C Eddy (or peeps like him) vs. J Pareles (or peeps like him)

Also, if I had a dime for every music review I've read that incorrectly identified a time signature, I'd have, um, maybe a dollar (and they'd all be for 'Hovi Baby' and 'Pyramid Song').

x-posts, ha

but it's kind of annoying how he always tries to switch time signatures in the middle of his posts. also, if he employed more interesting harmonies, i'd find it easier to read through his longer posts. he should consider throwing in some fourths now and then.

Personally, though, as a writer I wish I had more technical aptitude; lacking it, I sometimes fall into the Whitney conundrum of "I don't know why I like it - I just do." Which is lazy writing if left at that.

on the other hand, if a critic can accurately and entertainingly tell me that a certain piece of music is in a certain time signature and employs a certain kind of harmony and and all that kind of stuff, that will often give me a much clearer picture than if he tells me that it "sounds like monster magnet filtered through belle and sebastian's twee heads." if i don't get his clever references, or more specifically what his clever references mean to *him*, then i'm lost. whereas the technical goop is readily understandable no matter who he or who i am. as long as he doesn't get too technical or too goopy. pareles is good at this.

i still need the entertaining and insightful impressions and analysis and all that fun stuff.

but, to put it in movie-review terms, a paragraph in which you describe the plot can be awfully helpful in steering me through the rest of your review.

chuck's post reminded me of it . sorry. carry on.

isn't it more like describing for example the cinematography and lighting and type of film used?

not sure how a film plot description would map to an album review

I think describing cinematography is more similar trying to describe the sound or production, yeah.

yeah, certainly wasn't writing about anybody in particular, just a trait in general (and it's sorta fast and loose, not always across-the-board).

Anyway, I don't think that being theoretically-oriented (in a literary theory or cultural studies sense) necessarily means you pay attention to the "text" of the lyrics.

well, yeah, that was kinda the point of the question. Obv. lyrics are just one text within music, and not necessarily the only thing that can convey meaning.

For whatever reason, I've never given a hoot about lyrics, am almost unable to hear them, in fact, whereas the sonic material and structure itself provides me endless stuff to work with.

see I never understand why people make this claim, but maybe it's just a total difference from my experience that I'll never understand anyway. I don't think there should be this great divide re: lyrics vs. music, I think they are both important or non-important depending on what the listener brings. But to say "I never pay attention to lyrics" to me just seems like some sort of impossibility that I'm unwilling or unable to comprehend. Of course there's lots of stuff where lyrics aren't all that important (or are important in their unimportance cf. The Stooges), but I can't imagine being seriously into music and not liking or trying to understand certain lyrics - unless you just don't like music with vocals, which is another thing entirely.

I don't think being theoretically-inclined necessitates taking a *literary* approach to music. (Not that you're arguing that.)

Yeah, I'm not arguing for one approach necessarily over the other, just that those who take certain approaches also seem (very unscientifically of myself to say so, btw) to have certain tendencies that are somewhat contradictory.

*whistles idly*

"It's a truly wonderful experience, Ready to Die -- blunt and crude at points, sure, but never less than compelling, one of the few albums I can truly say is cinematic both in scope and in conscious design, telling a life story from start to end as it does."

kinda is what I'm talking about. Very much about narrative theory without ascribing any importance whatsoever to lyrics, which I'm not sure I jibe with. Don't wanna get too into it, or a discussion of Ready to Die in particular, other than to say it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Christgau can fit fall into any of these camps depending on his take, though.

not really. except at the most basic levels, writing in such terms presumes a certain degree of musical literacy on the part of the audience (unless you're writing a book where you're prepared to walk the readers through as much theory as they will need to understand your thesis, a very daunting task). which is why i think a more "formalist" (in the sense of paying serious heed to the formal components of music) pop music criticism is unlikely to flourish without some kind of institutional--say academic--support, where you can ask more of your audience in terms of formal knowledge and you have the space for writing/time for research that such an approach would require.

and i think if a formalist pop criticism were developed in those terms, the effects would be felt on criticism in the newspapers as well. perhaps a more coherent set of terms could be developed from which both critics and readers could abstract a set of more-or-less commonly appreciated formal concepts. that would probably do criticism a lot of good, and rectify some of the more nebulous aspects (and extremes) of the sort of impressionistic criticism that dominates now.

xpost

hstencil, perhaps a nitpicky sort of point, but i don't think that sort of criticism is really indebted to literary theory--i.e. the big ideas--as just a certain style of literary criticism--a certain allusive writing style. which is not so much "literary," even, as such a kind of common criticial writing style that you'll often find in reviews of movies/plays/whatever. which, i'll agree, often leaves a lot to be desired when applied to music.

"Creep," as Butt-head must have noticed, was the first of many Radiohead songs that used pivot tones, in which one note of a chord is held until a new chord is formed around it. (In the turn from G to B, the note B is the pivot point.) "Yeah, that's my only trick," Yorke said, when this was pointed out to him. "I've got one trick and that's it, and I'm really going to have to learn a new one. Pedals, banging away through everything." But a reliance on pedal tones and pivot tones isn't necessarily a limitation: the Romantic composers worked to death the idea that any chord could turn on a dime toward another. Yorke's "pedals" help give Radiohead songs a bittersweet, doomy taste. ("Airbag," for example, being in A major, ought to be a bright thing, but the intrusion of F and C tones tilts the music toward the minor mode. "Morning Bell" sways darkly between A minor and C-sharp minor.) It's a looser, roomier kind of harmony than the standard I-IV-V-I, and it gives the songs a distinct personality. It also helps sell records: whether playing guitar rock or sampling spaced-out electronica, Radiohead affix their signature.

though--to answer myself--certain "wings" of pop music criticism have gone a long ways toward doing just that without institutional support. i'm thinking of some (NOT most) reggae criticism i've read. for instance, certain things in the liner notes to blood & fire releases.

xpost xpost

thanks for that, douglas. i think franklin bruno has done some interesting stuff splitting the difference between formalist (again, not the best term, but the one i have) and impressionistic criticism.

(x-posts, I mean the Radiohead piece)

but their viewpoint is
just their personal choice right
and ain't "right" (or "wrong")

words are what I love
but they don't need to be good
pure or true or deep

yeah, I'm not saying it's necessarily bad per se, but just that I can't reconcile such an approach with my own experience. Actually I'd argue a lyrics-never-matter approach could be just as bad or good as any other.

woah, that's pretty useful. I think if I could do that, lyrics would be much more important to me. as it is now, I have to either make a conscious effort to hear/comprehend them (and my attention tends to slide back to the music even if I do), or else maybe over repeated listens i will start to pick up on them if they're interesting or important or whatever (this is how I went from not getting to loving Pulp)

i don't get this fascination with precedents. "no, they weren't the first to do this, before there was [rattles off long list]." i don't know soul coughing from adam, but i suspect they weren't doing *exactly* the same thing as, er, bo diddley and it's unlikely jaymc or anyone would appreciate them the same way.

Yeah. "Jessie's Girl" is a vi chord, though, not a VI chord. : )

i do think that within the narrower (and more relevant) context of indie/modern rock, completely nonsensical lyrics can have a certain convention-flaunting quality. though i'd argue this is not their most important or even most salient function.

I think a bare minimum of knowledge can be useful for the writer as well as the reader, just to better convey what the music actually SOUNDS like - as long as they don't take it too far. Ed Ward, to name one, used to review records for CREEM back in the early 70s, and he had an annoying habit of flaunting his technical knowledge - yet only when reviewing records he DIDN'T like, as if he had a personal bias against the Dorian scale but not the Mixolydian or whatever. This type of criticism was perhaps more out of place in CREEM than anywhere else. (I'm certainly guilty of the exact same thing - dissing London Calling because of something as trivial as a guitar-effects pedal, for chrissakes! - but I'm not a professional journalist, so I should be entitled to lower standards.)

BTW, I think Chuck sells himself short. At least, he's got a passable amount of knowledge regarding Latin rhythms. (Or else he can fake it convincingly enough.)

Yeah, nowhere did I say that there wasn't any precedent to what Soul Coughing, Beck, et al. were doing, or even that they were all that unique or anything.

I should mention that when I happened upon those bands, I was 15 years old and approaching them from the prevailing context of angst-ridden alt-rock, and at the time their absurdity seemed welcome and refreshing. Chuck, your point about "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is taken, except I think the difference between a Nirvana song and a Soul Coughing/Beck song is that even though Kurt's lyrics were plenty abstruse, there was this notion that you could figure them out, that there was a private meaning hidden under layers of symbolism. Whereas I don't think anyone was trying to read anything into "Devil's Haircut": it was just fun.

There's also a categorical difference between the Beck/Soul Coughing school and that of, say, the Bloodhound Gang, whose notion of nonsense consisted solely of a string of pop-culture references and signifiers, without any of the former bands' unexpected linguistic juxtapositions.

http://justagirl.com/webcam/work/hof/peeps.jpg

I hope this point by amateur!st (from way upthread) isn't considered out of context, but I think he hit the nail right on the head here. When Philip Sherbourne wrote that he didn't care about lyrics, I felt I understood exactly what he meant. In my mind, I even added another sentence to his statement, i.e. "I don't give a hoot about lyrics ... and that's why I find myself listening to a lot of music that doesn't have lyrics".

So, in reference to writers that write mainly about lyric-free dance music, does this thread even apply? For example, when writing about techno, does anyone even consider what scale or interval the track is in? Are there any writers doing this?

By not taking a "musical literacy" approach to their work (partly because many of those concepts don't apply, and perhaps because nobody in the field would be capable of using them anyhow), such writers need to use a different vocabulary if they wish to describe what the music sounds like. To me, this is the main reason why much electronic music writing is vastly different from rock music writing.

http://www.rockcritics.com/Disco_Crits_Intro1.html

techno music is still music, so why wouldn't its musical qualities be of interest? i'd be interested to read about techno from someone who could explain what exactly the bass and keyboards are doing and who could put it into a more general musical context for me.

I was referring mainly to electronic reviews vs rock *reviews* (but I typed "writing", my fault), since the original discussion topic seemed to centre on them.

In regard to her style when writing about dance music, Tricia Romano wrote "unless I am writing for a hyper-informed underground audience, like Urb or XLR8R, I try to stay away from serious geek terminology or references to other obscure 12-inches that only a few hundred DJs own". Except that I find a lot of the reviews in Urb or XLR8R or Grooves to be very difficult to read because they're filled with obscure adjectives used to describe the music and name dropping comparisons. I think there's too much focus on writing an in-depth analysis that attempts to precisely describe the way the music sounds, and not enough emotion and comments about how the reviewer felt while hearing it.

Examples, I search XLR8R's reviews archive for Fennesz:

http://www.xlr8r.com/reviews.php?keyword=fennesz

I would like to read more stuff like Cameron Macdonald's "Live in Japan" review and less like Alexis Georgopoulos' Desormais review.

techno music is still music, so why wouldn't its musical qualities be of interest?

They certainly are interesting, but why aren't people writing about it ,J Parales-style? (a serious question, if there is such writing out there then I'd like to know about it).

OTM

In other words, it's kind of sobering when you realize that all this writing is so often based on something so slender, and insubstantial. What I think rock and roll writing has taught us is that it's all in the WAY you play and not anything all that dramatic, musically, in the structure you choose. "Filling time" as jazz musicians sometimes put it, laying it out in the measure. Really, there ain't much else to it, musically. Which, again, can be sobering and ought to be. And which is why I don't read Eddy or any other rock critic and take it for anything other than pure entertainment, consumer-guide. And Chuck Eddy always makes me laugh and that's something right there, but he and all the rest are just writing about something that's just blatantly obvious. Of course you need to listen to lyrics to songs! What else is there? Except for Meltzer, who I think got through to something else in his listening.

I certainly think this is a total generalization. Why were the Music Machine better than the Count Five? Because there was more to their songs structurally.

I think Meltzer was a bit of a budding musicologist. The "tongue" analyses in Aesthetics of Rock are all about structure (transitions, specifically).

What's this all about?

This is a total waffle of a post coz the counterposition being argued seems so fake.

But overall I think that "knowing what you're talking about" gets way overvalorized for a profession where what you're talking about is more about people than words *or* music as such. Comparatively, there are relatively few who place great valuation on *not* knowing what you're talking about, and the possible and odd benifits therein. And meanwhile, for whatever reasons, the rockwrite cannon is built from greats who were at their best when they were full of total shit.

Or take dave q on Journey, where he probably knows what he's talking about but I don't and that worked just fine too. Or good technical techno-crit where the words almost matter less than the combinations, sounds, meters in which they're employed.

I know, for example, that when I write something I want people who have no knowledge/interest in the topic to be able to enjoy and understand the piece but also for it to inform foax who do have said knowledge and interest. And all that really means, I think, is having something interesting to say which crosses knowledge-of-music lines, which is to say having something to say which is about people as much as music. Which is a total goofy humanist approach, I know.

-- eddie hurt (eddshur...), August 4th, 2004.

i like this post (although i should add that i don't know meltzer's writing very well)