Right

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The promised follow-up questions (two of them in fact)

What have you been most right about? (The world may or may not have caught up to you on this)

Does being seen as "wrong" or "right" about music by other people bother you much?

Comments

What really really really gets me mad

[koganbot]

Guess I need to elaborate on that final sentence. That something is popular is a reason why someone ought to study it, since we ought to take an interest in the world, but I don't generally feel that I'm the one who has to study it, and I won't unless someone I care about either likes it or hates it - the someone I care about at times being me. (Or I suppose unless someone offers me money.) But something's being popular greatly increases the likelihood of someone I care about hating it or liking it. The real issue, though, is this: People have opinions about things that are popular, and what's going on in what David Moore has dubbed The War Against Lindsay is that many many many people want to wear their contempt for or indifference towards Lohan et al. as a social marker or a badge of class solidarity. Paste magazine, whom I've written for - and seems to be run by nice people with good liberal ideals - devotes the final page of a recent issue to a comic about a Kerry-McConnell bill, "Take Out The Trash," a proposal to "forbid future discussion of the overly talked about trio of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan." To be fair, maybe the comic is about the impossibility of not talking about them, since in the comic the senators can't stop themselves; but still there's the irony of a magazine devoting a page to trumpeting their decision not to talk about something. And so you have magazine writers wanting to sneer loudly at something while also congratulating themselves for making no effort to understand the people they're sneering at. And given that the sneer is aimed at (1) people who've made some great music, and - THIS IS THE REAL BATTLE - at (2) the audience for these people and this great music (e.g., me), this gets me real mad real fast. (Fwiw, there is too much stuff written and said about Lindsay et al., but conversely there's not nearly enough intelligent stuff written about them, and their music hasn't gotten nearly enough attention, though Britney at least once had high sales.)

Re: What really really really gets me mad

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Won't go into where I thought I was right (though M. Matos semi-mockingly called me the little-known writer of "the most important music review of the decade"!), but in line w/ what Frank just said, I wrote this on Marc Hogan's blog, part of a longer semi-incoherent rant and convo (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6302794271451371310&postID=2582398475964053466) (truncated):

...good music writing could come from anywhere. It doesn't come from very many places about ANY kind of music right now, but there's not a direct correlation to the music being discussed (there's a lot of amazing music with little to zero good criticism about it, just waiting to be written) [...] But hey, how about Fergie? Lots and lots and lots of words, but NO GOOD CRITICISM about her album, and it's a great album! (If Sanjaya puts out a great album, maybe I'll want to read good words/have a good convo about him, but for now he hasn't done anything to merit one.) How about HSM, the #1 CD of the year, probably a bajillion words written on it and not a one of 'em will make anyone, including me, even remotely interested in listening to it (usually the underlying point in those articles was that non-kids SHOULDN'T be listening to it, and shouldn't be expected to -- it was for the primal preteen hordes. Why?). [...] performers who get fifty ZILLION words and not a single one that makes me want to do anything but stop reading

Re: What really really really gets me mad

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

frank, how would you assess the situation if (1) just completely dropped out of it?

you are obviously quite intent on keeping it in there, but it seems that people you would like to fault for their opinions about any of the relevant entertainers (often for stuff related to (2), on your end and theirs) will absolutely refuse - basically everything, refuse to consider, refuse to think, refuse to be convinced, refuse to ignore without sneering, refuse to give a pass to for 'non-musical' reasons - if you do keep it. i wonder what effect it has on the larger conversational and social stuff, and whether it has to.

by 'dropped out' i don't mean 'you stop believing that the music is great', but 'you stop insisting that it is to unsympathetic interlocutors'.