Please help me to distinguish between Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy.

Eddy -- Lyrics, pop-rock, detroit, hyper-referential, light on anecdotes.
Kogan -- Tonality of voice, pop-pop/dance-pop, internationalist, philosophical, heavier on anecdotes.

Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson!

Never mind.

Kogan = Psylocybin, Eddy = LSD

Frank Kogan is a wafer-thin plastic sheet that can be used to deter muggers and extends at the touch of a button

Chuck Eddy is a cufflink that's completely reversible and plays the theme from Steptoe and Son

frank kogan is the editor of why music sucks
frank kogan is this obscure
frank kogan is right

chuck eddy is the music editor of the village voice
chuck eddy is heavy metal's bastard child
chuck eddy is me
chuck eddy is best known for his controversial book stairway to hell
chuck eddy is the only print critic i have much time for
chuck eddy is notoriously arbitrary
chuck eddy is a great popular music critic
chuck eddy is
chuck eddy is one of the most incompetent
chuck eddy is a philadelphia
chuck eddy is also the author of the accidental evolution of rock’n’roll
chuck eddy is one of my best friends
chuck eddy is right and album
chuck eddy is a rock critic and one of my favorite writers
chuck eddy is god sundar subramanian
chuck eddy is always too reluctant to believe that consciousness comes naturally to human beings
chuck eddy is definitely the
chuck eddy is one of the few that have taken the bangs style and added his own unique spin

Sorry, Frank, I think you need more Interweb exposure.

So when Chuck cranks the stereo, with his windows down and his system up, it's because he really wants you to hear that record, and the next record, and the one after that. When in the "people-who-write-about-music-are-just-bitter-that-they-themselves-can't-play-it" thread he suggested that people who write about music might instead be frustrated disc jockeys, he was making a very important point for himself. But for me it would be no point at all, in that I don't particularly distinguish between playing a record and playing a guitar, or between blasting a record out the window and shouting out the window, between using a sound system and using a pen. For Chuck, the music's the thing, while for me it's a vehicle. Not to say that Chuck and I haven't improved by taking on whole gobs of the other one's tendencies - if it wasn't for Chuck forcing me to confront so much music, I wouldn't ride songs nearly as well. And it doesn't follow that Chuck's writing is less "personal" than mine - he's in his words as much as any writer I can think of, and I'm more likely than he to play with my persona rather than merely inhabit it (persona is another instrument, like records). So it also doesn't follow that, when I'm speaking by way of the music, I'm speaking about me, or that the fact that it is I who's speaking is of particular significance. But I could say the same of actual speech, too. If a car is going the wrong way on a one-way street, and I alert the driver by yelling "one way!" out my window, I'm not telling him much about myself, but I am making a point.

(And here's a side issue where I don't see any difference between Chuck and me but that maybe pertains to my conversation with Martin over on the postmodernism vs. futurism thread : Given that for me there's no fundamental difference between playing a record or playing a guitar - either way it's my "voice" that's coming through the speakers - I'd reject the argument that hip-hop turned the DJ into a musician [since he already was one in the first place] or that turntablism and sampling etc. mark a break with the past. And the use of the word "postmodernism" here just doesn't make any sense, gets everything backwards: Yeah, sure, if Jackson Pollock had started playing records rather than throwing paint around, that might have marked a break with his past [or might not have], but I wouldn't call Bambaataa and Flash and those guys postmodern for doing something that might have been a break with Jackson Pollock's past, had Jackson Pollock done it.)

Anyway, the most important term in the subtitle to Chuck's Stairway to Hell: the 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe isn't "heavy metal" but "500": and sure, Chuck is delighted to fuck up and discombobulate your notion of heavy metal and to make you think, but still, that's not the point. 500 albums is the point. And so his strategy as to what to include in the book isn't based on any particular argument about what heavy metal is, but rather on every argument about what heavy metal is. A particular argument will include some music and exclude other music, but what Chuck does is to take all the arguments and include any record that any argument would include, while ignoring the fact that each argument excludes a lot of what the other arguments include. So sure, if Teena Marie records a side of hard funk and metal guitar, she's in the book. Whereas when I'd brought Teena into the discussion, back in Why Music Sucks, I'd said "'Billie Jean' rocks as hard as any '80s 'rock'; 'Lips to Find You' rocks harder," and this doesn't mean "include Michael and Teena within the genre 'rock'" but rather, "if you want rock, you gotta go to non-rock to hear it." So I wasn't including Michael and Teena in rock, but excluding rock from rock, and saying that if rock were to reconstitute itself, this would happen outside of rock. A year later I claimed that the girl-twirl disco of Company B and Sa-Fire and Vivien Vee and Exposé was the only possible future of punk. (Yes I did; you can look it up. I'm also the guy who told Selznick that he'd lose money on Gone With The Wind.) So one of my goals was to fuck up your idea of rock - "think of rock as an idea without an embodiment" - get you thinking about genre, call into question the rules of the game. I'm the one who spins out theories about Superwords. And Chuck will use the theories, but always to bring you back to the music (which is good for me, since he often brings me to the music that challenges the theories).

Not to overdraw the distinction. The abundance/free lunch stuff in my Disco Tex essay was a continuation of my thoughts on how to get out from under the context of our appreciation/justification ("there's a self-hate that makes us seek ulterior justification for our selves/our music in terms that are PBS"), but it was also a couple of rhetorical devices that allowed me to throw together a bunch of things I wanted to say about Slade and Dylan and "Louie Louie" and "Smooth Criminal." And conversely when Chuck brought the awesomeness-triviality conundrum to Gladys Knight & the Pips, he came up with a much better way of expressing the idea than Meltzer or I had. (And sure, I'd said that disco naturally danced itself fucked (so that you don't have to add tragedy to disco, rather, just extrapolate from what is already there), but Chuck's the one who spelled it out in detail in the Flashdance chapter of Accidental Evolution. Still, I'm the one who's going to keep asking "Why does triviality protect awesomeness? Why does it need to? What's the social process here? What are we trying to get out from under?" Chuck's the record-list geek and I'm the social-science geek.

If I had to align Chuck and me with our mentors, I'd line Chuck up with Christgau and Bangs, and me up with Meltzer and Frith. We all would probably assent to Meltzer's "pertinence can be just anywhere at all," but for Meltzer "anywhere at all" can mean bottle caps and bugs and Buber, while for Christgau... well, he's as bonkers as the rest of us, but it's Bonker Man in Record Land: Even though Bangs and Meltzer are the official wild creatures in the game preserve, They Who Have Collapsed The Distinction Between Relevant And Irrelevant, in fact the Christgau Consumer Guide is every bit as audacious and lunatic, as well as being more systematically so. E.g. (as Chuck's pointed out to me), in Guide for the '80s there are seven entries for Joe Jackson, none higher than B or lower than C-PLUS, one grade actually having been altered from B to B-MINUS. Talk about roaming around in the Who Knows Where in search of the Who Knows What!

Though actually, if you compare us to "rock journalism" as a whole, all six of us are the Crazy Explorers Of The Endless Social Space, we're all the social-science geek. But for those of us in the 55 rather than 45 bracket, or anyway for me, this leads to financial problems, since the record review simply is not my natural form. It's good that I'm forced into it sometimes; it's debilitating that I'm rarely paid to do anything else. I don't know how I'm going to stay in the business. And Chuck himself often goes too far into social-geographer mode than is good for his financial health (I can't imagine that Accidental Evolution sold nearly as much as Stairway).

eddy: i learned to like, even if I disagreed with him half of the time (his trashing of the electric eels (or maybe the styrenes) in spin made me seek them out and love them forever).

and

kogan: i already liked, even if I disagreed with him half of the time. celine dion?!?!

I'll comment on everything Frank wrote eventually, but I just wanted to say that Jack Cole shouldn't feel alone, since my trashing of the Electric Eels helped make ME love them forever, too. And a Styrenes album (mostly recorded a quarter century ago) made my 2002 top ten. Which is not to suggest that Jack Cole doesn't underrate Celine Dion.

Sterling, it's a dream of mine to one day go to the Meltzer thread and extrapolate on the issue that you're raising, since I don't think that Meltzer's template "rock collapsed/reversed the dichotomy between A and B" was a good way for him to express and work out his ideas, at least not one that he took anywhere beyond the original poetic flash. The stuff about "dichotomies" is philosophical babble that needed to be replaced by social insight. That pertinence can be anywhere at all doesn't mean that it is anywhere at all, and if pertinence seems to be more all-over-the-place in one activity than in most others, this is a social and historical fact that needs to be explained. But I don't have time right now. (A dif between me and
Chuck; I wrote this paragraph, he didn't.)

maybe you had a return there in an early draft which you forgot to take out? (eg bcz it wasn't visible in the lie of the text in the message box?)

(graham fixed the greenspun glitch re line-wraps, so i think it has to be something you did, unless yr browser is v. non-standard)

Doesn't Matt Groening mention saying this phrase as one of the signs you're going over the edge as an undergrad? Along with playing guitar in the dorm stairwell?

More on film "theory" here.

But Scott, you ought to elaborate. And so should I: In college I decided that there were two types of auteurism; the Bazin-derived, wherein you're interested in the filmmakers' vision of the world and you pay close attention to how the filmmakers convey this vision, and the Ferguson derived, where you're interested in what the filmmakers are doing in the world and how they get their effects on us (obviously, filmmakers do both, and obviously Bazin and Ferguson took both into account). So in one you're reading for the filmmakers' vision, in the other you're reading for the filmmakers' activity, and taking into account your own activity, how you yourself use the movie. Sarris is closer to Bazin, though he was less likely to see it as "artists' vision of the world" and more likely to see it as "artists creating a world." ("André de Toth's most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and outright treachery of human relationships. Ramrod, Pitfall, Springfield Rifle, The Indian Fighter, and Day of the Outlaw are unusually unpleasant explorations of failed love and trust. The assorted villainies seem more like the natural order of things than like mere contrivances of melodrama.") But Sarris was a fan of Ferguson's, as well. I place myself closer to Ferguson; my hotshit rallying cry in the advice-to-Xgau section of WMS #4 - "think of music as an activity in which people participate" - is Otis Ferguson Kogan talking to you.

I adore Bazin, and like Sarris a lot. People sometimes forget that the (now glaringly obvious) limitations of his early writings allowed him to say new and exciting things and say them in such a way that people payed attention.

http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/files/images/cameraphone/20040531/jesus_wept.jpg

http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/2006/04/former_philly_g.html

1) eddy's not dead
2) you have an easy life if a superannuated film critic dying is the biggest event in five years
3) kael sux

dude, black metal man - that's the future of rock!

god im so sick of hearing that every time i walk into a bar

so, chuck eddy and frank kogan walk into a bar.....

Ha! I have always had this problem.

you should start going to different bars

kogan = into little girl pop stars. creepy.
eddy = stubborn.

talks about his middle school and/or how current-day middle-schoolers might respond to something = Kogan

"this is good, it reminds me of Dana Dane, Die Toten Hosen, and Ugly Kid Joe" = Eddy

"ambient is the new hardcore" = overheard at bar recently

Ha.

That Kogan stuff about Otis Ferguson is kind of interesting. I haven't heard OF's name since the updaters purged his quotes from Halliwell's Film Guide.

why are you guys so mean to kogan, he seems like a nice guy.

and he's a great writer!

easy jokes, bruv?

i think they are both great writers that write about a lot of music that i don't really like

Frank Kogan is older than me. Chuck Eddy is younger than me.

Kogan, Morley lead blowout UGA booksale!
In an exciting and innovative sales strategy, the University Of Georgia Press is conducting a CREATIVE NONFICTION SALE, to create room in the warehouse, no doubt. Titles include:

--Frank Kogan, Real Punks Don't Wear Black, sale price $6.24
--Paul Morley, Words And Music: A History Of Pop In The Shape Of A City, sale price $6.24

Sale ends 12 noon EST (I think they mean EDT, actually), August 1, 2008. Of course, you might want to act sooner in case supplies run out, though my book will not run out, as it does not have legs.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black will make an excellent stocking stuffer, turkey stuffer, and wedding present.

i'll probably buy this

why is it that this thread seems to work as a nigh perfect example of ilm's disintegration over the years? such a sad ending. or is it just me?

Yeah, the glory days of Googlism have long passed.

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/9/90/AmericanHansen.gif

i think you may have missed this one on the mod request thread, Dan:

Please help me to distinguish between Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy.