but <sweetie belle>oh, come on!</sweetie belle>

5
music 2012 criticism
Dec 19


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