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

maybe it's more an issue of "style" or "voice" or some other writerly term, than "tone"

RELATED TOPICS: why are esquire and gq 'general interest' magazines, why did lilith fair not book worthy female instrumentalists, would an 'i listen to my wife's records' blog have had each entry accompanied by a cutesy photo with twee-life signifiers in the frame

I'm not even as outraged about this blog as a lot of writers (although that says more about me and my ability to be outraged this year, which is mostly deadened) but saying that the only reason female music writers have an issue with this blog is because they're jealous is... kind of crappy? (and also a bit... weird, given you mentioned people misreading women's tone/intentions.)

The same holds true for Alex, with whom I’d happily do a blog where he has to read a pile of my favorite children’s books, or go to 10 of my favorite ballets, or go to soul cycle with me for a month and write about it - parts of my life of which he is completely culturally ignorant.

but katherine that's just how women are, all tone-policing and jealous

I have had my "tone" (regardless of what my intended tone actually was) criticised by people with axes to grind and worldviews to reinforce far too many times to ever call out a specific woman's "tone"

What your intended tone was is not really here or there. What matters is how it's perceived by others.

?

isn't the tone in line with the entire perspective of the project (the life) that all of this can be undertaken in an utterly noncommittal way?

i keep thinking about that ac/dc record. how a guy 'who just collects records' and has like half a dozen certain ratio records can have TWO ac/dc records just because of will oldham covering 'big balls' and can really know almost nothing about ac/dc (not as if they're not generally a constant presence in popular music culture for the last 40 years!) and hardly even have listened to the records (WHICH ARE GREAT).

it's not surprising that the husband works for NPR because THEIR LIFE IS NPR. their little corner of the apartment is ikeaed the fuck out, his hobby is to collect records, her new hobby is to write about her reactions to things on the internet, and the entire project takes the form of going one by one through a giant list of things and generating reactions to them, seriatim, with no logic to it other than the fact that these records in alphabetical order are the ones her husband happened to acquire.

I just feel like I have heard this song so many times at this point that I don’t feel any real emotions about it.

sometimes she has some, sometimes she doesn't. sometimes they're personal and sometimes they're banal. but they get written anyway because the point is to register the occurrence of 'feelings', opinions, etc. in response to the series of props for stimulating the occurrence of opinions, feelings, etc.

against that backdrop, why SHOULDN'T it grate that the voice she adopts resorts readily and regularly to these gendered 'o you boys and your silly record collections' poses and 'i just don't know about any of this' poses and 'poking fun at the pretensions of the pretentious' poses? because against that backdrop the entire point of every reaction to everything is to render it as anodyne as possible, so that the only way it could possibly have any effect is through the suggestion that by becoming more tasteful and sensible (in the way that the accumulation of culturalized junk prompts you to, not through anything in it but through its being curated, organized, listed—and by conforming with the blanded out requirement to assent within the bounds of polite disagreement about what culture is) things will just generally be improved in some vague way.

j OTM. Most revealing thing about this is their surprise that anyone is annoyed, because twee NPR lifestylers have no idea how irritating their shit can be.

To some

twee NPR lifestylers have no idea how irritating their shit can be

well given their disproportionate media representation as the apotheosis of what american youth should be, this isn't too surprising

j mainly otm.

but like where do you suggest i buy my new couch from because i'm lazy but i was thinking ikea because my current couch is from a place with "cheap" somewhere right in the name and the middle turned out to have cardboard and not springs and it just sort of fell in, so you know i was thinking of stepping it up. and you know i would like a couch, but not a couch that causes me to render things in an anodyne light.

It isn't that they bought the couch at Ikea; it's that their idea of home decor is as impersonal as a Hilton lobby.

I just read the Anthrax entry:

Look you guys, I’m really liking it. It’s oddly beautiful, but I feel like it’s really hard for girls to get to know this kind of music. I would NEVER want to see this band live, even though I’m really liking the music. It would be too violent and too dangerous, and that sucks. And yet I’m not blaming the people who feel the need to get “caught in a mosh,” upon hearing this. It’s probably exhilarating, but sitting on the couch listening to it is fun in a totally different way. Why does music have to be such a division of the sexes sometimes?

my idea of home decor is i would like to step it up and have a couch that has springs is that a statement

why should your home decor be personal.

i have piles of papers around. i suppose they are my personal papers unique to me.

On top of everything else: kinda loving the idea that they're going off to Scotland where the guy can apologize for liking AC/DC and everyone there will look at him like he's insane.

i really like maura's tone.

great sustain too

why should your home decor be personal.

i have piles of papers around. i suppose they are my personal papers unique to me.

― eric banana (s.clover),

"Impersonal" would be "Look, dear, put your papers in this beautiful electric blue 11 X 17 box in polished wood that I bought in Target."

ikea expedit shelves are the best for records tbqf

why does home decor have to be such a division of the sexes sometimes?

bit of a #humblebrag, as my social media sphere is personally handcrafted, but I haven't seen one positive mention of this blog. I find the tone too banal-to-pandering to want to bother reading it, but as - again - i haven't been faced with an actual fan of it - I don't really feel on shitting on it either (though i also don't have a problem with women critiquing it and being frustrated by its virality).

On top of everything else: kinda loving the idea that they're going off to Scotland where the guy can apologize for liking AC/DC and everyone there will look at him like he's insane.

Pockets of Scotland/Glasgow have higher concentrations of these kind of people than anywhere else in the world. They'll fit in perfectly.

i got caught in a mosh last night and i liked it

OK, is this the worst piece of home decor ever?

my wife's stupid peacock feather collection

bit of a #humblebrag, as my social media sphere is personally handcrafted

share the name of the Upper East side boutique where you bought this sphere

I said personally!

artisanal friend requests

Try these:

http://designdininganddiap✧✧✧.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Industrial-Decorative-Spheres-Made-From-Cereal-Boxes-v✧✧✧@Tarynat✧✧✧.j✧✧

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H6M6koEvLIQ/UWD_muxY_mI/AAAAAAAAMSk/Sey2FtBFc-c/s1600/DSC_0140.JPG

you can take your balls everywhere you travel

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xsE3CIu3rtA/TZVM3-iDKiI/AAAAAAAACmE/URNbn3PbIMM/s320/p15247nrgb8.jpg

j. mostly otm about the npr effect, or the way things can become neutralized in the name of "good taste" and how this is a kind of hegemonic pov that should be resisted. but i want to add that there's nothing inherently wrong with being anodyne. there is a place for aesthetics that seek to soothe rather than provoke, especially in the area of home decor, but in music too, and painting, and anything else. there is a way in which i am not super interested in picking apart this woman's personal life and her apartment.

The reason this is getting more attention than music-writing by women who know their shit is that it has an angle. Ordinary, knowledgeable. music writing just doesn't get zoomed around the internet, period.

it has an angle THAT TIES INTO EXISTING STEREOTYPES.

^

why do you think all the worst, most self-image-reinforcing shit on buzzfeed gets shared further than anything else?

it's practically begging for a Buzzfeed response: "10 Things Your Girlfriend Says About Your Record Collection"

i don't care about her life, i care about her instantiation of a cultural phenomenon, as e.g. exemplified in the way that this is a project, and is readily set up as a project, simply by virtue of resolving to write about these records in order and style the project as

My Husband's Stupid Record Collection
Where I listen to my husband's record collection, one record at a time, and tell you what I think.

with header image and house style (here is a record, here i am holding it) and etc.

… which is then the automatic object of momentary interest

when there are writers like maura or katherine or deej or whiney or so many others showing how it could be done (think about how much shit they know and how hard they work to capture moods and sensibilities and tie music to its contexts and put something of themselves at stake), and even amateurs who can poke their heads out into the same public space without automatically ceding anything that might have been individually or personally important to them about the products of culture that they identify as their reason for doing so

the high concept is a winner. no doubt. i really thought you guys were gonna just shrug when i posted this but i also knew that you were gonna hear about it a lot this week and i'd see that ol' ilx fire.

when i did that pitchfork thing i got like 5 zillion more hits on my blog than i ever have before. again, high concept. it ain't rocket science. though i certainly didn't expect it. i dunno how much these people expected it. the attention, i mean. but they are pretty savvy so maybe they knew they had something.

"a winner" in the sense that it's easy to grasp and very linkable/clickable.

what would get more Google hits: "Pitchfork" or "my husband"

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/images/standard/WebLarge/WebImg_000256/190741_3056034.jpg

the title of my blog post was catchy and easy to grasp too. just write about pitchfork and you'll do fine. 10,000+ blog hits versus i dunno 200+ average on the regular.

she is the best damn music writer i have read in ages and i am crazy crazy jealous, like knowing what harper lee was up to her teens & 20s level jealous. just for the record.

when i did that pitchfork thing i got like 5 zillion more hits on my blog than i ever have before. again, high concept. it ain't rocket science. though i certainly didn't expect it. i dunno how much these people expected it. the attention, i mean. but they are pretty savvy so maybe they knew they had something.

― scott seward, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 11:18 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

scott the reason that thing got a zillion hits was it was full of very funny easy to find one liners about and lots of people of have heard of. the concept there is "scott is mean and casually dismissive and funny" more than any particular format to hang that hat on.

well I had completely missked skot's pitchfork thing until now, so at least this discussion produced something good

actually the most hits i got was after j. hopper linked it on rookiemag. i was a teen sensation for a minute there.

I have a million and one things to say to Maura and Katherine about this, which would probably be better said in (semi-)private on Tumblr or wherever, because this is starting to feel uncomfortable. And yet. Damn the cross-posts.

1) The whole "ooh you're just jealous" thing. You know what, in a world where there is only allowed to be One Woman Anything (remember, you're talking to the girl whose band was not signed by a label who loved us "because we already have a girl band!") it is an awful warping lens. Where the one woman who succeeds gets held up as some kind of benchmark. And instead of hating on the system whereby only one woman is allowed through (and then has to speak for ~all women~) it is *really* easy to get caught up in "it's not fair that this woman got the book dead/record deal/whatever and why not these other great women who totally deserved it (including me)". It would be dishonest of me not to include myself in this group. Of course I am jealous that this woman gets hundreds of thousands of readers, and my little blog gets 250 and I will never get a book deal ever. You know what? There are dude writers who I cannot stand and everyone tosses their 8000 word thinkpieces around on twitter and I just think "why the fuck do you even like this boring masturbatory toss" but the thing is, no one holds up these boring ~dudely writers~ as a benchmark whose mastubatory thinkpieces hurt or harm other male writers. So why do we do it to this woman? I think that Maura is right to go after the *system* rather than the woman, but then turns around and starts criticising the woman's tone or style or voice. Which leads us to:

2) This is something that comes off the Gurl Thread. It's something that ENBB said to me, which has resonated in my head for a long time afterwards. I am a gender non-conforming/genderqueer/whatever woman. I get extra added shit, in addition to the normal every day shit of being read as female, for being this way. I have, in the past, got very angry at women who *do* perform "stereotypically female" roles and enjoy stereotypically female activities and conform to ~feminine stereotypes~. Because my sense was, "lady you are making things so much harder for people like me." Because my sense was, they were just going along with What Society Told Them To Be, and they got an easy ride because they were able to conform to "pretty" and to "gender stereotypes" and therefore got all the Nice Stuff that was denied me, because I couldn't and wouldn't. And we butted heads on this a lot, but what she said was very true: it's not that simple. Many women do and enjoy ~stereotypically feminine things~ not because they are brainwashed by society but because that is who *they* are. It is not my place to judge whether a woman who performs femininity a certain way is doing it because it's her genuine gender expression or because she's brainwashed by patriarchy and the cis-tem, maaaan. I can certainly criticise the *system* that rewards feminine women and punishes genderqueer persons with nice things like societal approval and publishing contracts. But criticising a woman for being stereotypically feminine and performing in a way that TIES INTO EXISTING FEMININE STEREOTYPES? NOPE. I learned the hard way that's not on. And that's what I see every time I see women criticising *this woman* for "making it harder for the rest of us!"

3) Tone/style/voice whatever you want to call it. Living in Britain, my only exposure to this "NPR twee" thing you keep talking about is vague awareness of threads I avoid because they are overly American and also clusterfucks. She writes like a LadyBlog, yes. Surprise! SHE IS WRITING A LADYBLOG! It's like there are two conflicting narratives in this thread: A) she is some mastermind of marketing who is deeply embedded in "NPR culture" and also is a librarian who has read a thousand books and therefore knows exactly what it takes to Write A Best-Selling Blog Crossover and so she has deliberately constructed this "Faux Naif" tone to exactly nail the right tone to push record-snob-man-buttons into making her blog a smash viral hit with instant publisher appeal!!! result!!! B) She is an amateur writer who knows very little about music, and writes about music as a Non-Music-Fan who writes like a LadyBlogger in LadyBlogTone because... (get this!) she reads a lot of LadyBlogs! Which of these narratives is true? A little of both? Somewhere inbetween? I don't feel qualified to call it. Maybe Maura has way more experience in public and can tell more easily what the aim of someone's prose is than I can? This is possible. It is also possible that I am completely missing the cultural context of WHY THESE PEOPLE ARE SO TERRIBLE because "NPR twee" is not a part of my experience and if it were, I'd hate it like I hate... oh I dunno Charlie Brooker or some British equivalent?

4) On letting down the team. I come from the other side of this. I know that I write with a tone which attracts *disapproval* from Serious Music Fan Men (and also many, many women). Because, basically, I aspire to write with the breathless enthusiasm of the 15 year old fangirl I used to be. I try to write about the emotions that music inspires in me. Some of these emotions are, um, salacious. OH MY GOD SHE'S TALKING ABOUT SEX AGAIN. I know it makes some men very uncomfortable when I talk about sex and music in this way. I also know, that in "serious fandoms" I often get taken aside by *other women* and told that I mustn't talk about music in such a ~fangirl~ way because it makes it harder for Serious Female Music Fans to be Taken Seriously, and not treated like raging fangirls who just want to fuck the boys onstage. And then we get to a point where I'm trying to review a band where the singer-dude is talking about fingerbanging and singing about threesomes and yet I must not mention sex or sexuality when describing my experience of this music because I might come off like a fangirl and let the team down. Right. So when I see other Female Music Fans talking about how Other Women must not reinforce bad female stereotypes, I really really get *my* hackles up.

I have spent way too long writing this to hit the back button now, even though sense tells me I really should and I'm going to get ripped apart, but there it is. Anyway, I have to go and look for a job now.