I’ll be sitting out all of next week and possibly for days or even weeks afterward, due to what promises to be the least fun move ever (do they ever get any easier?). Hopefully, as August winds down, I’ll be able to pop in every so often to play a bit of catch-up, but don’t hold your breath. The rest of the month could be a washout.
Thanks for tuning in, and — we’ll see you when we see you.
Kit Rachlis on rap and black pop, from Mother Jones, January 1982
“As a critic — and as a fan — Rock doesn’t seem to fill me anymore. I admit complicity in my own alienation. Events had denied all of us the social stability which Rock requires.”
Richard Goldstein, in 1969, demonstrating how weariness among rock critics set in early (was, indeed, I might even argue, built right into the profession).
Send it to The Daily Swarm.
Jack M Silverstein at Chicago Now says YouTube and smart phones are the music journalist’s new best friends:
…you don’t have to be a pro with a pro set-up to leave your mark in the music journalism game. I don’t know if evilmonkey679 is a rock journalist or just a music lover, but who cares? The Evil Monkey’s channel is FILLED with great you-are-there concert footage. Whatever the intent of evilmonkey679, she or he is now, with the help of a smart phone, a music journalist. Certainly there is more to good journalism than just point and shoot — backstage access, a larger outlet than social media, and the ability to interview and write are still essential tools — but at for base-level reporting, someone like evilmonkey679 is invaluable: on the scene, collecting footage, and distributing quickly.
An early review in Publisher’s Weekly of James Wolcott’s Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York:
Wolcott… arrived as a college dropout in 1972 and scored a writing gig at the Village Voice — a snake-pit of feuds and nude editing — that inducted him into the city’s hippest scenes. Chief among these was the punk-rock incubator at the bar CBGB, which affords him vibrant portraits of Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, and other punk luminaries against a backdrop of Hells Angels… Wolcott’s hip, closeup yet detached narrative falters during worshipful scenes of his mentor Pauline Kael, the New Yorker movie reviewer who elevated criticism to ‘a higher power’; his reminiscences of dishing and cackling with Kael at screenings and soirées feel claustrophobic and dull.
Via Billboard:
And with this, of course, it was all over. America would never be the same again.
Okay, not really, but here’s what one commenter at the A.V. Club (ostensibly commenting on a review of Reynolds’s Retromania) has to say:
I finally got a chance to read Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic and despised it. It was slightly interesting at times (it’s also outdated), but so meaninglessly politically reactionary it read like a Red State tract. It’s impossible to measure the bitterness that is contained within the pages: it’s not just ‘winding up the hippies’, it’s as pathetically phallocentric as a Norman Mailer journal entry. I understand why Reynolds would’ve found it intriguing, as it was definitely a uniquely individualistic look at rock music, but I also think he liked it because everything Carducci wrote was almost entirely the exact opposite of everything that Reynolds has ever written in his life… Reynolds is probably fifty times the writer that clowns like Joe Carducci are, more thoughtful and more intelligent. Maybe I’m biased because I remember fondly reading him, and a handful of other terrific writers, in the last heyday of the Melody Maker, but to even put him in the same hemisphere as some middle-aged crank who thought that fucking Saccharine Trust was the second coming is an insult to just about anybody who has ever uttered a word.
Milo Miles in his interview with Steven Ward at rockcritics.com:
As to freelance writing, if you are not part of the scarce elite who get hitched to the slick-magazine gravy train you better be part of a two-income couple, as I am, if you want to get by at all.
And that was ten years ago, almost to the day, when there was still (or so it seemed at the time) a ground to stand on. (More on the economics of rock criticism here.)
Inquiring minds want to know.
Next year Duke University Press will publish Flyboy 2:The Greg Tate Reader. He recently completed The 100 Best Hiphop Lyrics for Penguin and is now working on a book about the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, for Riverhead Press.
Billboard, June 29, 1974
As part of their ‘Spotlight Albums of the Week,’ October 16, 1961. (Along with Lucille Ball and Marshall McLuhan, Robert Johnson turned 100 this year.)
Frank Zappa playing guest DJ with Tom Donahue in 1968 on KPFA. Good banter in here about doo-wop amongst other things.
RockCritics.com 