ROCKCRITICS.COM IS THE BEST

scott = the quiet torontonian who gets it done hurrah

There's actually a few people I'd still like to see interviewed - I don't think the UK writers get enough mention on the site. Nik Cohn, Nick Kent, Ian Penman, Paul Morley...has Simon Reynolds been interviewed yet? Or hey, just start picking random ILXers: I'm sure they'd be as interesting as anyone.

Music is not lyrics. To me, lyrics are almost irrelevant. The only time lyrics will affect me one way or the other is if they outwardly annoy me, like with the Wiseblood record. I don't look for meaning; I don't think most people who listen to music do.

YES YES YES! I just had this discussion w/2 of my uncles. I hate the fact that so much attention is given to a lead singer and his lyrics. It's like me going to a beat-poetry reading and then going on and on about the bongo player. I hate the fact that music w/vocals is the default version and things get labeled as 'instrumentals'... and bands who don't use vocals are somehow missing a human element. I've been starteing to appreciate singers, but only as another instrument player in the band. Music does not need poetry to be complete!
/threadjacking rant

An ILx roundtable with some of the ILx bigwigs (Raggett, etc.) might be interesting, esp. since it got such a big shoutout in the Best Music Writing review.

I'd love to see an interview with Alex Ross, Julian Cope (interview him as a rockwriter, not whatevah). It might be interesting to see some former-critics, present-day rockers muse on their critexistence (Neil Tennant, Ira Kaplan, the usual suspects). Has there been a 'submit you're questions to Meltzer' q&a a la Marcus & Christgau?

6 year bump! Love this site. Hasn't been updated in awhile, though. I'm wondering if Scott has moved on to other things. I really liked the discussion about the best Beatles books, given a year or so ago. Anyone still check this site out?

or 7, me math is bad.

One of the funnest things I've ever been involved with, srsly. And Scott is a gent of the first order.

I'm grateful to them because they brought me here.

Scott's been doing some amazing work this year in terms of multimedia rock crit (for lack of a better term) -- as Alfred knows of course! Then there's the Daft Punk "Digital Love" podcast and there's more to come...

Alfred - haven't listened to the Roxy Music discussion yet as I've yet to hear any Roxy Music yet. I love how there's 10+ hours of discussion on one topic, though.

music fanatic, you are in for a real treat on both fronts!

Scott Woods is a longtime friend of mine, so this is a little self-serving (or incestuous, or something unseemly), but I'm going to plug something he's just put online anyway:

http://writingaboutmusicislikedancingaboutarchitecture.com/

It's something he's been working on for a few years--he basically stopped talking about it somewhere along the way, and I assumed he'd abandoned the idea. I think it's more or less taking the place of an active rockcritics.com site, a lot of which he plans to archive--the interviews and some (a lot?) of what was on there will still be accessible. Anyway, he's looking for ongoing input into the new site.

Interesting:

Writing About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture is an assemblage of quotes by and about rock critics on a myriad of topics, including the practise, the players, and the ideas of rock criticism itself. The site is the offspring of rockcritics.com, the source of many — though hardly all, or even most — of its quotes. Material, in fact, has been culled (sans official permission, I should say upfront) from a variety of sources, including:

•Music mags, from obvious suspects like Creem and Rolling Stone to such left-field treasures as Music Sound Output and Option.
•Fanzines, though those are (at least thus far) necessarily limited to a handful of titles in my purview.
•Music books, though not as many as you might assume.
•Various blogs and websites. (Not, however, chat boards — not at the moment, anyway.)

It looks great! Thanks, clem.

Great resource, thanks, didn't know this existed.

FYI, in case Scott is reading this-- I subscribed to the RSS feed for the site and it looks like it is delivering the whole site to me in 5 or 6-post chunks. Been going on for 24 hours.

Phew, didn't know if my login still worked here... Thanks for letting me know, Mark. Though I confess I'm somewhat confused (I've never really understood or paid much attention to RSS feeds, I only have a general idea of how they work). I will look at my settings, but is there anything you can suggest? One thing that may be causing issues is that, after making this thing 'public,' I realized I should be putting hyper-links into every post, so I've been doing a LOT of re-posting of stuff, so I can fix up the format, add links, etc. I wonder if you're getting every one of those re-posts through your feed? I see myself continuing this activity for at least a week or so, though, before I'm up to speed and can simply just add new material. (Sorry if it's a big hassle and is cluttering up your feed.)

Oh yeah, maybe the re-posting is doing it, no big deal honestly, I'm sure once they are in place that'll be it, look forward to exploring the site.

Saw I got linked there myself -- thanks sir!

Just a short note that Scott's been posting regularly again for the last few weeks. There's an excellent conversation with Scott, Steven Ward, and Kevin Avery about Avery's new biography of Paul Nelson (looking forward to this book so much), also an interview with Ellen Willis's daughter about her new collection of her mother's writing. Rock critics: the public's love affair with them just gets deeper and deeper with each passing year.

Looking forward to the Paul Nelson book, though I couldn't find that conversation on the website. Used to go in that video store all the time all the time and never knew about him working there until after the fact.

You've got to scroll back a couple of screens, James:

http://rockcritics.com/2011/07/11/rockcritics-podcast-paul-nelson/

("Used to go in that video store all the time all the time"--to get the papers, get the papers?)

Never rented Goodfellas from them.

Scott has just started to re-post Top 5 Lists that used to run on the site...mid-late '90s? There are probably some ILM people who participated.

http://rockcritics.com/2019/04/03/from-the-archives-five-poppiest-art-rock-songs/
http://rockcritics.com/2019/04/06/from-the-archives-five-rock-critic-cliches-that-most-make-your-skin-crawl/