the Voice's high-school days

"After Ben went off to Dartmouth and left me behind, my bitterness propelled me into angry lesbian rock. I got more into the Breeders and Belly, then went further. I started listening religiously to Throwing Muses, and to anything Kim Deal-related."

guh.

"At the time, the Breeders were a relatively unknown band...."

To her, maybe.

"..megastars like Nirvana owed much to the Pixies for paving the way for their pseudo-intellectual neurosis."

Yeah, that's right, `cos the Pixies invented that, didn't they! Gimme a break.

"..Kim, feeling hemmed in by Frank Black's male-dominated scene...."

Not to be Johnny Pedantic, but I believe the gent in question was still travelling under the moniker, Black Francis at this point. Someone's not doing their homework!

"After Ben went off to Dartmouth and left me behind, my bitterness propelled me into angry lesbian rock. I got more into the Breeders and Belly, then went further. I started listening religiously to Throwing Muses, and to anything Kim Deal-related."

Belly, Breeders, Throwing Muses = 'Angry Lesbian Rock'??

Revolting.

however, calling him frank black or black francis is infinitely preferrable to a review which would call him charles.

it would be a terrible blog entry, too.

sterling, i'm glad you agree with him, but care to explain what you agree with?

As far as what Eddy's grand plan is, he mentions a bunch of young music writers he likes right over here. He mentions them in reference to a question asking him for folks he thinks could be the next Chuck Eddy. From what I've read from these folks, they do talk about the music in terms of their own experiences. I am all for music writing that eschews the usual critical pitfalls for more revelatory discource about one's relationship WITH the music. However, a good number of these writers just don't strike me as being good writers - that is, forming solid sentences, developing their ideas, choosing words intelligently. Falling back on slang and sloppy syntax might capture THE MOMENT, and frame one's enthusiasm, but it doesn't lead to the sort of prose that one should get paid to write.

And that's the thing that makes all the difference - the paycheck. If this were just someone's personal website, or someone's Xeroxed 'zine, I could care less that they're navel-gazing and writing about their run-of-the-mill collegiate experience, this little article wouldn't have mattered one bit. Stuff like this gets uploaded to webservers on a hourly basis. Publish something like this in a reputable publication, and you're setting an interesting precendent that might not yield satisfying results. Blowing the dust off of the stultifying discourse that typifies "music criticism" (or, better yet, ROCK criticism) in such a blustery fashion is just going to upset the balance to the other end - you'll have gramatically incorrect sentences filled with uncorroborated facts and flimsy, hollow, nonsensical ideas. That's WORSE than that accursed academic masturbatory thesaurus strokin' by a wiiiiiiiide margin.

The fact that a number of the writers Eddy names (if not ALL) are females is a bit disquieting, too. There aren't many female music writers, unfortunately; to use this fact as an excuse for letting this batch of gum-snapping harpies make money babbling about their indie world when their indie world died about 6 years ago is ridiculous. Is it too much to ask to find some folks that can tell a preposition from a proposition, someone that knows that being a writer and living a life doesn't immediately make that life worth writing about?

And if we're going to once again lower the boom on Pitchfork, it should be noted that all personal writing done by offending PFork writers was a ruse - a lame ruse - used to discuss the music.

it's not going far enough, but then the bits in starlust i like best were mostly made up by fred vermorel

The only bit i can now remember from this piece was one of these women described how, when making love to [idol whose name i can't remember], she wd like to cup his balls tenderly

"angry lesbian rockstars" — which is tongue-in-cheek anyway, humorless archive-patolling d00dz — tells us something abt the writer and therefore something abt the breeders

POISON ROCK AND U R ALL FAGZ!!

(ps this is why i finish c.1 piece per decade)

I detested that article.

Mark's comment that the writing 'tells us something about the writer and therefor the Breeders' has at least a couple of leaps in unproven logical connections too many for me. It doesn't tell me anything about the writer (I don't believe the author is being truthful) and nothing about the Breeders (what information there is, is flawed).

I know my opinion that rock crit is worthless is quite unpopular here but I do think that some rock music writing can be worth reading for the pleasure of reading good writing.

This infantilism isn't good writing though. I can't see the point in this piece being written - especially because I am so suspicious of the reliability of the (invented?) persona.

Somebody gave me a hard time on here when I said I had no use for the reviews on Pitchfork. That wasn't a value judgement on the quality of their writing, just that the underlying tone (that of pompous and inflexible English professor marking essays on a topic he or she has little residual interest in) is one that cannot provide any worth to me because I react so badly to my perception of the writers assumption of the relationship between the writer and the reader. That was also why I was so disappointed when I saw a few (a tiney minority) of the guides in allmusic adopting a similar tone. I love most of the allmusic writing.

Anyway, I don't even understand what the author of the Breeders piece thinks their relationship with the reader could be, it can't merely be that they assume this doggerel confession if somehow interesting?

What it tells you about the Breeders is that this is what they meant to the kind of girl she currently thinks she was back then.

"Detest" => this is really what I am reacting against. I wd ten million times rather read it than (almost) anything The Guardian has published abt pop music in the last 20 yrs.

haha you ph34r this piece because it proves troll s to be right arfter all!!

if it had been in the hornby da capo best of rockwriting i might not have HATED that book quite so much, and actually been able to write a review

For me the article would be saved if the chewy morsel of analysis of the record at the heart of this experiential gobstopper was actually more, um, chewy. If the only thing she can think of to point out about the new album is that it's less full-on than the previous albums, then what's the big personal experience build- up for?

Another way of looking at this: Jessica is anxious to tell us how she used to relate to The Breeders, but she's not particularly strong on how she relates to them now. That little bit of analysis is not only inconclusive in re the record, it's also inconclusive in re her. Yeah, sure, she's older now, she's adult now, but, um, what else? Some proper self-analysis would have substituted for the missing record analysis more than adequately.

Thus the clincher, the point where the article fails for me, is when she writes:

"When I found out they were touring a couple months ago to support Title TK, I almost wet my pants. Kim. Live. In person. Holy shit. I bought tickets as soon as humanly possible."

The implication is that in fact Jessica hasn't grown up, hasn't changed a single particle since she embarked upon Kim Deal fandom at age 10 - which is fine, but arrested development is much more complicated than just saying "I love The Breeders and I still love them now." It's much more conflicted, it's much more problematic, just as any type of growing up is.

For Jessica, aging is a process of gentle shifts - she gets slightly bigger, while the Breeders album in her hands gets slightly smaller. But if this is all you learn, then what have you learnt really? If you're going to use the past in discussing your relationship to an album (and indeed, to yourself) in the present, then you can sure bet that your audience is going to expect it to include some sort of critical perspective.

No it isn't.

(Rock'n'roll) U (Journalism) = Ø

anyway the general feeling here (several threadsters excepted obv) ISN'T "this isn't terribly captivating", it's "TOTALLY EXTERMINATE!!"

b) conversely I don't think expecting the article to fulfill at least one of its possible/attempted aims is being unreasonable or even dadrockist.

it is not JUBILEE it is PRESSWEEK you unhelpful parasite

I'd go further and say writing can only have its ouwn inherent merit and cannot 'add' to works in any other medium. I love reading Sight and Sound, and I love reading through allmusic - but only as 'streetmaps' not are critisisms which add value.

I've been trying to think of any counter-examples to disprove it. The nearest I can think of is kinda odd, its the novel Flicker by Thoedor Roszack.

(*or any number of ilx posters for that mattter, nu or old.)

Or is it some sort of "It's *because of* The Breeders that I am in suspended animation" thing? Or some sort of statement about obsession.

(reads again)

I can sort of see it, but that would be an exceedingly generous reading.

Above: I agree with chuck eddy that not only do the little girls, they understand, but cf. Accidental History, Riot Girls are HOTTT.

What are you seeing in this that I'm not?

But Sterling if you are on her side because you're picturing her as one of the girls from Josie & the Pussycats then I REVOKE!

the underlying argument seems to be that a. teenage(rs) (girls) are the unfettered keepers of music crit... aka the Chuck Eddy argument

Chuck was the first editor (of a commercial publication) to have the courage to print Don Allred, who turned 10 in, oh, 1961, and is or ought to be the future of rock criticism, and who's in the same issue as Jessica Grose and Nick Catucci, who's the same age as Jessica or younger, but writes more like Don. (I write more like Jessica; sometimes I try to write like Don, but I suck at it, so no one ever sees.)

Although, I must admit, there was the sentence about her dancing around to the breeders in her underwear. so maybe I'm seeing ms. My so-called life w/ the violent femmes, or britney w/ madonna at the beginning of crossroads.

I don't know. Have you ever read Jane Dark?

this made me larf non-stop (dr vick is in corsica)

Well okay, let's put aside the issue of whether or not i 'liked' the article. It read (PERSONAL HISTORY ALERT) like something I would have received and edited heavily of back when I was editing the college paper's Friday section, but I suppose that's the point (did you know that the New York Press has a teenage food critic, too? the trend isn't isolated).

I guess I just get frustrated when I read a barrage of pieces like this by younger women - all youthful bluster and hearts dotting the i's. I mean, I suppose it has its place, what with the little girls understanding and all, but -- well, is there room for any more measured writing out there that can be claimed as 'female writing,' things that haven't traveled straight from the brain to the keyboard? All these travels through Diaryland that I've read lately seem so ultimately safe to me -- they're cheerfully, completely bereft of reflection and tying phenomena in with the larger picture, like, oh, say, the almost-total lack of a strong female rock presence in mainstream music culture. ("But that's, like, so BORING, so CRANKY, and we're totally postfeminist now, you know?")

I guess the bottom line is this: Is this article going to make anyone who hasn't had this set of 20-year-old girl experiences want to listen to the record? Or is it just going to make those people dream of a 20-year-old dancing around in her underwear? And which of these ends is the more desirable one these days, anyway? It's getting harder and harder to tell.

.

.

.

(ok, not rilly).

I mean, my point is that the target audience isn't ppl. with the same age, gender, and life-experience set but rather people who project their desires for those experiences.

This thing might be even better if it is revealed to be a CONCEPT REVIEW by a 45 year old man. Or maybe not. Or maybe because chuck edits the voice, EVERY review is a concept review by a 45 year old man!

And this would be different from every other early 20s female in the public eye how?

Come on.

it has a real real lowkey-yet-pervasive deadpan humour to it, the exact opposite of vapid, i think... you COULD buttress it up and make it more obvious, but i wonder if that wouldn't damage the relationship she's establishing towards her own earlier fandom with it?

in dadrock world this tends to lead to an embarrassed leap away from such loves, towards "real" music, w.real justifications; i like the way she ISN'T hard on her old (silly) self at all, because actually her present self agrees: "look at me the clown: i was right actually"

i can fill in the blanks because i fit into this girl's category in a lot of ways. but her writing is shit and -she's- not the one telling me that.

i'm not into much rock criticism. much of what i've come into contact with has been dry or boring. unless it involved that personal element.

i'm very stuck on the idea that context is everything, and you can't trust someone who won't tell you where they're coming from. and when i go to read about an album, i want an overview of context. i want to know how this piece fits in with the culture it comes from, and that includes the author's personal context. that it -is- the writer's personal context.

which is why i can read pieces written by 40-something critics who grew up in big cities getting piss drunk and playing in garage bands, and get something useful out of them, even though they certainly don't fit in my personal category and i can't relate to the authors on any kind of personal level.

You only mention two instances, and I can't think of a third. The alt.press style manual says, "You may not call something a 'fetish' if it has not occurred three times. Cf. 'trend.'"

Or does Metal Mike Saunders count as a teen girl?

Then my grandmother would reply in her soft Viennese accent (a cross between Doctor Ruth and Marlene Dietrich), "Maybe she's a lesbian."

This is good writing. So is:

she deemed me as the artsy one because I wrote a poem about how much I hated mimes. It was called "I Hate Mimes."

So I don’t understand the blank insistence that this is a badly written piece. Maybe you’re all a bunch of mimes, secretly.

I listened to the whole album in one sitting, and although I didn't really get it (how could a 10-year-old know that "Hellbound" was about a living abortion?), I knew I had found something that was my own. Kim sometimes shouted, and sometimes whimpered. She spoke to the burgeoning angsty adolescent in me.

is only followed up with

When I went into high school, I still retained some bright-eyed, bushy-tailed idealism.

which is maybe not contradictory...but we aren't given enough of - anything- to make that distinction.

(And she's working within word limits. That's always my excuse, anyway.)

Perhaps she's working in a space more opened up by federman and joyce than Xagu? one where language isn't "right" but appropriate?

Also, irritatingly enough, I think a good portion of the foax jumping on this review probably like AHWOSG.

The trap of kneejerk feminism here is that the men who DON'T like the review also listen to more "rock" probably = more men, while many who DO like the review listen to more women, knowing what I do of the cast of characters on this board. How can I be a humbert when she is only one yr. younger than me and in fact older than my girlfriend?

I found the article disappointing because it didn't mention The Josephine Wiggs Experience.

and what's this about kneejerk feminism while you spout some overt odd sexist take on musical taste and attitudes towards journalism?

would you like to be part of my posse?

another trap of knee-jerk feminism = we cannot write as people but only as machines so that the menfolk will not look down on us!

wtf??

i called your remark sexist (and will call the most recent one sexist as well) because it's based in this idea that women (and feminists in particular) are a certain way and write a certain way and think a certain way.

which is almost as ridiculous as saying a piece is allowed to be crap because it's written within a word limit.

I respect you, and therefore think you can take criticism w/o lashing out at everything as sexist.

Besides, you hate women more than I do, just like you hate the reviewer and the 90% of girls you went to school with she reminds you of.

Ethan: uh, no.

I respect you, and therefore think you can take criticism w/o lashing out at everything as sexist.

Besides, you hate women more than I do, just like you hate the reviewer and the 90% of girls you went to school with she reminds you of.

you don't respect me, sterling. if you did you won't post something like this.

i don't have a feeling toward women as a whole. and i <1>love those girls i grew up with.

i hate that people try to justify bad art.

i don't like the review because any of those girls i grew up with could have and would have written it better.

but burgoning means precisely that the process is not complete, and she only sez she retained SOME of the bright-eyed idealism thus there is no contradiction, only a process. & in the logic of the articles she leaves the breeders for the throwing muses and then the amps who are "rougher" i suppose than the breeders, and thus speak more to anger & she resocializes at the same time thru college in a likeminded enviornment. there's plenty of musical evolution there, and some which is only infered.

i agree with you, in that i think the stylistic attempt is good, but it is only an attempt. she says vaue things and doesn't clarify. and she doesn't relate now to then, except for a burst of present day fandom that she doesn't really break down or explain at all.

i don't want to take it as it is, because i -know- it could be done better. and there's no reason to waste time on being sub-standard.

she is talking about burgeoning -angst-. and then follows it up with - idealism-??? that's not a process, that's a car crash.

& in the logic of the articles she leaves the breeders for the throwing muses and then the amps who are "rougher" i suppose than the breeders, and thus speak more to anger & she resocializes at the same time thru college in a likeminded enviornment. there's plenty of musical evolution there, and some which is only infered.

she makes jumps from talking about her life and family to talking about only music...with no bridge. the bridging is necessary.

proper standard: following up on points you introduce. dealing with the material rather than just thinking about dealing with it. engaging the reader and leavign them fulfilled or usefully unfulfilled. all of which are very possible within this style.

and no, seriousness isn't important. i think this article could have been much better if she had taken on a (more) humorous tone, actually.

As for the rest of this thread: I'm constantly amazed at the hoops people try to jump through to justify that they're not [insert -ist adjective here, and yes I'm lumping rockist in, too]. I'm especially amazed at them when they're so slippery and twisty that any attempt at an original point is totally lost among the verbal gymnasticizing.

But I wasn't arguing that all their unformed points should be paid for—syndicated, even! Don't you remember all my Teeth articles about how I detested weblogs? (And all in 1999, too. I was so ahead of my time!)

Tracer, that's an entirely understandable misreading of how I used "remarkable" (I wasn't too clear). I meant make this an interesting-sounding story , rather than an objectively "interesting" story (cf. Tom's pieces, which often grapple with "unremarkable" or "commonplace" appreciation for music v. successfully - ie. "remarkably" - I think). What's unremarkable about Jessica's story - reading it as face value, which again maybe I was wrong to do - is that she doesn't find anything about her relationship with The Breeders worth *thinking* about. It's almost a blank retelling.

And maybe within that blank retelling there's lots of implied criticism, the "necessary impossibility" of her position shining through without any need further to explicate it. But then to me her arc of familiar was not "so familiar it's almost painful". I'm not a teenage girl, and perhaps more importantly, I don't have any particular pre-conceived notions about how teenage girls receive or should receive rock or pop .

Hence my (joking) Josie suspicion w. Sterling - I wonder if you can only really love or hate this article if you have ideas about teenage girls that the article conforms to or deviates from. I don't think Jessica advances any particular position critically; rather, readers find something "painfully familiar" in either a positive sense or a negative sense. But if you *don't* know what is supposed to be painfully familiar, then maybe like me you're left scratching your head, as this article offers nothing to point you in the right direction (ie. as satire it - surprise, surprise - *only* works if you can conjecture a teenage Breeders fan growing up without reading the article first). It's unremarkability lies not in the story - which is interesting enough and rather well-written as far as I'm concerned - but rather in terms of why the outside reader should care at all.

I really really really DON'T think this is where I am working from. AT ALL. It made me smile, from the very first (very funny) sentence. It's a nice idea — cf Tracer's reading, about unspecial/undemanding relationship deciding NOT to big itself up into a world-historical melodrama (trans: indie) but also not running hard in the other direction (trans: dadrock) — nicely handled.

Obviously it's hard defending something as funny when ppl are standing round saying 'I don't think it's funny at all" => and if it's like things you've read ten thousand times before then sure you're going to be bored, but it's not like things *I've* read ten thousand times before. If all teenage girl's diaries are like this then MORE OF THEM SHOULD BE PUBLISHED IN THE VOICE!!

The sex thing and the feminism-antifeminism aren't QUITE total red herrings but they're both completely inconclusive either way unless you actually let the piece speak itself. Not as a representative of a trend, or an example of a type, but the THING ITSELF.

I think that the whole blog/internet/amazon reviews thing (however you want to source it), is starting to swing the pendulum back towards personal pop narratives again - that's great. But my initial - and I stress initial, this was a really brief readthrough, much like I'd guess an average Voice reader's would be - reading was that this was basically an Azerrad-style narrative of growing into indie rock, switched from third person to first. Yes Mark you could define Dadrock using this thread, but only if you included the article itself as a starting point. I enjoyed reading it - but I'd enjoy reading a similar, honest piece by a lot of people here more.

(ppl. talking)

cuba: comment about article tarnishes women writers & humbert humbert - - I read as "this article demeans women and if you like it you are a perv!"

(ppl. including nancy talking)

sterl: omnibus reply including point that cast of ILMers who like article also like more female bands/artists than ppl who don't, which is a huge generalization but felt right at the time. this reply uses the term "kneejerk feminism"

nancy: sterl is a sexist about music AND journalism!

sterl: GARAASFDAFABLASERAGHADAGFHGA! Also, another point about cuba's post & maura's earlier logic -- that women must represent for the womenfolk, while I say why cannot they just be people? again uses the "knee-jerk" feminism term.

ethan: sterl is a post-feminist!

nancy: sterl is sexist because he disagrees with feminism and therefore demeans women!

nancy: i fucked sterl's girlfriend

sterl: i addressed an ideology, what's wrong with that? also a misreading of an earlier nancy post.

nancy: you can't talk about feminism because it is very broad. also, you are wrong about my earlier post.

sterl: here is my take on porn, or something similar, which is NOT post-feminist.

sterl: also, i was wrong in reading your earlier post but i don't understand

nancy: feminism is so big as to not exist, nearly, and also something about porn w/r/t this and feminism being divided about it where i still don't understand the point.

(various other discussion)

so i think some of my points about cuba's post nancy thought were about hers and responded as such, and i got everyone mixed up because i just kept hearing "sterl is sexist sterl is sexist" which drove me nuts because I am not and so i was more nasty and less thoughtful than i should have been. and ethan kept throwing fuel on the fire.

But I do think that the overall cultural fetishization (sweeping generalization alert!) of this sort of writing (and really of youth in general today) does stem in part from a systematic, ever-creeping desire (probably borne in large part from the aging of Boomers, although the popularity of '80s revival stations in major markets shows that they're not alone) to "have youth"—whether that having is reliving it or getting the girl that was never gotten, as it were.

Can I also say that this thread has been bumming me out quite a bit, and I can't really put my finger on why?

(Also: Anna Rose to thread!)

(i accept that "THE VOICE SHOULD PUBLISH A MILLION MORE PIECES EXACTLY LIKE IT" was possibly not a helpful intervention on my part)

being very extremely old i am inevitably also quite ambivalent about the fetishisation of teenage authenticity, which in loads of other contexts i wd fight against (viz: "why doesn't old man dylan/bowie/whoevah call it a day and fuck off"), but one of the reasons it is valued BEYOND barely legal sex is surely an awareness that it is the last time we are routinely socially allowed to be unformed, confused, mistaken etc etc. Another thing I increasingly also want to fight somewhat against — and a bit of it is going on here, from the tuff smart girls AND the anti-girly boys, and i suppose i am against it from the punk-rock angle of my soul — is that being an adult is like entering a finality zone of Minimal Professional Standards of self-awareness and emotional expressivity. Yr 21 now: no fuck-ups allowed!! Be bold be stylish be self-aware!! The future demands it!! As if fumbling and apologetic and non-threatening self-awareness has to fall at the first Darwinian fence, or something...

Le Tigre: "In seeking specific technical information, we discover that behind the hysteria of male expertise lies the magic world of our unmade art." Apply "hysteria of male expertise" to the discourse of historical self-awareness and/or self-historical revelation, or something...

The danger is that for "made", everyone (inc.me) is in fact reading "male"...

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Taking sides: danger vs safety....

Radical subjectivity, ho ho. *flees*

Don't quite understand this - how would she have done this, if she'd wanted to?