New Pavement Slanted and Enchanted

Oh boy. Bonus material from pavement. America's great r'n'r saviors. indie music's bloated ego of sanctity. weeeeeeee.

so yeah.

Uhh... is Slow Century coming out? I gave up trying to keep track of it after they moved the date 10 times and talked about ditching it etc.

The Live material that consumes the majority of disc two is the same goods that appear on Stray Slack. However, even though the inclususion of the Watery, Domestic E.P. won't surprise too many, the added Peel Sessions and S&E outtakes make this edition worth the price of admission.

I mean, S/E was pretty much ace without a dozen more outtakes. Part of its charm was that it didn't go on forever.

But you have to hand it to Matador: 48 songs (!) for this price, plus a swell booklet to go with it, is a great value. Look, the stray slacks may not be all that important (or even relevant or good), but it sure would be nice if other companies gave this much of a shit when they did reissues.

FUCKING BRILLIANT.

You dorks at Pitchfork get so much wrong, but damn, I'll wipe the slate clean for this one. Great, great job.

Now if only the rest of American music mags would stop trying to be Q and get a personality.

I'd thank Jess for the traffic, but there hasn't been any.

re: your review...

PSF was named "the best record you haven't heard" in Spin's 1990 year-end issue... not 1991. I believe the S&E demo review was in the September 1991 issue, about 8-9 months later.

There's a couple other minor points, but hey, i'm going to lunch...

We had a "rock party" last night. I was going to go as Fred Durst but I couldn't find a baseball cap, so instead I sat around downloading hard rock hits, almost all of which sounded wonderful at ten to fifteen years distance. I never listened to hard rock or metal in the 80s; I looked down on it, I thought it was pompous and dishonest, and I was a little frightened of it too. I thought hard rock would be aggressive, so aggressive it might compromise me somehow - or implicate me, more like, in its world of big emotions and big noises and the hedonism I so pinchedly mistrusted and desperately wanted.

I'm confident enough to like it now. I'm not saying that hard rock was music for confident people - most of the people who listened to it were probably as neurotic, or teenage, as me. But the specific patterns of my neuroses - passive-aggression and puritanism - meant that big gestures were an aesthetic no-no. And they don't get much bigger than "November Rain"; an enormous, glutinous, gorgeous skyscraping stupid mess. Not aggressive, either - it's an absolute truism (because true) to point out that Axl was the most confused, agonised, flouncy and downright indie performer of his day, but it's still his vulnerabilities that make the song. Well, them and the bitchin' solos.

At the party we were talking about how Suede's "Stay Together" was a pallid imitation of "November Rain", and even that record sounded vast compared to what other rock bands in Britain were doing. The grandiosity was what put me off back then but now I can just enjoy it as a sonic fact: the need to cram in more sentiment, more solos, more orchestration, more more more of everything but always making sure the whole tottering folly is still a song. Maybe because I'm confident, because I'm happy, I don't need to believe in the music I listen to any more - but even so at four this morning I could lie back on my bed and let Axl's fuzzy studio pain slosh around me, and I might not have needed to believe it but I did.
Tom Ewing

Being clever is a waste of time, Jess - you'll learn that eventually. Until then, keep on believing credibility is transitive, and namedropping is art.

You don't have to explain, of course, cos it isn't that big a deal, I'm just interested in what critics of my site think.

My god, I remember using this same exact kind of argument (down to the competing myths comparison) to a former adviser nine years ago about why I didn't like grad school and the way critical theory was treated. JessNed mindmeld!

whereas actually what yr doing is proving that that, content-wise, GnR = the US Smiths!! (gareth's genius suggestion of months ago)

(i actually think "faux-blasé" is a much better term than "ironic" for the thing Chris is against, cz it accepts that there are complex and possibly contradictory feelings under the surface of a stated position, tho i don't think it bears much relevance to the piece he cut and pasted...)

(unless he's maybe abreacting to the opening sentence? As in "We had a Rock Party" = "We are declaring our ironic 'appreciation' of rock"...?

as in

Tom: "We had a Tarts and Pimps party last night"
Offended Critic: "Unless ppl actually sold their bodies for cash this kind of behaviour is specious posturing!!
The World: Offended Critic, do you understand the concept of the "party"?

But this is guesswork. My three favourite LPs during my 18-odd months editing the Wire were Use Yr Illusions, Generation Terrorists and Pretty on the Inside...)

I think I'm being dense cos I don't see how even the Axl=indie thing means "pop=alternative".

*leaps to turn down fkn foo fighters still infesting UK Top 40*

axl = manufactured corporate hair metal = pop?
indie = alternative?

i said it required assumptions you don't make

(it also requires projecting guesswork onto chris's various posts, so if i'm offensively way offbase here apologies for that)

haha we also determined that my personal defn of what can reasonably becalled "rock" is almost as restricted as my personal defn of what can reasonably becalled "punk"!!

"AC/DC!! And that's it!! Of course not Bruce Springsteen!!"

[genre x]'s relationship to being written about (how and by who) is utterly central to this whole argument

The question being: Can a music matter if its fans don't especially want to read about it?

November Rain is just one of the greatest songs of all time.

yet does anyone want to get mentalist/metaphysical over "the macarena" on ILM...?

Does the macarena matter (assuming: it is the last great single of the pop era), if its fans don't especially want to read about it?

The assumption that fans of pop music WANT TO READ ABOUT IT is the thing that makes me chuckle most about ILM...

If I assumed that everyone who liked pop wanted to read about it, I'd have gone round venture capitalists saying HEY LOOK a website plus message board all about pop! And I'd now probably be much poorer.

Yr wrong, Dan. It's the 1991 Year in Review issue. Perry Farrell (ARTIST OF THE YEAR) is on the cover, for starting Lollapalooza and killing Jane's Addiction. T'was the first issue of SPIN I ever bought.

For those keeping score, Bandwagonesque was the best album you have(?) heard.

jess, if you don't me saying, i continue to be surprised that you get so worked up about it because based on all evidence you (and SR, as well) are 'right,' and you know that. but, y'know, mark s. is on point (the defining myth <=> the thing mainly written about): the established critics and those who group themselves together in the wilderness of the interweb to thumb their noses at the masses -- what else are they going to say? the day most daily newspaper crits/nme/whoever can no longer insist with a straight face that skinny white boy with guitar is the be all, end all of music is the day they all lose their jobs.

Also.... so... Pavement?