Why to you folks seem to dislike the ones who makes a living writing about music?

WRT Hilburn in particular -- to be sure, I wouldn't mind his job. If it meant writing like the dullard clodhopper he is in order to get and keep that job in the first place, then fucking fuck fuck.

Friend ML Compton told me a story about how back in the seventies he did have something going for him but his moment of truth was when he enthusiastically raved about an upcoming Throbbing Gristle show (!). Various fashionistas and pillars of the community showed up and were nonplussed at the racket, and word got back to Hilburn that if he tried something like that again, he'd be out on his ear. He has since turned into the 'stay the course, upset nobody, repeat the platitudes' mofo that he is today, decades worth of fishwrap.

True, but the world doesn't really need music writers, y'know? Not that you have to have a job that saves lives and betters the world, but writing about music for a living (and, by the way, for a long time period, writing about music was my only way of making a living) is a needless sorta job.

sillier than posting to ILM all day and night? :)

Well, ILM doesn't pay a thin red dime, so no.

I've never especially liked most rock journalism that I've read, long before coming to ILM.

Not true

i know that's a widely held belief, and i see the point to an extent myself, but i wonder WHY that's so for music critics but not for, say, movie critics or TV critics. no one automatically questions a 55-year-old taking his or her seat at a screening of the new ashton kutcher movie, do they?

why do you think its more amorphous or relative?

However, you could write volumes about why I shouldn't like, say, "Live Wire" by Motley Crue, but if I've heard it and it connected with me in that indefinable way that music affects a listener, then there's nothing you can really do to alter or erase that impression or appreciation.

but i've seen 'nine to five' and wasn't aware of the boom mic. if i enjoyed the movie (and many movies overcome shoddy or cheap production values) then similarly you couldn't argue me out of that belief. similarly, there are many people for whom 'shoddy productin values' on a piece of music is intolerable. i don't think that holds up.

Anyway, ILx treats critics much the same way it treats music: nothing's beyond an especially juicy savage attack.

jesus christ i'd rather be sent to hades than have to sift through a zillion new lps a month

amateur!st otm, unless he's talking about me.

that said, a lot of the people who seem to continually contrast jazz and rock/pop writing seem to be the type of people for whom losing in public or making an ass of yourself because you're so caught up in the moment would be an act of transgression on par with child rape.

(In fact, if anybody knows of anybody else who writes with comparable-to-Meltzer energy + life + humor about jazz, especially if they're young and they live in New York so they can go to shows a lot, I'd love to hear about it. If you know them, tell them to put some clips in the mail to me, pronto, so I can see what they write like.)

Strongo OTM in his last longish post, by the way.

:...(

also, book reviewers tend to be a lot lazier intellectually than music writers do. here's an example: the last Klosterman book was excoriated by lots of folks because--gasp!--he wrote about Pamela Anderson and The Real World and breakfast cereal. that's why a lot of folks dissed it--because of the subjects he wrote about, not for how he wrote about them. that's the mentality behind a lot of book reviewing--a very cloistered, sheltered, hierarchical idea of what is "high" and valuable and what is "low" and not valuable--whereas when you write about pop music those rules go kerblooey, and good, because they're fucking useless in the real world. unless you're a rockist hack creep (and I am totally aware that the great bulk of music writers, in fact, are), there are no rules, no easy guidelines, to what makes a piece of music "good," and that mutability starts to look, as Alex in NYC intimates above, "childish," because as you get older I guess you're supposed to, you know, stagnate and stuff. There’s the whole “I give up” aspect, too, e.g. “you mean the fact that it’s guitars and on an indie label doesn’t mean it’s automatically worth more than some drum-machine thing? wtf?!” meaning not “haha guitars suck” but that perceptions and therefore the canon changes all the time, and it’s harder to take a solidified position when you’re walking on quicksand. Plus the fact that pop music has only been taken seriously a fraction as long as the novel.

getting back to the question that started this thread: I think in a few cases that dislike comes from the simple fact that a lot of people are getting paid to do something they’re not very good at, and at a certain level that’s something people SHOULD be mad at. Not to mention that frankly there are people (past and present) on ILM who are just plain fucking better writers than the majority of people who actually do make a living writing about music, so yeah I’d guess some jealousy arises that way, because there’s that whole “I’ve spent all my time thinking about this and you who gets paid to do just that clearly hasn’t, you’re fucking LAZY” aspect as well. I can say that deadlines and overabundance (way too many CDs, not enough time, only you’re getting calls and emails about stuff you haven’t even gotten to yet and blah blah blah) and other stresses do hamper your ability to wade through everything as neatly as you’d prefer, and therefore your thinking about it all, and obviously pro writers choose their lot so shape up. But I understand the non-pro side of it too. Neither is more “right” than the other.

That's the second time someone has claimed that writing abt movies is 'easier' than writing abt music. Could you clarify this?

I was not talking about anyone in particular. Plenty of ILX posts take that kind of form.

The only one of the 4 writers mentioned in the first post that I'd hear of is Christgau, and even then I know very little, certainly not enough to have any strong feeling about him either way. My total knowledge could be summarised:

- He's been around for a long time.

- I have a vague memory he had some connection with "Rolling Stone" magazine and is referred as "The Dean" though I'm not 100% certain about either of these facts.

- He was enthusiastic about "Exile on Main Street" when it was still critically unfashionable. (I'm actually 100% certain about this).

- He published books of record reviews based on decades and graded the record on an academic style A+/A- etc type system. I've flicked through a couple of them in bookshops.

- A particularly difficult to decipher paragraph of his was once the subject of a long thread on ILX.

Knowing that much still puts Christgau in the top 5 pop music critics based on how much I know about them, assuming that you ignore people like Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill and Nick Hornby who became well known for other things.

A good example (if I could remember all the details) happened recently in Australia, a High Brow Lit Crit was brought in to do a hatchet job on a noted pulp writer. The only reason they did this was to flatter their readers because they don't read such thriller trash. This would be have been fairly depressing in a Pitchfork 101 Rooty review kind of way, but what really depressed me was how the HB lit crit was attacked, not because of the writer's shallow attack on the book, but because it was unfair to intellectually examine such an obviously lowbrow book. Highbrow is highbrow, lowbrow is lowbrow, and never the twain shall meet.

X post x 8

I completely disagree with this, as many might expect (most rock journalism is WAY more boring than most rock criticism, and always has been), but who cares. It strikes me as kinda odd, either way, since Derogatis is actually a pretty decent rock JOURNALIST, as near as I can tell. It's his criticism attempts that are completely inept.

Have you ever seen a movie?