Some book called "Sonic Cool"

Hopefully the addition of Charles Rogers will speed his progress, but then again it usually takes rookie WRs at least a season to adjust from the college game to the pro game.

Whereas in the days before MTV, Rock had merely been a livable commodity, still somewhat outside the fray of the mainstream 'entertainment' industry, by the '80s, it was big business

Some of the new purveyors of this new form of women's liberation were fiercely aggressive, almost to the point of wanting to tame - or maim - their male counterparts (whom they saw as repressors). Divas like Sheena Easton, Annie Lennox, and Janet Jackson readily emasculated their would-be suitors in massive video campaigns broadcast all over MTV. Madonna was, of course, the most successful practitioner of this kind of female self-empowerment, but it wasn't a Gloria Steinem type of liberation urging women to be less catty and to stop using their sexuality to get what they want and to adapt [sic] more manly attributes.

Later on he says that women in the 80s regarded "liberal" men with derision and, "cut their balls off".

Consumerism as a way of life was also reflected by the first generation of MTV idols : Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson among them. These artists corresponded with the Reagan doctrine, because they were all basically working class [sic] and from mid-America but upwardly mobile and unashamed to reveal their greater ambitions.

Dude, that is not how it was.

Oy, I could go on and on. But I've only started. He seems to know a lot about punk and indie bands, though.

And his pazz and jop ballot last year was such horseshit (he voted for ten OLD albums, get it? because, like music's real *bad* now, and stuff?? and didn't even list their record labels!) that bob xgau and i decided not to even enter it. The book isn't just bad; it's inept. One the most shittily written and cliche's-up-the-ass rock books ever. Which would be no big deal, except he apparently thinks he's upsetting apple carts. Or something.

V

what i meant was: did you think that carducci and joe harrington guy have a lot in common in terms of their views and so on? (I have been trying to get hold of'rock and pop narcotic' for a long time now)

*shudder*

There was also the dyke thing to consider. The radical feminist wing of American liberalism, whose profile had increased sharply in the '80s even as Reagan had them on the run, had long embraced what was essentially an anti-male stance. As the '80s became the '90s, the bastions of the politically correct had imposed a doctrinaire pall of the female gay movement.

On Sleater-Kinney : Anyone who remembers the '90s and knows anything about the way the media work realizes that, around '96 and '97, nothing but a feminist group made up of dumpy-looking broads with glasses could have pulled such honors.

But this was another changing facet of the culture : because of the whole "babies makin' babies" syndrome that was happening in the ghetto, the span between generations was shrinking. The whole notion of 'granny' as a little old white-haired lady holding a pan of freshly baked cookies was becoming a thing of the past. Now granny was a former coke whore who chain-smoked and spat venom.

It wouldn't bother me so much if this book weren't being sold to libraries as some sort of authoritative history. Damn near every page has factual errors and ridiculous characterizations of social movements.

My uninformed guess is that Harrington almost definitely copped a lot of his shtick from Carducci's book (the third part of which -- the "rock hagiography" history part, where Carducci traces the history of of his small-band aesthetic) is actually pretty wonderful, in its way, by the way; MUCH more fun than Azerrad's *Our Band Could Be Your Life*, for instance. And kinda smart. But the parts of Carducci's book where he doesn't talk aboute music per se are ridiculous, not to mention completely hypocritical to the theme of the damn thing (i.e., he spends pages and pages whining about how critics, etc., write about everything but music, but mainly, HE writes about everything but music, too! When he finally DOES get to the music, though, he's not bad. Which is not to say I agree with his definition of "rock"; far from it. But there's a consistency to his aesthetic, and he explains it well, and knows the music, and actually got me interested in lots of bands I knew nothing about. Harrington's another story, by far.)

For a guy who's so keen on the WILD and REBELLIOUS and ANARCHIC nature he could do better than structuring most of book in a kind of "...another band of this ilk was...another band of this ilk was...another band of this ilk was...." way, which is so overregimented and tedious to read. He's not writing a history, he's crossing off items on a checklist. And he even starts his chapter on punk with bullet points, about how it was a reaction to x, y andz, like it was a PowerPoint presentation! And he literally writes more, way more about the kinky sex element disco than he writes about the Who (or disco qua disco, for that matter)!

Actually, some or even all of this could be sheer genius -- but not in a book of the kind Harrington wants to write.

Incidentally, I am proud to the point of smugness of my response to Harrington's only known post to ILx.

Oh, and his views about black people amount to sentimental tenth-generation noble-savage vomit. And he praises hiphop only to completely ignore (save for some stray references to Tupac and Biggie) everything else that came after the Geto Boys.

308- :Disco was by definition the blandest of musical forms, because it represented the systematic mechanization of rhythm itself. Despite current attempts to make Disco ‘cool’, there’s no denying that Disco was completely sterile and devoid of emotion. The preponderance of Techno in the 90s, however, forced a reevaluation of some of the more technocratic aspects of Disco.

Since Rock began, rhythm has always been its basic excitability agent. . . What Disco did was turn the rhythm into the mere messenger – the producer and, ultimately, the DJ and the way he programmed the music became the whole show. . .

. . . But the coke made people twitchy. They didn’t want that much out of music. Disco was perfect: it was all a mechanical pulse, like breathing (which under excessive coke wasn’t always that easy). There was no experience behind it, no tradition. You didn’t – nor were you expected to – ‘get’ anything out of it. It was just there. Considering the times, this was more or less apropos. . .

. . . This left the field wide open, so to speak, for the DJs, who became mainstays at the gay clubs in the Village as well as out on Fire Island. DJs weren’t the only ones who were pivotal in the emergent disco culture, though: there were also the producers, particularly those in Europe, who looped endless rhythm tracks together until the ‘song’ was not a song at all, but merely a groove. Producers had always made mere mouthpieces out of artists and turned them into ‘product’ – that’s why they were called ‘producers’. But this was different than the manufactured singing groups of the 60s (i.e. the Monkees), who at least still had personality. Most disco artists were just faceless voids. . .

. . . There was a whole new wave of Euro-producers churning out rote-a-tote rhythm tracks, often with some kind of autoerotic embellishment, such as Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby’ (1975), one of the first international Disco hits. International because, even though Summer was a Black diva from the town of Boston, it was German producer Giorgio Moroder who laid the mark of distinction on that particular ditty. Once again, the artist became merely another tool in the ultimate product. The twenty-minute track became famous for its length as well as Summer’s increasingly heightening yowls. .

. . . Synthesizers were important, not only because they could readily produce the endlessly chugging mechanical repetition of Disco, but also because they could take the place of actual musicians. You didn’t need a band, or even ‘musicians’, to produce Disco, but you did need a rhythm track. The endless thumpa-thumpa of the programmed synth-drum took care of that.

Disco producers like Moroder came to define the role of the synthesizer in modern Pop much more than their Prog-Rock counterparts . . . In pure Rock terms, synthesizers never really did become an innovative part of the musical landscape, but instead a tool of formalization, making contemporary Muzak indistinguishable from TV commercials.

The homogenous mixture that came to be identified as Disco, as well as MOR, was the final nail in the coffin for the traditional Rock form, which had always been rough-hewn and raw. From then on, anyone who left the rough edges in was ‘Punk’ because, once the industry proved how easy it was to mass-produce such gloss, real bands were expected to shine up their rough spots or hit the boot trail. It only figured. . .

No one understood this more than Neil Bogart. In the 60s, he’d been the key puncher behind the Disco of its day, ‘bubblegum Rock.’ Like Disco, bubblegum was primarily created by studio musicians, and its ‘artists’ were more or less interchangeable. Founding Casablanca in his wife in 1973, . .

In their heyday, Casablanca launched two of the ultimate manufactured Disco acts: Donna Summer and the Village People. Summer was important because she was the first artist to be specifically pegged as Disco and to supposedly do ‘creative’ things within the format. . . [makes a bunch of condescending, skeptical comments re critical acclaim] Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, from late ’77, with Moroder’s whirl-o-matic production, was a likely prototype for Blondie’s heavily acclaimed Rock/Disco fusion ‘Heart of Glass’ a year later. But at that time, the two camps couldn’t have been farther apart.”

253-4: “Black music went back to being a producer’s art, much to the detriment of the music. Disco fit efficaciously into the equation. But Disco didn’t only represent the subversion of Black music, but all music, and, as a method, Disco would unfortunately set the pace in the industry from here on out. Eventually, record companies would figure out they didn’t even need musicians per se. . . Disco changed everything – for the worse. But Black music went Disco at the same time Country went Kenny Rogers. It was purely a symptom of commerce.”

The rhythmic fall of capitalized words alone is like poetry.

But Black music went Disco at the same time Country went Kenny Rogers.

TWO CHUCKS THAT SUCK

Thanks for skewering the Jack White of rock critics, Chuck Klosterman, in your "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" issue (3/31). The whole idea of celebrity rock critics is loathsome—guys like Bangs stumbled into it, and by the time Tosches had attained such status, he wasn't even writing about "rock" anymore.

As this year's version of Gina Arnold, Klosterman is basically harmless. Next year you should go all the way and excoriate the reprehensible Chuck Eddy, who as the music editor of the Village Voice is actually in a position of some power as far as influencing the anti-esthetic of younger critics like Klosterman. Here is a man so desperate to flaunt a "garbage" esthetic (which he passes off as populism), that he thinks Dolly Parton is better than the MC5, Joy Division and the Misfits combined, who rates an LP by Kix, a forgettable 80s hair-metal band, as the fourth-greatest of all time etc. In other words, it's a joke.

A couple years ago, when it came time to hand in my annual Village Voice "Piss and Slop" poll ballot—a pointless exercise that every year turns out to be a rally for the major labels—I took the 10 albums that I happened to be listening to and listed them (even though it consisted of stuff as far afield as Exile on Main Street and My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything). The point was, it wouldn't have mattered what I nominated, because the whole contest is meaningless.

"Mmmmnn," Klosterman fumed to his rock critic friends: "He voted for all old albums as if, you know, there was no good new music." A year later, he was still fuming about it (and I paraphrase): "Mmmmmnnn! Christgau and I decided not to run it!"

Can you imagine two grown men actually consulting on something like this? As if their poll was, umm, important? As if my facetious reply would tarnish the integrity of the institution? Where's the anti-esthetic now?

Umm, Chuck, sorry, hate to break this to you: There is no good new music.

Joe S. Harrington, Portland, ME

I don't believe Carducci is a hypocrite here. One of the main points of the first section of The Rock & Pop Narcotic is about the confusion of rock and pop over the last several decades and the role many rock critics had in spreading the confusion through poor and uneducated writing. That is the reason why he isn't writing about the actual music for large chunks of the first section.

I don't agree with all that Carducci wrote but it do believe it is an important read for people who want to write about heavy music.

As opposed to Carducci's excellent informed writing, you mean? His rock/pop dichotomy is full of baloney. He wants us to judge music by how it sounds, yet he judges it by how it's MADE -- He doesn't get that you don't need a "band" to "rock." And he doesn't want critics to judge music by its effect on society, yet he titles his book "Rock and the Pop NARCOTIC"; the mere use of that word "narcotic" means that's HE'S judging pop music by its effects. So yeah: Hypocrite, for sure. (Though again, I do agree that the last third of the book can be helpful for people who want to learn about hard guitar-band music.)

Go Lions.

Do rock critics really make yummy-sounds when talking trash about other critics?

>>Chuck, aren't you the guy who discounted Joe S. Harrington's P&J ballot because none of the records were "new"?<<
Nah, the stupid fuck didn't list any record labels for all those 25 year old albums, and I didn't want to waste my time looking them up, basically. If you're gonna be a moron, at least DO YOUR WORK, you know?

Huh. I thought they'd go "yuuuuck" like everyone else.

His ability to understand music's long history - something honed no doubt from being a critic when a young child of ten - really should startle a reader able to dig into what he writes. He justifies his choice so well they seem absolutely natural.

"Sonic Cool", I must confess, does not go down as nearly so startling but it does nothing to make me lose any respect for Harrington's intelligence and skill.

Vg

so i picked up this at a used bookstore just for something to read while in portland last month, without remembering this thread. i wonder if he sold it back himself.

and yeah, it's awful.