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

When I was first listening to Sublime heavily, my manager from the ice cream shop I worked at (a black man maybe in his mid to late 20s) invited me and some other coworkers over to his apartment to smoke pot. On the way over, we were listening to some kind of alternative that he didn't like, so I asked him what he did like and he says "I'm into reggae." My coworkers and I got really excited. "You've gotta hear it." I was hoping for something better than "what the hell is this crap?"

this calls for Robert Stack in "Unsolved Mysteries" mode recitatoin

Like doing Grateful Dead songs over the "Funky Drummer break," scratching a Minutemen album, doing a folk song about KRS-One, singing Bob Marley lyrics over a Just-Ice song — it all spoke to the post-Beasties smash-up culture they were trying to promote and attempt and see through the lens of smoked out cali loving surfer bros/dalmation enthusiasts

― [Fine Whines via] Treeship, Friday, August 8, 2014 8:35 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the mash-up aesthetic, in the internet era, is kind of played and combining/curating disparate sounds in itself doesn't sound refreshing in 2014. that might be why i didn't notice all the stuff whine mentioend and just remember 40oz as this ska-rap album that has a song about date rape

― Treeship, Friday, August 8, 2014 8:37 AM (6 hours ago)

wholesale dismissal of "post-beasties smash-up culture" (if that's what we're calling it now) in the indie aughts depresses me. not that the beastie boys (or ratm or sublime or the judgment night sndtrk or w/e) necessarily deserve a long shadow of active artistic influence, but it's sort of a drag that the interconnections between genres have been so thoroughly severed.

also, all this sublime talk reminds me of recent activity in the not guilty pleasures thread. when a artist becomes a comical icon of awfulness, trashing them becomes a bore. if nowell's "genius" wordplay weren't such a constant stream of casual slut-shaming misogyny, i'd feel some obligation to fake like sublime. as it is, i just figure they're someone else's thing. whiney?

If you're bored with Sublime:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/08/08/all-that-jazz-isnt-all-that-great/

fuck that guy

fuck that guy

disparaging jazz like that seems inherently racist

is it? i think it is.

inherently stupid

really if you find yourself writing a piece about why something you don't like is overrated have a think for a minute then stop doing it and go and do laundry or something else useful instead

that article is just trying to wind people up, relax

I appreciated that these generous African American men deigned to share their art at a quite white New England liberal-arts school. But I just didn’t get their aesthetic.

being deliberately challopian doesn't make you not obnoxious

it's sort of a drag that the interconnections between genres have been so thoroughly severed. -contenderizer

is this true? grimes is pretty eclectic. death grips integrates rap with punk and industrial in a way that feels new.

sorry to change topics

apology accepted. thanks, Treeship.

cheapo "here's what i think" gen-y articles are a dime a dozen these days

yeah but how good would your articles be if you were only being paid 83 cents to write them?

83 cents?

dime a dozen

i don't know, ted koppel. what are your thoughts on all this?

it's cool that dude got a C- in anthony braxton's class and decided to repay him by denigrating his chosen art form in the media

i took fiction writing from a pulitzer-prize-winning novelist, i'm pretty sure the american novel is kind of an embarrassment tho. where's my byline, wapo

i think this sort of kneejerk academic reverence for / defense of jazz is the exact sort of reason the new yorker, washington post, etc should go ahead and publish millennial bullshit like this once in a while. does it really harm anyone to go ahead and admit that in the end, popular music really isn't that important

it harms the american spirit

this is fun to listen to if you like jazz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-04Dey1SzQ

i just can't ignore these stupid articles. i really do know better. i swear. just ignore them. but i guess i'm just dumb...

i can be kinda dull-witted.

There’s not much difference between a screechy performance by avant-garde saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from 1974 and one from 2014.

See how Jazz doesn't advance? This one dude sounds just like he did 40 years ago.

justin moyer was the drummer for gay dad bass player for el guapo and supersystem.

I kept typing different responses to the dumb shit in this article, but keep erasing them for fear of taking the bait. Daphnis otm upthread, and it applies to this sorta shit too. This piece is the height of stupidity, I'mma go do some laundry, later gators

Moyer also wrote a pretty tedious Wash City Paper article a couple years ago about "the Brooklynization of culture"

i was ruminating on stupid things as i left for work. jazz is stupid because it does away with the words to popular songs. like they just get lost the jazz tubes and no one ever gets to hear them again. it would be better if jazz kept all the words and ditched the improvisation. then it would be more like the national and everyone could be happy. the fuck does this kind of thing even happen inside a person's head, much less get published?

the depth and character of condescension in the idea that ellington's "take the a train" is an "african american anthem" because it mentions sugar hill while mingus/dolphy's is a meaningless waste of blackness is overwhelming to contemplate

really, don't bother

urite obv

yeh

late to the party ... and i know the decline of the Voice has been well-documented ... but the fact that that once-great publication published that pitiful Sublime piece is really, profoundly depressing

man that was one of their better argued more literary efforts

http://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://s3.amazonaws.com/Morning-Mix/Images/author_images/140/Justin_Moyer140.jpg&h=90&w=90

this fucking useless pointless soulless douchebag is laughing at us all

imagining miles davis pistol-whipping this motherfucker

6. Jazz Artists Keep Pistol-Whipping Me

read this on the wp this am w/bloodboiling, knowing it was trolling/clickbait but still wondering how something so aggressively ignorant & philistine even gets published. not to mention just kinda dumb. like with that marginally more sophisticated but (to me) crushingly unfunny sonny rollins satire, it's hard to imagine white cultural icons getting the same treatment.

http://www.undergroundbee.com/2009/03/21sxsw1/images/IMG_4660_JPG.jpg

Jazz let itself be co-opted. Marsalis’s critics say that he gives “too little attention to innovations in the form since the 1960s,” as the New York Times put it. But the main innovation since that era has been jazz’s business plan... I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

I used to don drag to perform. It was cool because it would fuck with people, you know, because I don’t think it’s very typical for straight men to do drag in the name of punk-cabaret, or whatever I was doing it in the name of…

oh justina

Jazz is dead. Long live jazz.

Best response to the Washington Post piece would be for Clickhole to reprint it verbatim.

guys that was all worth it for the eric dolphy youtube

haha otm

Justin Moyer
8/10/2014 1:45 PM EDT
Dear Readers:
Per my below comments posted yesterday, this article was not intended as a serious analysis. To better understand the piece as parody, you should read an article I wrote back in 2012 about the Brooklynization of culture (written for another D.C. paper).

This article is a parody of many idea shared there: things getting "mushy," music being "co-opted," and "fetishizing" certain music. I use some of the exact same language.

In the 2012 article, I wrote:

"On general principle and for the good of all, I stopped writing music criticism for money almost a decade ago."

I stand by those words--and perhaps I should extend those comments to humor!

Thanks again for reading.

Joobajooba
8/10/2014 11:03 PM EDT
Justin, why on earth would you write that your piece is "not satire" then attempt to defuse the uproar by justifying it as a parody.? I read journalism to be informed, not lied to, misled, or duped by clickbait. And why should I go read something you wrote in 2012 in an attempt to understand the current drivel..? A piece needs to stand on its own. Columnists in this day and age need to have some pretty powerful and unique things to say to justify a reader's attention. This falls far short, and is an embarrassment to the Washington Post.

Justin Moyer
8/9/2014 2:52 PM EDT
Dear Readers:
The piece above is a work of parody and was not meant to be taken seriously. My apologies to anyone who thought it was real.

The reasons given for jazz being boring and overrated are ridiculously flimsy and ill-informed. Ask anyone who knows me--I do not feel this way. I might as well have penned a column that says, "I don't understand soccer and thus it's boring and overrated." Sure, some Americans may concur, but such an exercise would only serve as a triumph of ignorance.

Thanks for reading.