NY Times on DFA and post-punk

*ducks*

But I just bought my dancing shoes!

Seriously though, for the typical NY Times reader, of course the 12" single is "odd."

More from the "NY Publication Kills a Scene" File: I heard a few weeks ago that the New Yorker is working on a piece on Lightning Bolt.

I'm not specially a Neil Strauss fan, but I do think it's good that someone can write a long article about people as obscure as DFA for the Times. Personally, I wouldn't have run it (it was boring), and I should pretty much be the target audience for a piece like that in the Times.

Anyway, they have Kelefah Senna and he is excellent. More Kelefah please.

I fell on some ice and later I was thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. I know not what you speak of.

SNAP!

PEDANT ALERT! OAKLAND*

*this is subject to debate but I'd have to namedrop so I'll just settle with just saying "OAKLAND".

I thought I'd heard they recently moved to NY.

I'm glad someone posted these articles. I thought Neil Strauss did his usual yeoman-like job. About once every 6 months, the NY Times will report on some "music of interest." I'm sure my mom will cut this out for me like she usually does. Heh.

Well sure there are two different categories. And Strauss' sentence isn't claiming that a 12" single is some rarity. He's just saying that it's "odd" for a label to gain popularity through that format these days.

When I first saw that the Rapture had released a 12" single I was surprised. Am I a frozen caveman lawyer?

you may very well know something that I don't; however, they played here last month to kick off/warm up their European tour...

so the question is:
why would they fly from New York to SF for a tour kick-off/warm-up show then fly to Germany? Frequent flier miles?

Hanging out with Sonic Youth does not make you "from New York."

I noticed that too when I visited their homepage, so I very well could be wrong... but somewhere in the addled recesses of my mind (right next to my 12" single collection) I _seem_ to recall _someone_ telling me they had or were moving to NYC.

And actually, I'm not sure if my Mom knows what a 12" single is. Maybe she could settle the argument for us?

my mom definitely doesn't know.

It's so bizarre that the Times critic least beholden to pragmatic user-friendliness is Herbert Muschamp, whose flights of fancy and theory-fetish re architecture deal with multi-million-dollar uber-functional public projects, while the totally ephemeral realm of music gets treated like hard news data.

Kalefa Sanneh's the lone exception music-wise: Pretty much every time he writes he shows that exposition and ideas don't need to be mutually exclusive, even in a short space.

I deserve it! I realized I had set someone up perfectly two seconds after that last post.

I'll let you know what she sez...

Nothing better than reading "Ms. Love," "Mr. Rotten," "Mr. Jagger," etc. etc.

shit, i'm so bummed out about culture in general these days that seeing the raincoats getting namechecked in mainstream publications again inspires a feeling of relief in me.

also 'danger! high voltage!' is pretty much my single of the year.

i don't really like kelefah sanneh's pop criticism so much. that interpol review where he compared them to the strokes the whole time was INFURIATING, not to mention lazy to the nth degree, and i think his writing and analyses err on the wrong side of the bland spectrum.

(And Maura. And Maura, you're wrong! ;)

Just wait till you see the video!

http://electric6.com/multimedia/index.shtml

(be warned, it's a huge file)

For those of you who like sanneh so much, what are some of your favorite pieces by him? i've read several, but none of them really click with me. what's the fuss about? I have access to everything he's ever written for the Times (yay lexisnexis access) so tell me what to read that impresses you guys so much.

And i don't really know how a paper as old and grey and dowdy as the Times can really win when it comes to covering music. if they cover stuff that's "hip" they are uncool poseurs/rockists. if they cover stuff that's "pop" then people say they're wannabe popists/condescending/tokenist. if they cover the stuff they're expected to cover for their older demographic, like bob dylan or the rolling stones, then people say they're boring, bland, and get-with-the-times-granddad.

One thing i think they really need is a dedicated "music" section, instead of this "arts" crap.

I think it's called the Village Voice. Thank you, thank you, here all week.

But seriously folks, it's funny how they _do_ occasionally have a music section but it's devoted only to classical and jazz. How much more old & grey could they POSSIBLY get?? God love em. Only newspaper I ever read either.

i mean, there are so many worse, nightmarish even, scenarios out there -- try the washington post's business reporter turned music critic, david segal, or dan 'headphones' aquilante of the ny post. i may not care much for sanneh, but i don't really get the derision that's being thrown around here either.

I guess I wasn't clear. Sure they cover pop and rock, but put them under the Pop and Rock superhead. Music, however, is for classical and jazz. Just that they make such a ghetto-ized distinction is hilarious. Maybe they do this less or I'm not paying attention or something, but I'm pretty sure I've noticed it. Or something. I'm tired.

Just noticed that Simon Reynolds wrote about British rap earlier in the week ("The British Can't Rap, Haven't You Heard?"). Did anyone post/see this?

http://nytimes.com/2002/10/20/arts/music/20REYN.html

Plus I have to give it up to anyone who not only voted for Superlongevity in last year's P&J poll but placed it second as well.

Her reaction was, 'it sounds like something that you were doing,' meaning my old record label from several years ago (I did in fact put out a couple 12" singles). SO, having a priori knowledge, she had some indication what it was. Talking to her more, however, she started talking about old jazz records, 78s, and her 45s. The more I pried, the less it turned out she actually knew about 12" singles, because after all they came into being in the '80s (well after she had stopped buying records). I think the key part about them is that they are a format geared toward DJs, which she had no awareness of and is what makes them a supposedly "odd format."

So, once I told her why I asking, she said, "Well yeah, the only people who listen to records are old farts like me with my record collection and people your age."

Ergo, the average "older" NY Times reader would probably have no idea what a 12" single is, but a "younger" one probably would.

Does this help? Probably not. But I feel that the cause of scientific inquiry has been served!

I read Reynolds' article and it interested me enough to listen to that Streets album. I thought the record was quite bad, though. I'll probably give it another listen just to see, but the article definitely made it sound more interesting than it is.

ok, so maybe it won't be unusual for long...

Oh, you mean like the Hall n' Oates 12" single to "Say it Isn't So" with extra remixes from the 1980s that I own?

I can just see it now... a series of 12" remix singles released by Tortoise... maybe one will have a remix by a house DJ...

What is ordinary and normal is that stuff gets released on compact discs that millions of people buy: there is nothing insane about noting that 12-inch singles are not, in fact, a medium that the average American will ever in his or her life deal with.

But could we maybe stop talking about whether or not it's appropriate to call the 12-inch single an "odd" format? It's absolutely pointless and has nothing to do with the thrust of the article.