Do Certain Genres of Music Inspire Better Writing?

Reading a recent thread about IDM, I realized it's difficult to find writing about this sort of music that I like (I like a lot of IDM music, though).

Are certain genres or scenes more likely to inspire good music writing than others? What kind of music is most difficult to write about?

(heh)

actually i am glad we came back to this bcz i wanted to expand on the point i was making (very clumsily) that arf arf didn't like on the "if you have to ask you'll never know thread"

however not now

adohno!! the philosophy of the modern music!! adohno!!

oh ewing stop being a philistine, it ill becomes you.

this is always the line of defence used by ppl without musical knowledge or training.

what's the use of writing about music?

what's the use of music?

look just go and read "towards jazz" by hodeir and "a jazz retrospect" by harrison. both make all other subsequent music criticism look like the juvenilia that it is (church of me included).

people who write abt more 'musical' things tend to forget all about other factors that come in when the music is created. it's never just abt the music, i think.

(i so don't have time for this argument!! back to roger fry i'm afraid foax)

for a splendid rebuttal of "it's about more than just the music" i refer you to cardew's "towards an ethic of improvisation."

The qn wasn't a 'line of defense' at all - ArfArf's comment seemed to take it for granted that writing concerning form was better than writing not concerning it; your comment parroted that with the usual Carlin dash of self-loathing (and bizarrely combined it with the old lyrics argument - what is Eng Lit analysis of lyrics if not a formal exercise, eh?). It seems to me that we do need to ask in what ways pop criticism would be better if it concerned itself more with form, rather than assuming it would be. Maybe it would be - if nobody's doing it I can't really tell! (I agree that more people should do it).

"What's the use of writing about music? What's the use of music?" - these are also good questions.

max h's position on form (in writing) was also "lady if you have to ask you'll never know!!"

is any of cardew's writing available on the net: i haven't read any of it for a squillion yrs

benjamin and form HAHA the arcades project (said the man who has been writing a vast huge book for 10 years and sees it now as a sequence of piles — "convolutes" — littering his faux-chaotic flat)

most eng lit grads can't concern themselves adequately with musical form because the analytical tools to which they have become accustomed are not much use for discussing music apart from the lyrical content - thus decades of laborious/laboured treatises about/deconstructions of dylan's lyrics, rather than how dylan "sings" them; because

(a) they don't have sufficient musical knowledge to carry it off;

(b) they have the sneaking suspicion that pop doesn't REQUIRE musicological expertise, because hey it's minimal, it's kids' stuff and maybe in five years' time i'll graduate to writing about cinema.

the church of me needs to go back to being more "arcades"-like; more episodic, more pointillistic, more quotes. like nath's taste in music, i am (de)evolving. 3000 word articles need to be put to the back. less box sets, more contortions.

(clue to my deep position: we need music socially bcz we need a discourse that will forever remain "non-linguistic" even as it eternally and relentessly invites interpretation: that remains publicly fluid, bcz language is a reification and congeals much too quickly into the opposite of what we want from it, and can only be kept runny and vital in its encounters with music => musicians are our wise patsies, our shambling, a-linguistic shaman, in this endeavour.... even though some of them, like for example arf arf, happen also to be highly intelligent and articulate)

"it's never just abt the music, i think"

I wasn't making a philosophical point, though, but a critical one. You choose what your interested in. Writing about form is rarer, more difficult but gets closer to the core of what matters and IMO is generally done to a much higher standard. Writing about meaning is easy, the sheer quantity of it is terrifying and almost all of it is utter wank. Its ostensible subject matter may be the music (which I'm interested in) but the real subject matter is almost always the writer (which I'm not).

it occurs to me that max h is in fact the tim westwood of straight music; rd cook on his intro to "essential jazz recs" - "i regret to say that harrison's comments on rock are ill-informed."

i just did a piece on escalator for stylus - a fine rebuttal of the "unreadability" of specifically non-specific lingual discourse - and am rather depressed that all i do in it is talk about the bloody form of the record. i will do a scratch pervertz remix for c.o.m. - maybe post it for xmas.

"Do Certain Genres of Music Inspire Bed Wetting?"

must.get.sleep.

hurrah!

actually mark if you mean the thread you just linked to, that was probably me, not gygax. i didn't realize this was what you were getting at with that thread, and i think i derailed it with very basic thoughts about the "writer -> fan" relationship instead. sorry.

that's, like, the best analogy ever!

Tangent: there is a bit of writing about classical music that takes sociological concerns into account, a la pop music writing. An author I could mention off the top of my head that does this is Lydia Goehr (I think that's spelled right).

(jones yr actual mr contribution was i spose a bit of a side-issue but not fatal: gygax! bronx-cheered it on another thread i seem to recall... which is fine obv, tho as all know the korrekt formula in this regard is "is hornbus keeping it real?")

I can't read about classical or jazz without being bored to tears. Who wants to hear the music itself written about? God gave ya'll ears for a reason.

well, he's OK. he does tend to use the term 'fire music' which can get annoying. he wrote some informative notes for the reissue of 'black woman'.

It feels like there is load of (semi)popular music that hasn't been written v. interestingly abt, yet - great chunks of pre-rock pop ('Dino' by Nick Tosches being just abt the only exception), tons of stuff that gets filed in the 'world music' section of yr local megastore, modern country, etc.

hee hee i can't wait til tom put's up my azzzerrad review...