Re the Interview with Ben Ratliff at rockcritics.com

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I don't know Ben Ratliff's writing, but I really like this comment:

"As an adolescent, reading Rolling Stone and the Voice's music section, I thought that the whole point of being a music critic was that you could live in a cultural cocoon and foist your hipness on the world. It seemed like subsidized record-fetishizing. And I think that for some people, it is precisely that.

But the real challenge of the job--and particularly in writing for a daily--is to keep in motion, always putting more distance between you and what you thought was cool when you were in your early 20s. (You can always admire the old favourites again, but carefully: you must meet them on new ground, as a more developed person.) You have to keep going against assumptions, especially your own. Hipness is a disease, it really is. It freezes thought."

I couldn't agree with this more. Here is the full interview.

― Mark (MarkR), Friday, 14 February 2003 18:17 (twenty-two years ago)

He sounds very sensible. I too read Nik Cohn very early--the edition I read was titled "Rock from the Beginning"--and that book has influenced my take on pop music ever since. Ratliff is right to say that the book, thought not perfectly written (and rife with factual errors) is much better written than many another book that is better written. Nik Cohn looked for the things I consider pop-music essentials--speed, disdain, sex, hysteria--and consequently was somewhat dismissive of Dylan, the Beatles, and many others. In this I think he's basically right--Bob Dylan is a towering figure but he did kill off the kind of pop that Nik Cohn loved (and Cohn says that's not Dylan's fault); and the Beatles, who started out as "Coke drinkers from way back" in Cohn's great phrase, then became darlings of the pseudo-intelligentsia with their "Sgt. Pepper's" music.

It sounds as though we're coming from the same place, which is of course always gratiftying. We've read the same stuff. And he's absolutely right about hipness being a disease.

― chicxulub (chicxulub), Friday, 14 February 2003 19:27 (twenty-two years ago)

"Gratifying" not "gratiftying."

The only thing I would add is that the discipline of "moving on" as Ratliff says, finding something to write about all the time, makes for a tough job...and it inevitably affects your take on what's cool and what's not, what you think matters and what you think does not.

Hard to stay fresh. Always the danger you'll over-value or undervalue something. As he did, if I recall right, with Beck's "Midnite Vultures." But maybe that's me being, you know, hip.

Good, too, to see someone mention "Motorbooty," which used to be such a great magazine.

― chicxulub (chicxulub), Friday, 14 February 2003 19:32 (twenty-two years ago)

thirteen years pass...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/arts/music/popcast-a-send-off-for-ben-ratliff.html

― j., Friday, 5 August 2016 18:22 (nine years ago)

I'm leaving the NYT to write & teach, after 20 years from his tweet

He wrote about Brazilian music that no one else at a major media outlet in the US was covering. I will miss that.

― curmudgeon, Friday, 5 August 2016 18:46 (nine years ago)

always enjoyed his stuff -- that Jazz Ear book of his is a great read.

― tylerw, Friday, 5 August 2016 18:51 (nine years ago)

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