It's ILM: The Book!

which would be highly entertaining, but a 'hard' read.

gear OTM, and if Ned isn't writing on Loveless I will, um, be very surprised.

Heheheh. Actually I'm writing on Rage Against the Machine's debut.

Anyway, yes, Loveless. I realized that I've talked very little about the album over time. My 136 list entry is about how I *can't* find the words to talk about it to my satisfaction. So this will be a challenge to see if and how I can.

xpost -- Roxy is evil, and that is why we love her so.

17. Dave Queen
18. Ned Raggett
19. Simon Reynolds

Damn, that's good company to be with. :-)

yes, ken, internet stalkers are HILARIOUS. keep it up.

Um.

I mean, you DID read the rest of my post, yeah?

anyway, good luck on the book. don't think it's my cup o' coffee but whatevs.

I didn't want to have to call you out from stage during my set at next year's Summer Jam, Ned, but you've forced my hand.

what a desert island disc that would be. there needs to be a companion book - what album do you love, but would absolutely not bring?

xpost with slutty nabisco

tell me it was on a deserted island.

Yeah, why no Europeans?

A few reasons. 1) I don't know many European writers (don't read any non-US music mags besides The Wire and, occasionally, Mojo [mostly when there's a good CD stuck to the front]), so couldn't judge whether their work was of sufficient quality. 2) I'm in charge of paying contributors, and it's a pain in the ass to pay people in foreign countries/currencies. 3) There are unbridgeable cultural and philosophical gaps between US and UK when it comes to pop/rock/whatever music, and I am so totally America-centric in my POV that I wouldn't be able to give non-US writers a fair shake as an editor.

I'm going to be writing an essay myself, by the way, and I finally chose the album: Steely Dan's Gaucho. Every year, it seems like, these guys speak to me a little more, and once I passed thirty (three years ago) they pretty much took over my brain. Gaucho, the title track especially, is one of the most despairing (and yet resigned to an endless future of bleakness) albums I've ever heard; it leaves teenaged crybabies like Joy Division wallowing in its dust. So really, there was no other choice.

ha!

ILM: The Flip Book!
ILM: The Saturday Morning Cartoon!
ILM: The After-School Special!
ILM: The Play (In One Act)!
ILM: The Milk!

And if it is the real list I cannot wait to read that SFJ piece

Also... refreshing to hear about a rock crit book without dero...

(My desert island drum'n'bass LPs would be Haunted Science and Two Pages, but I think most of you would disagree with me.)

Those of you that think roxy's list is legit: please send me all your money and prized possessions.

I would pay good money to read at least half of those.

gygz! - a Polvo album
ddb - the last UI album
jon williams - some album on the LOAD LABEL

TIM PLEASE WRITE IN THE NOIXZE DUDE BOOK BUT NOT ON OF MONTREAL, THANKS.

pdf has a good point here. Americans and Europeans have such incommensurable, mutually incomprehensible outlooks everything that no bridge could ever be long enough to join them, nor any editor wise enough to edit them. It would be impossible for an American editor to know when his European writers were being sarcastic, for instance.

I always thought Canada was that bridge. If you think that the vast majority of its population live within a couple hundred kilometres of the US border, it's also very long. Like Chile on its side.

Poor Greil Marcus. He's spinning in his grave.

I think it means that the island is literally a desert. Nothing but sand and maybe a few palm trees. Like Aruba.

And vice versa, of course.

lactose intolerance

You were joking, right?

This kind of attitude, in a nutshell, is the reason why this group of (mostly) smarmy pseduo-intellectual Christgau worshipping NYC-via-Minneapolis writers are so hilariously awful and pretentious and why this book will be such a predicatble BORE. News flash: ILM is the ONLY place where U.K./Euro music critics are viewed with such disdain. Outside of this little high school rock crit clique, they are universally considered more literate, perceptive and entertaining than the sleep inducing lot you've put together Phil.

I am an American. I am never, ever joking.

I think it's hilarious. I wonder if the American readers understood Mark Sinker's entries in the Spin Guide.

I love how people expect their opinions to be taken seriously when they're too big of a puss to use their own name.

So you don't really take any musicians who go under an artist name seriously?

This is absolutely true: the ex-Pitchfork board is 50% about Sinker and 40% about the famous Slovak dance-music critic Chris Ott.

Which non-Matos crypto-Minneapolitans on this list am I not recognizing? I see more Philly-area roots than Minnesotan. And a surprisingly non-overwhelming proportion of New Yorkers, though that's partly because a lot of them have moved elsewhere during the past few years.

I do love, though, how someone on ILX can always find a way to make it some kind of issue when an American editor signs up with an American publisher to publish stuff by American writers. I mean, really, it'd certainly be nice to get transatlantic perspectives, but I'm not sure it's something to automatically expect of a project. And yeah, it's easy to get that Round Up Usual Suspects feel about a collection like this, but then again we're on this freaking board; any given person could be going through life with a significant interest in reading about music and still have never heard of plenty of these folks. Apart from Ned Raggett, of course. Could someone do a me a favor and photoshop a Final Jeopardy pic where the answer is "Who is Ned Raggett?"

that said I look forward to reading this. seriously.

Jon Dolan and Jessica Hopper.

I'm just slightly weirded out by the Euro/American complaint, though. Granted, Phil might have found better ways to defend that one, or better wording for it -- it seems to me that he's basically saying "I don't really know about European critics or their world, so that's just not the book I'm doing," which is more or less fair. No, it's funny because US and UK publishing are strikingly independent about publishing to their respective countries, maybe sometimes to the extent of underestimating one nation's readers' willingness to go for something from the other. With a small-run book like this in a specialized field you're more likely to get crossover, but really it's kind of the norm to keep stuff like this within your nation -- because the publisher (whoever it may be) probably won't be intending to do much with it in the UK, and therefore won't see the point in adding a lot of UK-related material, stuff considered to appeal to a market they're not even selling the book to.

Which reminds me- to really get it right, they would have to leave in the typos.

link to the contents page on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0306806827/ref=sib_rdr_toc/002-4094979-5502458?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S006&j=0#reader-page

It's partly that, and partly that the NME-ish UK perspective I'm familiar with w/r/t pop music (the whole this-week's-thing-is-the-greatest-thing-there's-ever-been-except-oh-wait-here-comes-next-week's-thing, um, thing) is pretty much antithetical to the book I'm looking to see come out of this. Yes, Marcello's blog(s) take the opposite approach, but I really didn't think Marcello would contribute even if I asked him to (you know, since he pretty clearly hates my fucking guts 'n' all), so I didn't ask. Plus, as has been covered already, he's Old. (And BTW, I'm thinking maybe I'll put a little parenthetical behind Reynolds' name saying Token Old Fart. Think it'll help?) Finally, as has been implied/discussed by nabisco, I really don't even know if this damn thing will be published in the UK.

Finally (as should be piano-on-the-head obvious by now) this book doesn't have a damn thing to do with ILM; I called the thread that because a preponderance of contributors post here, or have done in the past. If it confused anyone, I'm sorry. Just my knuckle-dragging American sarcasm lumberingly at work again.

You keep digging yourself a hole, though, Phil: boiling UK criticism down to "that stuff the front pages of the NME do" is not a very good position to take! Bit like "I don't really go for American music criticism -- those Entertainment Weekly blurbs are just so short."

Yeah, well, that's getting closer and closer to a fair position. I mean, I've never had anything longer than 200 words published in the Voice, for example.

NORTH DAKOTA DOES NOT FUCKING COUNT AS MINNEAPOLIS

Arrgh, dude: by that logic, then, you shouldn't work on your own book -- coming as you do from the who-cares world of word-limited American music criticism.

(Wait no I was defending you, nevermind.)

-- Joseph McCombs (jmccomb...), August 12th, 2005.

you raise a mighty good point, my man! despite how off-topic this now seems: still OTM!

Three writers out of 23 from Minneapolis in some capacity = more coincidence than anything. Whereas if I'd been in charge it would be more like half. And if I were from London it would be a lot of Londoners. Et-fucking-c.

For example, some of us regular folks are totally confounded by the fact that the Minneapolis/NYC/Voice/Spin/Christgau-spawned rock crit mafia (the one referred to in that previous inflammatory post) have decided to shamelessly hype a pedestrian, rockist, histrionic, retro-FM styled band like The Hold Steady, yet choose to revile a group like Marah for the EXACT same reasons.

Couldn't be that the Dolans, Hoppers, and Matoses of the world are having their critical faculties clouded by the fact that most of them are friends or friendly with Craig Finn, could it? Or that many of the same people who are lauding the Hold Steady in major magazines and newpapers also draw a salary from the eMusic.com editorial board, a company that Finn was a longstanding employee of?

Well, perhaps none of that's true at all, but it's just one recent example of the kind of critical behavior that rankles and raises eyebrows.

And while I don't agree with all the sentiments expressed above (although I dislike Hold Steady and Marah equaly), you guys are plaiyng a silly semantic game. You know exactly who is being referred to when he talks about the "Minneapolis/NYC/Voice/Spin/Christgau-spawned rock crit mafia" --ha, you probably have a secret handshake -- and it has nothing to do with who actually hails from Mpls. or who resides in New York.

As for "rock crit mafia" et al--you mean, "writers that editors like and publish," right? Because that's what they're called everywhere else. Especially if it has nothing to do w/locale.

On the other hand, a little brain-searching reveals that there is an obvious outside, a huge one -- it's just that it operates through slightly different channels. Philly-type Magnet-type writers, online indie-rock writers, people who write mostly for mass-audience publications, people who write for hip-hop publications; there are plenty of them. So maybe Matos's circle-drawing should be something more like "writers that editors like and publish within a particular field of magazine and alt-weekly criticism."

So it is a network -- but I think it's a network defined as much by a field of criticism as it is one defined by everyone buddying up into a mob. And from a publishing and editing perspective, it makes perfect sense to pick contributors within a particular field, or even ones who have a particular agenda or style -- that's just how edited volumes come together, whether it's in academia or popular publishing. You don't typically sell books as "samplers"; you try to capture a particular strain of something, so that potential buyers have a coherent single thing to buy into. And you assume that people in different niches and different networks have every chance to publish their own books in their own styles and worlds.

this is the funniest accusation ever leveled anywhere - the day Marah has a lyricist anywhere near CF's caliber is the day CF does guest vox for Marah

The one solid point out of Tom's post was that to many people (myself included) the difference between bands like ILM faves The Hold Steady and ILM targets like Marah are minimal, yet this small network of writers and editors can arbitrarily decide to shove the former down the public's throat with reviews in Spin, RS, VV, etc.
which is especially galling.

It just feels like some people (not you per se, Matos) are talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to the criteria as to why they like HS, but then they dislike Marah for doing the same thing -- or pick another set of bands, one that is ILM approved and another that's on the ILM shit list. But maybe Marah is a bad example, since I'm convinced most people here simply reject them out of hand given their association with Hornby.

Yes they do. "Deserted Island" wouldn't make any sense because it implies that the island was inhabited at some point. The point of a Desert Island is that it's nothing but a little bank of sand out in the middle of the sea.

i'd think that by virtue of the fact that it's an island, its proximity to water would probably enable vegetation just fine, wouldn't it?

I'm pretty sure plants don't enjoy saltwater any more than you or I.

I chose the people I chose because I like the way they write, even when I disagree with them about, or have never previously heard of, the artists they're discussing. I don't go to bars or dance clubs or indie rock shows, so I never encountered any of them, other than as just another reader, prior to exchanging posts with them on ILM. I met some (but by no means all or even a plurality) of them for the very first time at EMP in Seattle this year. I have never read Hit It Or Quit It and have had less than five minutes of conversation with Jessica Hopper. I have never listened to the Hold Steady or Marah, because most (like, +/- 90 percent) of what I listen to is either free jazz, death metal, or 70s AOR hard rock. I hate indie rock, +/- 90 percent of the hip-hop I've heard in the last 10+ years, and about the same percentage of the "dance music" I've heard in the last 33 years. I have yet to hear Arular or any grime other than the two Dizzee Rascal albums (my disappointment with DR led me to not bother with M.I.A.). I have myself published less than 10 pieces in the Village Voice, nothing in Spin, and one piece in the Seattle Weekly. I do most (like, +/- 90 percent) of my writing for Revolver, Jazziz, The Wire and the Cleveland Scene. I literally could not imagine successfully pitching a piece to a major (RS, Spin, Blender) music mag. So if I'm part of some kind of "critic mafia," it's fucking news to me.

Maybe "tiresome," sure, Matos, but it's at least something it's something one could legitimately complain about -- at least more legitimate than "they published a book and it's all the kind of stuff they like!"

And Mike, the thing is that nobody really "guards" music criticism; there's less presence of some uber-editor who can stand outside of the music-crit world and monitor the sort of thing you're talking about. If members from a particular aesthetic cadre get into editorial positions, they're quite naturally going to bring on writers from a similar (or at least compatible) aesthetic genre, and that's going to become, yes, an influential one. Matos could maybe say more about this, but it's my assumption that in most cases there isn't going to be a chief or managing editor at (say) an alt-weekly who's going to call out the music ed over the Hold Steady or little insider aesthetic camp-formations; in most cases there isn't going to be a ton of reader feedback to evaluate the music section in terms of popularity; in most cases it's like the academic apartment where the new star dean brings in all his intellectual allies, a bit of Duke English action. The main check on it is just who the older generation of critics feels good about handing off the torch to -- who they were publishing and grooming when they were in editorial positions themselves, who they "crown." But it'd be nice to think -- particularly with the amount of low-overhead internet criticism going on -- that critics couldn't get too disconnected with their audiences (and their crammed-up throats) without winding up replaced by something new.

But there's also the issue of effort, more or less, which I think comes into play with this particular mafia -- "effort" as in which writers actually go out on a limb and decide to become music writers and go all-out at bugging people and pitching people and making a career of it. Which requires a bit of network-info to know how to do properly in the first place, yes, but it still seems like what separates plenty of successful mafia-insiders from other people. Even among those on this list who are already really successful, which I say basically as a way of congratulating Douglas Wolk for getting all up in the book reviews.

http://www.cramercollectibles.com/79tmolit.jpg http://www.707sportscards.com/psa-cards/09002193.jpg http://www.dickperez.com/images/psd_dk_MorrisJack_lg.jpg

There are whole saltwater plant ecosystems! Some of the coolest ecosystems around, actually!

I have often thought that a collection of stuff by the best ILM contributors would be fantastic but have never had the drive/connections/gumption to do something about it. Sure, there would be an amazing Euro-equivalent of this (I could start a new thread for dream line-ups!) (also UK wd have to include commonwealth, hi Tim F), but it's hardly Phil's job to provide one.

Nabisco is thinking hard as usual. It is true what he says - that it is unfair to say that everyone in the UK only likes things for a week. For that is untrue.

I like the question about the desert island.

How about a different slant: Recruit people to write about the song that was #1 when they were born and how they feel that (does/doesn't) represent them? Considering how big a hit Popstrology was earlier this year, it could be interesting.

M'self, I'd be in, pondering how "Me and Mrs. Jones" has impacted my life and wondering how things would have been different had I been born a day later under the sign of "I Am Woman."

P.S. I'll be picking up Phil's book as well.

Big ups to the choice of Iron Maiden's Killers, though.

All further thoughts to be allusive, cryptic and written in shorthand.

Guess he couldn't live without "The Last In Line".

I'll never understand you kids.

-- EARLY-90S MAN (miltonpinsk...), September 20th, 2006. (Enrique) (later)

qft

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marooned-Generation-Desert-Island-Discs/dp/0306814854/

He liked the whole thing, but he liked Scott Seward's Divine Styler piece a whole fuckin' lot. (Unsurprising, because it's fantastic.)

So I'm searching through Marooned on Amazon, and I see that there is a Stranded-like discography at the end, which is REALLY cool, 'cause that was my favorite part of Stranded. What I'd like to know is who put the discography together. I'm guessing it's not Freeman alone, cause he has (by his own admission)pretty narrow tastes.

(it does seem to have a lot of metal and jazz, though, but it also has Blur and Coolio!)

phil is a renowned coolio scholar. be on the look out for his forthcoming book on coolio's electric period.

I put it together, but I solicited nominations from other folks who listened to (for example) way more 90s indie rock than me.

Peter Shapiro reviews Marooned in the new issue of the Wire.

Does he say nice things? I haven't seen it.

he says mostly nice things, yes

Bump! Why does the bloody release date have to be the end of the month? At least I have Wolk's book to tide me over for a couple days...

Results 1 - 10 of about 36,300 for "write your own book". (0.20 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 325,000 for google search joke makes me yawn. (0.19 seconds)

Amazon says it comes out on July 30th, but also says it's "in stock" (nothing about pre-ordering). Which is it?

uh, Amazon is retarded. Is that news?

i want a copy! i'm a big fan of me! oh, and all those other people too.

I got 35 copies dropped on my doorstep yesterday, so I guess if you want one, go ahead and order one, you'll probably get lucky. Scott, contributors' copies ought to be en route. Except you're the only Marooned contributor who actually lives on a goddamn desert island, so yours might take a while.

oh the irony!

do u live on barbados skot

cuz that would be the metalest shit ever

no, i'm actually not that far from major east coast ports. maybe i'll buy one on-line anyway, and see what gets here faster. i should get one before those weird west coasters get one!

I'm reading this right now! It's good! Seward and Matos made me really want to hear their albums and Ned made me really want to see MBV live! (unfortunately, the albums are safely out of print and mbv isn't touring this summer) Top of your games, guys!

Hey, thanks! :-)

GREIL'S FORWARD IS MY FAVORITE FORWARD EVER! hahahaha!

i broke down and went to the book store and bought a copy. AT FULL RETAIL i might add.

i will read all these ilxors.

when i went to barnes and noble they didnt have marooned yet

but they had stranded

so i bought that

john rockwell really liked him some linda rondstadt

I kept thinking it was out at the end of this month, for some reason. I better get shopping!

Yeah, Scott, holy shit, that's gotta feel good. (xp)

congrats to you maroonders; it looks great! I can't wait to read it (but I may have to pry it out of skot's hands first).

I just got a copy of the new edition of Stranded in today's mail.

I knew you'd be pleased, Scott. I kept meaning to send you the text of Marcus's piece, but just didn't wanna do all that typing.

eBook version?

Apparently Amazon has a limit for how much you can read of the book via "search within text" and then they cut you off, haha.

oh my lil' ilxors, what a treat! totally the beach-read of the season! you can all stand up and take a bow. seriously, this is the addictive kinda music book that i crave, so it's doubly cool to be a part of it.

ned, your piece is super! i really dug it. seriously, i love your tone, and if i hadn't already heard the album (a zillion times), i would HAVE to hear it after reading what you wrote.

inadvertent hilarity: your long-view and rapturous take on "you made me realize" set-closer and d.wolk's one(or two) sentence summation of same.

and douglas's piece, likewise, wow, what a stunner. but then i'm a big fan.

filthy phil's motorhead love-letter is also top-notch. and i liked the stuff about steely dan and black flag as much as the motorhead stuff! (and the list is great too. and even great for future fist-fighting. about that interpol entry...)

and dave queen is dave queen. singular. the alpha and the omega. and i'm still trying to grapple with his fear of the word "the".

and geeta's was short and sweet and wonderfully written. too short! i want more geeta!

and miccio i want to kiss on the mouth. with tongue. and saliva. what a hoot! so funny.

non-ilxor-wise, simon is simon. smart and good and if he writes a 70's folk-rock book i will buy it immediately. greg tate is greg tate. also effortlessly good, but also too short! wanted more more more.

that's all i got to tonight. matos will have to await my fearsome judgement. and all the rest. so much fun so far!

:-D Too kind of yer.

inadvertent hilarity: your long-view and rapturous take on "you made me realize" set-closer and d.wolk's one(or two) sentence summation of same.

Hehehe.

note to phil: i actually had the cassette version of no remorse complete with faux-leather tape-cover! how cool is that?

it IS funny. because then he goes on to describe much the same thing that you experienced with MBV. only with him it's stereolab.

And thus the continuum is established, or something.

greg tate is greg tate. also effortlessly good, but also too short! wanted more more more.

Dude, when Tate agreed to be in the book, I was in fucking heaven. He could have sent me a bar napkin with the words "Bitches Brew. Why? Fuck you, that's why." and I would have scanned it in and printed it.

So yeah, got my copies and have been dipping in and out. At the risk of sounding like there's mutual backscratching afoot, Scott's piece is *very* good indeed -- I've adored that album for many years, and Mr. S both delivers with a lovely track by track breakdown and a compelling autobiography/contemporary history essay. All that I would have hoped for! :-)

Pretty much everything I've read has been a treat, it's a total pleasure and privilege to be part of it. So far the essays have hit me the most were Scott's, Matos's wonderful (and in its own way similar to Scott's) piece on History of Our World, Dave Q's amazing tour de force of detailed hilarity and kinda to my surprise Daphne Carr's take on Spiritualized -- Daphne's a great writer and of course I love Spz but the combination here was really unexpected and very moving. This was the essay out of all of them that made me want to immediately dig out the album for a listen again (and that's what I'm doing right now).

Woohoo, my amazon order of Stranded & Marooned just came in today! Weeks of bedtime fun will be had thanks to you all! (er.. I'll read one review a day before I go to sleep, I mean, perhaps a little disappointingly)

Sounds good, see you in 20-odd days!

I'm having a great time reading Marooned. Looking forward to the island-themed contributor's dinner party, where each writer performs a song from their record. Look out, Stephen Stills...

Phil, is it true Da Capo is sparking interest in the book by giving away an iPod filled with all the records -- or did I just make that up?

I suppose I could hum the "Soon" riff.

Oh, and for a couple of seconds I thought you really *had* been on a crashed flight between Iceland and Ireland.

I've been posting a couple of reviews at the book's blog:

http://maroonedbook.blogspot.com

I'm gonna get to the one from Paste in a day or so; it's longish.

i set up a show aug 22 at cake shop for post prandiazepamial fun w bunnybrains and coyote(birdman) and the dark meat(athens ga) and sumone else whose good..ive invited OG BB Elyse Flynn to play w us..and hope all who need summer love to attend..sktt duxxnt not lie leave th uisland that much and i weanted him to drink a beer and play th skambourine(thats what Ska band play) w us..see sum sites for more sites

cool! i enjoy fun every once in a while. not that cleaning feces and blood-stained hospital rooms isn't "fun", you know, but it's a different kind of fun.

where is cake shop? can my/your/our parents come?

they will be around. they are going to see that jaazz women that dad loves. ya know the one. band leader. brazilian bird songs. i forget her name. and mom wants to go to the folk art museum. they are hooking up with dadz friend. masta ace's father-in-law.

i gotta get this

sktt,here are the coordinates..
http://www.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=126+Crosby+St+New+York,+NY+10012&daddr=152+ludlow+10002&sll=40.72171,-73.992445&sspn=0.006115,0.012746&ie=UTF8&mpnum=0&ll=40.723047,-73.991783&spn=0.006115,0.012746&z=16&om=1

thats h.works to cake shop in case it confuuxxes.
our parents can attend if they feel like that will help.
masta ace on the other hand may not like it.

I will be on the radio tomorrow to talk about the book. WNYC, 93.9 FM if you're on the East Coast of the United States, otherwise listen live at wnyc.org between 2 and 3 PM EST. Rumor has it Greg Tate and Ian Christe will also be participating by phone, and there will be open phone lines so you can call in and ask why your favorite writer (or record) wasn't in the book.

"My name is Mr. Tteggar. And I come from a place...oh, very far away..."

See you there, Phil -- I don't have a decent enough phone on my island any more, I have to paddle downtown to talk for 5 minutes in person.

http://bangbangblog.info/2007/07/24/marooned-with-maiden/

bumpety bump:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/musicreviews/2007/070727/

(critics reading critics reading critics? you bet yer butt, homey. this is fun!)

'tireless contributor the All Music Guide' = I have an actual epitaph for the gravestone!

Seeing the paragraph about John D. on Dionne next to a naked female butt with a smile on it is doing my head in for some reason.

Wow, that guy really hates Greil Marcus.

what a lame review; what's the point of complaining about GM being well-known if you spend the whole review focusing on him?

A: Making a pretty sound and encouraging counter-argument to a decline-and-fall story that tends to get swallowed a lot, even by people who still find other reasons to hate the people making it?

Meantime I am now listening to the radio show -- I have no problem with my essay being judged the least surprising. ;-) (Really in part the essay was explaining how unsurprising my choice was, precisely because of the impact it had on me etc. etc.)

I mean, the perspective he's assigning to Marcus here is one that a whole lot of people kind of take as a given, even when they're not in the mood to hear someone older than them complain about it -- and yet I don't think that much work has been done really eloquently articulating why that perspective might not be true, in terms that are positive and convincing (rather than just going "shut up LOL yr OLD"), so it's nice to see someone putting a little work in on that project.

actually that guy doesn't hate Greil Marcus at all, just doesn't care for the argument he sees him making. though Kevin posts here all the time and will probably weigh in himself.

Weighing in...

Actually, J.D. (is this a John Darnielle pseudonym? if so, I still absolutely adored your essay) has a point. The more we bitch about Boomers, the more we may be counterintuitively reinforcing their (coughs) hegemony. But what can I do? The foreword enraged me so I wrote about it.

And yes, I love a lot of Marcus' writing. But he's been bitching about the decline-and-fall nabisco references above at least since 1985's "Corrupting The Absolute" (and you can even see some kernels in the original intro to Stranded). As I told Matos, it reminds me of his 2000 Don Henley put down: "While it's well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one's very existence, it's generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so."

Nabisco, my first draft was much more positive but sadly, rather incoherent. Still, you should check out Charles Hamm's Yesterdays and Philip H. Ennis' The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music for eloquent, positive, and convincing arguments against the lingua franca theory which may just be another way of saying that they write with no Gen X baggage.

P.S. I'd like to claim that Dave Queen should be king of the world (he already has royalty in his name, after all) if it didn't go against the spirit of his essay so egregiously. But gawd, he should be the king of something.

J.D. = not J0hn D. Carry on.

I have no problem with anything you wrote, generally speaking; I've made the same anti-Boomer arguments myself, though never in print. And I thought what you had to say about the rest of the book was quite nice, so thanks. (I'd love it if you'd elaborate your thoughts on the discography section here, because that thing was a big pain in the ass and I thought it would get more mentions in reviews than it has - you brought it up, and the Wire review mentioned it, but that's about it. What did you think of what I chose, and what I didn't?)

hi Kevin John! J.D. is not me, I am J0hn D. Thanks for the kind words!

J.D. OTM - any crit who doesn't dig Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda needs to do more than "shake the cobwebs from my personal canon" (ugh)

What does that have to do with J.D.'s beef with the review?

lameness of reviewer established/confirmed by v. poor value judgements and predictability of their own taste/opinions (Loveless yawn)

So... nothing.

So...long.

Ban Kevin John BOZOLKA

I like the idea of a loveless yawn. Romantic boredom incarnate.

Dan OTM but the thing he's OTM about is symptomatic of general cultural rot in re: ability/willingness to reason critically: finding something a speaker says with which one disagrees !=sufficient rationale for dismissing the speaker's position, let alone grounds for constructing a counter-argument. Everybody knows this, so pretty much every time somebody indulges this extremely popular fallacy, he'll argue something along the lines of "I normally wouldn't, but in this case, the kernel with which I'm disagreeing is clearly so fundamental as to justify wholesale writing-off of anything that follows or preceded it."

This is huge problem in political writing/thinking/blogging in particular - it's pratically the governing trope at this point, sadly - and is the sort of thing that my talk-about-music buddies used to deploy for laughs all night ("no, Lodger clearly sucks because 'I'm not a moody guy' is a lame lyric") but which makes for poor discussion/great Web 2.0 boarding I guess

I have no serious qualms with the discography. I just wish it were more passionately argued. But I realize you had a huge task at hand and were probably under passionless time constraints. I really only have one question: why did you include two Pavement records when you made it very clear on the radio that you didn't like Pavement?

> why did you include two Pavement records when you made it very clear on the radio that you didn't like Pavement?

The mere fact that I hate 'em doesn't mean they're not important. I included a bunch of stuff in that discography (Nirvana, for example) that I wouldn't listen to on a dare. When I was compiling it, in fact, I enlisted the help of friends, saying to them in effect "You know I have spent years scrupulously avoiding polluting my ears with indie/"college" rock, so what do you think are the major records that should be included? All the death metal stuff, and most of the hip-hop, I was able to fill in on my own.

"I have no serious qualms with the discography. I just wish it were more passionately argued"............how do u argue a list w more passion?

Well, it's not a list; it's an annotated discography.

what's the point of complaining about GM being well-known if you spend the whole review focusing on him?

And now that I think of it, I wasn't complaining about Greil Marcus being well-known, just about his lingua franca ideas.

Great article about the book and, specifically, John D.'s contribution.

Well I gotta thank Strongo for pointing this out to me but in a word, UH.

Wait, how is that OK?

.how do u argue a list w more passion?

The way Greil did with his list in Stranded, maybe? (on which, by the way, I never got the idea he was including any records just because they were "important," but maybe I'm wrong.) (And oh yeah, his list there is my also my favorite thing he ever wrote, anywhere, and one of my favorite pieces of music criticism of all time.)

I liked Phil's list okay, though! I dunno...I could probably write a few thousand words about what I liked and didn't about it, if I had too, so I won't start.

Funny: Most of the reviews of the book I've read either think Scott's Divine Styler essay was brilliant or incomprehensible. (But I haven't read that many, really.)

They can just copy a whole chapter/essay in their review? what the hell? (xxpost)

Send them an invoice.

Ned should just copy a whole USA Today article in one of his next album reviews.

>Wait, how is that OK?

They got permission from the publisher. The publicist dropped me an e-mail about it today. I posted it on the book blog. If you're in NYC, come on down to Housing Works tonight! Scott Seward, live and in person! Daphne Carr, Rob Harvilla, Kandia Crazy Horse and Tom Breihan, too! And me...

Oh hey Phil, as long as you're here, some station in San Francisco wants to interview me about the book. Drop me a line and I'll tell ya more.

Sent. (Note new email address.)

Crap, reading's TONIGHT? Considering it starts right when I'll be leaving work, I'm guessing I'll be a little late.

Wow. Fantastic article, Ned! And now I don't need to buy the book. =p

Well I -- hey! (Besides, there's all the metal pieces in there you haven't read yet, so hop to. And thanks!)

YOU WRITERS NEED TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THE REAL WORLD AND NOT THE WORLD BETWEEN YOUR EARS!

(sorry for the all caps, but I found that quote funny in one of the reviews)

how do u argue a list w more passion?

The way Greil did with his list in Stranded, maybe?

I'm guessing he thought it was literally a list with no commentary.

And oh yeah, his list there is my also my favorite thing he ever wrote, anywhere, and one of my favorite pieces of music criticism of all time.

I have never understood this and I'm not just in Greil gripe mode here (again, I DO love lots of his writing). I don't think "Treasure Island" is bad by any stretch. But those are strong words above. Are there any particular entries you think are especially noteworthy?

One thing that's always bugged me about it is that most of the singles are just listed. So we get yet another comment (genius or not) about The Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan but nothing on, oh, The Kalin Twins or The Poppy Family. Which we need!

Most of the reviews of the book I've read either think Scott's Divine Styler essay was brilliant or incomprehensible.

I can understand someone finding Dave Queen's essay incomprehensible (me, I bought 365 copies of the book so I can burn Dave's essay every day in an invocation of the gods...don't know which gods yet, though...). But not Scott's (which is unquestionably brilliant). What reviewers found it incomprehensible?

If it wasn't for the and one of my favorite pieces of music criticism of all time I would have assumed Chuck was being nice by leaving out the words "by default."

I enjoy Treasure Island, but god a lot of it is just ridiculous hyperbole.

12x5. English robber barons laying tracks across the U.S.A., they seized huge chunks of right-of-way, foreclosing on modern soul with "Time Is On My Side," careening to apocalyptic heights with "It's All Over Now," and terrifying all opposition as the guitar that opened "Empty Heart" reached out and grabbed your very soul. 1964.

Granted its the kind of hyperbole a critic would be wise to be good at - gets young music nerds salivating and gets educated folks to assume the shit's "relevant" as long as they never get the chance to hear it at face value.

It's also fucking hilarious (intentionally)!

Singles Collection: The London Years. A three-hour sexual tour, a three-hour sexual tour (Abkco). 1963-1971.

Reading the stuff on Fleetwood Mac was inspiring in the early nineties when they were fashion victims at Clinton's inaugural.

Entry on Bryan Ferry's The Bride Stripped Bare also inspiring, but wtf.

just wanted to say: so great to meet everyone last nite! laurel, jon, ian, bb, sang froid, mrs. sang froid, nabisco, jon lewis, and filthy phil. we had a great time. and we are paying for it now. bunnybrains show was a blast.

LOVE the first sentence of this L.A. Times review(!!!):

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-book25aug25,0,4289402.story?coll=cl-books-util

Also, I posted the text of what I read at the Housing Works Reading (minus my intro remarks):

http://skotrok.blogspot.com/

Again, had such a great time in NYC! Thanks, Phil, and everyone.

Aha, you have a blog, Scott. Into the bookmarks you go.

Are there any particular entries you think are especially noteworthy?

Savage Rose. Hackamore Brick. The Stooges. Put Your Cat Clothes On. Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band And Street Singers Attack The Hits. The Zurvans. (Not necessarily my favorites -- just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head.)

a lot of it is just ridiculous hyperbole.

So? I never said I agreed with it all! I said it's entertaining to read. There's a big difference. (For all I know, a bunch of the records aren't even real.)

had such a great time in NYC!

Scott, you were in New York?????? How come nobody told me??

haha that LA Times review still has me as a "Village Voice contributor." I guess I did write that sentence about Hinder in Pazz'n'Jop last year.

I can understand someone finding Dave Queen's essay incomprehensible...But not Scott's. What reviewers found it incomprehensible?

Blocked them from my memory as soon as I decided not to read those reviews all the way through, but I'm pretty sure the guy in Paste did, at least.

Savage Rose. Hackamore Brick. The Stooges. Put Your Cat Clothes On. Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band And Street Singers Attack The Hits. The Zurvans

None of which, by the way, are "boomer-centric faves," whatever the heck that's supposed to mean (beyond the obvious cliche it's been for almost as long as 'boomers' have been around to whine about).

I mean, I like and/or love essays about all kinds of records in Marooned, and there definitely are some great records in there (and great essays about some music I don't care for, too), but I'm still pretty stumped by the apparent need to identify with a "generation" in the first place, much less pat said generation on the back for choosing, say, My Bloody Valentine or Iron Maiden (both of which have also been canonized into tedium by devotees of their particular niches forever) over, say, the New York Dolls or the Eagles. Just really seems like splitting hairs to me (and not just because I prefer the Dolls and Eagles -- there's plenty of music in Marooned I like more than music in Stranded.) But maybe I missed the point of that part of the book. (Though maybe I'm misreading it? Not sure.)

A good thread about Stranded, btw:

The Greil Marcus Stranded Book

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is why people think the eternal strawman "boomers" is still something interesting to complain about. Seems like it might have been interesting 25 or 30 years ago, but not so much now. (I may actually be referring more to the reviews than the book itself, actually. Here's what Kevin writes in his: everything truly meaningful happened when they were young. This particularly nasty facet of the boomer outlook has colored the music press, especially Rolling Stone, for decades. But, first off, how exactly does that make boomers different than any other so-called generation? And second, the most recent copy of Rolling Stone I saw had Maroon 5 on the cover, and reviews of all sorts of current music inside that were talking about how good it is. I'm never been much of a fan of the magazine -- obviously they miss a whole lot [though who doesn't?], and Wenner seems like a creep, and months will go by without me even looking at an issue -- but week to week, they do pretty much keep up on what's new, as far as I can tell. And if you're going to talk "the music press" in general, boomers haven't dominated the Pazz & Jop poll results for what, 20 years? That obviously doesn't mean I agree with the results. But it just strikes me as kind of lame target to aim at in 2007.

strawman arguments are always lame, right chuck?

I guess you guys aren't reading Bob Lefsetz or listening to "classic" rock radio stations. They echo the boomer strawman outlook, although yea maybe they do not justify the whole strawman argument above.

If anyone's interested, I'm going through the Treasure Island Section of Stranded and putting downloads of things I was interested in hearing in a folder called Greil Marcus Stranded (on soulseek)...some great fities stuff I didn't know about

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is why people think the eternal strawman "boomers" is still something interesting to complain about.

I doubt I'll be able to convince you that the argument is interesting. But how exactly is it a strawman argument when boomers eternally complain about the death of the pop music lingua franca? And how interesting do you find Marcus' argument in his Marooned foreword, an argument he repeats almost verbatim from that 1992 piece ("Notes of the Death of Rock-n-Roll" or something like that)? You can even hear it in "Corrupting the Absolute" from 1985 (I think). It's enough to make you love Julian Lennon.

how exactly does that make boomers different than any other so-called generation?

Well, nothing, assuming Erik Himmelsbach is not a Boomer. But I can't stand when ANYONE makes the lingua franca argument which apparently is up to 1984 now with Purple Rain. Just wait - soon we're going to hear someone tell us how, oh, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or Stankonia or The College Dropout or whatever brought the people together and all else after is fragmentation.

But there is a difference. I just don't hear (m)any Gen Xers or Gen YNoters or whoever making the kinds of arguments Marcus and Himmelsbach are making. Plus Boomers have been around longer and have thus been making these arguments over a longer period of time (and hence more annoying). Plus Marcus has a much bigger soap box than Himmelsbach (and most any other critic, really).

the most recent copy of Rolling Stone I saw had Maroon 5 on the cover, and reviews of all sorts of current music inside that were talking about how good it is.

It wasn't until Stone hired Rob Sheffield that I got a sense that the magazine was willing to admit times had changed and wrestle with current music honestly. But even at that, look at their star rating system. They're much quicker to give a new album by a boomer fave five stars than a new album by anyone else. Neil Young's Freedom got five stars but Daydream Nation got three (or so - don't remember exactly). It doesn't matter if anyone reading this thinks Freedom is a better album than Daydream Nation. The point is that there were plenty of good critics in 1988 who could've given the latter its props. Instead, the magazine has to keep telling this story of boomer genius over and over again.

And you see it in all their lists, e.g. "500 Greatest Albums of All-Time" which mirrored their "100 Greatest Albums" list in 1987, both with Sgt. Pepper at the top. Christ, didn't Sgt. Pepper make the number one spot in a Stone "Best Album Covers" list too? What's next? "Best Record Spine?" Cuz we all know what would win that one (Go-Go's Vacation).

And if you're going to talk "the music press" in general

Ok fine, that was hyperbole.

If anyone's interested, I'm going through the Treasure Island Section of Stranded and putting downloads of things I was interested in hearing in a folder called Greil Marcus Stranded (on soulseek)...some great fities stuff I didn't know about

I actually did that in the Napster days and wound up with a 7 or 8 CD set I called Stranded No More.

Some ilx folk got the whole thing on three dvd-rs.

I have an op-ed on "the death of the album" (don't believe in it) in today's L.A. Times. Here's the link.

Q: Between Stranded and Marooned with its new writers answering the same question, do you get a sense that people listen to music differently now?

A: I don't know, but what struck me, aside from reading it and feeling that doors were opening in buildings I didn't know existed, was that these people are more confessional. The new essays are rooted more in the personal, in traumas. I don't know if that's a cultural snapshot of a moment, but in 1978 it was 'I'm going to write this because my reply matters,' and now it's the way the art on the cover transformed a life, not necessarily a song or a lyric. The social is missing, though it's not a bad thing. Newer writers will use a new experience to convey their sense of personal jeopardy.

Is this true? What say you, Marooners?

Oh, that's from a Q&A with Greil Marcus linked on Phil's Marooned blog.

I'd agree. Let's put it this way -- I'm under no illusions my piece 'matters' in some overarching sense.

Marooned : the next generation of desert island discs
Philadelphia, PA : DaCapo Press, c2007.

Sorry, the Library does not currently own a copy of this title.

I read the book, and mostly liked it. I think that the personal angle is what made the best reviews so good (to me these are Seward, Carr, Darnielle, and Wolk's). There were several reviews that I just didn't get, but I don't think that's because of their personal angle.

Not to get too abstract, but I don't see why taking a personal angle means giving up on the view that the review "matters". If you think that the personal is the political, these approaches are basically the same.

The social is missing, though it's not a bad thing. Newer writers will use a new experience to convey their sense of personal jeopardy.

I think that part is key to what Greil was getting at, i.e. it doesn't really matter--or maybe just doesn't need to matter--to anyone other than yourself.

PopMatters review:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/48844/marooned-the-next-generation/

It's weird to read ilxors in a non-internet font. All fancy and shit.

At least seven onetime/sometime ILxors featured in this:

http://www.amazon.com/Time-1000-Songs-Change-Guides/dp/1846700825/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213201091&sr=1-1

which is out now, I think.

LBZC Annual 2009 is gonna be in the stores early October as well.

One for the kiddies, pop it in their Christmas stockings

^ someone hound this sick pa3do off the thread

revive

Was just looking at my copy while moving some books around to make room for new ones.

https://www.amazon.com/Marooned-Generation-Desert-Island-Discs-ebook/dp/B06XGJZD4P

shop!

Guess they didn’t want an essay about Poison. I am genuinely upset. I was probably chatting rubbish on ILE.

Funniest thing about this book was how some contributors dramatize the psychological and physical ordeal of their "desert island" exile while others just blithely start describing their favourite album.

Oh, sounds good - I mean yeah, if someone says you are on a desert island and now talk about your favourite album - the situation will dictate. ‘Day 27: No fresh water to drink, ate a limpet. Don’t feel like listening to ‘Unskinny Bop’ today’

I mean I just start by describing living there in comfort. I am simple.

Pretty happy with how this turned out.