The thing I hate the most about The Wire

i think some artists simply succeed better at striking poses than others.

the wire i think is most interesting as a kind of barometer of shifting or better to say spreading tastes among a certain, er, milieu...sometimes what they have to say is less important than what they're saying it about.

but i have to admit that it serves as a good primer sometimes: the shirley collins article went some way i think towards extricating her from the current 93 etc fandom in which she has resided and reestablished the real context of her achievement, even if it didn't necessarily prompt many wire subscribers to go seeking out 'a shropshire lad' .

the wire used to be really "on it" circa 97-00, but over the last couple of years or so they've really contracted (especially in the review section) to an even more hermetic vision of what's "interesting" (as if they're returning to their roots as a jazz/improv/modern classical mag occasionally spiked with "out rock" whatever. the keenan-ization of things, in other words.)

mark more or less otm.

That magazine is called Bang!, innit.

is all i'm saying.

I do find their covers funny.

when they ran a review of the first UNKLE album they ended the review with some line like "this is the kind album for the type of person who thinks Sun Ra was on drugs!!!" which i didn't get at all.

their dance coverage is still good enough for me (mainly thanks to phillip and, uh, is it ken hollings?). the hip-hop coverage is inexplicably really really bad, though.

x-post haha dave tompkins and phil and hua hsu are the saving graces of the whole mag these days!!

this is not so easy, i cancelled my film comment subscription years ago because the magazine looked (and continues to look) like ass.

when they ran a review of the first UNKLE album they ended the review with some line like "this is the kind album for the type of person who thinks Sun Ra was on drugs!!!" which i didn't get at all.

this was actually from the review of the Unkle Single "the time has come" the review of the album actually ended something like "this record is only good for one thing: pulp"

yeah the last line of that unkle review always stuck with me. the whole thing was so catty!!

>the difference being, phil, is that there were rarely other places to read about these people in depth, critically.

Mm, you sort of have a point, in that hip-hop journalism is pretty fucking woeful about 99.9% of the time. (But so is hip-hop.) I guess I just don't care that much about all the beat-driven stuff being in The Wire because...well, because I don't like that stuff. (See above paragraph.)

I hate that kind of thinking, but that could be it.

well, honestly, nothing. it's just that i think he gets his full page because he's an eclectic producer. there are lots of producers who produce better deep house, better click-techno, better straight techno, etc. he happens to do all three - this is the stock complaint with jim o'rourke and i think it's valid.

also what's the difference between dj rush and brinkmann? well, dj rush has a very silly public persona, brinkmann knows people who own art galleries and his preposterous hand-scratched vinyl routine is great interview fodder. i don't mean to pretend that i'm surprised they go for brinkmann over rush.

1. Rob Young's editorials. He has a way of stating the obvious that makes the obvious seem really, really unappealing.

2. An over-reliance on e-mail interviews, to the point where the putative interviewee becomes the actual author of the article. These never-uttered utterences are easy to spot: look for semi-colons and punning (or un-speakable)parentheses, paragraph-long responses (complete with subject sentence and stinger) to four-word questions, and an over-abundance of synonyms for the word "says" in the absence of the word "says".

3. Articles filed from off-the-beaten-path tend to be written by locals who write awkwardly and over-enthusiasticly, and neither authors nor their subjects are ever seen again in the magazine (meanwhile Bailey Muslimgauze Björk Haino bla bla bla).

4. The proofreading has really gone to shit in the last year or so.

i find david keenan's contributions variable in their usefulness, but they do seem more about advertising things for musos than engaging in the music generally

simply, i think his purported interests and enthusiasms seem too wide for me to catagorically feel "oh, he really likes this music". it's easy to see him as a journalist in a mag that's review subjects seem to bend over backwards to invite him here and there, to buy him dinner, etc.. so i imagine he's stuck in the position of a young writer having gone out of his way to establish contacts and as so much of this music has marginal if any profits for most involved, then as a result of the hospitality he's received, i can't see how he can bring any objectivity to any reveiws that are at all related to those so happy to invite him over.

it's as though his engagements with this music he purports to like, the hospitality he's accepted, often from people with many more years experience than he in the music business, it's all led to a taste being prescribed on him, as a young and impressionable journalist for struggling niches.

wire should edit him more vigorously. the appetite to write all the time is something we've all fallen victim to at times. to me, he's simply _too_ _young_ for the column feet he gets. the enthusiams of one fashionable paradigm have already clashed with his overlapping others, but this will just get worse as time goes on. he'll paint himself into a corner or eventually retrospectively appear only superficially committed to some genre because of the direction of the wire in another year and the need to report on what may well be inconsistent yet fashionable material (in the future).

i find the tone of the "primers" quite hopelessly patronising sometimes. these attempts to actually define a genre, pigeon-hole, this form of journalism seems to run counter to the open-ended view of art as music that the wire would like us to accept (and which i'd prefer, if the wire can still do that). the "By such'n'such" at the top, with "help from such'n'such, and such'n'such" (sometimes including m sinker) at the bottom, i think that's a career /hack journalist strategy that really defeats somehow the point of the primrs anyway. isn't it better to at least admit these "guides" have been generated by a think tank or a meeting of minds ? the way the primers look at the moment, it's as though it's someone's latest assignment to get to the bottom of some umbrella genre tag someone has thought up. how can it come across as "this is the knowledge" when it seems so lofty and presumptious ? why not just print "here are some suggestions for this sort of music that some people call [xcvbnm]" ?

journalistic devices pasted up to appear to have more real-life experience or credibility than they have is how the wire reads to me. a pity, as there aren't other mags out there that cover this music at all. i've read it on and off for ten years, and in that time, this david keenan byline has appeared too often, whilst people like m sinkers seem to have almost dissapeared. too often, because i often do feel he's telling me nothing i didn't know or hyping something and/or i don't believe him and/or it sometimes feels like they aren't really his opinions anyway but repeated "wisdom".

oh, and all those NYC cover stories after sept. 11th, including a special regurgitation of people like sonic youth and richard hell, wtf ?

haha i love the word "thinktank" - but which ones *did* my name appear at the bottom of? (i am useless at primers, i don't believe in listening to everything by someone, it distorts your understanding...)

interesting idea -- not listening to everything by someone -- i like to save up some stuff by a favourite, so that the music by favourite doesn't run out or that i'll play it too much and get sick of it

as to the "distortion of understanding", i admit that having some bigger picture in your mind can really screw up your eventual response to it -- that depends on
a) all those slightly extra-musical things that are bundled with the music too, stuff like political stance, "rockist", "idm" etc. etc., "this music is the now and the future" type claims made implicitly in so much packaging and grooming
vs.
b) straightforward visceral response to music (that might nevertheless make claims in the lyrics)

the primers could be a handy set of pointers and obv. first stabs, or they could purport to be exhaustive surveys with definitive 'canonical' tone. It's the latter use that i find useless and more importantly music-thought-shrinking, an extra layer of packaging, maybe the set of discs that make the re-issue in the appropriate year. There's nothing wrong with re-issues, even a set of re-issues bundled together in the reveiws section -- but that's where i think these opinions should remain, in the reviews section.

listening to music w/out preconception (eg not reading the liner notes or buying online w/out hearing and simply depending on some review) -- how do you find the music you like w/out relying on something like The Wire ? if i can rely on various the review section as well as the hedged-off review sections to be reviewers nursing their own pet favorites (which is what is so annoying about The Wire these days), what can i really rely on ? well, conversations here hopefully

if anything there should be MORE young people writing for them not less!

the letters column with that argument about Jim Haynes (whose reviews i find some of the more academic, tangential and mis-informative) claims about "[prolific writer David Keenan's first book]" was intriguing if seemingly a bit daffy. I don't know which side to believe, really.
The book's subject reminded me again of that "old boys club" feeling you get about the trad. music industry that The Wire i'd always hoped side-stepped. If Keenan's first book had been about all that "new music" that he has extolled ad. infinitum instead of being about such a real life "old boys club" then i'd be a lot more reassured about David Keenan.

with most wire type artists: they release so muc anyway so the probability of me getting everything is close to zero (not that I'd have the space or the time for it anyway).

I think there should be ppl of all ages writing for the wire => from 8 to 80.

i just realized that a lot of my favorite pieces of music writing like evah were published in the wire.

saw it mentioned somewhere else on a thread, from a while back though....but, any word on whether the Wire will ever get a Metal page in the soundcheck/reviews section? Will enough clamoring to them ever make it happen?

yea I know "better places to read about metal than the Wire" bla bla bla, but I really like their writers who do cover metal, I find their recommendations quite trustworthy for finding out about cool stuff, and their coverage of metal is different enough and unique to their general critical standpoint that they don't offer the same type of coverage as, say, Terrorizer or Decibel.

I mean, I really love dub and all, but is there really enough *new* dub (not just your standard repackaged, re-released, pulled from the vaults stuff) being released to warrant a full page review section? Maybe there is, and I'm just ignorant of it, and if so, could they just add a new genre review page and not necessarily sack another?

It's not really a "Dub" page, it's a "Reggae in general" page. I don't know how many Wire readers are really interested in it, to be honest. Some market research required?

B-But the name of the column is Dub!

I don't think they need a dedicated metal page. Their metal reviews generally concentrate on avant-metal and unique micro-genre stuff anyway, so they could comfortably sit with 'Avant Rock' or 'Outer Limits'. I think what would help, though, would be to open up those specialised pages a bit more, and let a variety of writers contribute so that the voices representing any particular sound don't echo back on themselves so much. True, a lot of readers trust particular reviewers, but at the same time those reviewers could easily get stuck up their own arses.

B-But the name of the column is Dub!

Think that's one of the things i hate most about the Wire actually - the section headings: Critical Beats, Avant- Rock, Outer limits......can you imagine the sort of person who would describe their listening habits in such terms?

THE THING I HATE MOST ABOUT THE WIRE

when they ran a review of the first UNKLE album they ended the review with some line like "this is the kind album for the type of person who thinks Sun Ra was on drugs!!!" which i didn't get at all.

-- vahid (vahid), Friday, December 5, 2003 12:29 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

i love this line

No, but I can imagine journos who do!

A metal section would be good in The Wire, but then metalheads would complain like buggery about what was in it etc and many Wire readers wouldn't want it in it either and it would end up pleasing noone. Despite the fact The Wire has some very good metal writers.
Phil should totally be in charge of it though if it happens.

Think that's one of the things i hate most about the Wire actually - the section headings: Critical Beats, Avant- Rock, Outer limits......can you imagine the sort of person who would describe their listening habits in such terms?

Yeah, I find this incredibly pretentious. "Avant-Rock", for goodness sake, why not just call it "Rock"? Just in case their readership recoil at the idea of listening to rock that isn't "avant" enough?

On another thread I and someone else mentioned that having a Dub thread rather than a "dancehall" thread (or an all-encompassing "reggae" one) suggested that the Wire was a bit out of touch. I forget the name of the section heading--but in a recent issue I think they had a global/intenrational/non-English language catchall section as well.

in the spirit of "avant-rock" can they call their theoretical metal section "fop metal"?

This thing I hate most about The Wire is that they only like weird and more or less unlistenable stuff. What's wrong with a verse and a chorus?

The one thing I hate about Mixmag is all the dance music they seem to be obsessed with covering. And don't get me started on Gardening & Homes. What's wrong with featuring a bit of Formula 1 now and again?

'"Avant-Rock", for goodness sake, why not just call it "Rock"? '

OTM. I've paid for the magazine, I'm signed up already!

Despite everything, it's still the only music mag on the rack I can face buying.

This thing I hate most about The Wire is that they only like weird and more or less unlistenable stuff. What's wrong with a verse and a chorus?

-- Geir Hongro, Friday, October 19, 2007 7:49 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Link

never has the Geir Agenda been so plainly laid out.

Despite everything, it's still the only music mag on the rack I can face buying.

True

I think that's because it's mostly written by the folk I used to like to read in the NME in the 80's though.

This thing I hate most about The Wire is that they only like weird and more or less unlistenable stuff. What's wrong with a verse and a chorus?

-- Geir Hongro, Friday, October 19, 2007 8:49 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

even a stopped clock.

On another thread I and someone else mentioned that having a Dub thread rather than a "dancehall" thread (or an all-encompassing "reggae" one) suggested that the Wire was a bit out of touch.

Just call it Reggae. I suppose the name dates back to a time when Wire's readership thought dub was all spooky and avant-garde while reggae was boring stuff about Jah with *ugh* vocals

i used to use a lot of exclamations marks.

that Dub page is probably the best part of their Reviews section at this point, I almost always get a pointer or two from there.

their longer articles are also generally pretty good, it's the coverage of current music, specifically in the reviews section, that's severely lacking.

Yeah, in terms of the review section, I still find good writing in the longer featured reviews, and good writing in the the columns, but the main reviews section seems to be stuck in place a bit in terms of format. Perhaps the pieces are of an awkward length, where they are too short for any detail, but too long for the pithy commentary of the columns. I'd be happy if they added another column or two, increased the number of long reviews, and cut back on the shorter pieces in the main reviews section.

Maybe it's not the right way to be looking at it, but why don't they cut back on the number of reviews as suggested above and put them on the website instead? As it is their site isn't the kind of thing I look at very often, it's mostly out-of-date news and back issues info, plus a few archive articles. I guess publishing a print magazine is more than enough work though, without having to maintain an active website too. They could maybe increase their profile by upping the web content a bit more though? Maybe even a forum? I'd give it approximately 2 weeks before that turned into a pissing match and got closed down, mind.

Alison Moyet mocks The Wire.

Shoutout for Splott there

There's not enough about Cliff Richard.