(no subject)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have a new Pitchfork column up - inspired indirectly by Frank's series of columns, and directly by conversations with people here, and by conversations ON here dating from ages and ages ago. The column is nominally about the Smiths but not really (also the summary on the front page misunderstands it, so I wonder if it isn't very clear what I'm getting at).

It's also worth having another look at yesterday's Pop Open thread, where an interesting chat has got going between cis and koganbot and a couple of other people, on the subject of...well, depending on what you think about the topic you might call it "indie trying to be pop" or "perfect pop" or "revivalist pop". Follow-on post action here may yet occur.

Comments

it's a little tangential to your main point

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

a lot of my aversion to music writing is because it leapfrogs the emotional response - presumably because they take that as a given. associated with that, in my head, is the suspicion that the non-emotional response is chosen post-hoc to fit with the emotional response (+ve or -ve). so if correspondent rly rly likes X but there is no 'craft/sophistication/rockist theme Y' in there they have to go elsewhere for praise.

the most ad- and post-hoc responses are when the response is -ve yet there is something really interesting to be said - for which see any super-long ILM thread which is full of long explanations of why something is rubbish interespersed with random 'i love this' posts.

Re: it's a little tangential to your main point

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Could you possibly be thinking of the Justice thread? ;)

I think it's very true that people trim the analysis to fit the reaction - OK I wuv this - why? I find that the longer I do this music criticism LARK the more cautious I get about trying to make sure that I'm just writing about how particular things in the music work for me, rather than inferring grand pronouncements of right and wrong from the mechanics of individual records. (I save those for Poptimists threads)

Re: it's a little tangential to your main point

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

actually i toyed with going on to to say explicitly NOT that one. (lex was treading his usual ideology, not ad-hoc, and ronan was upfront about his -ve reaction). i was specifically recalling the arctic monkeys thread. honest!

Re: it's a little tangential to your main point

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I HATED that on the Justice thread b/c everyone was all like "HAHA Spencer has PUNCTURED YR POMPOSITY" whereas when I've done it about Hilary or Paris or someone people demand explanations.