Will someone please keep Chuck Eddy away from the jailbait?

Also, though, this issue has a v. funny piece by Scott Seward as well as a nice Kogan one which stops right when I want it to keep going.

pre-Menopausal syndrome

(Josh, I think your 'smart fans' will be able to work out pretty quick what Phillips values in SY and tally that against what they value in SY and judge the piece accordingly - the fact of the clashing values isn't the issue as much as the review's providing triangulation points for any kind of SY listener, which I think it does.)

What teen group member was spotted at a party, elegantly licking white powder off his finger?

Josh, I don't understand what you're saying at all. It seems interesting though. Could you explain further please?

np: Voivod (who've been around nearly as long as SY but rocked much harder on stage and generated much more interesting guitar sounds with just one guitarist and do lead guitar solos too and do them better) - Angel Rat

how fucking predictable. It's easy to slag off an a-g 'covers' rec as some 'vanity' project. Let's get back to the rock (business), man!

''Jim O'Rourke is apparently a full-time member of the band now, but but he seems to have been too busy launching Wilco into the stratosphere to get you guys off the ground.''

No reasons are given for why Jim is a failure. it's just the 'he produced Wilco' therefore this must be bollocks. Anecdotal evidence.

''A Thousand Leaves, the album in between Washing Machine and nycgf, wasn't so hot either, but it had its gripping moments—like the pastoral "Wildflower Soul," and "Sunday," the rockin' single with the Macauley Culkin make-out video. Besides, I was caught in the throes of passion at the time; in 1998, you could do no wrong.''

sunday was hardly great material. The liking of the single seems to be related to a relationship she was having at the time. Rubbish!

what i like abt it is the way she is 'trapped' by her love of the band. She keeps buying this stuff in the hope that they may reproduce past glories. There are some nice descriptions of some of the tracks in Murray street.

Overall: some good stuff but I not great because she easily dismisses some of the places where they come without even thinking abt it.

Tell me where the article says this, please. When she writes about being "in the throes of passion" I took it to mean in terms of her infatuation with the band.

This isn't what I consider a great piece of writing, but the jailbait slur doesn't sound particularly bright either.

I don't want to drag ethan into this, but even when people hate what he has written the criticism is not the sort of snidey, anti-teenage vemon that I keep seeing for reviews like this.

Eddy has long enjoyed winding up Sonic Youth and their fans, but this doesn't seem to be any kind of interesting or effective challenge to their music/status...

I note with some amusement that the Voice gave NYC Ghosts & Flowers a glowing review...twice. And did anyone else in the world really like that album?

I'd also like to note that the fact that people are outragedly discussing this review means that it is, in some important sense, a success.

if someone would post a picture of o'rourke in the funny pants that might improve the situation.

sundar, I'm not ignoring your question, but I need some time to think

teenage girl: "i am 17"
j.blount: "so you're saying you want me to fuck you"

If the Voice consisted entirely of outstanding music writers except for these girls that argument would fly. But there are plenty of other lousy writers on their staff (and some great ones too, obv.).

More like -

amy phillips - I was 17. I WAS 17!

j. blount - fuck you.

list a:
Sonic Youth
Lee Ranaldo
'covered John Cage and beat up pianos and shit'
NYC Ghosts And Flowers

list b:
Weezer
Rivers Cuomo
'went to Harvard and smoked hash and shit'
the Green Album

harsh? i don't think so, as that's immediately what sprung to mind when i read it. the criticisms don't hold and aren't well-articulated. i can't even relate to the 'when your favorite band starts to suck' narrative the way she writes it, because she clearly shows herself as having lost all perspective in her fandom (if the best reason you can think of for moving to NYC is the existence of Sonic Youth, you ought to just stay in connecticut). while i find the jailbait thing a little offensive, J is OTM in pointing out that the piece is mediocre at best.

I didn't read the article all that carefully, but it seems to me her basic argument was Sonic Youth is a lot more boring band now than they used to be. I'm inclined to agree.

The only thing that nags at me - and in retrospect I think the piece on The Breeders suffered from this too, though it was hard to tell because the writer said very little about the actual album - is the sense in which these personal experiences follow the contours of established truths. As people have noted, Phillips comes to the exact same conclusions as half the critical world, which is fine I guess, but it still feels like the "personal experience" angle is a mere template laid over her rather unproblematic opinion of the album. I still hold to the perhaps unreasonable opinion that personal experience angles should be surprising, challenging - in contrast, these pieces tend to point towards the creation of a cohesive "voice" of the nineties youth experience, only a couple of steps away from the "universal acknowledgment" that Nirvana were the best band ever. Maybe if this was the same piece but about, say, the Quad City DJs, it wouldn't have that problem. Even the same piece about Moby's 18 (see Matos' review, heh).

A good piece of writing nonetheless.

I think that as web people who presumably read a lot of web writing we might be more familiar with this kind of writing than some VV readers - its breeziness and rock/suck/cool vernacular is pretty tired if you read a lot of non-music weblogs, but in the context of the VV might be fresher.

The other thing to mention is that both the bands written about in these pieces - Breeders and SY - very much *did* appeal to a disaffected punkish-grrl high school demographic in the mid-1990s (and you have to imagine some of this appeal was intentional), so asking, well, what happened to their fans next? is a good editorial question. Even if the answers are a bit predictable.

And yeah I do think that lots of the ILX women could write better than this, and that said ILX women should therefore be sending pieces to the Village Voice duh!

yes it wd be lovely if he trawled the entire world for new voices and types of voices => being on a weekly is like being locked in a decompression chamber, though, and you can find yrself hugely overresponding to stuff which seems different in yr very specific context, but of course supersamey to those whose context it emerges from

She elaborates: "You're still masters of suspense, skillfully building and building and building tension. But the foreplay, which once heralded glorious noise orgasms in "Pacific Coast Highway" and "Dirty Boots," now leads to nothing but flaccidity and frustration. Many tracks follow your trademark "Expressway to Yr Skull" verse/chorus/extended-instrumental-noize-attack formula that may have seemed revolutionary back in 1986, but just sounds predictable 16 years later." This band who made a name for themselves by being avant-garde and revolutionary have become formulaic and predictable, relying on tricks similar to their old ones but getting less and less out of them. She makes specific references to early songs and earlier techniques/structures to illustrate this.

She then goes on to say she finds the lyrics empty and that "the epic majesty last heard on Washing Machine's "The Diamond Sea" is still MIA." For pretty much every criticism she gives an example from a song from the new album. This is all the detail I would want from a journalistic review. She gives a very clear overview of her relationship to the band, how she feels about the new album and why, and supports it with examples from the album. I thought everyone hated track-by-track analyses? I certainly don't find them very interesting for albums I haven't already studied whereas something like this gives me a clear idea of what someone could see as being the album's, and band's, failings.

Also, she's not necessarily asking SY to put out another (insert old SY album). She just thinks that on this record they are trying to do the same old things they used to do and not doing them as well. If they actually did try something new for them (like, I don't know, find a beat) maybe she would get excited again.

What bothers me about the hatas is that the criticism usually gets linked to gender/sexuality (jailbait), where if it were a male writer he would just get called a moron. To me, using jailbait as an insult isn't all that different than using slut/whore as an insult (which still happens a lot).

This is actually the only thing I don't like about the review. Dunno why, I almost never find it very convincing when writers address their subjects that way (I'm guilty of doing at least one of these myself). I think it would only work if it was written in total fan desperation (like, this could actually affect history!), or with a more serious intent (Dave Marsh actually wrote a fairly convincing letter once to Michael Jackson in this style). Amy sounds both a little too knowing and not really bothered enough to pull it off.

Otherwise, it's always refreshing to read a piece on SY in an alternative weekly that's conversational and personal, and that doesn't fling about the term "postmodernist" or work itself into a frenzy outlining the lineage between SY and some underappreciated noise-experimental genius. Not that those things can't have value, of course, but SY criticism is full of that stuff. (In fact, when Chuck Eddy reviewed Sister in the Voice, his more personal, irreverent tone felt refreshing even back then.)

High points of NYC G&F: the "StreamXSonic Subway" riff, the intro to "Free City Rhyme", the descending guitar melody in the title track, a certain overall mood. The vocal melodies where they appear are pretty dull. The lyrics are hopeless and are not helped by the blah delivery (Why don't they experiment more with creative delivery of spoken-word tracks? Would expression be un-punk or something?). "Renegade Princess" is a through-and-through embarrasment (goes from a parody of middle-school goth poetry to a parody of bad bar rock to a not-bad noise ending). "Nevermind" would be better (would actually be a good song) without the coda. "Side2Side" and "Lightning" are OK, not great. The drone at the end of the title track is far less powerful and climactic than it should be, even compared to what Sonic Youth themselves have achieved before, though it wasn't bad live. (Er, never mind what I said before about track-by-track reviews.)

Maybe it's because I'm also a girl that is young and as I was saying, I wrote reviews like hers when I was in college on a BAD DAY, when I hadn't started writing something yet and hadn't even listened to the CD and would write something in an hour while listening to the CD for the first time. Maybe Phillips had a couple of bad days then. And I'm always wanting more women writers, because I think we do have a certain fresh and personable writing quality. But I don't want Amy Phillips to be leading the way armed with her diary and old issues of Spin and Sassy.

I like the fact that the article isn't dogmatic: it takes a hypothesis (the expiration date of bands) and tries it out, and is prepared to admit exceptions. This is the second thrust of the article, but is clearly linked to the personal narrative, and focuses the piece quite tightly on the idea of aging and development.

There is quite enough stuff about the actual music for my taste: I quite enjoyed the album, having not liked anything Sonic Youth have done since Dirty. (My disappointment moment came with 'Bull in the Heather' and the album that followed, ewww, how dull it was.) But I'm not sure I could have talked about it so well.

The one problem I have with the review is the idea of cool, which occurs at three crucial moments: "For a group that has always relied so heavily on the currency of cool, these aren't very encouraging signs."; "Your place in rock history is certainly secure, what with you basically reinventing the sound of the electric guitar and influencing, like, every cool rock band in the past decade."; "Or you could just sit around reflecting on how cool you are." At first I thought this was just weak writing, but I've thought about it a bit more.

I can think of two ways to read the use of cool in this review: either it's a kind of deliberate naivety, an ironic quotation of the breathy teenager's love of the band, and referencing the writer's own earlier passion for SY (they were cool to her, once); or it's being used as an analytical category - SY trade in 'cool' ie images, associations, clothes, an experimental lineage, hell even the idea of New York, so they should be judged against the criteria of cool. And in this case they are found wanting, which was pretty much inevitable given that 'cool' is terribly bound up with history and temporality in some quite complex ways (the citation of such and such a style from such and such an era at such and such a moment). Super-smart po- mo SY fans should surely know this better than anyone - or are they just sadsack fans like all the rest of us?

My disappointment moment came with 'Bull in the Heather' and the album that followed, ewww, how dull it was.

My feelings exactly. "Bull in the Heather" ranks as a song I've always wanted to physically strangle, then bury in a shallow grave.

Honestly, though, I don’t care one way or the other about Murray Street. I have a couple of their albums, I like them fine, I’ll even grant that some of the stuff I haven’t heard (which includes everything after Daydream Nation) might be fun but I’m not gonna download their ‘90’s oeuvre or pay for it anytime soon. But I’m suspicious of the way she just won’t allow for a redemption scenario for SY. If there’s a chance one day suddenly start not sucking, she don’t want to know. Sounds more like she wants to free herself from the need for Sonic Youth and all that embarrassing high-school fannishness it entailed.

I’d rather read a Sonic Youth review that went something along the lines of “It’s entirely possible I was an idiot for having such an intense emotional commitment to you guys” or even “I just realized: you guys have ALWAYS sucked” rather than “How DARE you suck!” Sonic Youth don’t owe you or me nothing.

I mean... ugh... I can relate to the part about being a teenager in love with Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation came out when I was 12 and it opened me up to a whole new world), but not the unrepentant- fannishness-leading-to-ultimate-disappointment. It's so un-punk to expect your favorite band to be saviors -- it's human nature that bands suck sometimes.

Even though she's just putting across her honest reaction, I think her honest reaction is so sophomoric that it makes me not wanna take her seriously. Plus, I don't think she really understands why she ever liked Sonic Youth in the first place, which is why it seems really odd that she'd be so negative about SY's most cohesive, least meandering album in nearly a decade.

I'm not saying "I don't think she really understands why they're good or not good," I'm saying that judging from the review she wrote and the type of personality she puts across in the piece, it doesn't seem to me like she has a firm foothold on exactly what it was she liked about Sonic Youth in the first place -- she establishes that she once thought they were rilly kewl, but she makes it hard for us to sympathize with her when she talks about her subsequent disappointment. Why did she love them so much? Why should we share in her anger? What makes a former Sonic Youth fan different from a former New Kids on the Block fan?

don't take this seriously anyway, I'm just throwing things out.

B-b-but... where are the hooks on 'Dirty'? Glam riff godliness, I'll grant you, but hooks? 'Washing Machine' = much better in that department (though NB. Amy loves that album).

I think people are taking Amy Phillips way too much at face value when she calls for Sonic Youth to break up, etc. I think all these possibilities ("Maybe I never really liked them for what they were", "Maybe I was foolish to be so obsessive about a rock band") can be considered as possible implications. Alext is totally OTM as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps Amy Phillips is too smart for her readers?

Thing is SY are fighting their past glories. It must be quite difficult for them but I'm glad they just keep going. same with the fall.

Sundar- have you got hold of any no wave? I'm searching for the no wave comp.

Josh does have a point BTW. For the first few years I obsessed over SY it never really struck me so much that some albums were much poppier or more experimental or whatnot than others. I don't think I even really thought of Goo as being poppier than Evol for a long time. When people asked me to lend them some SY so they could know what they sound like I'd just randomly choose a couple albums. The basic Sonic Youth-ness seemed to be the defining quality of all their albums that made them very different from anyone else's albums.

Well, that just begs the question: what's their "Africa" ?

pls choose at least one of the following options.

a) make sense
b) be more funny

sncrly yrs,
me

http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/ceddy_society_living_chuck.jpg
http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/ceddy_society_living_chuck.jpg
http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/ceddy_society_living_chuck.jpg

I'M ON UR LAP, RAEDING UR METRO SETCION

Of all threads to revive.

Yeah, wow...

Cute, G-pig tho.

gershy reminds me of the people in this story. dude has issues

lex, did you ever see the movie Reflections In A Golden Eye? you should check it out, I think you'd dig it.

Wot's this "jailbait"?! (Like, seriously)

http://www.ocferrets.org/images/jailbait.jpg

this thread sucks, ilx sucks

are j blount and cinniblount the same guy

posters come and posters go, but misogyny never goes out of style

posters come and posters go, but misogyny assholes on ILX never go out of style

-- bobby bedelia, Friday, 25 May 2007 23:38

http://www.fantasiamusic.co.za/images/Products/big_Zing%20Top%2010.jpg

To be honest, people were pretty restrained in this thread, considering what a flamefest it coulda been. Lots of reasonable attempts to engage with the actual review, etc. But yeah, it's funny how anyone who had a problem with the "jailbait" characterisation was dismissed as being somehow sheltered or oversensitive. Ah, old ILM...

what ever happened to amy phillips??

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/staff