January 2010
The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J....
agrammar:
Yesterday I posted a fairly peeved note concerning Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader article about Vampire Weekend. (She’s responded to that note, very graciously, on her blog, but that seems to have vanished.) My note led to a spike in traffic, which was unexpected: if I’d realized it’d catch much attention, I might have explained myself more carefully. The essay below is an attempt to...
Curve, DOPPELGÄNGER →
aceterrier:
About halfway through the album I found myself asking myself grumpily why I had it in the first place; surely I couldn’t have thought that anything this monochrome and repetitive would be a priority in my listening life someday. Glancing through the factoids a single search gleans, I realized why: because this is the band that people always say Garbage ripped off.
I don’t like...
iPad, whether you like it or not
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing....
Groove Armada featuring Bryan Ferry... →
therichgirlsareweeping:
Where are all these “featuring Bryan Ferry” tracks coming from?!? It’s like, magic and stuff. This one sounds like a lost cut from Flesh + Blood.
xoxo, c. hotpoint
Fantastic!
And for the record, Flesh + Blood is a great underrated album. Sure it’s not as edgy and “important” as early Roxy, but it’s a cool new romantic dance record in its own...
<that owl photograph>
internet paradox
agrammar:
And because the web is a totally seamless space, people are far less aware of the specific audience for any given place they wind up; if the content is Not For Them, they’re likely to blame the content.
This idea has extended into the physical world. Just read the comments for any new consumer electronics product. People will dismiss any new product as “stupid” or...
Does Being A Bit Obtuse Make For Better Music? →
tomewing:
My Guardian column. This is a little bit outside my comfort zone, in that it’s about indie rock, and American indie rock at that!
There’s nothing wrong with direct music, but it’s always the stuff with at least some obtuseness that I feel I can live inside of and keep returning to over and over again. I don’t know if that’s “better” music, but...
NYTimes to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web... →
990000:
via epak
My knee-jerk response is, “Good luck with that.”
Why are they announcing this a full year in advance? They’re trying to judge reaction. It will probably never happen.
I subscribe to the Sunday print edition, so this doesn’t impact me, anyway.
I don’t automatically believe all online news content should be free.
I’d be worried that any...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
tomewing:
rocketsandrayguns:
Why would anyone expect anything other than consensus, especially as professional critics become more and more digitally connected? In fact, I’d assume the more talk of audience fragmentation, the more consensus we’d get from career critics. If critical fragmentation matched audience fragmentation, wouldn’t that only support the perception that music critics are...
The Year of Too Much Consensus →
tomewing:
perpetua:
This is an extraordinarily depressing essay by former Voice editor/professional contrarian Chuck Eddy. It’s like a guy who used to be principal of a high school getting really angry about the outcome of his old school’s student council election.
The idea of Chuck’s I found interesting is that there’s a kind of default aesthetic at any one time - the stodgy U2-loving rock...
“I think you can tell a lot about a person from the Brian Eno interview segments...”
– asphalteden
1993
tomewing:
1993 in Britain was the apex of scene-a-week genremaking by the music press: history focuses now on the proto-Britpop stuff (because it ‘won’ and because it was pretty good) but at the time that wasn’t such a sure thing at all and there was a forest of other stuff going on.* Such as!
New wave of new wave - reputationally poor punkiness, aggressive and political (SMASH, These Animal...
“The next person who tells me the US has no class system will be forced to read...”
– https://twitter.com/dorianlynskey
