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

Sachin Tendulkar is one of the greatest batsmen of all time, no doubt about it!

It's not "worst ever," but I got irrationally annoyed at a Rolling Stone Lollapalooza writeup that referred to Billie Eilish performing "Oxycontin" (the song is "Oxytocin")

Feels like an argument in favor of A.I. tbh

Or sub-editors

It's not "worst ever," but I got irrationally annoyed at a Rolling Stone Lollapalooza writeup that referred to Billie Eilish performing "Oxycontin" (the song is "Oxytocin")

Not sure if I am doing this correctly, but #OneThread

Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

https://www.stereogum.com/2232515/broadcast-haha-sound-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/
god, where to begin, I’ll start with ctrl-f Cargill

yeah I peaced out after the opening, surprised I got through the entire paragraph tbh

first paragraph came perilously close to ruining the album for me. proceed with caution.

confident failure on simple terms like "archetype" and "naïeveté", or calling TNMBP "dissonant experimentation" rmde

One moment the titular Valerie wears a purple dress in an all-white bedroom, the next she’s surrounded by nuns at a church service where the state of being a woman is compared to the state of being a pomegranate (which is to say, split me open at the center and fuck me, daddy).

I am not letting this author near my fruit salad

I'm just the same boy I used to be

My wife almost never mentions music writing, but she sent me this link and was like "???", and... oh boy, whadda piece (turns out it's the one mookieproof posted a screenshot of back on March 4, but I'm not sure if it excellence was fully appreciated): Are We Finally Ready to See Neutral Milk Hotel for What It Really Was?

The last sentence of that piece is a gem

that is way too long to read after being posted itt

I did scroll to the last sentence and oof

aside from the fact that loading slate on my phone is always a painful experience, I thought that essay was…fine?

as far as bad essays go I figured the revive would be about this one

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/a-close-listen-to-rich-men-north-of-richmond

oh god no

Much like “Idol” contestants, such as Bo Bice or Scotty McCreery, Anthony can really sing. His voice isn’t quite as smooth and virtuosic as the country star Chris Stapleton’s, but it carries a similar depth of tone and his screamy rasp never feels like the affectation of an amateur who is trying too hard, but rather does what it’s supposed to do: communicate emotion.

Counterpoint: No.

Tell it to my rasp, my achy screamy rasp

slate informs me we need to talk about my adblocker

personally I feel the adblocker prevented me from reading this piece, and that's ok

It is (believe me) – though fwiw, activating the ol' Reading Mode (or whatever such browser extension you may use for that) gets around it.

Should We Be Blocking Ads? A Case For Being Sold To

I thought Carl Wilson was respected here; now he's the written the worst music article ever?

both things can be true, or sequential perhaps

just a matter of taste

Yes, I may just not be into certain types of “today’s” music writing (so it’s a me thing to some degree). There’ve been one or two other cases like that recently, maybe in the Pitchfork thread.

I believe PK was making a reference to Wilson's Celine Dion 33 1/3 book

which I remember liking, but I'm not sure I've ever been that into his work for Slate

all that quote needed was a comparison to Greta Van Fleet singer

https://louderthanwar.com/swans-albert-hall-manchester-live-review/

author is a "creative music writer" and this reads like a sixth-form assignment

Eh, at least she tried something. An editor could have helped her but I doubt that site has one.

Guess I just shouldn’t click on music writing anymore, b/c holy shit: https://thebaffler.com/latest/california-gothic-marzoni

I think the author of that is a return nominee to this thread?

The Baffler living up to its name

The urban fog that has trailed shibboleths of progress to the Pacific Rim hovers over a reflection in once-clear water that looks final in its murkiness: finding the barbarisms of modernity exacerbated and multiplied on the outer cusp of the American continent, settled under the false assurance of beginning anew, we can no longer dispute that the monsters are us.

In his neo-noir western, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson diagnoses mastery of the Occidental frontier as an Oedipal struggle between Christianity and capitalism, while statutory rapist Roman Polanski reimagines, in Chinatown, super engineer William Mulholland’s irrigation of the desert by means of the Los Angeles Aqueduct as an incest fantasy (a prevalent subgenre of the Gothic and noir) wherein the archetypal small-business owner, private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), uncovers the extent to which developers have fucked the local citizenry, their own offspring not excepted, for eons to come—and as Nicholson’s 1990 sequel, The Two Jakes, attests, boy, will they fuck again.

I honestly don’t think it’s meant to be “read”… how could it be(??)

https://www.stereogum.com/2233806/alice-cooper-new-album-keanu-reeves-trans-issues/interviews/weve-got-a-file-on-you/

why would anyone think asking alice cooper for his opinions on trans people is a good idea at all, just inviting him to say something bigoted. most charitably this just seems like total naivety from the interviewer hoping that he might say something positive based on comments from nearly 50 years ago? but even in the best case that does pretty much nothing for anyone and otherwise they're just letting him spew hate

Because that approach generates clicks?

most charitably this just seems like total naivety from the interviewer hoping that he might say something positive based on comments from nearly 50 years ago?

Based on the interviewer's previous work, that's my guess as to what happened. She mostly writes about contemporary pop music, in a cheerleading style. I've interviewed Cooper; he's a genuinely nice guy. I have no reason to believe he holds any hostility toward trans people. But he's also a befuddled old man who really shouldn't be asked what he thinks about things that his 75-year-old cable-news-addled mind is not prepared to process.

Cooper is clearly transphobic and also closeted in some sense and I won't elaborate but it's a highly relevant question even though his answers will inevitably be disappointing

it's worth it if only to have him on record as a case study for later generations to learn from

the LDR piece just sort of washed over me in a haze without leaving much of anything behind so it compliments her music very well

I'll take the baffler's music coverage over jacobin's any day

I don't care enough about LDR to read that piece, but going to the Baffler for "music writing" is a category error. I agree that first sentence Lavator quoted is impenetrable, but the incest point in the second is interesting imo

The LDR piece isn't as bad as it could have been. It's somewhat impenetrable, but once you pull it apart (I've been reading Albert Murray lately, so I'm in practice with untangling people's prose) there are some good observations.

Based on the interviewer's previous work, that's my guess as to what happened. She mostly writes about contemporary pop music, in a cheerleading style. I've interviewed Cooper; he's a genuinely nice guy. I have no reason to believe he holds any hostility toward trans people. But he's also a befuddled old man who really shouldn't be asked what he thinks about things that his 75-year-old cable-news-addled mind is not prepared to process.

― read-only (unperson)

look it's not the interviewer's fault for cooper saying bigoted shit, it's alice cooper's fault for being (apparently, i'm not going to read the article because i have enough transphobia in my life thank you very much) a fuckin' bigot

look it's not the interviewer's fault for cooper saying bigoted shit, it's alice cooper's fault for being (apparently, i'm not going to read the article because i have enough transphobia in my life thank you very much) a fuckin' bigot

Absolutely. Re-reading the interview, it's actually worse than it seemed yesterday. At first I thought it was just a confused but well-meaning take best responded to with "oh, bless your heart, grandpa," but re-reading it, he sounds hostile and insane, like someone who's been pouring Fox News into his eyeballs for a decade or more. (And I bet it got a lot of play in the UK, because there are some very fucked-up comments on the article now that read like they're ported over from the Daily Mail or something.)

lana thing has a college paper problem where it can't quote someone without giving a gloss of their career or invoke noir without explaining that california is the terminus of manifest destiny (as is traditional my own state doesn't count because it's not where the movie industry is) and that william holden is dead at the beginning of sunset boulevard, but otherwise it's on the right track about lana, a rare thing

this from alice cooper--

I’m not going to tell a seven-year-old boy, ‘Go put a dress on because maybe you’re a girl,’ and he’s going, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a boy.'

--reminded me of rick perlstein's pointing out that everything in the deer hunter is a specific memory from the war with the roles compulsively reversed

The California "mythos" somehow fries some ppl's brains for some reason, I'm not sure why (IMOM, that was one of the issues with Ann Powers' notorious LDR piece, which otherwise & of course was much more readable than the Baffler thing – which I'm impressed some of you have been able to penetrate to get to whatever its "point" is).

*IMO (though that reminds me, I should call my mother...)

The California "mythos" somehow fries some ppl's brains for some reason, I'm not sure why (IMOM, that was one of the issues with Ann Powers' notorious LDR piece, which otherwise & of course was much more readable than the Baffler thing – which I'm impressed some of you have been able to penetrate to get to whatever its "point" is).