Sasha Frere-Jones: Really?????

yep, as a former acoustic gtr. droning bore, i too must take issue with your constant unwarranted taunts, ithappens.

it's really only the beginning of what's wrong with that piece though which is a triumph of hyperconservative grandpa-ing - take for example

This one works beautifully, and with none of the "evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today.

which is just ultimate strawman dance party, or from the beginning of the same graf

Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English.

lol really herr myers? tell that to THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. tell it to Melville, whom you attempt to champion elsewhere in your essay when in fact the Myerses of Melville's day were exactly the dudes keeping Melville down.

and so on. sorry to get all lit up but I remember when this piece ran and being especially pissed because when he dismisses some writers I don't like, I totally feel this guy, but then I realize he's being dishonest; all he really means, to quote my favorite ilx post in recent memory, is "I remember it were all fields around here"

Er. there are no constant taunts: that's the first time I've ever replied to J0hn, or mentioned acoustic guitars, and I apologised immediately. I think you must be confusing me with someone else.

*shakes fist*

not even a big deal ithappens I'm just hypersensitive 1) generally and 2) to the idea that because I'm a singer-songwriter I'm somehow a champion of the form, when y'know I listen to more metal & ambient than dudes who sound like me/whom I sound like etc

God that fuckin piece is the worst thing ever

it the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing.

oh cool I'll just throw this copy of Ulysses in the garbage then you reactionary prick

This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE

off to Fox News w/you Mr Myers

ok I'll stop now

"This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.

THE CULTURAL ELITE"

Okay, take out cultural elite - which is an idiot phrase to use - and that's a commonplace of critical reaction, and especially in music blog criticism, where the inability to enjoy certain acts does appear to mark the listener out as a cretin. Not an uncommon trend on some threads round here. With books, it took me years to convince myself it was okay not to finish them if I was bored - precisely because of the reactions Myers writes about. Though maybe that suggests more that I was unsure of my own opinions than anything else. But, yes, "cultural elite" would certainly take us into Fox News territory if prefaced by "liberal".

i blame jaymc for all of this.

it's the same thing. it means, "anybody who says he likes this must be lying, he can't like this thing that I'm ridiculing!" myers should be left outside overnight in Chicago in January imo

I blame the parents.

"it's the same thing. it means, "anybody who says he likes this must be lying, he can't like this thing that I'm ridiculing!" myers should be left outside overnight in Chicago in January imo"
Okay, but "you're a poser" doesn't exist without "you're a cretin".

Oh, why can't we all just love one another?

Back to SFJ ---

Jay-Z’s new album, “The Blueprint 3,” and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms. Disco, it turns out, is always a good default move.

“The Blueprint 3” falls in line with other recent mass-market successes in hip-hop. Compare it to Kanye West’s “Glow in the Dark” tour, or Kid Cudi’s breakout hit “Day ’n’ Nite,” and you will notice that this is hip-hop by virtue of rapping more than sound. The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs.

Oh no, hiphop hits are using disco beats in 2009.

In the past he whined that indie-rockers didn't have syncopation (and by the looks of his top 10 albums he has moved on from that) and now its the rappers who don't have it.

i don't think there's anything wrong with preferring bounce beats to eurodisco, tho postulating it as anything other than a constant need for new (or recycled) rhythmic fuel is probably a mistake.

on the myers piece, i'm always happy to see that dead horse dragged back out for another beating.

the real problem with the sfj piece is that he appears to only be capable of listening to like 3 hip-hop albums a year.

Hip-hop is in a state of permanent decline because Jay-Z continues to make mediocre to awful albums, says SFJ.

there was a good album released in 2008, but that will be the last one.

Does Mary J. Blige really have more personality than Rihanna? I like Rihanna precisely because she has a very specific (and admittedly very limited) vocal persona. I also thought this was more or less the standard critical take on Rihanna. Blige I always have problems with because despite the autobiographical bent of much of her material, she can sometimes seem a little anonymous as a singer - I don't tend to remember specific details of her phrasing like I do Rihannna (or Nina Simone for that matter). Or is the swipe really just the opportunity for Frere-Jones to get in the polemical pairing of Blige and Simone, evoking them as artists of equal stature and importance as a kind of rhetorical tweaking of people otherwise not paying attention?

As far as the overall argument, I think it only holds water if you maintain a very limited notion of what hip-hop is. A certain model and ideal of hip-hop, as represented by Jay-Z or Raekwon, might be on the wane, but hip-hop as represented by the Black Eyed Peas (though I guess they're "pop" now, not hip-hop) is doing just fine. Which might spell the end of civilization, but not the end of hip-hop.

This Myers lad is quite the douche.

He wants 'unaffected English prose' yet he stans for Mervyn Peake?!?! I love Mervyn Peake but, um...

And LOLOLOL @ 19th century literature showing us the 'unaffected'.

tbqf i think some of u guys are totally misreading what hes saying -- hes still rong tho

i have a very limited notion of what hip hop is.

The common reader be damned.

Plain reader too.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer be damned.

hip hop's been dead - insofar as it is neither a vanguard for experimentation nor the template for pop chart success - since at least the early part of this decade

If hip-hop is dead can someone please pry R&B from its cold dead hand?

it has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

h8 these dum sluts

yes very good Lamp I'm quite outraged

hip hop is dead women write poetry think about it

I can't read think about it

and now it turns out roxanne shante isn't even a PhD.

It has become fashionable, especially amongst female rappers, to exploit the licence of ho'etry while claiming exemption from ho'etry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

hip hop is dead women write poetry think about it

all time HOF post imo

Reptilian overlords keepin' Theodore Dreiser down

i blame floetry

just curious but who's who is misreading, deej? i don't get why hip hop "atomizing" and wandering away from it's original form marks the end of it as thrilling new music. seems that's exactly the sort of thing it should be doing in order to keep from growing stale. he sure is reading a whole lot into a few hip hop albums sounding a bit more dancey; but as call all destroyer said above the albums mentioned in the article are probably the only ones he's listened to all year.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33566

also ew he likes DOA

Reptilian overlords keepin' Theodore Dreiser down

LOL I'm actually reading Dreiser now, reptiles can't stop me

http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/admissions/v_l.jpg

why is that picture a the yale law admissions blog

but as call all destroyer said above the albums mentioned in the article are probably the only ones he's listened to all year.

just a q btw, do you guys seriously believe this or is it a job requirement to say stuff like it

why is that picture a the yale law admissions blog

who do u think is running this country????

john it's just the way the article reads

otm

yeah no I get that but it's one thing to say "weird to me how a guy who clearly hears a lot of [genre] can come away w/those opinions" and another to actually get extend that to fantasy-land conceptions of who's more/less informed

(sorry, the whole "I disagree with someone, therefore he's clearly not in possession of the same information as me" style is a big irritant for me) (LOL along w/lots of other stuff today it seems)

dude i probably listen to <10 new hip-hop albums a year but i would never write something that was pre-framed w/"ever year has ONE BIG RAP ALBUM" which is what he basically does.

i think weve probably talked in the past about how when sf-j writes for the new yorker there's a sense that he dumbs things down a bit but to say that the blueprint 3 can be subbed in for "the state of hip-hop" in 2009 is pretty wack--if anything he should be telling that readership that just like every genre there's a bunch of interesting shit happening year in and year out.

my bad I'm just really contrary today sorry