Archive for July 29th, 2011
Ewing on Stone Roses
Posted by s woods on July 29, 2011
Tom Ewing, refreshingly sane on one of the more puzzling phenomena of Brit-pop: the (cue hushed tones among folks of a certain vintage and haircut) first Stone Roses album. (Weirdly, I probably give more credence to the quiet-pretty-folky parts of the Roses than Ewing does, though I’d still rank the album a 6 instead of a 7.)
You know how people always talk about how in the Old Days you used to buy a record and really concentrate on it and absorb it. I did that with the first Stone Roses album and I strongly remember WANTING to have my life changed by it. The whole narrative around music was to do with hearing these life-changing records, so you felt like you were doing it wrong if you didn’t have those sort of experiences on a regular basis. For indie boys reading the NME was kind of like how reading Cosmo must have been for teenage girls sometimes, except for “Oh god why havent I had an orgasm yet?” read “Oh god why haven’t I heard a Life Changing Record yet?”. But the Stone Roses album doggedly refused to morph from a Pretty Good record into a Great one.
(Ewing‘s entire name-a-band-any-band feature is a fun read.)
Posted in Record Reviews | Leave a Comment »
Jeff Pike on Rob Sheffield
Posted by s woods on July 29, 2011
Jeff Pike reviews Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
It’s hard to read in places—anyone who has ever lost anyone can expect to find Sheffield probing painful places one way or another. But it’s amazingly light-hearted too, even as it never shrinks from anything. In the end, Sheffield does a good deal toward making something substantial out of what too often seems among the most inconsequential and silly career choices imaginable: the rock critic. He makes something substantial out of it, and brings the dignity too.
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
