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

I think most media-savvy Americans would get that NPR is associated with a sort of "effete latte liberal" stereotype.

npr is just shorthand for public sponsored radio right? like, i don't know if WHYY = NPR but i call it npr when talking to ppl about what i heard during my commute

I don't know, Moodles, you say NPR, but you might mean PRI or American Public Media, which are obviously super-distinct and full of their own unique cultural signifiers.

^ i'm replying to this. like if u listen to terry gross, ira glass, the bbc, morning edition, all things considered, car talk, whatever - you're listening to npr i don't care what your station calls itself

xxp: how about just "liberal" without all the qualifiers?

like, what other liberals are left after NPR listeners?

Xpost

I have never heard of PRI until right now and have no idea what the distinction is between it and NPR. Maybe This American Life is broadcast on radio stations that also broadcast NPR?!?

like, what other liberals are left after NPR listeners?

teamsters???

like, what other liberals are left after NPR listeners?

― how's life, Wednesday, March 26, 2014 9:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sad but true question

I think there's a spectrum of left people who do at least some NPR listening, but the archetype is sort of the social-issues-only liberal. You know, for gay rights, "against racism," thinks charter schools are pretty alright, doesn't consider class politics much.

I think PRI and the like are content makers who sell programs to individual NPR stations.

@Mordy and Moodles xpost, Sorry, my post was an unsuccessful attempt to be funny after the assertion upthread that "this american life is not on npr." Looking back, what I posted looked sincere and ridiculous.

groups that are obviously democrat-aligned? seriously? local public radio listeners are a drop in a bucket compared to the majority of the party.

Growing up in the US, NPR was the radio station my grandparents would listen to for lite classical and soothing talk radio. In other words, it was the middlebrow radio station. So for most US folks on here, I think the fact that they've shifted toward bland indie pop is quite notable as it is a glaring indicator of where US middlebrow culture is today.

Yes exactly. This is what I honestly find interesting about the Spitz book. It is not an exploration of twee as an 80s/90s musical genre (though it sounds like he'll get into that). It is about a whole swath of cultural products of the past decade or two that are defined by descriptors like safe, tasteful, nostalgic, sincere, handcrafted, etc. That's absolutely a thing, and "twee" is the word I most often see applied to the broad aesthetic, even if you could argue about whether it adequately describes all of the examples thereof. If your primary connotation of "twee" is the Pastels, then it probably doesn't.

alternate title: limpdick

jaymc otm, although when I first learned the word "twee" I thought of it more narrowly -- Pomplemousse would fit, Zooey Deschanel, the "put a bird on it" sketch on Portlandia (but not EVERYTHING parodied by Portlandia). But I guess he's using it more broadly to describe a kind of warm fuzzy middlebrow.

jaymc v otm

like "farm-to-table brunch" is not something I think of as "twee" although it definitely fits this broader thing being described

is he just rewriting bobos in paradise?

If only there were a David Brooks penned book of music crit....

I think PRI and the like are content makers who sell programs to individual NPR stations.

hey guys I don't even live in the northern hemisphere but PRI is a distributor/syndicator of radio programming AFAIU

hemispherist

the hazards of using r*p g*n**s for hard statistical analysis: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-fastest-rapper-in-the-game/

(less for the writing, per se, than the dilettantism -- joey bada$$ has a release with sony and shawn chrystopher was on an owl city song, but they're "amateurs" I guess; linking that "cash"/"girls" thing with only the vaguest "this is probably not a serious indicator of anything" handwave, etc)

agreed on all points kat but beat you to it - OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Neither of you're even suggesting it's the worst ever music piece tho right?

"The seriously flawed and poorly considered music writing thread s THATAWAY pal"

xp I'm old-fashioned Doran. I don't believe in slamming a book for omissions until I've read the book and know what's actually in there.

NPR ILX is absolutely symbolic of a certain upper-middle-class aesthetic and weaksauce political liberalism.

― james franco tur(oll)ing test (Hurting 2), Wednesday, March 26, 2014 9:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I only know about the semiotics of "NPR listener" because of ILX but it seems to fit an analogy to UK shorthand use of "Guardian reader".

sounds about right

npr listeners are probably the reason the guardian has an auto-selecting 'us edition' now on their website

be the change you want to see in the world! - http://slate.me/1jYHqR7

Owen's good at this

wrong thread for owen's piece

holy shit, owen managed to get an almost unanimously positive comments section

thought i'd seen some kvetching about the song choice from boring rockist scum on there but ugh comments sections anyway. nice piece tho!

i just liked that he managed to w/ a pretty soft touch destroy the idiocy of the moody piece and counter the idiocy of the other 'music critics don't actually talk about music' piece and at the same time provide an actually pretty great of smart pop writing instead of just another inside baseball outrage du jour.

like this one better than the katy perry piece fo sho
mostly cuz i hate the kp song

not a katy perry fan (there are...aspects of her i like i guess) but 'teenage dream' is a classic

But the first chord of the progression isn’t A minor, it’s D minor. The song slides smoothly back to it each time (“I’m up all night to get some”). The insistence of the D minor creates the aural illusion that the song could in fact be in the minor mode of D Dorian—D E F G A B C. Note that the D Dorian scale contains all the same notes as A Aeolian, all the same keys on the piano. The only difference is what key you start on.

Um, no, the first chord is B minor. It goes B minor, D major, F# minor, E minor.

*N.B. this song is actually in F# Aeolian, not A Aeolian, but for casual readers, I stuck with the white keys. Also, I deliberately omitted mentions of added-7’s in my chord descriptions because of an inconsistency in notational unity between classiclers and jazzers, omitted also for irrelevance.

Maybe THIS is the worst piece of music journalism ever?

The new music recommendation services driven by music analytics and made possible by the wholesale migration of listeners into the cloud via streaming services, says Roberts, will encourage us to “explore new music.” Relying on the brute force of a search function to try to find good new stuff in a catalog of 25 million or more songs is hopeless. There’s no way to find the juicy stuff without the music industry taking an active stance. This is the surveillance state quid pro quo. The more we know about you, the better we can make your life. It’s a brave new world of new music.

oh yeah, just saw that, xp

I like the exercise of doing analysis of pop songs in music theory terms. My problem is when he veers into qualitative stuff. His explanation for why the song works could just as easily be my explanation for why I find the song so static and boring.

Also this:

Katy Perry may have captured the world’s attention with her enormous eyeballs, but as I argued earlier this week, the reason “Teenage Dream” went to No. 1 and remains in radio rotation is that it is a textbook example of the excellence and supremacy of the rules of Western music theory.

is kind of a misunderstanding of what music theory is and does

"The song that the key is in" is in fact the least interesting (and most easy to discern) aspect of musicological analysis, and I've deliberately been using the simplest possible keys to describe the chordal relationships, a) because it keeps it simple for casual listeners, and b) because it trolls people who care about meaningless bullshit

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I'm hoping that my hints that this whole line of analysis is white-people-pop-centric bullshit are not going over people's heads

i.e. "the supremacy of the rules of Western Music Theory"

I like the exercise of doing analysis of pop songs in music theory terms. My problem is when he veers into qualitative stuff. His explanation for why the song works could just as easily be my explanation for why I find the song so static and boring.

which is why musicological criticism only takes you so far. I can explain why the unstressed meter in a Marianne Moore verse creates suspense, but not why this same technique still produces what is to you a boring poem.

we've been primed by years of hongro

cool, I would actually even see if they can put that NB upfront next time because it just threw me off the whole first time I read your analysis. It would probably be interesting for me to try to figure out why the Get Lucky chord progression doesn't work for me. I think there's actually something that feels forced about some of the jumps from one chord to the next that prevents it from having that "fascinating endless circle" effect that some songs with repeating progressions have for me.