Richard Meltzer - trivializer of the awesome or awesomiser of the trivial?

That's exactly my point.

kogan's line — probably laid out further up the thread — that as his writing got better his thinking got lazier is on the whole true (interesting also: eg name a writer this is NOT the case with...) (ie whose writing AND thinking improved in lock-step) (apart from me obv) (joke) (kinda)

+ there's no way you can call the thinking 'in' the writing in The Night (Alone) (for example) 'lazy'.

Lazy isn't neccessarily a bad word to use in respect of later Meltzer, but this is bound up in the enabling/disabling baggage of rockwrite that he endlessly, er, 'negotiates'.

yeah and whatever happened to those? all the links have been down since that site went out of business.

overall its worth a read.

Anyway, Meltzer isn't too hot on post-anything 1970, at least in writing, seems like he knows about it but he can't summon up the energy. But Aesthetics is one of the essential books on the '60s, period, and indeed the greatest book ever written on the Beatles, their force field of influence on everything there for a fat five years.

Aesthetics of Rock is one of the few attempts by a rock critic to address both musicological topics (the "tongue," etc.) and subtle factors regarding the aesthetics of particular records (as in his Sgt. Pepper analysis).

Meltzer was a truly great rock critic, but the selection of pieces in A Whore Like the Rest seems to imply to me at least that he's not all that interested in this aspect of his past work. He poo poos his Village Voice pieces (of which there were many), for example. The record reviews he did for Rolling Stone in the early seventies were great, but there's only one of those made the book (the L.A. Woman review). I understand it, in a way; the book is more about him than it is about the music he was writing about. The problem with the book, though, is that it's too easy for someone to read it and to think that he might have been a good writer, but wasn't necessarily such a great critic.

eddie so so SO OTM

Last year I was trawling the library shelves for a book and came acorss RM's "novel" The Night (Alone) which I'd never read. Apparently I was the first person to check out this copy! Now I wasn't expecting er, Madame Bovary or something in terms of traditional narrative etc but WTF! Talk about recycling the SOS. Right about the time the Meltz wheeled out his snowball fight with the New York Dolls anecdote for the 12th time I hung my head in despair. A real crisis of IMAGINATION in a truly original stylist who previously never lacked "I" (is more depressing than hemmorhoids). Hopefully his geezer book is a rebound.

Search: "Buy A VTR And Rule The World" (1978)in the old Best Of The Village Voice anthology. Meltzer at his non-bitter funniest and also wierdly prescient re: hometaping, file-sharing etc.

And I think RM is willfully cranky, myself. I came across this mot when I was trying to write something useful about Big Star (which I find somehow impossible)--something like "Big Star is the means by which the current generation gets their dose of the British Invasion." Which is obvious, way obvious, also bedrock, and something, like so much of his writing, you shouldn't forget.

I was trying to explain how to read "Aesthetics" to a friend, he was put off by the "philosophy" angle. Forget that, just concentrate on it like you do Nietzsche or someone, go for the aphorisms, like the great bit about listening to the first Rolling Stones album and how its re-creation of a one-night stand corresponds to the millions of real one-night stands happening at the same time. That's great.

first, wtf @ old ilx/this thread -- it's just bananas right from the beginning.

i just have one simple question related to richard meltzer:
will 17 insects can die in your heart ever be reprinted or has it been and i just can't find it? going price for a used copy appears to be over $100.
i'm assuming "good verse and bad" means it's going to be verse and not rock criticism?

maybe try interlibrary loan?

i've always wanted to track down meltzer's article about abbott and costello -- i came across a reference to it once in one of his interviews but have never seen it anywhere.

yeah i have a trip to the library in my future anyway, it's on the list.

apparently acc to my local library/worldcat there are 3 copies in libraries in this country, none of which are circulating.
interesting.

and one of them is in the library of the HoF