Music as conversation

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

New Pitchfork column by me on answer records, fan fiction, music as conversation... thanks to piratemoggy for her help putting this one together!

http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7635-poptimist-21/

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHA awesome.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Just came here to do one of these ;) and figured a few people who'd beaten me to it. Although, to be fair to people who aren't demonstrably RONG, I think that "immersing myself in it" can also be an escape route, saying that there is a cultural sphere to which you are not initiated or interested, and therefore there is no way you can organize the _____ of that sphere (music, conversation, whatever) without it being an "inauthentic" representation. But I can write tons of great stuff about music for kids without hanging out with them, or using, e.g., my own kids (who don't yet exist) as a kind of anecdotal buffer zone. In fact, sometimes nothing is more irritating than using a vaguely anthropological approach to do something that just isn't a big deal in the first place, like figuring out how genres might work.

Granted, there's a difference between finding aesthetic or conceptual similarities between different songs/music and claiming that, say, the reason confessional male R&B has been so hot lately is because they're all on vicodin.