Simon Reynolds - C or D

There are other things to ask. One complaint of yours with Reynolds is that your students turn in half-assed papers that take advantage of his ideas. But would they be giving their experiences with dance music, for example, serious thought if it wasn't for him? Are you offering them viable alternatives, and attempting to give them ways of writing about what's important to them, in ways that are acceptable to you? I don't mean for this to sound just like "well, what are YOU doing?" Just to indicate what I take to be the importance of getting people thinking and giving them a vocabulary.

- we didnt delete the post.

- the reason we said we might is cos at the time we had a policy of deleting personal abuse aimed at another poster. SR had posted here and been met with the thread title "Simon Reynolds Is A Gobshite!". As you pointed out, this isn't high on the Richter Scale of abuse, so the thread stayed. Simon Reynolds - C or D? is fine, as is the sort of critical mauling you're dishing out.

As for what you're actually saying? Hmm. For a Texan, you're very class-conscious. I can't really say much about your accusations because almost everything you're holding up as a great sin of English rock criticism I totally endorse and encourage. I'd also prefer a writer like Reynolds - who whatever his starry-eyed conception of the proletariat is at least writing regularly about the music that excites him right now - to someone like Meltzer who has as far as I can tell spent 30 years playing the same solitary I-coulda-been-a- contender tune.

By the way J, calling someone earnest and sincere and then pointing out not one paragraph later that same fellow is basically a "desperate square" in love with the idea of seeming hipper than he is seems to be bit of a contradiction. Reynolds cannot simultaneously love and enjoy the rave scene and be the same sort of calculating hipster hanger-on that Meltzer clearly thought Christgau and Marcus were/are. Those two were genuinely disconnected from much of (if not all of) the music and the scenes they were writing about. Unless you are implying that Reynolds has never been to a rave (a claim easily refuted) or that he didn’t enjoy the “raving experience” (another claim I think would be pretty easy to refute) I fail to see the connection. Just because he doesn’t fall into your rather limited preconception of English ravers (slack-jawed yobs?!?) doesn’t mean that he didn’t “belong” and/or wasn’t accepted in the community he documented. Christgau and Marcus would have difficulty claiming such a thing and this is what Meltzer was pointing out.

I have no real idea whether Reynolds is earnest and sincere. He may be engaged in quite a bit of self-promotion and hipster quotient enhancement, but if that is your “real” criticism, J, I find it a bit ironic to be coming from a someone engaged in building the same sort of mythology about himself. Did we really need to know that you are a professor of philosophy at an American university (I wager it’s not a very prestigious one or you would have mentioned it)? Or that you read over Sex Revolts with Holger Czukay? Hmmn. Is this necessary to building your arguments or you simply pulling a “Reynolds” so to speak? What do you think your hero Richard Meltzer would say about you?

You seem to be blaming SR for his [influence] on students, which isn't very productive: lots of bold, original writers are terrible influences. For what it's worth, I'm all in favour of misreadings of Theory mavens in popcrit, as long as they are fruitful misreadings. I think SR just takes the bits and pieces of Theory that he fancies (pleasures of the text, ecriture feminine, abjection etc), and doesn't necessarily try to be "true" to the sources. What's important is the energy that is generated by the meeting of the [magnesium of] idea with the [water of] the audience/readership. Speaking as someone who had his thoughts about music turned inside out by SR etc, I found it quite a productive encounter. {ps I think if you are going to criticise people for misunderstanding Theory, you shd make sure you spell Cixous correctly - am I alone in thinking that a Philosophy prof who disapproves of "hi-falutin' concepts" must have made some curious career decisions?].

You seem to disapprove of Reynolds using Theory to talk about "slack- jawed yobs" (I'm not sure that he does, but anyway...) - this seems to me snobbery of the worst kind. Should such people be undiscussable? Do you have an approved reading list of ways of talking about such people? Should one feel class-shame for one's education? I think Reynolds - who has been raving since the early 90s, incidentally - is much less the square rockprof than entire American rockcrit establishment (Xgau, Marcus, etc).

I can't really defend The Sex Revolts, I found it overly-schematic, a book that seemed like it had been written by a committee.

Nevertheless, I would say that Reynolds at his best (the early Monitor essays, most of Blissed Out, Energy Flash, the new book on postpunk by the look of it) weaves together the defining strands of English popcrit: analysis, theory, prosody: he has a peerless ability to place the primary experience (record/gig/event) within a number of contexts (artistic, cultural, political) and pretty much alone among current pop writers marries a sense of the seduction of the aesthetic with the responsibilities of the social.

It strikes me that popcrit is all about "idiotic attention to detail over insignificant pop'n'fashion trends". You think you have made an incisive critique of SR? As we say in Rotherhithe "you're talking out of your arse, mate".

I have that Sex Revolts book at home, have dipped into it a bit, and lean towards thinking it's a load of rubbish. I'm not such an expert on the discography of Can so factual inaccuracies there don't bother me. But I thought the general tone of the book was a bit reductionist (rock/pop music is all about lyrics) and the way most artists get a page at most on their work seems like Reynolds is just skimming the surface of their oeuvre.

Now I don't prescribe subject matter or content in any of my classes, nor does my aesthetic approach necessitate some pragmatic "usefulness" factor either. If SR inspires these students to view the music they like in a more thoughtful manner, fine. I just wish they had a better role model, then. Namely, one who knew what the hell he was talking about. I don't doubt that SR knows something of the rave scene - I certainly wouldn't presume to know much of anything about that, as my own tastes run more in the direction of Keiji Haino and Iancu Dumitrescu and not towards the dancefloor - but he sure doesn't know much of anything about philosophy, semiotics or cultural theory. Problem is, he sure tries to pass himself off as someone who does.

Well, I guess my American sarcasm doesn't translate so readily at all times. The Texas class conscious thing is funny (really!), as I was taking my cues (and taking the piss, I guess you'd say) from the class stuff in Energy Flash. As Lester Bangs wrote, I don't know shit about the English class system and I don't care shit about the English class system. (Well, I did once receive a paid trip to Cambridge University and found, with few exceptions, the profs and students alike to be the most snooty and arrogant bunch of toffs imaginable. One more snide, whiny "witticism" and I was ready to join the IRA! I admit it, the English class system is an impenetrable mystery to me and the English xenophobia is an inseparable gulf.)

As for Richard Meltzer, well, he seems to possess everything I find lacking in Reynolds, namely, wit, passion, and poetry. Compare that to SR's faux-Oxford grad student jive - the existentially neat, effete chiding/finger-wagging, half-baked theorizing. Meltzer hasn't claimed to be keeping up with current music, so tell me: just what is the point in running down something for being something that it's not? Talk about specious reasoning. Besides, Meltzer is the Voice of the Crank extraordinaire - perhaps the only valid voice left to anyone in this day and age. (And Meltzer certainly has a much more thorough grasp of the philosophical canon - tossed out of Yale for his troubles - than SR ever will - and is confident enough in his knowledge NOT to have the neurotic compulsion of a nervous clasroom swot, shoving his book-learning down the hapless reader's throat at every turn.)

Well, I figure that the Meltzer barb is a not-too veiled attempt to steer this thread into the tired old "rockist/anti-rockist", 1980's English pop weekly discourse vs. big bad US Forced Exposure aesthetic, Brittania vs. America camp. I ain't buying that argument, and I'll tell you why.

Jeezuz. Why the fuck are so many ILM posters obsessed with a 23 year old non-issue that I found silly when I was reading the NME in 1979? Here we are in 2002 and SR is now waxing nostalgic about his vanished youth (midlife crisis, I suppose; just watch, he's going to denounce rave music as decisively as he previously denounced Morrisey or long- forgotten "oceanic rock" combos), revisiting ye olde Rough Trade shoppe circa 1979 and gravely and pompously informing the world that we are all the poorer for not properly appreciating the true genius of A Certain Ratio or the tinny, sub-skiffle sounds which manifested from the skanky confines of Green's scummy boho squat. At least Tanya Headon can see that Scritti Polliti knew and accomplished fuck all. A fair and honest assessment, surely, but here we have Simon Reynolds insisting on presenting such long-dead insignificance as a matter of earthshaking importance. I just don't happen to think that some daft ICA/Dick Hebdige-semiotic reading of the length of this year's coat collar or Green mumbling "Jacques Derrida" or Tricky droning on about "oompa lumpa I be awful stoned and paranoid" or some such amounts to much in the way of, well, much of anything at all. A cultural and/or intellectual barometer ("supported" by some sound bites from Baudrillard and Debord)? You've simply got to be joking.

I don't mind being the crank around here. I find the discussions at ILM quite lively and intelligent. Next thread I start will be a thorough demolishing of Momus' "cute formalism" thingy, i.e. - attitudes such as this exemplify everything that's wrong with this world.

And before you jump all over me ...

1) I quite like and respect Momus as a thinker, even if I disagree with him 50% of the time. (Maybe 70% after reading his Bjork comment on a recent thread.)

2) Ye olde Rough Trade shoppe comment. Records by This Heat, the Fall, the Raincoats, Red Crayola, TV Personalities and Young Marble Giants rate among some of my all time favorite records, so you certainly can't accuse me of Anglo-phobia (yeah, I know, Mayo Thompson was a Texan too.) HOWEVER, Scritti Pollitti, The Smiths, the Virgin Prunes and Aztec Camera should all have been strangled in the cradle. Along with Bjork and Derek Birkett, Momus. (I remember when Birkett usta be an ANAR-CHIST along with his brother and the Crass gang, long before his transformation into Larry Parnes-meets-Richard Branson. British pop kidz are so fucking FICKLE, eh? I personally blame it all on D. Bowie's postmodern Al Jolson guises, the shape- shifting vaudeville dog and pony show.)

Does he reckon that Beanie Sigel whups the asses of BOTH Jay-Z AND Nas?

and what's wrong with that, exactly?

(except for the tired hobby horse of: blah blah, trying to pass himself off as deep theoretical something or other. blah.)

The telltale thing about Blissed Out is that he spends the whole book inventing names for genres but when someone else (e.g. AR Kane) has the tenacity to think up their own genre names, SR moans on about their "sulling the purity of their music."

Me? I just think he tries way, way too hard.

*Which is true, fine.

meltzer = mother of all anti-rockists obv

mark s = mentalist.

Cixous, yes. So I'm not always the world's most accurate typist. Big fucking deal.

SR as earnest and sincere. Doncha recognize sarcasm when you read it?

Slack-jawed yobs and high-falutin' ideas. Doncha recognize irony when you ...

PROFESSIONAL PHILOSOPHY. Of course academia is full of shit, and philosophy as a discipline is one of the worst offenders. You think I don't know that?! Do you think I play that game? Do you want to take a guess how my vocal stance against the entire farce has worked out for me? Do you think I have or will ever have tenure? Take a guess. Go on. I dare you.

Prestigious university. As if that matters one fucking whit. It's the fourth largest university in the UT system. You figure it out, if it matters to you.

Otherwise, I think it becomes an example of what other people are saying..."Well, who else is going to do it?"

DUNS SCOTUS!!

(SR did EngLit didnt he? not even a Real Subject, only introduced in 20th century)

This obliquely reminds me of the revelation about the philosophy department here at UCI. In the men's restrooms there, there's a huge amount of anti-Derrida graffiti, obviously prompted by his residence here every spring. One time I asked someone in the department about that -- "Geez, are the grads here really ticked off with him?" "Oh no," came the reply, "that's from the professors."

I align myself with Tom in this particular debate, unsurprisingly.

Scenario 1: I'm gonna follow in the footsteps of other (non-Simon Reynolds) Brit super rock-crit Jon Savage and write a best-selling book all about how the souls of millenarian homeless loonies have invaded the spirit of this year's current pop practitioners, resulting in a utopian look-in/look-see shining future, sadly and surely to be crushed by the tide of History (capital H) and New Labour Market Forces, with quite a few pages devoted to the intrinsic world-historical importance of hand-me down Teddy Boy and long- castoff Carnaby Street fashions. I'm currently applying for a research grant, in order to enable me to devote the next year divining the dialectical import of the Nehru jacket. Like Savage, I hope to sneak such straight-faced phrases as "snookering one's betters" into my text.

Scenario 2: Move to London and assemble a boyband to manage; then I too can be Larry Parnes/Joe Meek/Malcolm McLaren/Richard Branson/Brian Epstein/Andrew Loog Oldham/Derek Birkett etc. and then some. The name of the band is Snotty & the Wankers. S&tW's aren't pure fluff. They like to have a laugh or two, go down to the pub, have a few drinks, but also in firm possession of a meaningful social conscience. Songs include "We Vote New Labour 'cos We're Thick" and "Gatwick Airport, How I Love thee".

Scenario 3: Become chair of philosophy at Oxford. Now that's the funniest one yet.

Now look what you've done, you've stolen Dave Q's plans for management world domination from under his nose.

Hey! Is THIS what J Savage meant by "snookering one's betters"?????!

Did I snooker you? Did I snooker the English? Did I? Did I? (Do you REALLY have a culture over there that sez things like "snookering one's betters"? Do you? Do you?! Tell me, damnit!)

Talk about duration and delirium ...

(formula "x and the ys", with its in-built and apparently overtly celebrated class hierarchy, is ALMOST NEVAH seriously adopted in UK rock/punk/pop self-naming, and when it is — Peter and the Test-Tube Babies? Slaughter and the Dogs — seems calculated to ensure failure to TAKEN seriously despite apparent pretensions; actually i wd term it a Strategy of Deniability, in that band in question were AFRAID to place themselves in role of responsiblity of ARTISTIC SERIOUSNESS)

(help me out foax, is this true: it FEELZ true...)

Didn't Mike Batt do a song called "I'm Snookering You Tonight"? Used as theme tune for top TV gameshow "Big Break." Now how would Mr Jim Davidson go down in Texas? (though he has worked with Greenaway, so some cred)

Golly! Would you like someone to fax over to you a nice cup of chamomile tea?

The Higher Criticism indeed. Any minute now they'll be recalculating Bishop Ussher's chronology.

Christgau and Marcus are indeed jerks and squares, but to be fair, I believe that Marcus went to Graceland and hung out backstage with Jon Landau and Springsteen. Probably drank Evian with Randy Newman and Robbie Robertson too on several occasions. Maybe even actually attended a Mekons concert and lectured to them on Johnny Cash's true place in the American Studies pantheon after the show. Probably tried to fuck Sally Timms too, who I bet wouldn't touch ol' American Greil with a ten foot pole. (Would you?)

Christgau undoubtedly attended appropriate industry functions and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame events, being the Dean of all things rock that the Dean of the Pazz & Jop poll would expected to be.

So how can you say that these twits are disconnected from the culture swirling round the gunk they write about in a way that your vaunted Simon Reynolds is not? I for one have no trouble believing that SR attended many raves, unsuccessfully tried to pick up many an ecstasy- addled sweet sixteen hot young thang, and noodled his (near) middle- aged arse in slightly-askew rhythm bump 'n grind, fancying himself a hotshot with culturally redeeming legit-reason-to-be-there, pausing occasionally and thinking through his halllucinogenic haze, fancying that rare A Certain Ratio cassette and his yellowing, autographed Crispy Ambulance flexi disc, and just remaining merely DAZZLED at how it ever came to all this ...

Do I KNOW you, J?

Terry, you're Marcello?

Uh...if you're a philosophy dude, aren't you much, much more disconnected from the cultures you've put under your own professional microscope than Reynolds or Marcus ever could be? I mean, it's not as if you've ever fondled hot slave-boy ass with Socrates or anything.

Anyway, for me the 'culture' of a music arises out of your personal experiences with it - if you try to force those experiences into some pre-determined model based on your mis-identification with the music's producers or primary consumers your insights are likely to be weaker. On the other hand if you're getting paid to write about music, getting tons of free records, interviewing musicians, editing your copy all the time etc. your personal experiences will be distorted and not worth much either. The best solution is just to be honest about your circumstances and opinions and let the readers decide, I suppose.

howevah i *LIKE* when RM talks abt himself re "music => sex" cf his piece on lawrence welk,m in which girlf is FOR ONCE not humiliated for daring to countermand RM's rigorous self-loathing (normally it's she likes me but i am horrible = she is stupid and/or a slut)

(punk traitor lite-ent TV theme tune shake down: CAPT SENSIBLE vs KEVIN ROWLANDS)

just coming back low-key style to talk about music. staying well away from ile and freds wot might get me annoyed.

For a nanosecond I thought J actually WAS SR, but I'm not sure now. Still that style is naggingly familiar from somewhere, wouldn't you agree?

I mean RM's own sneering = in-crowd logic => RM = effete fop

Where I worked at the time the theatre sent us some comps so we went along out of morbid fascination just to see how bad it was - and boy did it stink! Talk about rubbernecking.

David McCallum (obviously at a loose end at the time) was the male lead. And the thing started with the ultra-naff device of having each member of the cast stand in little boxes with their name projected in front of them, like TV credits. It didn't last very long.

Wonder where Pinefox is keeping himself these days - I'm sure he'll back me up on this.

I sure hope so!

I may have broken the chain, but I know for a fact that a leading hotshot analytic philosopher who teaches elite children of all stripes in an ivy-league covered structure somewhere in New York State not only carried on the noble tradition, he had a cavity filled by the very appendage that once occupied Foucault's own sorry ass.

Perhaps as we speak, some spawn of or relation to the Kennedys or the Bush brigade is receiving his education in the proper Greek manner.

If you want to know how to REALLY get ahead in academia, here's a clue, viz., by taking it from behind. Tenure and research grants await! (Reminds me of that "Mickey" post on the anal sex thread a few days back).

Actually, I'm saving my unsullied ass for the only man who matters - Simon Reynolds. Hee hee.

Sinker is right about RM being an anti-rockist. Why? b/c he recognizes the extreme subjectivity of his fondness for certain rock groups -- a subjective fondness which wuz only with him for about 1.5 yrs total in his life -- every rock fantasy he had was virtually dead before it started. He writes about the failed promises of rock like Springsteen writes about the failed promises of life.

And on Reynolds more generally -- what distinguishes him is the ability to go fromt the specific (microtrends) to the general (broad social changes) and back again via the notion of scenus.

tho if so i mean hurrah obv

Too bad Momus is Scottish, then.

Is this about music?

It seems to be about humans with personal issues.

I can honestly say you music journalists/historians/critics/lion tamers are quite amusing.

I'm going to go back in time and bitch-slap Hegel with a Stratocaster. You know, for the kids.

wrt Bataille - SR's pretty much OTM, but maybe this isn't much of a feat. The Accursed Share is a pretty transparant read, and SR's use of Bataille's idea of expenditure in understanding rave culture seems not only tenable, but downright obvious. Not to mention applicable to a helluva a lot of other music forms that I like.

Deleuze&Guattari are tougher nuts to crack. But are we gonna take D's word for it that we need to be intimately acquainted with the western philosophical cannon in order to "get" his work? Isn't this a question of degree? One can "get" Marx by reading the Communist Manifesto as a freshman in college. But it is then possible to "get" Marx on a whole different level after reading Hegel's Phenomenology. And then again after reading Kant's Critiques. And so on back to Plato. Doesn't all philosophy work this way? SR's use of D&G is on one level totally valid in that he's practicing what they preach, perhaps better than they do. Isn't Anti-Oedipus meant to be articulating a new form of language that rejects the illusion of an I/you or origin/end dichotomy and locates meaning/agency in a non- ending process? Our sense of subjectivity is not the true agent, but a by-product of the true agent, which is the uncontrollable flows of a desire which does not properly speaking belong to any one person, etc... SR fits in extraordinarily well here - his writing always strikes me as being unresolved, moments in an on-going thought. No conclusions, just endless digressions. Which is the kind of writing I'm drawn to. Which is why I'm drawn to philosophy (curious, Mr. Sutcliffe, what drew you to the field)... (btw - when any philosophy claims to be something else, a conclusion rather than just a drop in a still-flowing river, then it's getting too big for its britches... which is to say that I agree with Sterling)

So yeah, his approach to lit/cult crit is half-digested. Is it possible to fully digest any of this stuff? That would seem to suggest that there is a possible end to the philosophical/analytical process, which I find both unlikely and frightening to consider.

My only problem with SR's use of crit theory is that it often seems to obscure more than it reveals. He drops phrases like "desiring machines" without qualifying them. Which can be attributed to him not having reached some "proper" level of understanding of the theory he's using. Or it could just be that he on some level (mistakenly) subscribes to the same principles as Mr. Sutcliffe wrt having to know, unequivocably, what yer talking about before opening yer mouth. I'd rather see Reynolds take a few more risks, go out on a few more limbs, even if he does risk exposing his own shallow understanding of the theories he's using. I'd rather see him say why borrowing D&G's concept of "desiring machines" to describe a piece of music is relevant and get it "wrong," thus opening up a new meaning, than play it safe and leave us to wonder what in god's name he's talking about...

Also really like his conflicted insider/outsider relationship to the music scenes he reports on. Very similar to what anthropology was before it became less fashionable to actually do field studies - problematic, sure, but full of potential new ways of looking at both yourself and whatever the object of your study is...

Bizarrely I was just looking in the google archives tring to find my first message on Usenet and there is a 1994 message to me on AMA saying 'Momus is Scottish'.

Anyway, still don't rate any writers who seem to want to rehash Ian Penman, especially Reynolds, sorry. I hated Penman the first time round (Aside - is there a worse set of sleeve notes ever than Mutant Disco?). Rehashing that limiting style just seems like the sketch show parody of a Modern Review type editorial meeting where 'stylists' write polemics on why Habermas would obviously prefer Danni to Kylie and then ask how suprised people are that they have such outre opinions. See George Orwells comments on book reviewing which he says becomes the act of saying something interesting on something you dont care either way about (paraphrase - sorry).

I do like reading interesting writers, even if they are only writing interestingly (rather that saying interesting things) but I find neither of these applies to Reynolds. Thats why I always rated Paul Morely, in fact its why I like reading Tom E's stuff (mostly).

I hate to be pedantic, but this is exactly the kind of misunderstanding....

The sense in which people like Derrida and D&G mean concepts like endless digression and the impossibility of closure has nothing to do with the idea that it doesn't really matter how much you understand a concept before you use it, because hey man, we can never achieve perfect knowledge...

If anything it's the opposite. More about going all the way through Western rationality and coming out the other end with a radical sense of the bottomless pit that lies beneath it.... a more, not less, perfect knowledge by a matter of infinitesimal but not at all insignificant degree...

I think SR's use of theory is not too bad, all things considered. If anything I would fault him not for the theory he does use but for the theory he doesn't use (eg post-structuralism is rather weak as an edifice for thinking about class issues, as SR is wont to do in somewhat undeveloped fashion. It works for the purposes of blissed- out aesthetics, but not for considering quote unquote social movements a la Energy Flash....) My main complaint would be that he tends to get bogged down in heterogeneity=working-class=pop=women vs purism=middle-class=rockist=men binaries which are not all that interesting either way you flip them... Also that I think rave jargon and theory buzzwords mix v. poorly

Early period up till Sex Revolts : utter classic. After the move to NY and following the Death of Jungle: not as exciting.

desiring machine = very effective as rave jargon IMHO. Shit, they should name a brand of E after it.

I suspect that if one were to draw a venn diagram of reynolds' music tastes & mine, the intersecting bit would be the thinnest of thin slivers. He porbably hates most of the music I like, & would certainly not like my music. However, his writing is so smart & thought-provoking for the most part that for me he's an absolute classic. Blaming SR for his lamer imitators is like blaming hendrix for shit metal shredder twiddler rock guitarists. There are too few writers as gifted as he in the music press - almost none, in fact, and I think that's a shame.

Recently Reynolds has been very nostalgic for the late 70s, a time when language and politics seemed to be stable concepts. I look forward to reading his book on post-punk. In the late 70s bands like Scritti Politti and the Gang of Four were interested in Althusser and Gramsci, not Deleuze and Guattari. It will be interesting to read Reynolds' theoretical conclusions about that era.

There's a Crispy Ambulance flexi? And Reynolds has an autographed copy? This seals the deal, even if he does like that unlistenable rave music. Classic.

[Post referred to has been deleted for impersonation - yeah we know who it was. And no it wasn't Simon Reynolds). - Moderator]

There's a Crispy Ambulance flexi?

Mr. Darnielle, you are a man of goodness. :-)

THAT'S the quote of the year, so far.

Get's my vote for best quote of the year, too.

Ben - Wasn't trying to use D&G's theory as an alibi for SR's "failure to fully understand" the lit crit terminology he uses. I've already acknowledged that D&G seem to think a thorough knowledge of the cannon is key to understanding their work. The para you quoted is not a misrepresentation of the thought of Gilles Deleuze, but a perfectly accurate representation of the thought of Matthew Cohen. I'm not misunderstanding D&G, but disagreeing with them. No one sits down with the Republic and works their way forward before daring to approach present-day philosophy. Even if such were possible (it's not - if such were the case, we would never have any "in" to philosophy, our search for the first, original thought from which we can precede forward to D&G et al would only come to an end with the ancient, indecipherable scribblings on a cave's wall), I don't agree that it's necessary. One's understanding of a given text is of course refined, improved, etc. when one reads the texts that have come before it, but this is not to say that one cannot reach any of understanding of a given text prior to achieving this refinement. The impossibility of absorbing the cannon in its entirety is reflected in the work of the very continental philosophers we're discussing - there seems to be a gaping hole in their representation of western philosophy, between Aristotle and Kant, which is filled only by Spinoza and Descartes (the latter of which seems to exist only for the sake of taking potshots at, ignoring Spinoza's indebtedness to him).

My point about SR practicing what D&G preach was that he has achieved a form of writing that D&G seemed to advocate - focusing on the heaving, oozing, jiggling movement of (for example) the rave scene, rather than its isolated moments. Which is to say that, wrt the ideas he takes from D&G, he seems to understand them just fine, even if he doesn't get the bigger picture. (and I honestly have no idea if he gets it or not) (and who does, really?)

Mr. Sutcliffe - Still would really like to see some examples of SR's failure to properly grasp lit/cult crit...

I am putting off reading certain contemporary works because they assume so much knowledge of earlier philosophers. I don't think it's difficult to come up with a reading list of the names which comes up the most, the thinkers whose ideas had the most widespread impact. There are only so many big ideas to go around. The more minor philosophers may reshuffle them or put a new spin on them, but it's not difficult to get some sense of who the most important authors are (in terms of impact). That doesn't mean there won't be arguments, obviously.

I am very suspicious of a lot of continental philosophy, but I would like to read it eventually. However, I didn't see much point in coming to it without having some Hegel under my belt.

Hegel fills me with total helplessness every time I try to read him, but I swear, one day, one sweet day, I'll make my way through both the Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

1. The slack-jawed E-gobblers aren't by and large violent at all. I think you are confusing them with those famed Football Hooligans (who, famously but I don't believe a word of it stopped being violent when they all started taking E).

2. This is mad. You're saying Texan students are all recycling Simon Reynolds? His fame extends wider than I could ever have imagined.

Imagine Mark SinXoR as a Texas philosophy lecturer, dismissively scrawling over essays in red ink: "Pah! Another boring Hornby re-run!"

poo i haf just remembered wot i had successfully repressed for three days, that i am meant to be delivering FT a review of that stupid da capo book...

well, no reason to read the review then, ho ho.

blimey this puts a crimp in my DECLINE OF ACADEMIC STANDARDS riff

Geeta, you must seek to get your hands on a copy of Frank's zine Why Music Sucks. As Ned might say: it is good, oh yes.

(Frank I've decided that I owe you a Mix CD - how does that sound?)

I'll have to second that, and I still have yet to read a word. ;-) Chuck Eddy mentions Frank and WMS prominently at the end of Stairway to Hell, and I now curse myself for never writing away to the address listed there all those years back. I've missed years of good thoughts, musical and otherwise, as a result.

it was about decadence and iggy pop's penis.

Tim - I've always wanted a mixtape but was too shy to ask. Address is Frank Kogan, PO Box 9761, Denver CO 80209-9761 (the addresses listed in the back of the Eddy books have long since been abandoned; this one won't last forever either, I don't think).

People actually interested in WMS should email me rather than sending $$$ to the address, since prices vary depending on where I'm sending it and which issue I'm sending.

Minna I'm delighted. Thank you.

yrs bll

Oh, you could say something about Simon Reynolds's writing, which almost no one on this thread actually did except in the vaguest terms. Like, open a book, read a page, say something about it.

Also, if you want to be taken seriously, its best not to identify yourself as a tool.

the 'plateau' idea that reynolds uses from time to time (not always in those words) seems to me v. useful and pretty close to whatever d. and g. mean by it. EVEN BETTER, d. and g.'s source, gregory bateson, means something v. useful and interesting by it, well applicable to dance music, moreover rap, a-g stuff, indie rock, all kindsa things.

the 'desiring machine' stuff is not v. well developed so it's hard to tell if reynolds' use of it accords with d. and g.'s (whatever the hell that is exactly). my suspicion is that r's use doesn't show any deep understanding of d and g's, but it's along the right lines.

So let's try the other thing. I just happen to have a copy of History of Shit on my bookshelf, and I'll open it at random ...

"The individuation of waste, which enjoins all 'to hold and retain matter within their homes' comes attached to a moral homily: it serves as the 'raw material' for a fable whose hero serves a calendar in which singing and dancing days are always a year away."

Surely no one here can fail to see that this is a devastating description of the music critic and of how music criticism actually works (instead of the way our late capitalist society pretends that it works). For example, here we are reading this 'matter' when we could be out dancing, like Simon Reynolds always claims to be. The point is that HE is the 'hero' described in the quote and music criticism is the 'fable'.

See. It works.

I just spent the last half hour reading this thread. Extremely interesting.

Can somebody please explain to me who you people are? Is I Love Music a university thing?, a profession guild, how did you people find one another?

Anyway.

I have done some compiling over the last months and I want you to check out some of my pages:

http://www.jahsonic.com/SimonReynolds.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GillesDeleuze.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/DavidToop.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GeorgesBataille.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GreilMarcus.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/BlackScienceFiction.html

see other thread to read my introduction

Kind regards
Jan Geerinck
http://www.jahsonic.com

greil marcus in particular distinguished himself recently when he posted this thread:

YOU SAD BASTARD! Carter Reconsidered Tom Ewing, September 2002

and emmanuel is a troll. but a loveley and kind troll :-)

It's almost too much -- the sustained invocations and praise thrown at every bit of every scene, the compulsive political readings and most importantly the accumulative aspect -- each chapter each twist builds on the one before and the fractures get more subtle and complex at once. Most troublesome is that Reynolds ties each change into the social landscape of region in question, but honestly it moves a bit too fast. I mean he's talking about how certain cultural features came to dominance in '93 thanks to unemployment, etc. so what are we supposed to think -- that the U.K was a bundle of peaches and cream until '92? His criteria for class relations, social change, etc. all seem too confined and limited in their scope. Meaning becomes too hermunetic and cloistered by this -- which is itself the dancefloor moment I suppose.

So thus probably the most thrilling part is how he builds and destroys the arguments for and vs. each twist and turn of genre-fracture being the one to liberate mankind bring peace freedom harmony and lemondade oceans. The experience of stepping in and out of the dancefloor, coming up and coming down and worrying and arguing over where next, the immediacy of local change in a minute twist of culture like Douglas Adams' fantasy from his Dirk Gently novels of an alternate reality tuned into by just twisting slightly sideways through a fourth dimension.

Plateau does seem an appropriate metaphor -- discontinuous sheets of social interaction each projecting itself forever into the past and future.

lemonade oceans? ew.

Perhaps the search for what gramsci terms the "historic bloc" where the entirety of the apparatus of society -- economic roots to most advanced ideological exposition and esthetic appreciation -- becomes harmonious, the real is rational etc. The dialectic of flight from dialecticism, heh.

to Sterl's points, yes Energy Flash/Gen E is action-packed, it covers 10 years of a transglobal subculture and ten years of its prehistory--not even a subculture reallly, more like an alternative mainstream --it moved fast and it mutated wide. any individual artefact or sub-scene within it could be looked at through a host of prisms -- its relationship to the rest of its genre; the genealogy of that genre; the artefact's relationship to the broader pop culture; its relationship to changes in technology; to changes in drug use; its relationship to society. And probably several more prisms. even the biographical prism occasionally with someone like goldie basically telling his lifestory through breakbeats and wussy synth-washes.

at different points some angles will seem more productive than others, or more salient (it's hard to see the social stakes in microhouse or electroclash, say) but other times you might want to try to use them all. (and i'm sure there are points where the EF/GE cake is too rich).

the prism thing is is sort of my big disagreement with kodwo eshun, that as a point of policy he eliminates for himself one whole set of prisms to do with the social, the historical. why would you want to tie your hands like that, why reject a whole set of methods that produce results?

re. pre-92 england as peaches and cream. actually if you recall there was a recession in the early nineties, it's the economy stupid thing was what lost bush his re-election, and it was particularly bad in the uk in 92-93. it came after a period of economic boom and optimism in the late eighties (which really fueled rave), thatcherism's policies had begun to finally pay off (for some of the country anyway -- London and the South of England more than elsewhre), a new spirit of entrepreneuralism abroad esp in the young (see rave again) lots of money circulating in the economy, and more important a perception that there was a boom. that changed by about the time rave turned dark and junglistic, unemployment rose, doom and gloom in the headlines. plus more important the specific microeconomy of rave was doing badly, the boom bubble of massive raves and records that were so popular they'd go straight in the charts wihtout any mainstream radio play, that had burst. so that deflation would be the background to whatever was also going on musically in terms of the music's own narrative, the pharmacological narrative

re mills as purism/fanaticism, if minimal techno was a one man genre i could say probably 'yay', but certainly much more when i wrote the bk there was a whole genre of minimal techno and it seemed to show the downside of purism/fanaticism, you have the purist impulse becoming anorexic, eating away at itself. same thing happened to drum'n'bass ultimately.

talking of which SoundMurderer mix-Cd on Violent Turd -- 60 tks of ragga-jungle circa 94 in just over an hour -- the best jungle mix ever? meaning therefore the best dance music mix ever?

Simon--Jesus god this Soundmurderer fella knows his shit, dunn'e?

talking of which SoundMurderer mix-Cd on Violent Turd -- 60 tks of ragga-jungle circa 94 in just over an hour -- the best jungle mix ever? meaning therefore the best dance music mix ever?

When is this COMING out??!? I don't see it listed on Tigerbeat6's website at all!! What's on it? Who mixed it?

But the good one-man genres always inspire a following, no?

Track 1 (30:48)
Cobra: “R.I.P.”
Remarc: “R.I.P.”
Remarc: “R.I.P. (Remarc Remix)”
Remarc: “Sound Murderer”
Remarc: “Sound Murderer (Loafin in Brockley Remix)”
Cutty Ranks: “Original Ranks (Just Jungle Remix)”
Kemet Crew: “Truth Over Falsehood”
Dennis Brown: “Rebel with a Cause (Bizzy B Remix)”
Johnny Jungle: “Killa Sound (Krome & Time Remix)”
DRS + Kenny Ken: “Everyman (AWOL Remix)”
DJ Rap ft. Outlaw Candy: “Intelligent Woman”
Kemet Crew: “Vibe Out”
Krome & Time: “License Remix”
General Degree: “Papa Lover (Stretch Remix)”
Rude & Deadly: “Lightnin and Thunda”
Shy FX: “Who Run Tingz (T Power Remix #1)”
Shy FX: “Who Run Tingz (T Power Remix #2)”
Remarc: “Thunderclap”
Cutty Ranks: “The Return (Bizzi B & Ruffkut Rmx)”
Tek 9: “Pushing Back (Remix)”
DJ Hype: “Bad Man”
Capone: “Massive”

Track 2 (22:33)
Shy FX: “Simple Tings (10” Mix)”
New Blood: “Worries in the Dance”
Prizna ft. Demolition Man: “Fire (AWOL Mix)”
Simpleton: “Coca Cola (Remix)”
Garnett Silk: “Flip Flop”
Salt Fish & Ackee: “The Gunman”
Barrington Levy: “Here I Come (Remix)”
Physics N Tricks: “Crazy Tings (Remarc Remix)”
Simpleton: “Unity (Remarc Remix)”
Darren H & the Punisher: “All Massive (Remix)”
Ninjaman: “Murder Dem (Lewi Remix)”
L Double: “All Massive”
DJ Rescue: “Untitled #1”
Pure: “Anything Test (Zinc Remix)”
Da Matrix: “Come Een”
Trinity: “I Selassie I”
Krome & Time: “Studio 1 Lik”
Chuckleberry: “Bad Man”
Run Tings & Liftin Spirit: “Come Easy”
Marvellous Cain: “CB4”
Squarepusher ft. MC Twin Dub: “Full Rinse”

Track 3 (15:48)
Psychokenisis: “Secret Place”
The X: “New Dawn (ST Files Remix)”
T.J.C.: “Raw”
B.L.I.M.: “Jeamland (Trace Remix)”
Dom: “Drones”
Nookie: “The Prelude”
Decoder: “Fog”
DJ Rescue: “Untitled #2”
Kemet Crew: “Powering Through”
DJ Gunshot: “Wheel Up”
Solution: “What Can I Do”
Souljah: “2-1-2”
Northern Connexion: “Bounce”
2 Player: “Extreme Possibilities (Wagon Christ Remix)”
Plug: “Cheesy (Aura Mix)”
Shy FX: “Dubplate”
Cyche-Outs: “Kaos Future to Kuranka (Fukakuteisei Mix)”

But my main criticism with regard to Reynolds' theory that techno was heading for an elitist dead end is that it's pretty ironic to see it becoming more populist/popular than EVER in its entire history.

which is then their downfall, no?

no but seriously, often if something's a real good then it inspires loadsa imitators andn if you're reall really INTO that something good then seconddivision secondhand versions of it are going to be just peachy, the more the merrier. but coming as a ahem dilettante outsider to jeff mills's particular fanaticism, it seems like the sonic bases of minimal techno are too narrow to sustain more than a few folk. whereas the gloomcore template actually seems to have more possibilities, but maybe i am too "inside" that sound to be objective

also,
>re each twist and turn of genre-fracture being the one to liberate >mankind bring peace freedom harmony and lemondade oceans
i don't think i ever say anything like that, in fact there's a thread of doubt and ambivalence running through the whole thing that it's all a massive waste of energy, that the euphoria is going nowhere and signifies nothing. i never was one of those this will change the world, it's a revolution in human consciousness types, that side of rave always seemed a bit silly and hippie, it's what put me off it the scene til the harder darker techno came in circa 91. but if the impression is of excessive urgency and the writer being convinced that this area is the most passion-deserving and thought-provoking musical phenom of the Nineties, fascinating both in its broadest contours and implications as well as its smallest details-- well that's what i was feeling.

as a music formation, rave is/was as vast as rock or rap -- as a convert, there's a sense in which you like all of it, the whole cultural project of it feels like a Cause that Stands For Something and that you Stand By (cf hip hop) , but then of course there's particular bits you really really love and think are the leading edge of it. so in writing that bk, i'm trying to big up the whole thing while work out which sectors are most taking it forward.

listening to SoundMurderer --glorious barrage of mash-up amen rinse-outs and snarerushes and sublow skank bass and ragga battle cries -- it's hard for me to imagine how anyone who heard this music in its time could fail to respond to it as a Call, a summons, an energy signal.

it's still more far out than anything that followed, no matter how everyone from drill n bass to the splatterbreaks Scud-types tried to make it weirder and more fuckedupe -- although that said Scud also has a great record out with Panacea under the name The Redeemer called Hardcore Owes Me Money -- their own tribute to h-core/early jungle samplemania slathered over more modern d&b beats

If dance genre = plateau, then a "perfected" genre = a singularity, collapsed in on itself and inaccessable but permanantly deforming the musical landscape around it? I like this metaphor since it captures the jungle is dead -- > jungle is everywhere paradox.

All in all, I think Germany's importance in the advancement of electronic music is overlooked in the British media. When talking about Germany's role in this people talk about Love Parade, Low Spirit and how things went big/mainstream there, but the other side of the story is often forgotten. First of all, the German trance/rave boom made people in more remote countries (like mine) turn their heads to electronic music and make their own bastardization of it. Secondly, a scene that big is bound to create a bunch of underground artists, pioneers and explorers. But because some people still think Teutonic dance music is a joke, that it equals with rigid hordes stomping to a Nazi no-soul beat, the German scene is belittled or ignored.

A good case in point is the scene in Cologne. It had a big part in creation of the current electro craze (with Mouse on Mars, Kerosene, Jammin' Unit, Khan, etc.), it helped to rescue digi-dub from becoming new age music (with Incoming! Records, Nonplace Urban Field & co.), and also gave birth to a number of brilliant but unclassifiable acts, like Air Liquide or Love Inc. Out of these, only Mouse on Mars has gotten the attention they deserve, probably because they appeal to indie/rockist sensibilities. However, the grounding work done by Jammin' Unit, Dr. Walker, Kerosene, Khan, Mike Ink, Burnt Friedmann and others seems to be largely ignored. All of the above mentioned acts were taking place already in the mid-nineties, but since Britain has always had it's own preoccupations, I guess they were lost there.

it is worth mentioning that vath, zaffarano, tanith, westbam etc regularly played huge parties in britain, and, initially at least, alongside mills, beltram, hawtin, angel, wild etc

i think the with the demise of hardcore in britain, that it can be overlooked that a lot of that audience switched over to the emerging german/dutch hybridized techno/trance sound of harthouse, bonzai, important etc, and the way that melded with american stuff like red planet, axis, synewave, UR etc

but again, yes, this applies to the way the euro sound caught on in britain, rather than in europe itself, and i'd love to read a similar book that concentrated exclusively on germany

1)It's created in the US.
2)It's imported in the UK, where it becomes big.
3)It's mutated into million different subgenres by the UK producers.
4)Then, maybe a small chapter or an epilogue about it going worldwide.

Reynolds doesn't claim that his is the complete story, but he also doesn't say it's just the British story. I mean, Reynolds does write about foreign scenes as well, but mostly about the stuff he himself fancies. To be objective you'd have to at least acknowledge the impact the German scene has had on electronic music.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/dubplate/

Second most frustrating thing about ILM: seeing a new thread when it pops up and thinking "Oh I'll have to check that out later" and then coming back after an hour and realizing it's too lengthy to digest. Most frustrating thing about ILM: seeing the same thread revived a year after it started and being reminded of the first time you said you'd have to read it later.

(Then almost immediately thought of the acrimonious debates earlier this year about a certain mud-hut dwelling young lady whose publicity shots invariably depict her crouching on a jungle tree branch; that bizarre net-spectacle of folks who disdain the concept of authenticity engaged in frantic authentication!)

Perhaps someone can clue me in to what he's talking about with regards to M.I.A. here? He is referring to her right? I can't recall a single publicity shot where she's dwelling in a "mud-hut" or crouching on a "jungle tree branch". She appears in a jungle themed setting for the "Amazon" video. How exactly are anti-authenticity types "engaged in frantic authentication"? It would seem to me that so many of her detractors are *obsessed* (perhaps unconsciously) with where she's from (not speaking of Sri Lanka here, but with her art school/class origins? forgive me, I'm only an American here). Is there some assumption that everyone who likes her is somehow reveling in some kind of 1950s cliched exoticism?

As for the phrase above, I've always thought it was originally reversed and very American - i.e. it's not where you're from (place, class etc), but where you are now, where you've brought yourself (by the bootstraps) to. The inversion as quoted just seems like a moderately clever play on the original phrase and something that would mainly make sense in NYC (as in, which suburb do you represent etc).

Sorry if this is the wrong place to bring this up, but I don't have time to figure out dissensus.

Also, could someone please give a layman's account of Simon's nu-rockism idea?

Where she says things like:
"'I'm glad I went that far into it. I was the best hoochie on the West Coast at the time. I had the best clothes 'cos I was coming from England and really good at shoplifting. I had Versace on before Lil' Kim started rapping about it 'cos the only place I could steal at was Harvey Nicks, where it was sooo easy. So I studied, like, the whole thing out in Compton: how the best you could do is be there for your man, be really good at sex, throw barbecues in the park, have babies and keep that unit together with the money that you get.'"

This obliquely reminds me of the revelation about the philosophy department here at UCI. In the men's restrooms there, there's a huge amount of anti-Derrida graffiti, obviously prompted by his residence here every spring. One time I asked someone in the department about that -- "Geez, are the grads here really ticked off with him?" "Oh no," came the reply, "that's from the professors."

thats a great anecdote!

This leads him to conflate the apparently rockist and popist arguments put forward in M.I.A.'s defence. He assumes that all M.I.A. fans are anti-authenticity popists who nonetheless love M.I.A. due to the perceived authenticity of her Sri Lankan/terrorist/anti-globalist lefty imagery.

For him the M.I.A. fan contradicts him or herself by moving between two arguments: "M.I.A. is important because she is [x]!", and "so what if she is not really [x], it is rockist to care about such things!"

It is true that different M.I.A. fans have touted these lines. But unless I'm forgetting some glaring example I can't remember an instance of the same person using both.

the funny thing is, if you look at reynolds' piece in the voice, it's really very even-handed and bends over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though, at the end of the day, it's critique pretty much amounts to *points finger* "she went to St. Martins!"

and then, after being attacked from all quarters, his rhetoric got surprisingly spiteful online, especially dissensus, and he wound up attacking her for a lot of the things that he went out of his way not to attack her for in the voice piece (eg, supposedly stealing grime's thunder)

and at this point he's reduced to pretty much incoherence i think.

time for a group hug, really

It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result.

And besides, wasn't Reynolds' original comment that she doesn't "come from anywhere" directed at the promotion of MIA from the industry, at a promotional concert? I don't think that the fans are his target.

not really. it was that she didn't have the right to use images of war and struggle. and she doesn't have the right to use them because she is an outsider. and the only real evidence we're given that she's an outsider is that she went to st. martin's. nothing else about her background, apart from to say that her father's terrorism doesn't fit a third-vs-first struggle.

my beef is really that, all arguments about MIA's rather-more-complex-than-simply-going-to-st-martins background, it's a bit late in the day to be saying that being middle-class, or having the taint of the middle class that going to st. martin's gives you, means you come from "nowhere." it's the old rootless cosmopolitans vs. grounded proles trope. everybody comes from somewhere, including prince harry, and proles (like, for example, hip-hop loving grime MCs) are just as likely to pick up "other people's music" and use it for their own ends as anyone else is.

but god knows i'm not getting involved in this again! vye

"It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result."

I agree Michael! That's what jars about M.I.A. (positively or negatively, depending on your position) and it's the tension which instigated the entire debate. But the attacks on M.I.A. inevitably did become displaced onto her fans and, by extension, all "popists" (as if popists had been responsible for her campaign strategy).

Still only heard it all the way through once myself. Diplo was better than her at the live show I saw, frankly.

Fair enough, it's been done to death, it just struck me that Tim's popist defense of the fans was slightly skewed - but there were seemingly some quite heated debates over personal politics over at dissensus from memory. A few that Tim joined in.

But finally bugged, I think Reynolds is interested in the cultural politics of MIA - or what those would involve for Prince Harry to start making grime, for instance. This is not question anyone's ability to do so, it is examining the effects of those exchanges and the ethics involved.

uh uh. read the piece! he never once mentions the industry or the promotion of MIA, unless you count the "face of hype," which is very vague and more sensibly read as referring to critics

Reynolds is more cluey w/r/t M.I.A. than most people on ILX give him credit for being, but that doesn't mean the anti-M.I.A./anti-pop position staked out on Dissensus wasn't absolutely riddled with holes (the biggest being the idea that M.I.A. = pop).

basically:
fortysomething journalist who's just put out a book about music made a quarter of a century ago. hears the clock ticking. feeling on the verge of slipping out of the loop. sees mia video. decides to start an argument so that people will take notice of him again. it all seems pretty sad and pointless to me, and yet another indication of how reynolds seems to revel in painting himself into an aesthetic corner.

of course it doesn't help that dissensus is the de facto reynolds fan club message board, run by someone who is essentially reynolds' errand boy/lickarse, which thereby shuts off all potentially useful outside lines of debate. try and question any of reynolds' opinions on dissensus and see how long you last there (i speak from personal experience, lol). although it's apparently ok for ingram to insert snide comments about "let's hope mia wins the mercury 'cos that will kill her career stone dead," and have all the other smug 35-year-old wire hacks nodding their plump and ample heads in agreement.

i mean, is it just me, or was the simon reynolds who used to write lovely, lurid and lyrical prose about ar kane and the young gods and throwing muses about a million times better than the one who came out of the rave on the road to damascus/beltram? in a lot of ways i've stayed with that '87-'88 melody maker/monitor mindset but i still feel i've done more in the way of "moving on" than reynolds has.

usually if you decide to shut yourself off from all other options, you end up suffocating.

Tim, I think M.I.A. is pop, or "Galang" is at least, it's being played on daytime Radio 1, it's out as a single called "Galang 05" (!!) next week, it fits the pop context at least.

Mind you I'm as arch a 'poppist' as they come and I can't stand most of her stuff.

Also Marcello I think it's pretty much inescapable for message boards to defer a bit to 'celebrity' members - sure Chuck gets challenged on ILM sometimes but there's a lot of respect for his viewpoints too, ditto Mark and Frank K. And in fact if you look upthread you see J Sutcliffe complaining cos I'd threatened to delete something he wrote about Simon R! (I have no recollection of this). I didn't look at Dissensus for long but there was definitely a spectrum of opinion there.

Is it utopian to hope that maybe one day the whole "who is the crankiest crank in Ye Olde Cranky Rock Critic town?" sweepstakes will give way to . . . . something else?

Irony-alert ahoy! I'm pretty sure "J. Sutcliffe" posted as "Majooba" elsewhere (both mention teaching philosophy in Texas, have conniption fits over snooty British dudes). Remember that buttmagazine.com photo of you and Martin piggybacking nude? L4nya 4nderson: ""Based on the picture above, I may have to become a Matmos fan." Majooba: "If you're into Aryan gay sex. Whatever floats your cute fascist boat, aesthetes."

Aside: I have absolutely no idea how I'm supposed to be "helplessly stuck in the joke-trap set for him with that 'all of western philosophy' stuff" No idea what that means, none. Help me out here, people, I'm only a BA.

this is because only white artists can do art school projects and have cred, when 'the ethnics' do it it just means theyre no longer authentic, duh

Ha ha true (and ouch).

My point was simply that I think not all reasons for liking M.I.A. are pro-pop ones, although certainly some are.

Uh yeah. Are you people saying it wasn't there on crack or something?

See, I don't understand this statement at all. The kids go crazy for many other fun tracks on Arular - I have witnessed this myself! How is "10 Dollar" or "Bucky Done Gone" not pop????

yeah, I have to admit that when I was reading the chapter on Remain in Light I couldn't help but think, "This is like the reverse-negative of what he said about M.I.A."

"As Lester Bangs wrote, I don't know shit about the English class system and I don't care shit about the English class system. (Well, I did once receive a paid trip to Cambridge University and found, with few exceptions, the profs and students alike to be the most snooty and arrogant bunch of toffs imaginable."

Which almost makes me think it's a prank, but probably not.

"Amazon" is by far my favourite track, but after that would probably come "U.R.A.Q.T.", "Hombre", "Bingo" and "$10". "Bucky Done Gun" is great too but often strikes me as a bit awkward in its construction (plus when it comes to baile/carioca funk I tend to like the tracks with big 80s hooks). Actually as far as I'm concerned the second half of the album is a fair bit stronger than the first.

(likewise... assuming you care... me saying that it's probably not going to be in my top ten isn't supposed to be a put-down either - I find it very difficult to ever limit a list a favourites of anything to just ten!)

there's something strangely, terrifyingly wonderful about the ILX/Dissensus hivemind bubble that allows a sentence such as this to comeinto being.

shine on you crazy diamonds.

reynolds is hitchens now, with less bite and wit but also somewhat less full of shit or 'provocative' in that what reynolds writes about is so so much more trivial than what hitchens writes about. they're both worth checking in on if only cuz contortionists are fun (thinking of the guy with the winking asshole in pink flamingos esp), and they somehow still will pop up with something otm a couple of times a year (literally like the proverbial broken clock). i still very much want to read ripitup (uk edition obv), he should (and probably will right?) stick to the past - he might still be able to write about that. the present and future hold no place for him.

xpost - surely ilx is matthau

There were some people (e.g. matos, spencer) running the "it's great pop music regardless" line on ILM, but yeah, the vast majority of published rock crit conformed to your description. The critical debate over M.I.A. really boiled down to rockists who give a shit about "proper" dancehall vs rockists who don't.

ILM's distrust of latterday Outkast and ambivalence towards Kanye West is I think a v. interesting factor in trying to talk about an ILM vs Dissensus (or anti-rockist vs nu-rockist) split on this issue. There seems to be something important about the fact that, say, Matt Woebot despises M.I.A. but thinks Kanye West is a genius, which I haven't quite unravelled.

BTW Jess was more the voice of reason w/r/t M.I.A. on Dissensus I think.

Tim I kiss you

TS: England vs. America

About The Odd Couple - yes, Jack Lemmon as Woebot, Matthau as Ewing; that is extremely logical.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

Eventually, most of them end up being cheap... I'll let you know my viees on RIUASA when it ends up being cheap

interesting -- if the art-schooled daughter of a northern irish terror outfit (either side) made an lp named after her father and adopted light terra-chic outfits/occasional lyrics, i think 'authenticity' (not in terms of roots, which is the wrong way to go) would be a viable object of study.

is it cool? has she thought about all this? that kind of thing. sri lanka is far away, so MIA had an easier ride of it.

"many white critics dont know what to make of MIA, its too much for them to take on."

hahaha, "power move" as grimey simey would say. absolute horseshit -- although i don't recall anyone saying at the time that sri lankan critics should have the final say on this.

spencer, why did you think it would have been 'consistent' for reynolds to have liked MIA?

xpost -- honestly, you don't need RIUASA

i don't think he said this, or not constantly, one book at least had him saying 'use this fucker, i don't own it, dn-suh-dn-duh i'm just a war machine' or something.

Tim, thanks for the further info on your critique. I should note that I never checked out Piracy Funds Terrorism before Arular was released - so for me the album itself was a complete rush on its own. I find "URAQT" to be basically annoying (and I love Sanford & Son!).

As for Reynolds, reading his earlier stuff I felt like he was coming to this fantastic music and then making connections with theory and history in order to add further significance to the music and the genre. I read and reread Blissed Out again and again and sent the Feminine Pressure link to every smart person I knew.

Now, I feel like he's placing new music into his own highly developed theory/map-of-music which acts as a barrier to his 'pure' enjoyment of the 'sounds' (which I'm wondering if his nu-rockism is challenging - I've never assumed 'sound' enjoyment to be completely apolitical, but it's at least an attempt at getting past a lot of rockist nonsense).

I'm sure that's an oversimplification, but I suppose it's just an annoyance with all the pop critics who could not 'just' hear a fantastic pop/dance production a la Richard X or Basement Jaxx with taunting girl chants on top.

I will be watching critical reactions to Lady Sovereign's "Hoodie" and eventual album very closely because anybody I've played it for here in the US instantly says "Oooh, is this the new MIA??" They seem to both be "AT" the same place, but I wonder if certain critics will like her more because they're more comfortable with where she's "FROM."

to 'just' hear this you need to blank out all of the other stuff. obviously hip-hop fans are used to this, but it remains a thorny issue.

This makes me think that SR's judgement is silly.

Thanks for your valuable input. I happen to be a proud Dissensian and a MIA fan. Try thinking before posting.

pf -- i think an article he wrote on the stone roses back in 'the day' included the quote 'it's not where you're from it's where you're at', as voiced by ian brown but original from eric b and rakim c. 1987. somehow when he saw it, he thought the t-shirt was referencing ian brown -- which maybe in new york would give this anglo a rush? especially since the reversal for some reason meant something to reynolds, who has long had an interest in the concept of authenticity.

MIA's lyrics seem to be an abstract pastiche patois of urban,third-world,terroism-chic etc. I think they're in fact too vague to really criticize as harshly as so many have.

who has long had an interest in the concept of authenticity.

I'm very willing to believe this now, but it's never really struck me before. Is there something specific from one of his books?

It's not where you're from, it's where you live.

Current whereabouts takes precedence over origins.

Let me guess, YSI thread?

I don't think it's a comparison thing--just that a lot of Americans (in my experience at least) seem unable to distinguish the one voice from the other

Try to to keep your tongue away from Reynolds' nutsack. Thanks for posting. LOL@you calling yourself a proud dissensian and not realising how pitiful such an admission is.

because hes not just an authority on music but race as well! he knows everything!

DO TEHY MEAN ME? THEY SURELY DO!!!

LOOK LOOK ILM CALM IT DOWN I BE RUNNIN' TINGS AT DISSENSUS ALL IS IREIE AND GOOD WITYHMY MAN WOEBOT HE IS RUNNIN TINGS I THINK WE IS COMPO TO YOUR PROVERBIAL CLEGGS AND FOGGYS LOL LOL LOL THATS HOW WE BE RUNNIN' THATS HOW WE BE RUNNIN TINGS

I'M A MAN OF PECAE I GOT NO BEEF WITH NONE A YA PLAYA HATAZ LOL WE SHOULD ALL GO SEE BONKERS SOON THAT 'D BE GOOD BROTHERS BE SLAMMIN IT DOWN! MIA'S ALRIGHT BUT SHE'S NO JULIANA HATFILED THATS A FACT THATS SOMETHING THAT CAN'T BE DENIED LOL LOL BIGGING UP TO KATIE M

LOL

CHECK OUT THE KOOKS THEY ROCK!!!

PEACE

Yeah I reckon Feminine Principle is probably the absolute pinnacle of mid-era (pre-nu-rockist) Simon's work.

"Now, I feel like he's placing new music into his own highly developed theory/map-of-music which acts as a barrier to his 'pure' enjoyment of the 'sounds'."

Simon responded directly to this charge (I kinda implied it on a Dissensus thread) by saying that he was merely attempting to explain his own reactions - any map-of-music tendencies are simply attempts to diagnose and theorise the patterns in his reactions. I'm inclined to accept this and assume that Simon's inability to flat-out adore M.I.A. is a "real" reaction (i.e. a matter of base level perception/enjoyment) - it's not inconceivable that some people might be left wanting more from Arular, for whatever reason.

The bigger danger in this regard is not so much distorting/subverting the path of one's own enjoyment, but rather proceeding too quickly from one's own experiences to some grand theory-of-everything that doesn't allow for the multiplicity and ambiguity of effects that music can have.

Of course Simon (and Matt Woebot and Mark K-Punk) muddied the waters a bit by using the M.I.A. debate as a launchpad for an attack on popists who will risk everything to protect their own enjoyment. But I really think this argument is ultimately a red herring, used for strategic purposes more than anything else: none of the three Dissensus heavyweights ever propose to seriously question their own enjoyment (or lack thereof in some instances), so they in effect place themselves outside of their own critical programme.

When one of them finally and openly says "I love this piece of music but objectively speaking I shouldn't and therefore won't love it any longer", we will know that they take their own nu-rockist anti-enjoyment crusade seriously.

the ancient baltimore club track that they sample in the mia tune (called "you big dummy") is better though.

Yes, that's a big part of the problem, isn't it? If there's a beef I have it'd be with things like this--less the actual ideas (we can always argue about ideas) but more the methods. Taking up the odious "everyone does this but us" technique. Taking up the "I will take one small detail from your argument and focus on that, ignoring all the parts that I cannot actually argue with" technique. The "I am seemingly being cordial but actually being a total cunt" technique. Basically, all the bad parts of arguing on teh int3ernets, but applied to arguing about theory. It makes me feel dirty, like we're having a Kirk v. Piccard flame-war, and that's exactly what I never wanted this to become.

Of course, I also never wanted to write tortuous sentences like the above. Can't always get what you want.

i followed that debate a little (a little k-punk goes a long way) and i don't know that this is a fair summary -- i mean which popists are 'risking everything' exactly? what does this even mean?

There are people on Dissensus whom I do enjoy reading and who do post interesting stuff, e.g. K-P, Stelfox, Derek W, Tim F (when he's on there), but otherwise it's a bit like the local Rotary Club with some pomo added.

there was a smudge on my computer monitor that made "some pomo added" look like "some porno added", thus quite drastically altering the meaning. anyway, carry on.

*smokes plastic kid's toy bubble pipe*

there are ways of doing things, of course: maybe the popists are reacting to the misplaced puritanism of political correctness. i think most ilm types are involved in some kind of complex negotiation when listening to homophobic/sexist lyrics though, and i think it's a lie (or just worrying!) to say 'oh i can just ignore all that'.

there's also obviously the possibility, esp with rap, dancehall etc, of listening primarily in terms of beats, production etc rather than the lyrics. this is how i naturally listen to much of aforementioned music, rather than because i'm privileging anything on ideological grounds.

equally, tho, it is posssible to some extent to ignore the cultural baggage surrounding a piece of music by not immediately discounting it in terms of the demographic that likes it. i'm sure i wouldn't much like the majority of girls aloud or 50 cent fans, but that's not going to stop me listening to the music with an open mind. this debate's been reduced by people insisting on absolutes, particularly in terms of the popist position.

i think marcello is otm, but haha yes very good 'blount move', 'life isn't like that etc etc', i'm not tuomas though, i know this stuff, but what can i say? oh, i know, i said COMPEX NEGOTIATION which i'm involved in too. you won't find any black eyed peas in my cd collection, but you will find ludacris and, yes, schoolly d.

i think i probably would like girls aloud's fans (not 50 cent's though).

i listen to music mostly for production and don't always trouble to figure out lyrics, but i still think this position, which spencer took, is a bit disingenuous.

the effect of this sly, self-legitimating move, in ilm terms, is to say that 'i can fully identify with ordinary working folk who like pop music for the simple reason that it sounds good but i dislike those who listen to rap music about the streets on a non-authentic basis'. it's back-door rockism masquerading as popism!

I didn't mean it in that way at all (the misreading is my fault not yours nrq I fear)! I meant that a large part of the nu-rockist critique of popists is the argument that for popists nothing is sacred (meaning, importance, consistency, authenticity, resonance etc. etc.) except some sort of shallow consumerist enjoyment. Hence the importance of the (empirically dubious) idea that M.I.A. fans celebrate M.I.A.'s political context and then, when questioned on this, the same M.I.A. fans say that this political context is irrelevant. i.e. the popist position is to have no position, to stand for nothing so as to fall for everything.

ie the popists have no position because authenticity is part and parcel of the whole MIA package.

there are very few people who boosted MIA for realness, iirc!

"there are very few people who boosted MIA for realness, iirc!"

You clearly never opened a newspaper or magazine ever!!!

only if you choose to take lyrics about rubicon and mangos with a straight ear, so to speak.

-- Tim Finney (tfinne...), October 7th, 2005.

this i have to concede!

(The only time I've really been baffled by anything SR has said recently was about 6 months back, either on Dissensus or his blog, I can't remember, when he said in essence, well yes I systematise things, by the time you're 30 you should know what you like, and I thought, god, I'm 30 and I know less about what I like or why I like it than EVER!)

(i.e. yes Ich Bin Ein Flake)

" i don't understand how it's really possible to listen in that contextless popist way, i don't even know if i want to! i think here reynolds at el were saying, 'how can you ignore all these issues when MIA herself foregrounds them'. "

I don't think anyone really does listen to music in that gross-simplification-of-popism way. But music always has a multiplicity of contexts, whose importance vis a vis one another will be reshuffled according to how they intersect. e.g. it's easier to ignore M.I.A.'s political side on the dancefloor than it is when looking at her artwork or reading an interview with her. I think one of the first steps towards a reasonable critical discussion is to acknowledge that we are likely to use (and therefor conceive of) the same piece of music in different ways.

Against the point you raise above, one could just as easily say, "i don't know how you can ignore M.I.A.'s great hooks and awesome grooves when she herself foregrounds them." But such statements only get us so far if we don't acknowledge that we'll all rank these things differently.

this is not a rhetorical question.

.

context changes a piece of music, but only up to a point, and you know if you've seen an interview with MIA and then hear her on the dancefloor, you've still read the interview...

The fact that neither abolishes the other is precisely the point. Actually the idea that the dancefloor abolishes everything else is something of a nu-rockist touchstone NRQ! Read that pop thread on dissensus!

"their ears are always good enough to detect the tinge of authenticity (even when they have no direct experience of the authenticating tableaux) and vice versa."

See yeah this is a big issue I have. If authenticity is basically referenced back to what your ears told you, isn't it, like, an inaccurate attempt to actually talk about something else entirely?

(x-post)

it's the classic romantic aspiration of being able to detect absolute, objective truth thru entirely subjective means. it's entirely oxymoronic, but obv very well established historically...

the idea that dancefloor abolishes all is a kind of foundational myth for dissensus as it allows 30something m-class, wannabe journalists to get down and dirty with real-life grime emcees and producers, thinking that their input is on the same-level collaborative, rather than patronising (in a kinda renaissance patron way of course)

Mark K-Punk reformulates this objectivity as something like (neurology X deleuze)/zizek, which is at least audacious!

to an extent, i do like and agree with the k-p line that it's a very british thing to regard aspiration and endeavour towards revelation as a bit much really and therefore relax back into the easy, existing world of political, musical, neurological imprisonment, which dictates never pushing the boundaries and never recognising the notion of Higher Truth.

I may be entirely misrepresenting him but i believe he wrote something along those lines a while back.

Currently her album is sitting proudly at #378 in the Amazon chart and there are a lot of copies with promo stickers on them on sale in London's second hand record shops so that'll give you some idea.

-- Marcello Carlin

Aroundabout 5,000 worldwide, considering her respective chart positions in the US and UK, and how I can't imagine any other country has gone for her.

(x-post)

-- Dom Passantino

Thanks! I'm not in a very cosmopolitan part of the country so it's a little hard to gauge things that way usually.

And good god, that really isn't much! I'm quite shocked. Although the download figures are probably astronomical.

With all the chatter she's generated I reckoned she would have still sold _much_ more than say, Ellen Allien (20,000-ish per album if DJ Mag is to be believed). So I thought saying she'd shifted 'very few' seemed unfairly dismissive. Apparently not.

M.I.A., the Velvet Underground & Nico of the '00's!! *cough*

There's an idea (amongst theory types) of objectivity/universality etc. as being "impossible but necessary". We can't really achieve it, but everything we do implies it and every time we try to throw it away we end up unwittingly reintroducing it.

The mistake of a lot of postmoderny stuff (and, in a different way, stuff like third way politics etc.) has been to trumpet the "impossible" bit and ignore the "necessary" bit. I sorta think that Mark (following Zizek to some extent) does the opposite, over-privileging the "necessary" part such that the recognition of impossibility is lost.

Whereas I think we really have to keep both plates spinning constantly, and recognise that we really need to mediate between these two poles - if we can't have universality in music criticism, we can at least look for the next best thing - be it a spontaneous shared visceral reaction or a description of a piece of music so breathtakingly spot on you think the writer's been inside your head, or... whatever. Absolute transparent objectivity remains impossible, but there are things that can fill its place.

HI DERE

I remember a long thread back in the dark ages of old-ILM about canons. There was a poster (Arf Arf?) who said that we needed canons in order to have discussions, that without agreed upon standards there was no point even talking.

I disagreed with that then and I still do, but there's maybe a kernel of it which is on the right track: maybe what we need is the desire to agree upon standards (which we've yet to actually finalise). ie. music discussions are not about canons, but about canon-building. The search for an impossible objectivity-to-come rather than the deference to an objectivity laid down in precedents.

to me, this implies the romantic objecitivity objective of acheiving a standard of communication so peerless that it denatures the author. ie there is an objective reality that we all can experience if only the writing around it is of a quality high enough to take us there.

i probably think that the fierceness of that 'shared visceral reaction' can only really take place on a dancefloor - codifying in words subjectivizes - but i guess that takes you back to the notion of dancefloors as temporary autonomous zones with happy romantic elision of class, race etc. however corny that is, tho, that is something i still sometimes personally feel and that recognition, however indididual and potentially empirically false, isn't something i can get from reading about music. this may make only subjective sense.

I didn't really mean this (i'm not making some habermasian point here). I meant more that all we can ever really access is an imagined objectivity, something that seems like it must be objective but isn't really. This seeming, though, is worthwhile in and of itself. Hence the point re dizzee - if a critic insists that the music conveys authenticity of class/race etc. whether or not the artist lives up to that in truth, what we're really talking about is a certain apperance-of-objectivity rather than objectivity itself.

the holy grail of music crit as continous enrichment of listening experience thru the inspired search for universal critical standards without the desire to ever actually acheive a static imprint.

i think the most important point about canons isn't whether or not we have them, but the fact that they don't exist as generally perceived. cultural proscription in the leavisite sense has been dead since the 60s. the universal allowance of counter-canons, even within the most conservative bits of academia, invalidates the whole notion of ur-canon in the first place. you can either have a canon or you can have no canons. you can't have lots. therefore there aren't any. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and form them whilst happily acknowledging the hopelessness of the search.

yes exactly! But I think a lot of great something elses come from discussions about music: more intense enjoyment of music, a better understand of why we enjoy (or don't enjoy) stuff, an insight into the way other people relate. But I think it's hard to get to all that without presupposing the potential for agreement.

Mmm, I still hold that a canon of the personal exists for every person, that you CAN have lots -- I may only be playing games with the language, but to me this demonstrates the crypto-religious power that individual musical (or artistic or whatever) obsessions has for an individual. The 'potential for agreement' lies less in what is agreed on than the recognition of the ways in which are moved (and even that is intriguingly fractured). That said, while I'd love to get into this more I've got a full day's work ahead of me and I won't be near a computer much until the evening, so have this discussion without me and I'll say more tonight!

Ned I totally agree with this. The point is not so much that there is a potential for agreement but that we explore it; the desire to write about music is in some ways the desire to tell stories about our experiences, to give people something that they can use. In this sense the differences and fractures we discover (which obstruct agreement) are as useful as the commonalities.

not sure if there's an album out yet but if/when it does get publicity expect all the mia arguments to be dragged out again.

Why not? That seems as relevant and vital a way of responding to things as any other; and probably better than if you reverse the polarities, and like nasty things and dislike nice things.

But in truth, I probably don't really know what this discussion is about any more, or was at that point, or whatever; never mind.

I think this might be one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Also Tim, do you have some kind of cult set up - or at least a PayPal account so that we can just send you a portion of our income?

Yeah I'm finding this hard to believe myself.

I thought it was kinda bland in a WorldMusik(RegisteredTrademark) kinda way. But I will admit that I only listened to it once, so it's possible that I dismissed it too soon. I can be cruel when I have too much to listen to.

-- Jedmond (jedmon...), October 8th, 2005. (Jedmond) (later)

That's completely wrong. "Boy In Da Corner" entered the top 40 on three seperate occasions (at #40, #39, and a Mercury spike at #23 later in the year). At a rough guess, it may have cracked the US top 200 as well? "Arular" still hasn't gone top 100 in the UK, or top 200 US. Before Antony and the Johnsons won the Mercury, he was at 15,000 sold in the UK and the album had just failed to make top 40 (42? 43? I forget. Obviously, now it's gone top 20, he's probably looking at aroun d80,000). Considering that album came out roughly the same time as "Arular", the idea that it would have sold six times the level whilst achieving chart positions of around 50 to 60 places lower is absolute nonsense.

The 100,000 figure for MIA was for worldwide sales, whereas I'm seeing multiple references for Dizzee having sold 100,000 each for both of his albums in the UK.

* Of course, I don't actually know anybody who voted for the Democrats during the last election.

Also, I think the M.I.A. album is *much* more popular than either Dizzee record in the USA. I don't know *anyone* outside of ILX who owns it. I know a bunch of people who have Arular.

"Showtime" probably sold three times the number of "Boy In Da Corner". 100,000 without going top 20 is a longshot (read "near impossible"). He's not the Violent Femmes, you know?

Suggestions:

* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.

so unlike getting stuck on a certain "golden age" era of post-punk white music.

i know what he means that some white fans of black musics can seem a bit over sentimental (?) and limited about the way they treat black music but as well as simply not liking white fans of black music, reynolds just has a problem with black music overall as hes never felt totally able to relate to it, and hes such a raving rockist at heart that he never much liked the soulful end of garage or house, doesnt really like soul, doesnt really like hip hop as such unless its pointing the way 'forward' or whatever. i dont quite get how he likes grime so much really. this idea that black musicians are oblivious to white dj types also works for them (allegedly) being oblivious to white critic types. as if any of the grime mcs give a fuck about any critics.

anyway, its not like only white fans have difficulty adjusting to periods like when hip hop went all glitzy and commercial, or when soul went all electronic in the 80s - reynolds might not be aware of this as hes so busy foaming about white fans of black music, but GASP - quite a lot of black people didnt like it when soul lost its 'live' approach from the 70s either. he should probably read some old interviews with bobby womack or whoever. or read any interview with a rapper who prefers 70s soul to the plastic 80s stuff. and he might be loathe to realise that marley marl - A BLACK PRODUCER - hated it when puffy arrived with his retarded take on hip hop in the mid 90s. maybe marley marl is white inside.

And what you got into it in 1985 when you living right down the road from King Jammy in Kingston? *rolls eyes*

BIG BIG BIG YAWN
did i say that?
i said his taste seemed informed by mid 90s/late 90s stuff when the music was entering its international commercial phase

you don't know what ur fucking talking about.

i must have struck a nerve in the reynolds cult. i hope i wont get stoned for this when i leave work today. dont burn me at the stake guys! i still like reading energy flash and rip it up and start again! honest!

for anyone wondering where that apparently elusive 'simon frith you my nigga 4 life' quote is from, its here my lovelies.
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2003_09_07_blissout_archive.html#106328663272031401

That's news to me since Marley Marl used to play Bad Boy arists like Craig Mack, Biggie, The Lox, Mase, Puffy himself (cuts like "it's all about the benjamins", "victory", "young g's", "bad boy 4 life" and "let's get it" all got reugular spins), Black Rob and G. Dep on his Future Flavas radio show.

It has nothing to do with being a Reynolds/Stelfox fan (I'm not) and everything to do with you being an idiot.

The ironing.

(2ND BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN uncut)

...like he's arsed.

lol
what did i say that was idiotic apart from my stelfox comment? nothing. but its ok, carry on ignoring everything else i said and keep taking affront to one pithy comment you stupid fucking cock snuggler.

I don't see the difference between "feel so good" by Mase and an old Marley produced track for Biz with T.J Swann on the hook or "around the way girl" by L.L, personally. The difference is what exactly..?

It's utter nonsense that Marley stopped producing when Bad Boy hit it's stride : he produced more then than he produced after he left the Juice Crew in the early 90s (all the Intelligent Hoodlum and Lords Of The Underground Marley was credited with producing he now admits were ghost-produced by K. Def) as he produced numerous cuts for Kamakazee and Screwball in the late 90s, a cut on Sauce Money's album, that terrible beat generation lp he put out on BBE in 2001 or '02 and tons of promo tracks and remixes he's played on his show and released on promo singles like "haters" by L.L Cool J, "funk shit" by Common, his remixes of Nas cuts like "one mic" and "bridging the gap" etc.

Damn, Clinton..judging by the dancehall comments too it looks like yer talkin' outta yer ass every which way but loose here.

marley marl didnt stop producing but he said in the interview something to the effect that puffy made him want to stop producing.

"Feel so good" = Kool & The Gang sample + sung hook.

"Around the way girl" = Keni Burke sample + sung hook.

No difference whatsover. I'd certainly rather listen to "life after death" and Puffy joints like "benjamins" and "victory" from '97 than 60% of the atrocious "wu-tang forever" or offbeat underground stuff from around the same time like Company Flow.

Thoughts?

"there aren't all that many resources for low-income people to seek out "underground" music."

how did hip hop rise through the bronx, philadelphia and all those other places then? ditto blues, R&B, etc etc? they didnt exactly come pre-packaged through clear channel and MTV did they?

as for this theory - "Feel so good" = Kool & The Gang sample + sung hook/"Around the way girl" = Keni Burke sample + sung hook."

its stupid. yes on paper you can say 'hey kool and the gang sample and sung hook, its the same two songs' but if you hear them, its obvious theres a world of difference.

i suspect people got their backs up re: clinton's comments for the same reason white rap fans and white soul fans get reynolds' back up (according to the comments here).

as for the marley marl comment, clinton got the source wrong - it was in scratch magazine, not XXL. and marley did say that he quit making music for a while during puffy's reign. still, i dont expect ILMers to care about such arguments that much, i think the post-96 period of hip hop is more loved here than any of the previous eras.

I won't defend my theory to the death, but I will say that it seems pretty obvious that radio and 'black music' has changed a lot since those days. When it was all on the local level, underground as far as white America was concerned, there weren't alternative strains because it was grass roots. It was the alternative. Now you have five different radio stations with the same shit in rotation, and rap music/R&B have largely crossed over and are big business. When I moved to Oakland a few years ago, I was excited because I thought everything was going to be Blackalicious, Heiroglyphics, and Jurassic 5. I was surprised to see that those shows were just as white as any of the rock/metal shows I've been to. The stuff on the radio was tinny-sounding synth beats and Ludacris, and Lil' Jon, Snoop, and Black Rob, and shit like that (and Eminem, too!) I guess it got me wondering why, with all this quality stuff, in one of the blackest cities in the country, these rappers were spreading a positive and intelligent message about mainly black issues to a bunch of white kids with khaki cargo pants and dreads/crewcuts. It's kind of an awkward experience, really. I guess I can't really think of a better reason than Clear Channel and Viacom. I'm open to other theories.

I'm trying to judge the level of seriousness of your statement here.

there's a lot more underground than, uh, overground mainstream radio.

How does that negate anything I said? As far as I can tell, most of the underground stuff is supported by a predominantly white audience (in the states at least). What do you have... the backpacker crap, the groups (People Under the Stairs - last time I heard them anyways)who still think it's the early 90s, the Ill Bill/Necro crap, the conscious spreading-the-knowledge battlerap Blackalicious stuff, Grime, "house hop" ... am I missing anything significant? (please don't say anything about Juggalos) I'm not trying to be some kind of an expert on hip-hop, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Are all those scenes not predominantly white? Is any of it on the radio?

deej 100% otm.

xpost- yeah, but it's not on the big radio stations, either. It must be actively sought out.

not particularly, criticism-wise. his recent "free folk" piece in the voice was fucking terrible, no surprise. he seems like a nice enough dude otherwise, though. i wouldn't mind reading his new book.

Do you ever listen to KMEL? Where the fuck are you from? Yeah, yeah, yeah, "synth beats" blah blah blah. Frontline & Balance. Keak Da Sneak. Turf Talk. E-40. Mac Dre RIP. Too $hort. etc, etc...the political issue is too deep for me to get into right now, but you may have a point on the corporate tip. After all, Davey D got bumped from KMEL for talking too much shit, but still.

metal shows

See, that's your problem right there. Why don't you come cruise the E14 with me so we can pretend we're black together. Then we'll go to Sweet Jimmy's and get stomped in the parking lot.

Get Stoopid

At least we stopped obsessing over Simon Reynolds.

its stupid. yes on paper you can say 'hey kool and the gang sample and sung hook, its the same two songs' but if you hear them, its obvious theres a world of difference.

Why is it stupid?

Both are sampled from old cuts the 70s and 80s hip hop d.j's (from Flash to Kid Capri) used to play and both are on Ultimate Breaks & Beats compilations. Both Mase and L.L were smooth rappers (no homo !!!) making cuts for the ladies but which still bumped enough for guys to be able to appreciate them. "Feel so good", like "around the way girl", is a straight loop of a classic hip hop break with Mase talking slick over the top and a sung hook. There is no "world of difference" whatsoever.

if you think ll's rapping style or lyrics are anywhere near the same as mase's lazy mush mouth blabberings, or think that marley marl's beat on around the way girl is like the paper thin, blanded out to the point of funkless-ness of mase's song, that's nice for you. feel so good makes around the way girl sound positivly hardcore.

by the way, i dont think around the way girl does sample kool and the gang - always thought it was keni burke and mary jane girls.

seriously, i get what youre saying - both have sung hooks, both R&B flavoured, but feel so good was fluffy pop stuff compared to around the way girl IMHO. around the way was still soulful and funky, feel so good sounded bland as anything when it came out.

Never ceases to amaze me how these corny white rap fans and backpackers like tracks like "around the way girl" by LL and the smooth jams people like Grand Puba or Pete Rock & C.L Smooth made but somehow convince themselves that tracks like "one more chance" remix and "mo' money mo' problems" by Biggie or "feel so good" by Mase are some "flossy glossy sellout rap".

Hilarious.

stretch and bobbito must be some corny fucks too cos last time i saw stretch armstrong play, he wasnt playing hip hop and he had a 'hip hop is dead' card on his turntables. bobbito doesnt play new hip hop anymore either. he must be a corny white hip hop fan. masta ace says he doesnt really feel modern rap or didnt much care for the bad boy stuff - he must be a corny white hip hop fan too. k-def thinks production is soft these days. another white cornball. who else? large professor didnt like any of that stuff. not even the lox liked it, and they were ON bad boy. they must all be corny white fuckers. keep on pulling out the race card and generalising dude, as if its only corny white fucks who thought the bad boy stuff was lame.

Hiphopfan must be British. I've had the misfortune of living in the U.K the last two years and have met far too many of his type. I don't see any difference between me making generalizations about white rap fans and you making generalizations about commercial rap and the people that enjoy it. At least i admit my racism.

Again, Mase was a hardcore rapper who ended up making commercial music just like LL. Puffy's whole production steez was taking the old r&b and funk cuts he used to hear when attending the Brucie Bee and Kid Capri parties at the rooftop and then looping them, just like Marley and Pete Rock did. I can't see any difference between their commercial tracks whatsoever. In the 80s everyone from Spoonie Gee to Slick Rick used to make club records. I can't see how you backpackers can claim that Mase isn't "real hop hip" (a despicable term) when the music he and Bad Boy in their prime made is far closer to actual, ya know, "real hip hop" than all this earnest backpacker nonsense you guys seem to think is authentic.

Strech has always been a cornball, Bobbito is cool but put out a lot of shitty rap on Fondle 'Em like Cage and the like, Masta Ace is old and bitter and boring, K. Def is my man, Large Professor fell off, The Lox were better on Bad Boy than they have been since.