 | s woods on Critics Are Strange |
| s woods on From the Archives: Jon Pareles… |
 | Steven Ward on From the Archives: Jon Pareles… |
 | Larry Holt on Critics Are Strange |
 | Richard Riegel on Critics Are Strange |
Posted by s woods on September 30, 2011
A twin feature from the Los Angeles Review of Books: King of the Contrarians: Josh Langhoff introduces Chuck Eddy, the man with more voice per square inch than any other rock critic, and Michaelangelo Matos finds out what makes him tick.
Also, in PopMatters: Chuck Eddy Will Piss You Off with ‘Rock and Roll Always Forgets’ by W. Scott Poole
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Chuck Eddy, Interviews, Links | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 29, 2011
A friend sent me this, so I’m posting it, a little nervously… more fascinating archival material.
Just one short comment: fairly delighted (and surprised) to see Pagliaro’s “Some Sing Some Dance” rank #6 on the Top 6 (!) singles list. To put this in some perspective, it apparently only needed three votes to attain that position. Still, we’re talking about a bilingual pop craftsman from Montreal, who never once cracked the Top 100 in the States. “Some Sing” has always been a personal favourite (it made my recent Top 100), and it’s odd to see it played back in this context. (Odd enough that even the Fusion eds felt the need to clarify in the introduction to the poll, “That Pagliaro song is from Canada, near as we can tell.”)
Posted in Archival, Polls & Lists | 6 Comments »
Posted by s woods on September 28, 2011
Ralph J. Gleason dug 16 Magazine!
Posted in Gloria Stavers | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 28, 2011
Why I miss the monoculture by Toure, in Salon.
Fretting about where we are and where we’re going is clearly the rock critical meme of the year, and you can add this article to the evidence (I fret also, though most of my fretting tends to be about why and how I seem to be tumbling headfirst into a do-I-really-give-a-shit-anymore attitude about the entire operation — music, writing, etc. — while still cranking up the latest Britney Spears single every time it comes on the car radio). See also Christgau, espousing similar ideas about the “monoculture” in this 2006 PopMatters interview.
I don’t know, “monoculture” made very little sense to me when Christgau posed it (footnoted, not-irrelevant question I’ve thought about for a long time: did African-Americans, en masse, give a shit about the Beatles during the ’60s?), and, given the respective eras each writer is drawing upon, it makes even less sense to me when Toure poses it. Toure writes: “We no longer live in a monoculture. We can’t even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.” Huh? Disco sucks-ers (and who, by the way, is “we”?*) were a “monoculture”? You mean as opposed to the zillions of citizens buying disco records, listening to disco songs on the radio, and dancing to disco in roller rinks and whatnot (across a rather large portion of the the entire planet, no less)? Colour me extremely confused, if not downright skeptical.
* Um, I realized after posting this, that I employed that godawful royal “we” right in my first sentence here! But just to be clear, I am referring to a fairly specific if nonetheless ridiculously diverse species: people who are in some shape or form pop music writers (or “rock critics,” same thing in my book).
Posted in Blabbin' | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 21, 2011
Hard rock critics Phillip Freeman and Jeanne Fury engage in a Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam debate, only to have Vernon Reid (of Living Color, once upon a time a sometime music critic himself) jump into the conversation as well.
Posted in Podcast | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 21, 2011
Sara Marcus on Ellen Willis’s escape from the music ghetto (reviewing Out of the Vinyl Deeps in the Los Angeles Review of Books).
Willis understood rock to be not the solid monolith its name might suggest, but rather a permeable pavilion through which currents of cultural change flow, and within which agglomerations of human desires gather. As we see throughout Vinyl Deeps, she was concerned with what songs meant, and what bands’ particular existences in the world told us about the culture we desired and deserved. What is sometimes missing, ironically, is how the actual stuff produced by these bands — the songs themselves — encoded these values and trends and forces. I mean that Willis rarely wrote in depth about how things sounded. She listened less with her ears than with her brain and hips and feet, far more likely to tell us what a song’s lyrics seemed to be saying, or whether she enjoyed dancing to it, than to delve into what it was about a song’s construction that made it feel a certain way.
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Ellen Willis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 21, 2011
Not a new interview, but new to me. Simon Frith interviewed at DRYRIB. Part 1 and Part 2.
I don’t regret any of my critical assessments—mostly because I can’t remember most of them. One of the salutary lessons an academic learns writing for a paper like Melody Maker is that readers’ interest in what you say barely survives the day of publication so I often regretted my assessments on the day they came out but then they ceased to matter. I did dismiss the Smiths as non-starters when I saw them as a local support act early in their career and I can remember thinking (though not sure if I wrote) that Madonna was foolishly overrated when her career began. I was wrong often enough but have no regrets about going public — part of the fun of being a critic.
Posted in Interviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 16, 2011
Quote:
When you begin to think of Pop music as a product rather than a genre, the rocktivist argument makes a lot more sense. Art critics could write reviews of the output of graphic design firms, but usually they leave that task to Ad Week.
This piece does nothing to answer the question, “What is pop music?” but it does introduce a new word into the lexicon: “rocktivist”!
Posted in Links | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 16, 2011
Beginnings of a survey at Open Sky Jazz. More interesting than I would have expected.
Posted in Links | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
I’m intrigued by a sentence written by Jonah Weiner in Slate today, referring to hip-hop’s “identity crisis” towards the end of the ’90s:
“And the fact that dusty old vinyl samples — particularly soul and jazz loops, intimately tied to black music’s past — were losing ground to glossier, colder synthesizers was alienating.”
As someone who has followed sampling history with a fairly keen interest since the mid-80s, it’s kind of incredible to see this technology employed in a precise reversal of how it has been employed for so many years previous. This is sampling posited not as the fake, anyone-can-do-it party line, but rather, sampling as the genuine article, the real deal.
Posted in Links | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
1. The Los Angeles Review of Books reprints Jonathan Lethem’s foreword and two selections from the first chapter of Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood – 1979-1983 (in stores one week from today).
2. PopMatters reprints the “Predicting the Future” chapter from Eddy’s Rock and Roll Always Forgets.
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
An odd little visual preview (fresh from the galleys — read the comments) of James Wolcott’s Lucking Out.
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
Via Google Books: Rock Criticism from the Beginning (Ulf Lindberg, Guðmundsson, Morten Michelsen, Hans Weisethaunet).
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
Bryan Ferry on the recently deceased Richard Hamilton, one of the founders of “pop”:
I was fortunate to be taught by Richard Hamilton in 1964, my first year at the fine art department of Newcastle University. From then on Richard was a great inspiration, both as an artist, and as a personality. Frighteningly intellectual, he seemed to validate my romantic leanings towards American culture and he revealed how poetic and mysterious the modern world could be. As a teacher he taught by example, and his restless enquiring spirit I have tried to emulate in my own work as a musician.
Posted in Art & Photography, Obits | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 15, 2011
Simon Reynolds points towards the index of the latest BookForum, which contains his twin review of Chuck Eddy’s RARAF and Marcus’s upcoming Doors book (not to mention that the same issue also contains a review of James Wolcott’s upcoming memoir and a piece on Dwight MacDonald — of these, only the MacDonald piece is available online) (but yeah: critical geek alert, for sure). I will buy BookForum when I can find a copy, and review at great length Reynold’s review of Eddy and Marcus (just kidding. I think). In the meantime, Reynolds chimes in with a few thoughts on GM and his version of the Doors:
This narrative arc of the Doors oeuvre — explosive entrance, rapid fading of powers, belated resurgence — is the standard critical shape for the group’s output and probably representative of how people of Marcus’s generation responded in real-time. You might say that this is the Historical Truth of the Doors. But why should listeners who discover the band subsequently, long after the fact, feel obliged to keep faith with that historical truth as it unfolded so many years ago? More to the point, how could they stay faithful to it even if they wanted to? The way music listening is now organized and freed up by digital archiving systems, trying to abide by that Truth would entail a great deal of effort: not just listening to things in exact sequence, but trying to keep out of your mind what happened next to the band. It’s impossible and probably pointless.
Two reasons I look forward to Marcus’s book:
1) there’s not been a lot of worthwhile criticism about the Doors (too often they’ve been under-served, unfairly dismissed, ridiculously misunderstood); I look forward to a fresh approach, and am genuinely curious about GM’s perspective, given how little he has previously written about them.
2) um, see last line in previous point: they are fresh material for GM. As I’ve written elsewhere, and probably ad nauseum, I tend to prefer Marcus when he’s exploring stuff that exists (or anyway, appears to exist) more around the edges of his usual obsessions, if that makes any sense.
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Chuck Eddy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 12, 2011
Luc Sante, in the Wall Street Journal, on “The Book Collection That Devoured My Life” (coming soon to a theatre near you… well, with a title like that, it should be):
Having books crowd every inch of wall space in the room in which I entertained imposed a certain burden on the conversation, as if dead authors were leaning in, contributing dry, derisive chuckles.
My life is still in complete transition. We’re out of our last place, staying with relatives while we fix up our new place. Which means, every book I own, save a handful I put aside, are sitting in boxes, waiting to be unpacked, sorted, shelved, glanced through, touched, absorbed… the only part of moving I’ve ever really liked, and in fact I love that part of it — the tactile version of a hard reboot.
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 12, 2011
I’ve been curious about Christopher Small’s Musicking ever since Christgau reviewed the thing back in 2000. (My curiosity was further piqued when Marsh referred to the concept in his 2001 rockcritics.com interview with me) (nb: I have to live with my misspelling of “musicking” in the Marsh interview until I’m properly set up with a home PC again). Small died last week, prompting a recollection by Christgau, as well as an obit by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times.
Posted in Obits | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 6, 2011
Steven Ward writes:
“For those that missed it the first time around, Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer goes on sale today as a paperback.
“Edited by Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Anthony DeCurtis, Blues & Chaos collects the best music journalism by the late, great Palmer, known for his work as a teacher, musician, record producer as well as the first, full-time rock critic at the New York Times.
“Back in November 2007, Rockcritics.Com published a critical tribute to Palmer — Deep Blues: Missing Robert Palmer — with remembrances by writers, friends and fans on the 10th anniversary of his death.”
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Robert Palmer | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 6, 2011
“From rotgut to milkshakes, do-rags to ponytails”: Tosches, rock and roll, and Satan
Joe Bonomo: “The book’s a quick, fun read, and it benefits from Tosches doing what he does best: adopting a quasi-hard boiled tone while letting the genuine participants — among them Hy Weiss, producer and owner of Old Town Records, members of Bronx doo-wop group the Jaynettes (‘Sally Go ‘Round The Roses’) and their producer and session player, and Jerry Blavat, aka “The Geator With The Heater,” a Philadelphia-area oldies DJ — speak for themselves, in incriminating, sometimes self-deluding, but always lively and honest ways. The heart of the book is the sound of these voices. Tosches’ well-earned tendency to become a participant in the book’s telling is here, but he doesn’t steal any light that isn’t his.”
[Bonomo is the editor of an forthcoming anthology, Conversations with Greil Marcus]
Posted in Book (P)reviews | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on September 6, 2011
[BAM founder] Dennis Erokan, a Lafayette resident who has been running the public relations firm Placemaking Group for the last five years, started BAM magazine as a bi-weekly free publication back in 1975. Over the years, it became an entrenched part of the area music scene, especially once it started hosting the Bammy Awards in 1978. In the ’80s, BAM published editions in both Northern and Southern California, gaining a peak circulation of 130,000. BAM‘s fortunes dampened with the rise of the Internet, which forced Erokan to close shop in 1999.
Posted in Zines | 2 Comments »
