interesting article from Washington City Paper

But I don't think Jason Cherkis deserves much sympathy about "fighting for space," not in this day and age, and not if that's what he's going to do with what space he gets.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/special/2002top20/jcherkis_2002top20.html

Of course there are rare exceptions, and I bet they appear scattered across a pretty wide distribution of writer-types -- fiction writers included. I don't know for sure, though.

Sounds like any old music critic to me...

I'm about to puke right now.

"Remember that smiles are for free! :D EEEEEEEEEEEE!"

x-post

Moody, though, is a much better writer than the average blogger or Webzine contributor, a clutch of whom have dubbed the author “douchetarded.” The future of rock criticism may indeed be online, but the writing is still made by a thousand Baby Bangses. Especially at sites like Pitchfork, which presents its inimitable pastiche of gushing, snarky, and ill-wrought five days a week.

That "douchetarded" thing came from a private discussion group thread that I forwarded to him. I had started a thread about the S-K thing called "Rick Moody: Rockist Douchebag or Just Plain Retarded?" and a friend of mine suggested that he might be "douchetarded."

it would probably be more if it werent for those pesky filesharers!

the idea of a "marquee rock critic" makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

True.

Also,

Taking Sides: David Eggers or Judd from Real World San Francisco?

i mean, i admired "heartbreaking work" for about 10 minutes while reading it (and basically only for the title.) but it just sucks, and if i have one more english teacher or fellow student tell me that its the future of literature, im gonna go nuts.

(of course, no one really talks too much about eggers now, im referring to a couple of years ago)

David Denby?!

According to Nielsen Soundscan figures, Pitchfork faves have done quite well with minimal mainstream press coverage. The Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat sold 30,000 copies. Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People sold 75,000. And the Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Pitchfork’s favorite album of last year, sold 167,000 units.

how ironic for Cherkis to be celebrating "huge numbers" in book-sales terms, not record-sales terms.

“In most cases, the rock critic finds out about it after the average Insound or Pitchfork or blog reader knows about it.”

because "the Pitchfork writer" isn't "a rock critic." gotcha.

F'rinstance, "Being effusive on the merits of the Mekons or the sonic digressions of Wilco offers a benefit you can’t get from writing for the New York Times Book Review: a bigger audience, one that may buy that Wilco book and read that tedious essay." Does this guy have any idea what the circulation of the NYT Book Review is? More people read that every week than Wilco has sold copies of every CD it has ever released -- probably twice or more as many. If everyone who cared about the Mekons were subtracted from the readership no one would notice. The audience for literary rock criticism may be different from the audience for the NYT Book Review, but it sure as hell ain't BIGGER.

And how about this: "'Peer opinion and access to peer opinion have been so elevated and multiplied that people tend to know about [records] from a trusted voice before the rock critic even does. In most cases, the rock critic finds out about it after the average Insound or Pitchfork or blog reader knows about it.'” Granted, that's a quote from someone else, but it is presented for the truth of the assertion, and it's flat-out nuts.

Then: "[The New Yorker] respects in-house rock critic Sasha Frere-Jones enough to give him room to write long. He’s allowed to follow his ear, covering everything from semi-obscure grime to MF Doom to Keren Ann, all of which he’s required to make accessible to an audience that’s probably more likely to buy The Mussorgsky Reader than any book about Wilco." Say what? I can't back this up scientifically, but among the New Yorker readers I know -- mid-double digits of them, at least -- the ratio of recent Wilco-related purchases to Mussorgsky-related purchases is infinite.

It's a matter of opinion, not fact, but I find the attack on Nick Hornby's Kid A review completely stupid. Hornby wasn't "rejecting a critic's basic job description" in pointing out that liking Kid A required a lot of work; he was communicating -- accurately -- information that was of value to the audience for whom he was writing. Just like a Pitchfork writer does. And, as far as I am concerned -- as someone who is Hornby's age and not so far off from him in taste -- he had Radiohead's appeal and recordings nailed. In my experience, people who do not have time to sit and listen to something repeatedly for days tend not to care much for post-OK Computer Radiohead. Kid A is a record that the boys my teenage daughter hangs out with like (or, more accurately, they liked it several years ago, when they were . . . 16).

But here is the nub of the article: "Fewer words to change the way someone thinks about how and why art is made and experienced—which is, after all, the real purpose of criticism."

Says who? I mean, I happen to like the Walters Pater and Benjamin a lot, and I used to like Greil Marcus sometimes when he was coherent. But I am not ready to change the way I think about how and why art is made and experienced every time I take Entertainment Weekly into the loo with me. Sometimes, I just want some help in filtering the crush of stuff clamoring for my attention -- since radio is useless anymore, and my kids don't always talk to me -- so that I can have a higher chance of hearing stuff that I find interesting or enjoyable or, yes, challenging when I have the time to listen. Sometimes I want the comfort of having my prejudices confirmed and reflected back to me. Sometimes I just want to read a good story by a good writer, whether it's about music or something else. Sometimes, a good quip or putdown will suffice. J.D. Constantine can be a pretty good critic, too, even when he doesn't "write long".

Wow. I guess there is a bigger Twee/Blues connection than was previously reported by scientists.

Uh... I'm sure there's a whole lot of relevant threads. Search "rockism." Or just search Eggers and Hornby. I don't think it's the self-indulgence, per se. It has do with received wisdom and assumptions about critical criteria.

I'm not too familiar with Egger's work but what bothers me about a lot of the "self-indulgent" types is that usually people can get so caught up in the "music I like is really an extension of myself" idea that the critic will like and dismiss music based on what kind of person it would make them if they liked/disliked it, and not on the actual music. In other words the reviews turn into massive circle-jerks with lots of "What am I saying about myself when I like certain artists and genres?" attitudes.

A lot of writers I really enjoy are fairly entertained by their own indulgences, and while I might not always feel like joining in on the fun (OK, I always do), it'd be pretty self-conscious and grumpy to be annoyed at even being asked.

And regarding Cunga's post - so you're saying the "music I like is really an extension of myself" idea is different from and less important than the "actual music"?

The piece does indeed get confused though. Part of the problem here is that while he establishes that Eggers and Moody may not know shit about music, he doesn't make clear what the criteria ought to be for the job. Who does have a right to be a music critic, by his standards? Cretins like Lester Bangs?

If finding adults who use neo-Winnie the Pooh phrasing makes me so, that's fine with me.

that piece wasn't bad. there need to be more like it. i have never seen egger's spin column. those quotes petrified me.

Anyway, I also don't mind writers complaining about space being taken up by celebrities who don't know what they're talking about rather than by music writers who do. As long as that line is clear.

for the record: my all-time favorite literary musical obsession would be the judy henske-love in andrew vachss' Burke books.

But the line is also just terrible because it's a ridiculous exaggeration.

You just need the right writer. Joy Williams (one of my idols) on Wendy O. Williams in Spin = brilliant. There is more than that too. These dweebs will go away eventually. (er, eggers, and moody and hornby and the like.)

what is more important, to me, is that someone quickly publish a reader entitled: Essays & Reviews About Bruce Springsteen, For Someone Who Wouldn't Mind Reading A Little About The Boss, You Know, Out Of Curiousity, That Won't Make You Want To Stab Yourself In The Eyes With Knitting Needles. (This, after reading last week's NYT Book Review. Or not reading it actually. I gave up.)

sorry, i'm going to bed, i swear. it was a long day.

Exactly! A lot of this writing seems so divorced from everyday culture, either out of entitlement or embarrassment or some combination, and given that populism is a kind of dividing line for how pop music is often talked about (who it appeals to and why, for example), approaching it that way is just awkward, if not condescending.

And I am TOTALLY for good writing about music from whatever quarter--Scott OTM on JW on WOW. Thomas Beller in Spin on Malkmus in '01 was also great. Etc. I'm for more of that, lots more. Just the ones who have a knack for it.

hahaha OTMFM!

Lethem and Jonathan Franzen are the only ones who seem to remember that it's important to tell a story.

And DFW wrote a useful David Lynch essay for Premiere around the time Lost Highway was in production. While it was a compedium of his usual tics (endless footnotes, asides, shrugs) it was fantastic and thoughtful.

(From a recent McSweeney's "Short Essay on (a) Favorite Song":

The most beautiful and most heartbreaking moment in all recorded music occurs approximately one minute and 36 seconds into the second movement. In that moment, a soft descending piano backed by sustained strings, Mr. Beethoven seems to have captured all that is beautiful and tragic about what it is to be a human being. Don't listen to it in public unless you are prepared to cry like a baby. It was there in my bed, with tears pooling on my pillow, that I realized that if something so perfect could exist, then the world must be worth living for.

maybe people just have to stop calling the moody/hornby type stuff "criticism". they are mostly just tributes from humble servants.

this may or may not directly address this, but i tend to get really aggravated when writers try to use personal experience as a measurement/justification of an album's worth (ie: "The Talking Heads were there for me when Sharon left, filling in the spaces where she used to walk, speaking the words I had forgotten how to say".) This seems to be a fairly consistent crime in all of the Eggers SPIN columns I've read. The christian music magazine CCM has a policy in their masthead that their reviewers will not appraise an album based on its "ministry value" (ie: 'this record will uplift your soul & bring you closer to god), and i actually think that's a rule-of-thumb more general music writers should consider employing.

I tend to like music criticism that's written by people who:

1) have heard a lot of music, and have some context for what it is they're telling me about.
2) write well without relying on cheap jokes or without getting too dry or highfalutin
3) have a coherent point about how the record relates to the culture at large, or can put the record in some sort of cultural context

with myself! okay, i'm going for real.

I will also say that I liked Moody's Danielson Famile thing in The Believer music issue--not tonally or because I agreed with him, but because he had some interesting things to say about the nature of Christianity in art and in America today. I also think the piece would have been better at half the length.

I think I'm going to buy an issue of this magazine just because they're smart enough to have that rule.

David Sedaris, Douglas Rackoff & Sarah Vowell

Hurting - 'I feel like what they're really saying is not "this is what's interesting/important/problematic about album x" but rather "this music is approved for use with McSweeney's products."'

I'm not particularly familiar with McSweeney's, although I've seen some of Egger's writing in Spin and I thought some of it was great. I'm not sure what to make of this criticism. You could level this charge at anyone you don't like who writes about the appeal the music they like has to them personally - if Nick Hornby loves Norah Jones for... uh... her warmth and homeliness, you could accuse him of just approving music that fits with the famous Hornby 'domestic' lifestyle (Hornby is quite happy with his novels being called "domestic", I believe). But it doesn't seem that outrageous that people might like things which fit in with their lifestyle. Are they coldly trying to sell you something, or are they just championing music you don't like? When Egger's talks about why he loves the Flaming Lips he does actually talk about what he thinks is important about the music, seemingly some idea about what attitude to life the Flaming Lips stand for. If you don't agree with the idea that music can represent a certain worldview or moral standpoint then fine, but that's a separate issue.

Matos - "A lot of this writing seems so divorced from everyday culture, either out of entitlement or embarrassment or some combination, and given that populism is a kind of dividing line for how pop music is often talked about (who it appeals to and why, for example), approaching it that way is just awkward, if not condescending."

I admit I don't really understand this. A lot of self-indulgent writing is divorced from everyday culture (ok), so it's not really populist? Or it makes little effort to meet the average reader half-way so it's "awkward, if not condescending"? You lost me a bit.

Alfred Soto - "...it's important to tell a story"

[This is a major tanget really, but what the hell] Why? Is what happens the most important thing in any novel?

As for the charge of being "intolerably self-conscious", is this because it's self-absorbed? With Eggers at least, I think it's a way of trying to be honest and upfront about everything.

And as for the thing about recorded impressions disconnected from thought, are you saying it's just raw unmediated impressions without any real reflection or ordering? And if so, is this always bad?

Yes, always. Always. Always.

But Matos is extra OTM about this: It's the disconnection that rankles, not the lack of interest in what they're talking about.

There is a deliberate disconnection from the culture in a lot of the writing being discussed here, a sense of not exactly feeling part of what they're writing about. Which is one reason I wouldn't in any way class DFW with Eggers et. al -- DFW is drenched in the culture, and unapologetically. Whereas Hornby and Eggers -- and to a lesser extent Sarah Vowell, although she doesn't bother me as much -- seem able to approach the culture only apologetically, to some degree. Like they find it all a little embarassing, and they have to go out of their way to assure you that this thing they're writing about (which is usually something like the Flaming Lips) is different than all that rubbishy kidstuff out there (which, ho ho, elbow-in-the-ribs, you know, old fogies like us just don't know much about). There's a presumed aloofness from the very thing they're deigning to consider.

You don't know from disconnection until you have read Murray Kempton on the Beatles. They really did look like bugs from where Murray the K was standing!

Matos - "disliking a person's singing voice can ruin a well-played, well-arranged song". Fair enough, but if someone asked you if the song itself was any good, what would you say?

People Funny Boy - I like to know where a writer is coming from, otherwise, how do I judge their judgement?

I'm not particularly familiar with McSweeney's, although I've seen some of Egger's writing in Spin and I thought some of it was great. I'm not sure what to make of this criticism. You could level this charge at anyone you don't like who writes about the appeal the music they like has to them personally - if Nick Hornby loves Norah Jones for... uh... her warmth and homeliness, you could accuse him of just approving music that fits with the famous Hornby 'domestic' lifestyle (Hornby is quite happy with his novels being called "domestic", I believe). But it doesn't seem that outrageous that people might like things which fit in with their lifestyle. Are they coldly trying to sell you something, or are they just championing music you don't like? When Egger's talks about why he loves the Flaming Lips he does actually talk about what he thinks is important about the music, seemingly some idea about what attitude to life the Flaming Lips stand for. If you don't agree with the idea that music can represent a certain worldview or moral standpoint then fine, but that's a separate issue.

I'm equally bored when they're championing music I like. It doesn't mean anything to me to know that Dave Eggers thinks Led Zeppelin III has "the awesomeness and beauty of life itself" or whatever (not an actual quote). I mean it might mean something to me if we were just chatting at a party, but not in music criticism.

I think the "lifestyle marketing" charge is quite fair actually, as it goes both ways -- through his inflated music writing, Dave Eggers is also selling you McSweeney's as the reading material that goes nicely with Iron and Wine and a Maker's on the rocks. I'm not even sure he's consciously doing this, but that's the effect it has.

The piece blows, even if some of the targets blow as well.

The main problem is (1) he thinks there's a model for what "real rock critics" should do, and (2) he doesn't say what that model is except in the most vacuous terms.

Point one makes him my enemy, but if he'd not been vacuous, and had actually communicated a vision of what makes good criticism good, I could have learned a lot and been inspired by his piece (inspired to defeat and pulverize him, since he is my ENEMY, but I'd have been inspired nonetheless).

I generally agree with what Matos and Miccio have been saying.

This is so not me. I'm all about cheap jokes and high and dry falutin.

As for the charge of "lifestyle marketing"...

Hurting - "through his inflated music writing, Dave Eggers is also selling you McSweeney's as the reading material that goes nicely with Iron and Wine and a Maker's on the rocks."

Is he selling McSweeney's on some notion of "hey, I like Iron & Wine, if you like Iron & Wine too, then you should buy my magazine"? Seems to me it'd be pretty hard to conclusively argue for this.

Aw, I think you guys are making too much of that "real" word. I know, red flag to bulls around here, but I don't think he meant capital-R Real Rock Critics. I think he just meant people who spent a while learning how to write music criticism by trial and error before they started getting published in The New Yorker or NYT or wherever. And as such, it's a fair point, and a much more limited one than you're trying to make it.

Well, I've never read a word of the guy, but surely not reviewing albums doesn't make one not a music critic. It just makes you not a record reviewer. (But if he doesn't pass any critical judgments at all, he's not a human being. Perhaps he's a shoelace.)

New York magazine has this regular feature where they take a celebrity sometimes and asks them how they'd re-spend the $10,000 they made for their first part or album or whatever, and then they basically proceed to name-drop a bunch of products and restaurants and clubs. That's what it reminds me of.

And Hurting - So Eggers oversteps a line between being a passionate fan of certain musicians or whatever and a less virtuous endorsement of products? If you've got any examples I'd be curious but I've never got that feeling from anything I've read.

Better not show this guy Meltzer's report on Altamont.

And a frequent crutch in my writing as well (though I consider my crutches tools of analysis, but what the hell).

Yeah, what the fuck do high-school dances have to do with music, anyway?

Terrible thing, learning things in linguistic class, or referencing college and grad school, or listening to music in cars.

That said, I'd think fiction writers would be the best for music as it's their trade to evoke empathy and locate the ephemeral and make it, um, less arcane. So to speak poorly.

The problem is getting all these tightass vanilla types--Letham excepted-- trying to find a variety of spew that'll pass for passion.

I interviewed Clive Barker once. He had an interesting sense of humor. Said "Rawhead Rex," one of his first short stories to be made into a movie, was his conception of the monster as a giant penis running around the English countryside eating people. The moviemakers pulled back on his more exact imagery, he said.

Back to thread...

I'm weirdly fascinated by Chuck Palahniuk, I think I may go read one of his novels. Just the focus on the visceral.. maybe it isn't so well executed in his writing (I'll find out) but my intuition is telling me that he's onto something, at least looking in the right place.

Re: Safran-Foer, ugh. He annoys me, but he's not the only offender - when you get an agglomeration of idiosyncrasies masquerading as a person, what do you do with that?

i tend to get really aggravated when writers try to use personal experience as a measurement/justification of an album's worth

I used to like this and I've thrown all sorts of random quasi personal remarks out on ILM, but I wouldn't do it if I were writing a review or essay. Taken too far, you're just using music to polish and show off.. uh.. something of yourself, and not putting in the effort to listen to what it is. I don't think that's fair to the artist, presuming you're reviewing something worthwhile.

Well...The long version would take me a while. The short version is that, while I like some things in McSweeney's, it seems to me to represent a sort of fundamentally defensive mentality. The stereotype would be to say it's the defensive irony of the perpetually excluded, the smart-kid smirk barely covering the heart on the sleeve, and I think the stereotype is valid to a point. But whatever, the net effect is a defensive posture toward the culture. It views the culture with suspicion, engages it with irony or satire (and tired satire at that -- the frontpage of the Web site currently features a mock diary of a death-metal vocalist, ho ho ho). It feels hothouse to me. American liberalism as a whole feels hothouse to me, and McSweeney's is catering to a Gen-X version of that. Not that they should be writing about loom operators in Honduras or, I don't know, grime or whatever (and maybe they are, I don't honestly read it much anymore), but the whole view of the world seems cramped and self-congratulatory to me. And that description of the store gives me the same kind of feeling.

gypsy mothra referred to "the cozy liberal perspective of your Eggerses and Hornbys (and, say, Thomas Franks), shaking its head and tsking-tsking at the society from the sidelines" -- i wonder if there's also a 'safe-space' reaction that is key to this development of insularity? like, eggers has made gobs of money, which has given him the ability to create venues that are apart from the parts of the world that cause him pain, almost like a gated-community reaction? (how many of these people are children of privilege, anyway?) note that i'm in no way excusing it, just trying to puzzle out why.

side note: is the mcsweeneys-approved axis of culture the new middlebrow, always taking pains to elevate itself in comparison to the masses and show that it's Educated and Right?

i think that lumping thomas frank and david foster wallace in with this ilk is a tad off-base, particularly in wallace's case (did anyone read his atlantic piece about the right-wing radio host in LA?). also, frank has fashioned himself as more of an overall social critic in the past few years.

(side note: i seriously don't understand what the appeal of rick moody is. the only thing he seems to be good at is asshole-spelunking of the self variety. when i bought the atlantic's fiction issue today and saw that he had an essay, i groaned on the train. is it a dude thing?)

and the original ilk of mcsweeney's might have run a piece on honduran loom inspectors -- issue no. 1 actually has a great article about the hawaiian sovereignty movement (its original theme, loosely, was 'killed magazine pieces,' based on eggers' misadventures as an editor at esquire)

Definitely agree about Wallace. He's kinda his own thing, and whatever his sins are they're not the sins of this crowd. (I think he maybe has the opposite problem of some of the people being discussed here, in that -- for my money -- he's a much better critic and essayist than he is a fiction writer.) Frank, himself, I generally find interesting and well-informed; but I think the "What's the Matter With Kansas" phenomenon, starting with its unfortunate title, plays to the kind of self-satisfied insularity I'm talking about.

this may or may not directly address this, but i tend to get really aggravated when writers try to use personal experience as a measurement/justification of an album's worth (ie: "The Talking Heads were there for me when Sharon left, filling in the spaces where she used to walk, speaking the words I had forgotten how to say".) This seems to be a fairly consistent crime in all of the Eggers SPIN columns I've read.

As Frank has pointed it, it's pretty silly to even attempt to remove personal experience from understanding music enjoyment. The problem in the McSweeny's/Moody/et al school of crit. is that it substitutes (seemingly very limited) personal experience for crtical engagement. There are a number of ways to incorporate experience into criticism--and, at times, it's necessary to propose what works or what makes a piece of music interesting.

I kind of think aesthetics are always political, to some degree. Or at least have political ramifications.

though the McSweeny's style can signify 'liberal', it's not always liberal (the crit being discussed is pretty explicitly conservative) and represents only a small facet of liberal commentary.

The crit being discussed is conservative, right, but it's a conservative streak running through American liberalism. It's something I've always found interesting about the rockism issue too, that the rockist viewpoint (to the extent that strawman exists) is a fundamentally conservative viewpoint, but it is rooted in Baby Boomer liberalism. My guess is that you can count actual Bush voters among McSweeney's contributors (or readers, for that matter) on not very many appendages. And ditto the rockist brigades, most of them were probably Kerry/Springsteen voters. And I'm not sure it represents only a small facet of liberal commentary, I think it more nearly represents the white, middle-aged, college-educated mainstream of liberal commentary (of which, granted, McSweeney's itself is just one small, eccentric example).

different from and I'd say it's very much less important when you are informing people about the music.

Of course, but they're still not the same thing.

I don't disagree that the streak you indentify exists in some form or another. Just that it's smaller than you (and others) have made it out to be--or rather it's a problem that exists within liberalism but these values are not inherent to modern liberalism. I think this assumption rests more on conservative charictatures of liberalism.

I'm talking about liking certain kinds of music/artists as an identity, which can be fun and is insanely common but when indulged in can lead to people dismissing good music for credibility sake and vice versa. The most common example is probably the "I hate pop music because that's what the masses listen to. I'm not like everybody else and my tastes must show that."

I have nothing against calling someone a "real critic," by the way. I'm a real critic. Cherkis is not a real critic, at least not in this particular piece. He's being a journalist (and not a very good one), and though of course journalism can be good criticism, it often isn't, due to the destructive limitations that "journalism" places on writers: that you have to write about what's important or what's available as a commodity, that you focus on the subject matter at the expense of analyzing your own and your readers' social role in relation to that subject matter (this is the mirror image of what some of you are complaining in regard to Eggers and crew, which is that they're putting personal role ahead of the subject matter; but these are two sides of the same coin), that you load your piece with examples and quotes from others to affirm that the trend you're writing about is, indeed, a trend. Cherkis's piece is a trend piece; he's not writing about the McSweeney's crowd out of inherent interest in what they're doing, but because they represent an important development - which of course is a reason to write about something. But in this instance, though Cherkis disdains this trend in criticism - his putative subject matter - he hardly seems interested in learning about it, much less being surprised by or learning from his subject matter. So the piece reads like a pot talking about kettles.

Real criticism can be a lot of different things, and different people have different strengths, therefore write different styles of criticism, or would if they were allowed to.

Gypsy, lots of liberals are defensive and smug, just as lots of liberals are stupid. Ditto for conservatives and everyone else. This is because lots of people are defensive and smug. So I wouldn't call defensive smugness a strain in liberalism, just a failing of some liberals.

I don't know if you came up with this one, Maura, or if I just haven't heard it before, but it's a fantastic phrase ("asshole-spelunking of the self variety").

Anyone else remember the issue of Musician magazine where they had Chuck D. extol the virtues of "Born in the USA" (the song)? Now *that* was some poor writing, inappropriately assigned.

Now Kissinger I'd read......

Now Kissinger I'd read......

-- PB (non...), July 9th, 2005.

Exactly. It's kind of like if the New Yorker started regularly publishing fiction by rock stars and actors. Of course, they have published Steve Martin, whose proven himself to be a good writer, which is fine. I feel the same way about novelists and the like -- it's ok to publish them if they happen to also be good music writers. If not it's just name-driven bullshit.

Frank said: I wouldn't call defensive smugness a strain in liberalism, just a failing of some liberals.

Both of which are of course true, when you're talking about the old semi-strawman of liberal elitism. And I know it's hard to talk about this stuff without falling under that shadow, so I'll try to pick my words more carefully. Because it's not the smugness so much that bothers me; I don't even think all of these guys are smug. Eggers comes across that way sometimes, but Hornby (for example) doesn't really seem smug. He seems like he'd be a nice enough guy to have a beer with.

But both of them seem emblematic to me of something larger, which I also see/hear reflected in, say, NPR, my parents and their liberal Boomer friends, the Op-Ed pages and arts sections of big-city daily papers, and assorted other gathering places of the liberal intelligentsia -- and what it is, basically, is a sort of sense of time having stopped moving forward at a certain point. Part of it has to do with the canonization of the '60s as some kind of high point of civic engagement/cultural revolution (as opposed to Cultural Revolution), the mythology of the great slide into hedonism and egoism of the Me Decade, the Rise of the Yuppies in the Reagan era, and this general sense that things have just gone right off the rails into the hands of Oil Men and Snake Handlers, leaving the rest of us with nothing to do but throw futile snarky middle fingers and/or write futile nonsnarky pasionate sincere odes to the Flaming Lips. Which I think is a lot of bullshit, is the thing. There's so much going on culturally in this country and globally that either doesn't register in the places of Boomer-controlled liberal consensus I'm talking about, or that register only as sort of novelty items ("Hey, Sleater-Kinney! Girls with guitars! And political songs! Like the '60s!"; "Oh look, a rapper who can play guitar and sing! And he sounds like the Beatles!").

So it's not smugness, and it's not even really elitism. It's a self-satisfied resignation. And I don't mean to Boomer-bash, but I think we're dealing with a generational, uh, ethos here, and I think the next-generation stuff that has inherited that ethos (refracting it through the gen-x/slacker prism) is kind of trapped in its amber. And that's what bothers me, the sense that things aren't moving forward in interesting and unpredictable ways, when they very much are. Like I said, a Democratic Party that understood hip-hop (or that understood file-sharing, for that matter) would be at least better equipped than the one we have now. That's not McSweeney's fault or anything, I just see them as symptomatic and therefore irritating.

Especially at sites like Pitchfork, which presents its inimitable pastiche of gushing, snarky, and ill-wrought five days a week.

Speaking of ill-wrought, isn't a noun missing?

fwiw, i like a lot of these authors, though find in general that they work better as audio books because their writing styles are often distractingly rehearsed.

lethem is particularly good this way, and he himself is an excellent reader.

It seems hardly coincidental that the one piece in the recent Believer that required heavy lifting (The Fall) was farmed out to a ringer.

This article somewhat reminds me of how many professional sports journalists and broadcasters are offended when athletes become journalists when they retire.

So yeah, maybe Dennis Miller hosting MNF is a more apt analogy to the situation at hand. A failed experiment that was. Sports fans dont want to hear comedians doing sports commentary like music fans dont want fiction writers giving music advice?

Not necessarily. I think if Miller was more insightful and it didn't always feel like he was doing a pre-planned routine it could've worked. If you're a fiction writer or just a celebrity and you know little about popular music and how to comment on it then you're in trouble. Or to top it off you're trying to sound like a hip writer by indulging in insane hyperbole and stuff then that's bad as well.

frank otm about the article.

but mothra not otm about thomas frank who actually seems to be saying some of what mothra is saying, except maybe now he's trying to say it to the ppl too busy listening to eggers instead?

sarah vowell i actually used to like back when i didn't read much music-crit and i read some of her stuff for salon and i thought she was MAINLY a music-crit. culture-tourism is just shallow generally, i think, and that's what most of the bad stuff comes down to.

O: "not really populist" isn't what I mean here--I don't have a problem with writers who aren't populist (I'm an editor and I use many writers who aren't). I suppose I mean that a lot of the stuff I'm referring to has this discomfort with the everyday, culturally speaking, and because in a lot of cases that's where pop is coming from, there's a strange disjunct there. a lot of folks here have already expounded on this better than I can above.

Matos - "disliking a person's singing voice can ruin a well-played, well-arranged song". Fair enough, but if someone asked you if the song itself was any good, what would you say?

I'd say that if it was, it got ruined on the way. That's true of loads of pieces of writing, too--I remember a novel called Homo Zapiens by a Russian novelist named Victor Pelevin. It was smart, well-written, had interesting ideas . . . and I didn't make it past the halfway mark because I couldn't stand the tone. And I was left with the idea that this wasn't the translation's doing, it was the writer's.

a lot of these fiction-writers turned rock critics aren't doing the same kind of criticism as people like S/FJ, and criticising them on the same terms seems a little daft. it's totally fair to criticise them for bad writing, but i think it's off the mark to say they suck because they don't "actually know what [they're] talking about on the level of band history". i find that eggers quote (abt weeping to beethoven) more affecting and invigorating than the last sasha frere-jones piece i read, even if it's rather whimperingly written.

I should point out, though, that (as per this thread) most music critics seem interested in reading "think" pieces on bands, exploring their history/influences/etc, and the same may even be true of most music-writing readers overall - but i do think that this sort of stuff has a niche, and is totally valid.

Yeah, I mostly mean Thomas Frank as a phenomenon more than as a writer. He's smart and says lots of useful stuff, but I'm afraid his book has mostly become a vehicle for more of the kind self-satisfied resignation I was talking about a ways back. I think he wants it to be a call action, but I don't think it's functioned that way.

Not really. "Paper Lion" almost did because it was a book about being in training camp with the Detroit Lions before anyone did even fair books on life in the NFL. Plus it was made into a movie. But for me it was never high on the list of good books about pro sport.

Plimpton was treated like a jackass by many of the Detroit Lions who resented him being there and having to put up with him. And you can sympathize with them. I remember wanting to read more about them without the feeb who couldn't even take a snap from center without getting his fingers jammed getting in the way.

And he was a jackass, even for "Paper Lion" he came to realize the element of this in the assignment and tried to make accomodation and amends to the Lions for it. He and his editors had enormous conceits about experiencing pro sport from the "inside" via someone with absolutely no physical attributes to justify being "inside," just a reputation as a writer.

Anyone who ever saw Plimpton lecturing on TV would have a really hard time imagining him lasting in any pro sports camp without being carried, which he was.

He used to when he was still living in Chicago and publishing The Baffler. Now that he's moved to Washington, DC, he's become corrupted by the city's near-total absence of culture, popular or otherwise.

Phil, contrary to the stereotypes there is plenty of culture in DC.

(For what it's worth: as the guy who wrote the Fall piece, I can tell you that I pitched it to the Believer, and that it's the third piece I've written for them--the second hasn't run yet.)