OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

it's still not that much worse than 99% of music shit you read online

agreed, when i found out the npr connection i was like 'oh, that's why anybody has noticed this'. it's not worse than 99% of the music shit npr actually pays for.

btw not that anyone asked, but the experiment i referred to above was not music-related

"But instead I am going to self censor and not say what I'm really thinking here because that's ~what girls do~."

or maybe you're just growing up. it's never too late.

Wow, you're still a condescending asshole, at least that hasn't changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5TxpJVKKQ8

this really isn't a good look, unless maybe branwell bell literally murdered your literal kittens

coffee, though, really? It's a pretty popular beverage iirc

― post-nodern music player (wins), Saturday, March 15, 2014 4:49 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok WTF with this open goal going unexploited with the requisite Gang Starr joke?

This blog... I just kind of wonder how useful it is.
I think it's quite amusing in places. Only read the Albert Ayler one, and questions of gender aside, it does a good job of reiterating exactly the kind of thoughts that someone who is unfamiliar with this kind of music would say - 'it sounds like tuning up', 'it sounds like a dying animal' etc. These are common criticisms of jazz from the uninitiated (along with two favourites from my own partner: 'All the jazz you listen to is either crazy typing music or it sounds like Snoopy!') - they're not wrong, a lot of jazz does sound like this. Without maybe a bit of context and/or background, it can be hard to really tell much of it apart or understand what's going on.
As someone who only recently came to jazz myself, in an admittedly willful way, (because it sounds like a lot of dying cartoon animals trying to type letters on out-of-tune instruments), it was only curiosity which drove me to try and acquire an appreciation for it. I found I could only do this by comparing different artists and eras, reading a bit about the historical, personal and philosophical contexts of the recordings, and listening to shitloads of it. Even this method felt unnaturalistic, like I was giving myself some sort of education as opposed to coming to jazz through some organic chance process. I guess any genre which was pre-formed before one had an awareness of it requires this unnatural approach to some extent - the opposite of discovering new music as it happens etc... So approaching this music in this methodical way is an interesting exercise, but it's the equivalent of getting me to write a blog about a car exhibition or a season of American football... maybe a bit LOL for a couple of entries but unless it's saying anything new, I can imagine it'd get pretty tiring and just piss people off after a while.
So yeah, where was I? I have to question what this blog is for, other than being a fairly entertaining exercise in naif/not naif bloggery. Are music fans and/or non-music fans actually learning anything from it? Do we get any new incites here, or is it all going to be 'Wow, some songs are 11 minutes long!' kind of stuff?

i don't get the term "faux-naif". sometimes it seems like people use this term to describe people who are just being upfront about the stuff they don't know, and in my view the best nonfiction writing does that.

Well I did enjoy the exchange between fictional insufferable ppl in waterface's parody quote up there, a+

Gonna go ahead an assume the actual blog yall are reading on purpose is nothin like that otherwise Jesus

xpost I actually appreciate this attitude. Rather someone is upfront about what they don't know than someone who pretends they know what they're talking about but clearly hasn't got a clue. But there are two extremes here - there's "I know everything about everything" and there's "Duh, what are these funny spinny disc things, LOL" - both quite frustrating. A good writer does their best to fact check and research the gaps in their knowledge. I get that that's not the point of this blog - it feels more 'live-blogged' than anything else, so there's no time for background research. It can be viewed a bunch of ways I guess, I just don't know if it's more about music or more about being a newcomer to a subject or about couple relationships or about gender issues. To me it doesn't seem to fall happily into any of these categories and that's why people are arguing about it.

imo both of these people are 100% completely complicit in their own boring life together

Well I did enjoy the exchange between fictional insufferable ppl in waterface's parody quote up there, a+

guess what

i don't get the term "faux-naif". sometimes it seems like people use this term to describe people who are just being upfront about the stuff they don't know, and in my view the best nonfiction writing does that.

― Treeship, Monday, March 17, 2014 4:46 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're being faux-naif when you claim you don't know what this means

who, me?

speaking of fictional &c

the quote i posted was real

from the blog

seriously though i think certain branches of the faux naif blog voice are intended as an antidote to the kind of writing you see so much of on the internet, where everyone is caustic and defensive and would rather lash out at people than admit weak spots in their arguments.

what a disaster for Albert Ayler

"Well, yeah"

The ayler piece at one point says "There is a lot of writing on the sleeve and back cover". I am all for affected styles, but lets not kid ourselves, that is an affectation.

seriously though i think certain branches of the faux naif blog voice are intended as an antidote to the kind of writing you see so much of on the internet, where everyone is caustic and defensive and would rather lash out at people than admit weak spots in their arguments.

― Treeship, Monday, March 17, 2014 1:01 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is also the passive aggressive faux naive bloggy voice which is my favorite, and also the VERY SHOUTY one with extravagant catachresis and that's not bad either.

lol christ xp

Catachresis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Catachresis is the name of many different types of figure of speech in which a word or phrase vastly has departed from traditional usage. Contents.
‎Classification - ‎Examples - ‎Derrida, Spivak - ‎See also

xp cloves, the latter one isn't faux naif though. the shouty folks write like idiots but they never for a second approach their topics with humility or openness or even feign doing this.

See, the thing is...

If I started a vaguely humorous blog about music, I might get a bunch of youse to have a butchers at it every so often.

Beyond that, who cares?

But then again, if I actually managed to get a 'readership', I daresay a bunch of people might decide to criticise what I say, but as I have no actual qualifications to prove or disprove my standpoint, most would not care either way.

If I got described as 'faux-naif', I think I'd pack it in.

But that's unlikely to happen, is it? Being described as faux-naif, I mean.

Treeship, go post on the fucking Saddle Creek board or something

cool

i don't get the term "faux-naif". sometimes it seems like people use this term to describe people who are just being upfront about the stuff they don't know, and in my view the best nonfiction writing does that.

― Treeship, Monday, March 17, 2014 12:46 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

get on our level already, you've been here long enough, i'm not buying this

even the most cloying faux-naive voice is a million times more tolerable than certain message-board standbys like oh I don't know

get on our level

http://typophile.com/files/ryan%20get%20on%20my%20level.jpg

treeship do you even lift?

Jeez guys the term is "falsely naive"

Is there a thread categorizing the types of forum posts

guys the term is credulity-frontin'

Jeez guys the term is "falsely naive"

the hardman crew reserve the right to get their terms wrong in order to demonstrate their hardman bona fides

faux sure

lol

idk maybe i'd be less salty about this if there were like more women who knew their shit writing about music and having it shared all over the place. MAYBE! </naïf>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrL9z3Kvww

sorry, i'm so salty, Treeship

tough love

*hugs*

you catch more flies with honey, WGW

ime the type of ppl sharing this and going nuts over it are mostly dudes who are really proud when their hobbies are seen as weird or inscrutable

whatever, music is weird. *giggles*

ime, it's you guys

This is not humming music, but then it does start sounding like a familiar patriotic song that I can’t put my finger on, but still really messy and almost like a band doing sound check. It also occasionally sounds like the trumpet that’s played before a hunt or a horse race.

'sounding like a familiar patriotic song that I can't put my finger on' is a good way to describe some of ayler's compositions, and the idea of the trumpet functioning like a kind of call to arms - a summoning - is gd, too, it just kind of gets buried under a lot of more ho-hum stuff.

Can we all just take a minute to salute those writers who strike the old "disarming honesty" pose have the courage to stand up and say "know what? I don't know everything." Sure, they risk the ridicule of snarky internet bullies, but in admitting their shortcomings aren't these authors more human, more humble, more - goshdarn it, I'll say it - more noble?

are you being serious?

everything