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

Mine aren't, which is one of the reasons why I didn't read the piece in the first place.

you don't need to read it, djp. i read it for you.

it is perfectly in keeping with the trump era though. because it reads like a little kid wrote it. #everythingishighschool

the worst piece of music writing ever was probably written in the '60s.

Wrestling Demons. Professionally, that is. Personally, she remains cloaked in a brooding sadness, all the more achingly impenetrable because she rarely talks about it—except when she sings. "I'm gonna make a gospel record," she told Mahalia Jackson not long ago, "and tell Jesus I cannot bear these burdens alone."

What one of these burdens might be came out last year when Aretha's husband, Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta's Regency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the first such incident. White, 37, a former dabbler in Detroit real estate and a street-corner wheeler-dealer, has come a long way since he married Aretha and took over the management of her career. Sighs Mahalia Jackson: "I don't think she's happy. Somebody else is making her sing the blues." But Aretha says nothing, and others can only speculate on the significance of her singing lyrics like these:

etc.

that's from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,841340,00.html

IT SEEMS somewhat appropriate that Aretha should have been playing the scene in the movie in a restaurant since she definitely admits to an interest in cooking — which brings us conveniently back to the peach cobbler mentioned earlier. My only comment is that if she ever decides to give up her singing career, she can open a chain of soul food restaurants in a minute and become a millionaire all over again! "Yes, I like switchin' in the kitchen! It's relaxing and it's creative. I have my own special dishes — banana pudding, home made ice cream, barbecue ribs, hams, quiche. And we've been growing our own fresh vegetables in the garden. I've been learning the art of French cooking and I've already done some Indonesian and Viennese dishes — so I'm not doing too bad, right?"

Right — after two helpings of peach cobbler — the verdict is guilty: Aretha knows what to do with the pots and pans!

She confesses that her preoccupation with the kitchen hasn't helped her waistline but "I don't want to go back to being quite as thin as I got a few years back. It was great from some perspectives — like going to dress stores and buying exactly what I wanted off the rack — but to me, it wasn't quite the weight I wanted. However, now I'm on the other side of it and I do want to lose a few pounds! I've been pretty good with my diet so I know that what I need to do is exercise more. You know, do some more swimming and playing tennis."

this is from 1980.

i can cut and paste more.

I'm a pop critic, I'm not the target audience or the person who is going to learn things from it, so you really don't need to give me an Accelerated Reader quiz, thanks

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Tuesday, September 5, 2017 12:54 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The funny part is that most woke music writing really is just for other media professionals since the election of Donald Trump to president pretty much confirmed that the "audience" for virtue-signaling media is pretty small in the grand scheme of things

But feel free to to keep strawmanning up the imaginary millennial taking a vape-break from FUCK, THAT'S DELICIOUS to get up-to-the-minute longread on Taylor Swift's woke level from Noisey's Japandroids guy

I thought every music critic already knew that we were only writing for each other.

sure but if only media professionals clicked/read these things then they'd have been killed off long ago

worst hunger games reboot ever

actually it's media professionals posing as harmonizers in the comments section

when i read pieces like this i just don't believe that the people who write them really feel this strongly about the subject. it feels deceptive, like they're angry about their internet addiction or inability to lose that last 5 pounds or the girlfriend that left them, it just feels like i can't access the emotion they are trying to get me to feel in reading these pieces—the righteous anger, the dismissiveness... it feels falsified or projected, misdirected.

i just honestly dont believe you are this much about Taylor Swift! i really dont

I don't read anything, I just link it on Facebook and write "this" in the comments.

*care

this. except i just write "i can't even..."

"I don't read anything, I just link it on Facebook and write "this" in the comments."

...can we talk about that Aretha piece.

this...

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/taylor-swifts-weirdly-mercenary-album-release-continues-with-ready-for-it

"...can we talk about that Aretha piece."

its best to forget that 85% of all music writing ever happened.

David Nathan (who wrote a LOT of pieces on Aretha and who was responsible for the food-related piece above) called the aforementioned Time piece "(the story that probably did more damage to Aretha's relations with the press than any other ever did)" in a multi-part career retrospective he penned in 1977.

janet joplin and mahalia jackson as secondary sources is something.

Blue-Eyed Soul. Does this mean that white musicians by definition don't have soul? A very few Negroes will concede that such white singers as Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee have it, and Aretha also nominates Frenchman Charles Aznavour. A few more will accept such blues-oriented whites as the Righteous Brothers, Paul Butterfield, and England's Stevie Winwood—largely because their sound is almost indistinguishable from Negro performers'. But for the most part, Negroes leave it up to whites to defend the idea of "blue-eyed soul," whether by the criterion of talent, experience or temperament. Janis Joplin argues it this way: "There's no patent on it. It's just feeling things. A housewife in Nebraska has soul, but she represses it, makes it conform to a lot of rules like marriage, or sugarcoats it."

If the earnest racial jockeying can be suspended, the question of who has soul actually becomes intriguing, if rather fanciful fun. The very elusiveness of the soul concept invites a freewheeling, parlor-game approach. Not long ago, in an eleven-page feature on the soul mystique, Esquire half seriously argued that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the havenots—soul-wise. Others have taken up the sport, which prompts the engaging notion that important personalities of history and legend can be classed in these terms (see box).

As for those to whom soul is anything but a parlor game, one thing is certain: the closer a Negro gets to a "white" sound nowadays, the less soulful he is considered to be, and the more he is regarded as having betrayed his heritage. Dionne Warwick singing Alfie? Impure! Diana Ross and the Supremes recording an album of Rodgers and Hart songs? Unacceptable! Yet many "deviations" may be solid professionalism, a matter of adapting to changing audiences. As Lou Rawls says, "Show business is so vast—why should I limit myself to any one aspect if I have the capabilities to do more?"

On the other hand, some soul singers are so deeply imbued with the enduring streams of blues and gospel, so consumed by those primal currents of racial experience and emotion, that they could never be anything but soulful. Aretha Franklin is one of them. No matter what she sings, Aretha will never go white, and that certainty is as gratifying to her white fans as to her Negro ones.

uh

is it bad that I feel like you could swap out Aretha/Janis/Dionne/Diana/Lou and put in Fantasia/Ariana/Beyonce/Rihanna/Miguel and I would expect to see that in a revived 2017 Da Capo

the question of who has soul actually becomes intriguing, if rather fanciful fun, DJP.

"earnest racial jockeying"

underrated big black b-side...

i think we all agree that there are other examples of bad music writing, other than the piece being discussed today

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RkI-B2JWSZI/hqdefault.jpg

yeah dan i definitely saw parallels between "the discourse" then and now.

linked not for the Newsweek writer but for Rove's stunning blurb http://www.newsweek.com/national-sleep-well-beast-karl-rove-662307

max landis.....hello

(for real, though, if I were in CRJ's crew I'd be investing more heavily in personal security)

if you visit the website he set up for this, it shows him Jared Leto Joker-style in a mental hospital. this is as far as i made it.

im hoping he turned himself in to save us all the trouble.

I blame poptimism for this.

i blame capitalism

I blame masculinity

this level of self-indulgence is indistinguishable from psychosis

katherine otm

http://stars.topix.com/slideshow/18800

don't click that by the way... it's one of those weird slideshows where you need to load a whole separate page to proceed to the next slide. the list is "27 Hilariously Lame Artists that Hipsters Love" and the author says that Modest Mouse is a "pale imitation of the Talking Heads" and that Radiohead's only good song is "Creep."

To be honest, the writing isn't as bad as I expected.

I mean, it's very bad, but still.

First, Aphex Twin is not a band, it's the stage name of Irishman Richard David James. He rose to fame with a song called "Windowlicker," which should tell you all you need to know about this ambient techno artist's off-putting vibe.

see how many mistakes you can spot

really into how mad the writer of that is about the very concept of solo musicians and also how despite their remit they can't bring themselves to be snarky about the Lumineers

this is bad:

There’s a reason a rock god like Springsteen might keep the prompter out of sight of his adoring fans. Because if they saw it, would they wonder: Is he singing from the heart? Or is it just from the McScroll?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bruce-springsteen-uses-teleprompter-in-performances-does-it-matter/2012/03/30/gIQAQTXGlS_story.html?tid=a_inl

Is this the early 90s?

Don't know about you but I'm forever racking my heart trying to remember the lyrics to songs.