Good column, but DUDES that Reynolds quote is one of the w4nkiest things I've ever read:
"thinking about how it was all underpinned by a quasi-mystical faith in beats as somehow figurative: a belief that the tremors that each breakthrough by auteur-producer or scenius alike sent through the state of pop somehow correlated with or could be equated to tremors through society..."
when is this quote from? i think for a while there WAS an over-arching "faith in beats" (or in scene) (or actually most likely in E) at the back of the rhetoric of the "Second Summer of Love" -- what would be interesting would be to explore how widely it was shared, once you got beyond the aceeed rhetoricians
simon's gift -- for good and evil -- is spotting "people like us"* within any scene: it's how he makes [_____] safe for the chattering classes, essentially
i think he's good at seeing such people, and characterising their utopias, favourably or otherwise -- what he's REALLY bad at, really deaf to, is the presence of everyone else in a scene, and what THEY contribute (esp.when it isn't in lockstep with the "people like us" element; esp.,when their self-expression is not naturally writerly or otherwise conventionally articulate)
*not QUITE as reductive as white semi-middleclass rockwrite-reading college kids, but often not far off
i think he's good at seeing such people, and characterising their utopias, favourably or otherwise
Strange, I think he rather sucks at this, unless "people like us" excludes me and Dave and Tom and Lex, for instance. But I enjoyed his "advice": "Whenever, as a producer, you feel yourself flinching a bit from using an idea or a sound or an effect, hesitating on the grounds that it's maybe a wee bit cheesy, then I would say just to push right past that feeling and go for it. Do it twice over, even. There can never be enough monster riffs or cheap tricks in dance music; there can definitely be a surfeit of just-so subtleties." It's like all along he was straining to become his distorted view of a poptimist, or he's cantankerously decided it's time to plump for Big Beat after all.
in fact on reflection i think "people like us" (in my formulation, but describing his) DOES actually exclude people like us -- in other words, "not including writers": it's a phantom he's discussing, but not merely a phantom in his own head (it's not unlike the phantom of "the readership" that any magazine editorial has: it DOESN'T mean the totality of the readers, and may well not even mean the plurality of the readers -- moire like "the typical read as we like to imagine him/her")
there's a straightforward get-out clause here, which he OR i could invoke: that is that writers mainly write about music they find conducive to discuss (inc. for some being paid to discuss), and that this distorts the "why" of their manifest taste
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-07-16 02:52 pm (UTC)"thinking about how it was all underpinned by a quasi-mystical faith in beats as somehow figurative: a belief that the tremors that each breakthrough by auteur-producer or scenius alike sent through the state of pop somehow correlated with or could be equated to tremors through society..."
ARRRGH
no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 04:20 pm (UTC)i think he's good at seeing such people, and characterising their utopias, favourably or otherwise -- what he's REALLY bad at, really deaf to, is the presence of everyone else in a scene, and what THEY contribute (esp.when it isn't in lockstep with the "people like us" element; esp.,when their self-expression is not naturally writerly or otherwise conventionally articulate)
*not QUITE as reductive as white semi-middleclass rockwrite-reading college kids, but often not far off
no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 08:09 pm (UTC)Strange, I think he rather sucks at this, unless "people like us" excludes me and Dave and Tom and Lex, for instance. But I enjoyed his "advice": "Whenever, as a producer, you feel yourself flinching a bit from using an idea or a sound or an effect, hesitating on the grounds that it's maybe a wee bit cheesy, then I would say just to push right past that feeling and go for it. Do it twice over, even. There can never be enough monster riffs or cheap tricks in dance music; there can definitely be a surfeit of just-so subtleties." It's like all along he was straining to become his distorted view of a poptimist, or he's cantankerously decided it's time to plump for Big Beat after all.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 09:27 am (UTC)there's a straightforward get-out clause here, which he OR i could invoke: that is that writers mainly write about music they find conducive to discuss (inc. for some being paid to discuss), and that this distorts the "why" of their manifest taste