Archive for the ‘Quotes’ Category
Posted by s woods on April 26, 2013
… in dealing with new things there is a question that precedes that of good or bad. I refer to the question, ‘What is it?’ — the question of identity. To answer this question in such a way as to distinguish between a real novelty and fake one is itself an evaluation, perhaps the primary one for criticism in this revolutionary epoch when art, ideas, mass movements, keep changing their nature, so that their most familiar features are often the most misleading.
- Harold Rosenberg, 1960 preface to The Tradition of the New
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Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing.
My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants to take them. But then, I can imagine my parents appreciating Hamlet, but I can’t imagine them being him. And I can see the similarities between Mick Jagger’s schematic wrong-end-of-the-telescope analyses of male-female relationships with my dad’s hard-headed, persistent political analyses. But I can’t imagine my dad wanting to blot the sun out of the sky, even in pretend. And my relationship with my parents wasn’t good enough for me to ever explain to them where my dad might have some Jagger inside.
- Frank Kogan mining the territory re: hard rock he more or less invented.
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Posted by s woods on March 14, 2013
He’s a case study in the moral inadequacy of authenticity.
- Christgau on David Peel’s 1972 album, The Pope Smokes Dope. Classic one-liner, positively Wildean in scope, though I leave it up to you to determine if he’s referring to Peel or to the Pope.
Posted in Archival, Quotes, Xgau | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on March 11, 2013
Critical language has for the most part been borrowed from other fields — few writers have been able to shake their liberal arts educations. The few new terms (tight, together, heavy) are vague and undiscriminating. A rock erudition has been established, and writers talk casually of ‘influences’ and ‘development,’ but it is all very distant. There are more reviewers, whose main function is commercial, than critics whose concerns are truly aesthetic. There is little rock criticism; change the names and it could be jazz or movies or art. And the bitch is that without other precedents, this bad writing is setting the precedents, and one more clean slate in the planet’s history is getting fucked up beyond all recognition.
- Michael Lydon, review of Paul Williams’s Outlaw Blues in Rolling Stone, April 19, 1969
Gee, if this doesn’t make you feel misty-eyed for the “golden age” of rock criticism, I don’t know what will.
Posted in Archival, Quotes, Rolling Stone, Paul Williams | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on March 8, 2013
In truth, by criticising pop music NME are merely biting the hand that feeds them. Pop music as every person who’s gone from clutching a copy of Madonna’s Immaculate Collection to owning Sonic Youth’s Dirty can attest, is a gateway drug.
Once you’re hooked by that excitement, that buzz and that joy of being fan you can go either way: maybe you’ll experiment, check out your dad’s record collection or yes, even buy the NME or maybe you’ll stay a fan of the charts, lapping up the sounds of Juice FM while queuing up for Beyonce tickets. Both are equally valid choices and no music press snobbery should convince us otherwise.
Those girls who’ve bombarded the NME twitter ever since defending One Direction are merely heading out on a long road of music fandom. Whichever path they take is the right one.
- Jamie Bowman, Harry Wake Up
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Posted by s woods on March 5, 2013
In the early 1970s certain journalists described James Brown’s music as boring. The reason they did so was because they were white and couldn’t see beyond their own stunted notions of what constitutes skill, intelligence, radicalism or social effect. They really believed that playing a 9th chord for 10 minutes was less intelligent than playing in odd time signatures for 40 minutes. The problem was that they didn’t understand their own buried partiality, nor could they see beyond the stuff they were born with.
- Maggoty Lamb interviews David Toop (The Guardian)
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Posted by s woods on March 5, 2013
A by no means comprehensive or conclusive survey of a Canadian power trio who once upon a time (much less so now) got under the skins of more rock critics than any other rock or pop artist going.
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- Creem, June 1981
“For the record, those three are drummer Neil Peart, who writes all the band’s lyrics and takes fewer solos than might be expected; guitarist Alex Lifeson, whose mile-a-minute buzzing is more numbing than exciting; and bassist, keyboardist and singer Geddy Lee, whose amazingly high-pitched wailing often sounds like Mr. Bill singing heavy metal. If only Mr. Sluggo had been on hand to give these guys a couple good whacks…”
- Steve Pond, review of Rush live in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone, 1980
Geddy Lee’s high-register vocal style has always been a signature of the band – and sometimes a focal point for criticism, especially during the early years of Rush’s career when Lee’s vocals were high-pitched, with a strong likeness to other singers like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. A review in the New York Times opined that Lee’s voice ‘suggests a munchkin giving a sermon.’ Although his voice has softened over the years, it is often described as a ‘wail.’ His instrumental abilities, on the other hand, are rarely criticized.
- Wikipedia entry on Rush
- Mark Coleman and Ernesto Lechner, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, 2004
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Archival, Canada, Chuck Eddy, Classic Music Mag Covers, Creem, Critical Collage, Dear Ed., History of Rock Criticism, Links, PDFs and Scans, Quotes, Rockism, Rolling Stone | 3 Comments »
Posted by s woods on March 5, 2013
I have been a professional rock critic, more or less, for 15 years, and as such my friends and family naturally assumed I would be “music-training” my son from birth, regaling him with Sonic Youth and Sun Ra and Ghostface Killah from an early age so as to make him The Coolest Baby on the Planet. Not for him, the scourge of Raffi. But I was determined to avoid this, to instead allow him the calm, sane, non-OCD relationship with music I never had, to just play him the Beatles like all parents do and let things progress organically and probably appallingly from there. I looked forward to being surprised (and appalled).
- Kid Rock Is Cool: In defense of the most reviled genre of them all – by Rob Harvilla, Slate
(cf. “Critical Parenting 101“)
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Posted by s woods on February 19, 2013
But I hedged my bet right from the beginning too, and kept my day job at the welfare department all the way through, as I was a family man and it provided regular income and medical coverage, etc. That job also gave me another kind of coverage, as a rock critic, as since my writing didn’t furnish my primary income, I could be very choosy who I wrote about. When Creem offered me (among many others) Journey’s management’s junket-to-San-Fran to featureize Steve Perry & co., I could stop believin’ right away and say “NO!” It was fine with me if Journey got written up in Creem, but I didn’t want my byline on the piece. I reserved that for say, a $5. Rock-a-Rama (capsule review) of Nina Hagen, one of my heroine-addictions of the time.
- Richard Riegel, Where Did (My) Zeitgeist Go?
I’d never seen this piece before (it’s from the blogger’s section of Rock’s Backpages) — rockcritics‘ fave rave, Richard Riegel, just having devoured Chuck Eddy’s latest critical tome, reflects on his own career/half-career in music criticism.
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Posted by s woods on February 19, 2013
But sometimes you get the real thing, as with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Like Chinese Democracy and Vineland, Finnegans Wake took 17 years, as everybody wondered how Joyce could follow a masterpiece like Ulysses. The Wake inspired a book of critical essays before it even came out, based on the “Work in Progress” fragments he published in lit mags. But when the Wake arrived, the long wait was forgotten, because it turned out to be another masterpiece that gave everyone more interesting problems. And now MBV is the new My Bloody Valentine masterpiece, ever since it arrived on February 2nd, which happens to be the same date Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, on his birthday. He was hoping to release Finnegans Wake on February 2nd as well, but it took him a few more months. (Joyce and Shields are Irish guys. Ever wait for an Irish guy to show up on time? Don’t.)
- Rob Sheffield, “My Hundredth Listen to the New My Bloody Valentine Album: Even Better Than the First” (Rolling Stone)
Sheffield is on the case…
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Posted by s woods on February 19, 2013
The important thing about Musician magazine is that it is named Musician magazine. It is not named Music magazine. It is not named Sociology magazine. It is not named Popular Culture, Politics and Anything Else the Editor Likes magazine. And it is certainly not named Critical Theory magazine. Why? Because musicians are interesting and everything else is boring. Well, okay. Music is intensely interesting when listened to. When written about, it is boring. Try it sometime.
- Charles M. Young, “15 Years of Musician: Why We Write About What We Write About” (Musician, August 1991)
(For the record, I would happily buy a magazine called Popular Culture, Politics and Anything Else the Editor Likes, which describes pretty much every great magazine ever, though not Musician, which was also once in a while a great magazine.)
Posted in Archival, Musicians, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on February 14, 2013
Well, I don’t listen to [gangsta rap] a lot, because my car speakers aren’t big enough, but I do listen to it, because I love it when people redeem the vernacular. I love the prosody — those physical, classical cadences. Jesus, I heard something the other day and the weighted syllables just marched along. They were positively Virgilian—like Latin hexameters, you know. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! And I always find myself thinking, when I listen to this stuff: is this meaner and more cynical than Exile on Main Street? Is this worse than “plug in, flush out and fight the fucking feed!?” One of the few enema lines in rock and roll. (laughter) How does this anomie compare with Lou Reed, with Street Hassle, for instance? Of course, when you’re dealing with popular music, you’re always dealing with the Heartbreak of Crazy Hormones at some level, (laughter) but I’m not shocked by it. The last time I was shocked was by a poorly-grounded Stratocaster. (laughter). I mean, gangsta rap is dangerous: it’s at the edge of being deadly, but, for all the death around it, it’s not deadly. It’s so desperately American. Just the act of speaking it, you know. Just the idea that these kids from fucking nowhere would work their butts off to remake the language and make it speakable, just stand up and speak it—that betrays a level of innocence and aspiration that breaks your fucking heart
- Dave Hickey, by Saul Ostrow, BOMB 51/Spring 1995
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Posted by s woods on February 12, 2013
There’s no one to tell the adults in the language of the adults what’s happening. The only writer who comes close is Ralph Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s been in the territory long enough so that he never says ‘pop culture.’ You won’t find any maps to that land in The New York Review of Books or Kenyon Review or Partisan Review. (Well, Leslie Fiedler has acted as a guide partway for the readers of PR… But he’s telling it from a distance. And so am I. Besides, nobody can go that route for you. You have to listen for yourself. Dig for yourself. Dig yourself.)
- Nat Hentoff, “Something’s Happening and You Don’t Know What It Is, Do You, Mr. Jones,” Evergreen Review, 1966 (reprinted in The Age of Rock, Jonathan Eisen, ed.)
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Posted by s woods on February 12, 2013
Many thanks for Ralph Gleason’s review of Albert Goldman’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce… I didn’t know Lenny Bruce… but I am acquainted with Albert Goldman and his ambition to stake out a monopoly position for himself in a culture of which he is no more a part than I am; and I have been hoping that someone with a true grasp of the reality would judge the book for what it was worth, which Ralph indeed did.
- Joseph Heller, letter to Rolling Stone, August 1974
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Posted by s woods on February 12, 2013
Because the new sensibility demands less ‘content’ in art, and is more open to the pleasures of ‘form’ and style, it is also less snobbish, less moralistic — in that it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edification. If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes. The brio and elegance of Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond or the singing style of Dionne Warwick can be appreciated as a complex and pleasurable event. They are experienced without condescension.
- Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” 1965
[I've been under the impression for a long time that Sontag mentioning the Supremes and Dionne Warwick was a Big Deal. To this McLuhan/Aesthetics of Rock fan, it all seems a bit so-what to me, but perhaps in context, in 1965 -- inside the halls of academia? -- assigning value to the Supremes did signal some kind of line being crossed. I don't know. I've also heard that Sontag later shrugged off whatever affinities she once expressed for pop, though I've never seen the evidence of such.]
Robert Rauschenberg, “Signs” (1970)
Posted in Archival, Quotes | 2 Comments »
Posted by s woods on February 12, 2013
See, the genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it. Not only Dylan, but that kind of scorching electric howl of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison — and these happen to be three people who died early and tragically — as if to provide an answer, as if to present a counterpart to what was happening around them in the streets, in the riots, in the assassinations, in the war in Vietnam, in the civil rights struggle. Rock was the art form that could match that. Not that these artists all made explicit reference to the immediate culture around them. But the music itself was a perfect counterpart to what was happening in our culture — as, for example, jazz was not. I’m a lifelong jazz fan — but jazz was just too cool to be part of that. It had to be rock. Rock just came out of it.
- Don Delillo interviewed by Greil Marcus
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Posted by s woods on February 6, 2013
I’m almost 30, and although certain elements of my lifestyle have remained as dissolutely constant as in 1971, I have to admit that I’m just not into drinking half a gallon of Gallo Port and listening to Black Sabbath’s first three albums in a row, which is what I did every single night the winter of that year.
- Lester Bangs, “The Roots of Punk Part III,” New Wave Rock, February 1979
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Posted by s woods on February 6, 2013
These would-be English Kings of Heavy Metal are eternally foiled by their stupidity and intractability. In the early Seventies their murky drone was all the more appealing for its cynicism — the philosophy that everything is shit, and a flirtation with pre-Exorcist demonic possession. Time has passed them by: their recent stuff is a quaint bore.
- Ken Tucker on Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1979
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Posted by s woods on February 6, 2013
What Black Sabbath fan hasn’t plotted revenge on that scumbag Nick Tosches, whose infamous Rolling Stone review of Paranoid railed about Black Sabbath’s ‘bubblegum Satanism,’ and then went on to attack lead singer (in reality of Black Widow) Kip Treavor???
- Wayne Davis, “Further Thoughts on Those Marvelous Loud Heavies,” photocopied pages from unknown fanzine, 1972
[Tosches' review]
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Posted by s woods on February 5, 2013
If someone is going to write about a pop star or a song or even an absurd haircut as if it doesn’t matter, then I’d rather they didn’t bother writing about it all. I always wanted to write about everything as though it mattered, and I’ve always tried to.
- Chris Heath, “Smash Hits to GQ: Adventures in Magazine Writing” (interviewed by Steven Ward in Popmatters, 2009)
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