The Excitement Plan

Is this the most punchable guy ever, or is this the most...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:37:00 -0400

Is this the most punchable guy ever, or is this the most punchable guy ever?

Quick addendum to previous post: I should note that I myself am a generalist—since I’m...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:51:49 -0400

Quick addendum to previous post: I should note that I myself am a generalist—since I’m interested in a lot of different things—who telegraphs a chief interest (mainstream-ish rock) by what I’ve consistently chosen to write about. So yeah.

"Sure, fine, dig deep. I think the answer is to dig deep on a lot of things, but yes, that takes an..."

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:24:00 -0400

“Sure, fine, dig deep. I think the answer is to dig deep on a lot of things, but yes, that takes an inordinate amount of time, and I certainly don’t always live up to my own bar. But you have to try. I think to be a true pop critic, you should listen widely, and with curiosity, and with dedication. That’s not saying I don’t appreciate someone who’s extremely knowledgeable about one thing and not others; it’s just that I don’t think that’s what this job is about.”

- This is Jon Caramanica of the New York Times, summing up the prevailing thought vis a vis music writing among many big-time critics to The Daily Swarm. I have no problem with this philosophy as it pertains to Caramanica or any music critic who sets out to be a generalist. But the idea that being “extremely knowledgeable about one thing and not others” is not “what this job is about” is problematic, if not flat-out wrong. “Listen widely, and with curiosity, and with dedication” has been been gospel during the so-called “poptamist” era in music criticism going back at least a decade, back when policing year-end lists for sufficient representation of a diversity of genres started becoming widespread. As if music fans think about artists solely in terms of genre tags, or that artists that get lumped under those tags by the media are somehow exactly the same or cancel each other out. “Listen widely” obviously means different things to different people but that’s beside the point; I think Caramanica is unfairly dismissing the validity of gaining expertise in a specific segment of the impossibly vast solar system that is popular music, rather than gaining something less than expertise in lots of segments (but still only a fraction of what’s out there). I can’t think of a music critic that I read regularly who doesn’t have some kind of specific expertise; some of them are self-described metal, rap, EDM, etc. writers, others have made their preferences known by what they’ve consistently chosen to write about. Specialist critics realize they’re not working in a vacuum; as with everything in our a la carte media age, readers turn to them for their knowledge in this area, just as they’ll turn to lots of other writers for commentary in their respective areas of knowledge. And that strikes me as a healthy, and honest, attitude about the limitations of covering something as decentralized as pop. While it’s good for critics to push themselves outside of their comfort zones as listeners, it’s equally important to recognize that, as a writer, you don’t need to state a public opinion on every single artist, genre, or trend right away—or at all, particularly when there are writers who can address them so much better than you can. The wisdom of “listen widely” is clear; the wisdom of “write widely” less so.

I wrote about Muse, EDM, Greg Dulli, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis,...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 22:57:49 -0400

I wrote about Muse, EDM, Greg Dulli, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and why pop-culture prognostication is a scam for Grantland.

"What’s wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. And yet my hostility toward Mumford & Sons remains...."

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 12:53:24 -0400

“What’s wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. And yet my hostility toward Mumford & Sons remains. There’s just something about this band that rubs me the wrong way, and I couldn’t figure out why exactly until I remembered what Brian Phillips wrote last year about Tim Tebow: “Whenever I catch one of Tebow’s games, I tend to lose sight of the scoreboard and just focus on the metacompetition, the weird Joan of Arc drama that seems to go along with everything he does … I find myself half-consciously rooting for Tebow to fail, even though I have nothing against him.” I suddenly realized that Mumford & Sons essentially is Tim Tebow in an indie-rock context.”

- I think I just wrote the Fake Grantland-iest story ever.

"Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear may well brawl like butcher boys in their spare time, but on the clock they..."

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:25:00 -0400

“Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear may well brawl like butcher boys in their spare time, but on the clock they tend to keep it pale and incorporeal and non-punk-rock. They gather in misty mansions and tweak their vintage instruments. Their music is not channeled or forced narrowly and madly out of them, Cobain-style, but sort of … secreted, ectoplasmically, from certain sacs or glands around the band organism.”

- I fully understand if people don’t like or “get” the new Grizzly Bear album. I wrote my own piece about how the record isn’t terribly engaging or easy to like, at least not at first. But, boy howdy, is this Slate review of Shields terribly annoying and just sort of terrible. James Parker’s thesis is that Grizzly Bear goes about making music in a “non-punk” way, which might be a valid criticism—rather than a plainly obvious statement of fact akin to “this band has four members” or “Grizzly Bear is a group named Grizzly Bear”—if Grizzly Bear were an avowed punk group or made music that aped the (extremely tired) pretensions of punk rock. In case we weren’t already overly familiar with said pretensions, Parker gives a reverent rundown; this guy’s posture is all about angry bellows and fuzzboxes and Nashville Pussy CDs. And Grizzly Bear just doesn’t conform to any of that. Here are some other things Grizzly Bear isn’t: a hip-hop collective, a bluegrass trio, a heavy metal octet, a free-jazz duo, a country-western orchestra, etc. Now that we have that out of the way, how about addressing the central task of the record reviewer and ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT WHAT THE RECORD IS. Again, I can fully understand people not connecting with Shields—I’m not sure I’m 100 percent of the way there yet myself—but it’s not valid to rip something for not being something it never set out to be. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to try to understand what the record is, even if you don’t like it? I know, as a reader, that’s what I’d prefer to read, rather than see the same old song-and-dance about “pale, meaningless” indie rock that self-styled trend-buckers—see the predictable line about “flinging the old laurels, hailing it as Album of the Year” directed at snooty strawmen—never get tired to trotting out. At the very least, can we please stop treating punk as the be-all end-all of honest, real, “powerful” expressions in a rock context? How are we still doing this now, in 2012, for crissakes? There’s more than one way to be good, man!

'to apply, send us approximately 1,000 words about yourself and your tastes

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:42:33 -0400

maura:

… and if we do get back to you, which we might not because we’re OMG SO BUSY, and like you, we’ll pay you two dollars a post.’

Nobody should have to write 1,000 WORDS to get a job that pays $2/post. That said, when I was young and desperate to get published, I wrote for nuthin’, so this is nothing new sadly.

I thought it would be interesting if somebody wrote about the...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:39:51 -0400

I thought it would be interesting if somebody wrote about the films of P.T. Anderson through the lens of Fiona Apple’s music, and Fiona Apple’s music through the lens of P.T. Anderson’s films. When I couldn’t find that article anywhere I decided to write it myself. Pretty psyched by how it turned out.

I wrote this month’s We’re No. 1 column on...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:55:17 -0400

I wrote this month’s We’re No. 1 column on Boston’s Don’t Look Back, a pretty good follow-up to an amazing debut record that’s still popular and yet weirdly undervalued critically. I’m not sure why Boston hasn’t been granted the revisionist cred that nearly every other big-time stadium rock band from the ’70s has gotten. Seriously, Boston is an amazing record! It’s so spotless and shiny that it’s practically post-modern as rock music, even now. I’m putting a ton of capital in a Boston revival. Join me! Prices are low at the moment.

Like a lot of people, I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the new...

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:21:00 -0400

Like a lot of people, I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the new Animal Collective LP. I think the group is suffering from an obvious case of Merriweather Post Pavilion hangover, but Centipede Hz also speaks to a larger … something missing in contemporary indie-rock, at least for those of us who thought it was going to become the new culture-dominating alt-rock of the 21st century. Anyway, I wrote about these things and more for Grantland.

: I @?#$!askflkaldj! NY

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 20:13:00 -0400

: I @?#$!askflkaldj! NY:

rachael-maddux:

Over the past year or so I have been reading a lot of memoir-ish essay collections written by women in their twentywhatevers and here is what I have to say about that: I am so tired of New York City.

1 million billion times THIS. Not just about memoirs written by women by the incredibly annoying idea that stories set in NYC are inherently interesting, and that’s what makes them inescapable in media (as opposed to raging myopia).

Has there been a straight-ahead, gut-level rock song as a good...

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 14:26:34 -0400

Has there been a straight-ahead, gut-level rock song as a good as this in the last several years? Goddamn, I miss the Eagles Of Death Metal.

"Thriller is the sound of absolute victory, where the hero is carried into the sunset on the..."

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:14:00 -0400

“Thriller is the sound of absolute victory, where the hero is carried into the sunset on the shoulders of friends; Bad is what happens the following morning, when the hero must face living the rest of his life in the shadow of all that, with old, unshakeable demons still intact.”

- Michael Jackson’s Bad turns 25 today. This is something I wrote about it last year.

Is Yeasayer’s Fragrant World this year’s secretly...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:26:00 -0400

Is Yeasayer’s Fragrant World this year’s secretly good album that everybody seems to hate? Or did I miss the memo announcing that this band sucks now? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought consensus on Yeasayer was that it was pretty decent band on the last album cycle for Odd Blood. That was the record that turned me around on Yeasayer anyway. When most of the rock press thought these guys were the bee’s knees at the time of All Hour Cymbals, I thought Yeasayer was a boring Animal Collective rip-off. But Odd Blood was like the Stone Temple Pilots version of Merriweather Post Pavilion, slightly dumbed down and super catchy. Fragrant World carries on in the same vein with a few “ambitious” flourishes—it is their Tiny Music … Music From The Vatican Gift Shop—only now the critical tide has suddenly (weirdly?) turned against them. I dunno, maybe Yeasayer was always lame. But this song is great no matter what anybody says.

Mark Richardson: Music Listening and Alleged Conflict

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:21:06 -0400

Mark Richardson: Music Listening and Alleged Conflict:

markrichardson:

Something I saw being said last week in many of the interesting discussions about the Pitchfork list is people saying they loved to “argue about music.” There’s this apocryphal scene where two people sit and have a heated exchange about whether early Beatles is better than late Beatles or some shit. And I dunno, I’ve never had a single in-person argument like that in my life, with anybody. It sounds miserable. I’m willing to concede that it does happen, but I’m guessing it happens far less than people say, since I’ve been in record stores and in the presence of music obsessives for many, many hours in my long life, and I’ve barely ever seen this sort of thing outside of High Fidelity. Conversations about music is another story.

I don’t know if I can emphasize this enough: I HATE arguing with people about music. I’m not sure if I even like TALKING about music. Somebody (maybe Klosterman?) once said that if he’s at a party he’d much rather end up in a conversation about sports than music. That’s definitely true for me. The great thing about music is that it’s so intensely personal and even spiritual for people; it’s hard to seperate feelings about songs that you love from the feelings you have about yourself and your own life sometimes. Not to say that doesn’t happen with sports, but at least with sports you have things like statistics and championship titles to act as hard “evidence” as to which is “better” in an argument. Also, there’s no expectation that two fans of opposing teams will ever persuade each other. With music, it seems like we are always trying to talk each other out of liking something.

I wrote about Divine Fits and sorta-superbands for Grantland.

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:16:55 -0400

I wrote about Divine Fits and sorta-superbands for Grantland.

Congrats to Cher Lloyd’s “Want U Back” for...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:44:28 -0400

Congrats to Cher Lloyd’s “Want U Back” for annoying the holy living shit out of me like no other pop single in 2012 (so far!)

anthonyisright: JDC JAMS 1982-1992, Vol. 1: The Classics Those...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:07:34 -0400

anthonyisright:

JDC JAMS 1982-1992, Vol. 1: The Classics

Those who dared to check out my One Star Music…from the ‘92 Rolling Stone Album Guide playlist may have noticed a Pitchfork favorite or two - notably Galaxie 500 and Talk Talk - were included. The man who slammed those bands, as well as the first Husker Du album and the entire (unavailable for streaming) discography of Big Black, was J.D. Considine, who wrote for Rolling Stone all through the ’80s and into the mid ’90s, when he starred on VH1’s brief, beautiful critics’ roundtable Four On The Floor (he currently writes primarily about jazz for The Globe and Mail). While he didn’t write the whole Album Guide, he wrote a healthy chunk of it, including a lot of the entries concerning popular and underground music of the ’80s (from Bobby Brown to Guns ‘N Roses to Madonna to Run-DMC to Sonic Youth), and a good bit of the jazz, which would mostly be gone from the ‘04 edition.

So if he didn’t think Big Black (“to be honest, it’s just noisy”), Galaxie 500 (“pointless and self-indulgent”) and Talk Talk (“simply grew more pretentious with each passing year”) were worth a music lover’s time, what artists did he recommend? The answer can be found in JDC JAMS 1982-1992, Vol. 1: The Classics, which features highlights from albums from that time that Considine gave four-and-a-half to five stars (one per artist). I tried to focus on songs that JDC specifically praised himself, from the opener, Anthrax’s NSFW Tipper dis “Startin’ Up A Posse,” to the closer, Steve Wynn and Johnette Napolitano’s cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie & Clyde,” which is erroneously presented as proof of Wynn’s “strengths as a writer.” When he didn’t point out a particular favorite, I sometimes went with a track Robert Christgau hailed (while they have their differences, both are bespectacled blurb legends who want you to hear James Blood Ulmer). Failing that, I took a honest shot at picking one myself.

Though Nirvana “at their best…typify the low-key passion of post-MTV youth,” they only received four stars from JDC for Nevermind. If you want a diverse taste of what crit picks were like back when a Van Hagar/jazz enthusiast was allowed to give Nevermind less than five in a major publication (and the Woodentops more than four), here’s a chance to revel in the dated and gated.

Memories! I was a regular watcher of Four On The Floor back in the day, as well as a cover-to-cover reader of the Rolling Stone Album Guide.(My mom got it for me for Xmas ‘92, and I remember snooping in her closet and excitedly reading the entry on U2. Pre-internet nerd alert!)

“Baba O’Riley” is probably my favorite song...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:54:14 -0400

“Baba O’Riley” is probably my favorite song ever, so I’m predisposed to loving any movie or TV show that attempts to harness the song’s massive reservoir of drama for its own ends. But, hoo-boy, tonight’s season finale of The Newsroom used it super awkwardly (and almost comically, though certainly not on purpose) at a pivotal moment. If you want to see a much better montage set to “Baba O’Riley,” check out this clip from Spike Lee’s otherwise forgotten 1999 film Summer Of Sam. I haven’t seen S.O.S. since it was in theaters, and I remember thinking that a hardcore punk would never play air guitar to Who’s Next. But this is a cool scene regardless.

I haven’t been making it out to many shows lately, on...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:29:00 -0400

I haven’t been making it out to many shows lately, on account of being a new dad and all. I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things a bit more once Henry’s sleep schedule stabilizes, but for now I’ve been enjoying the best part of not going out often, which is looking forward to going out. I don’t consider myself a jaded or cynical person when it comes to live music: I’ve worked hard to not be jaded, if only because I don’t ever want to lose what Jeff Bebe called “the fucking buzz” that only comes from a magical concert experience. It’s just that being away from it has made me yearn all the more for those moments when you can experience music you usually hear privately in a sweaty, drunken mass of humanity.

I bring this up because I’m really excited about seeing Futurebirds when the band comes through Wisconsin in October. Futurebirds blew me away when I saw them twice in one night last November, and I’ve been a big kick lately of DLing shows off of Archive.org. This live recording of Stevie Nicks’ “Wild Heart” is available on the site; I first heard it on the vinyl release of Seney-Stowall released for Record Store Day. As much as I love Futurebirds’ proper studio releases (which for now is one LP, Hampton’s Lullaby, and two EPs), “Wild Heart” is the band’s definitive song for now. A lot of hope and beauty and recklessness blows past you in this tune.