January 2010
97 posts
Stereogum: Stream Pantha Du Prince BLACK NOISE →
This will somehow factor in to whatever I write tonight. It is a minor expansion on This Bliss, with an emphasis on minor because, you know, it’s not that different, but what is different is its preoccupation with notes that some minds register as “sad” and “dark.” Despite the negligible appearance of that Animal Collective guy and his continued attempts to return...
Jessica Hopper and I share the same cultural background, that being the 90s hardcore scene. She was a much bigger fish in that tiny pond than I ever was, so I spent that whole decade reading her fanzine articles while she was never and is still completely unaware of who I am. But because we were both involved in the same scene, I can speak with confidence about the sorts of conversations that were...
This is why I hate the role of Game Commissioner: it’s not actually interested in other people. White, black, Persian — it’s not really interested in anyone’s particulars or what they have to say about that experience. Mostly The Game just uses non-white people as cudgels for Americans to outmaneuver one another on the subject of who’s too bourgeois. In order for The Game to criticize bourgeois...
1 tag
While you’re stirring—and it’ll get frothy what with all that carbonation so don’t get too aggro with your stirage, right?—you’ll need to bless the punch in some way. If you’re a smart, you’ll chant “double, double toil and trouble.” If you’re a cool, you’ll rap, “I did it like this, I did it like that, I did it with a wiffle ball bat soooooo….”
I am neither of those things so I usually just...
Agh you guys you guys
barthel:
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. I mean, good lord, they started their second album with a couplet rhyming “horchata” with “balaclava.” When Nirvana did it they called it “Serve the Servants” and we thought it was awesome. ...
Nitsuh’s indignation being completely righteous, some part of me longs to believe that Jessica Hopper’s great transgression here is some accident of transition. My reasons for this longing don’t amount to more than “emo discourse would be shittier without her,” but the clause at hand (“‘One of my bandmates is Iranian-American” has got to be the...
What we are looking at here is a white woman selectively misquoting/mischaracterizing a statement of two people’s identity so that she can cast it as some kind of bragging, or some kind of defensiveness, which the clever white critic is here to debunk. A person’s actual identity — like, say, being Persian — is secondary to Hopper’s desire to fit it into her own critical hobbyhorses about privilege...
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WatchYes.
“Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.”
The “rich kid vacation in NYC” critique is spot on, but some of the rest of this NYT...
Appropriation, Vacation: Vampire Weekend take... →
The explanation he offers the New Yorker for his love of Ralph Lauren Polo shirts gets points for creativity: For him they’re a cultural emblem because Lauren, recently ranked the 224th richest person in the world, started out as a poor Jewish tailor in the same Bronx neighborhood Koenig’s dad grew up in. When he wears them he’s repping for the brand’s humble immigrant...
The second of these, since I think the first was Elton John/Billy Joel (I was 6, Elton was shilling for Made in England, Bill Joel was probably shilling for River of Dreams, and so they shilled in tandem!), was the triple bill of Montell Jordan/Boyz II Men/TLC, which was all Babyface-cowrites and choreography. I think this was age 7 or 8; it was regardless an age at which I could not be bothered...
They didn’t want me to sing it. They tried everybody else singing it except me cause I was the new guy, you know. And then… they asked me to try it because no one else could do it. Nobody else could do the high note. And then I got it in two takes and it really pissed them off. And then it really pissed them off when it went to No. 2 in the charts and I had my picture on the front of...
rendit:
iAin’tnogoddamnsonofabitch
So this is fucking off by degrees and I suppose we turned out to be not-quite-Hawaii but I can float back to sleep cause at least you’re lying to me like music that dances from glowing apartments as shadows entwine into a creamy darkness like jewelry hung down from rich silhouettes portrays on the sidewalk where wetness reflects all the colours of evening and the onset of lights like the...
Cold wind blowing over your private parts I know a lack you’ve got and it makes a strong case for art.
…
Smoking just a little too violently I know that fact I’ve got and I know it single-mindedly
Today, instead of working, I sit in awe of various Tragically Hip lyrics. Among my writerly influences, Gordon Downie has perhaps the greatest and most subconscious effect....
raptoravatar:
studentloansforbeermoney:
...
internet paradox
natepatrin:
agrammar:
One of the strangest paradoxes of the internet, to me, is that it both encourages and chips away at the foundations of “niche” and “specialized” content. It nurtures the stuff while eroding the category altogether. It’s full of material that is very specifically Not For You, and yet it teaches you to feel that you have access to everything, that everything is for you. All...
All intentions of productivity today are really a cleverly disguised Simpsons marathon.
god i don’t even care about vampire weekend
Vampire Weekend Review
hardcorefornerds:
allele:
hardcorefornerds:
allele:
I’ve been writing a weekly column for Air & Sea Battle, and just posted my review of Vampire Weekend’s Contra. I, uh, didn’t like it:
[…] […]
Let’s go step by step. First, the use of Animal Collective is something that (a) people can instantly understand and (b) something that is obvious in the Vampire Weekend record. I give a...
Hope for Haiti Now →
In which Mike Barthel makes me cry.
Well, my explanation—and this is extremely unscientific, of course—is that the sad emotions expressed by sad music syncs up with the feelings of sadness we’re having, and takes it from a heaving, unmoored, senseless panic to something ordered and regular. It is sadness with a beat, and the beat smooths it out, gives it somewhere to go. It is like the pace of...
“None of which is to say that people who “like” these bands don’t ACTUALLY like...”
– Matt Lemay nails the lo/glo/bro-fi movement and its relationship to notions of hype and “authenticity,” though he’s a lot nicer and more respectful than I would be. I don’t doubt that plenty, if not most, of the fans of this stuff like it, but to me, the rise of micro-niches like glo-fi and...
Pitchfork: Franco & le Tout Puissant OK Jazz:... →
In which Douglas Wolk introduces me to music I have never heard of before and makes it sound like a revelation, and I am compelled to stand in its thrall.
Last Plane to Jakarta: a few words about a live... →
The clip described herein is good, thin and bony. The writing that brings this clip to our newly erect attention is good, thick and reminds us of charms and what tiny minerals may hide in them and reflect light forever.
The Awl: "People on the Internet Like to Argue... →
I nodded my head several times in the reading of this discussion, because it was so often on point that I had to physically agree with the internet.
“Stillness Is the Move,” which puts 99% of modern R ‘n’ B to shame in terms of...”
– Rate Your Music user troutmask, from his long, long review of Bitte Orca.
I wasn’t even looking for examples of music racism, but here they are, worn with an awful pride.
(via unbornwhiskey)
I admit I don’t listen to 99-100% of modern R ‘n’ B (if that’s still a current term, in any case), but not...
“Stillness Is the Move,” which puts 99% of modern R ‘n’ B to...”
– Rate Your Music user troutmask, from his long, long review of Bitte Orca.
I wasn’t even looking for examples of music racism, but here they are, worn with an awful pride.
“But why did I set it on fire? Great question. I don’t know either!...”
– The Awl: Initial Reaction To Scott Brown’s Senate Victory In Massachusetts: An Imagined Monologue By The Republican Party, by Alex Balk. I like my shit metaphors overextended and perfect.
Dirty Projectors, Solange Knowles, and the Perils... →
This is Maura Johnston’s incredible articulation of the problem with genre in these days perched on the end of the pitchfork. Her words on the comparatively ignored (in this particular community) Maxwell and The-Dream are true and resemble light on formerly-obscured ground.
Matt Ealer elaborated on the music-racism bit, because there is a real and damnable bias against R&B in certain...
The Male Gaze and "The Big Bang Theory" →
andrewtsks:
placidhips:
love-and-radiation:
isopod:librarianpirate:(via camiwillknow)
Why I love this show. It realized it was being an ass about women and it fixed it. Remember the episode where Penny chews Wolowitz out, gets shamed into apologizing, then PUNCHES HIM IN THE FACE? SO GREAT.
Worth it for the (knock knock knock) Penny montage alone, in addition to the writing.
...
(desperation + noise): WHAT FOUL DUST FLOATED IN... →
I had a lot of fun writing this, which may or may not affect your reading experience, should you choose to endure its long paragraphs about Miles and all the hope and light I find in his music, about how Biggie sampled Miles in service of one of the most desperate and sad hip-hop tracks, about what sort of pall this might cast retroactively.
So it unfolds, and unfolds. It unfolds on its big...
