interesting article from Washington City Paper

But I don't think Jason Cherkis deserves much sympathy about "fighting for space," not in this day and age, and not if that's what he's going to do with what space he gets.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/special/2002top20/jcherkis_2002top20.html

Of course there are rare exceptions, and I bet they appear scattered across a pretty wide distribution of writer-types -- fiction writers included. I don't know for sure, though.

Sounds like any old music critic to me...

I'm about to puke right now.

"Remember that smiles are for free! :D EEEEEEEEEEEE!"

x-post

Moody, though, is a much better writer than the average blogger or Webzine contributor, a clutch of whom have dubbed the author “douchetarded.” The future of rock criticism may indeed be online, but the writing is still made by a thousand Baby Bangses. Especially at sites like Pitchfork, which presents its inimitable pastiche of gushing, snarky, and ill-wrought five days a week.

That "douchetarded" thing came from a private discussion group thread that I forwarded to him. I had started a thread about the S-K thing called "Rick Moody: Rockist Douchebag or Just Plain Retarded?" and a friend of mine suggested that he might be "douchetarded."

it would probably be more if it werent for those pesky filesharers!

the idea of a "marquee rock critic" makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

True.

Also,

Taking Sides: David Eggers or Judd from Real World San Francisco?

i mean, i admired "heartbreaking work" for about 10 minutes while reading it (and basically only for the title.) but it just sucks, and if i have one more english teacher or fellow student tell me that its the future of literature, im gonna go nuts.

(of course, no one really talks too much about eggers now, im referring to a couple of years ago)

David Denby?!

and the original ilk of mcsweeney's might have run a piece on honduran loom inspectors -- issue no. 1 actually has a great article about the hawaiian sovereignty movement (its original theme, loosely, was 'killed magazine pieces,' based on eggers' misadventures as an editor at esquire)

Definitely agree about Wallace. He's kinda his own thing, and whatever his sins are they're not the sins of this crowd. (I think he maybe has the opposite problem of some of the people being discussed here, in that -- for my money -- he's a much better critic and essayist than he is a fiction writer.) Frank, himself, I generally find interesting and well-informed; but I think the "What's the Matter With Kansas" phenomenon, starting with its unfortunate title, plays to the kind of self-satisfied insularity I'm talking about.

this may or may not directly address this, but i tend to get really aggravated when writers try to use personal experience as a measurement/justification of an album's worth (ie: "The Talking Heads were there for me when Sharon left, filling in the spaces where she used to walk, speaking the words I had forgotten how to say".) This seems to be a fairly consistent crime in all of the Eggers SPIN columns I've read.

As Frank has pointed it, it's pretty silly to even attempt to remove personal experience from understanding music enjoyment. The problem in the McSweeny's/Moody/et al school of crit. is that it substitutes (seemingly very limited) personal experience for crtical engagement. There are a number of ways to incorporate experience into criticism--and, at times, it's necessary to propose what works or what makes a piece of music interesting.

I kind of think aesthetics are always political, to some degree. Or at least have political ramifications.

though the McSweeny's style can signify 'liberal', it's not always liberal (the crit being discussed is pretty explicitly conservative) and represents only a small facet of liberal commentary.

The crit being discussed is conservative, right, but it's a conservative streak running through American liberalism. It's something I've always found interesting about the rockism issue too, that the rockist viewpoint (to the extent that strawman exists) is a fundamentally conservative viewpoint, but it is rooted in Baby Boomer liberalism. My guess is that you can count actual Bush voters among McSweeney's contributors (or readers, for that matter) on not very many appendages. And ditto the rockist brigades, most of them were probably Kerry/Springsteen voters. And I'm not sure it represents only a small facet of liberal commentary, I think it more nearly represents the white, middle-aged, college-educated mainstream of liberal commentary (of which, granted, McSweeney's itself is just one small, eccentric example).

different from and I'd say it's very much less important when you are informing people about the music.

Of course, but they're still not the same thing.

I don't disagree that the streak you indentify exists in some form or another. Just that it's smaller than you (and others) have made it out to be--or rather it's a problem that exists within liberalism but these values are not inherent to modern liberalism. I think this assumption rests more on conservative charictatures of liberalism.

I'm talking about liking certain kinds of music/artists as an identity, which can be fun and is insanely common but when indulged in can lead to people dismissing good music for credibility sake and vice versa. The most common example is probably the "I hate pop music because that's what the masses listen to. I'm not like everybody else and my tastes must show that."

I have nothing against calling someone a "real critic," by the way. I'm a real critic. Cherkis is not a real critic, at least not in this particular piece. He's being a journalist (and not a very good one), and though of course journalism can be good criticism, it often isn't, due to the destructive limitations that "journalism" places on writers: that you have to write about what's important or what's available as a commodity, that you focus on the subject matter at the expense of analyzing your own and your readers' social role in relation to that subject matter (this is the mirror image of what some of you are complaining in regard to Eggers and crew, which is that they're putting personal role ahead of the subject matter; but these are two sides of the same coin), that you load your piece with examples and quotes from others to affirm that the trend you're writing about is, indeed, a trend. Cherkis's piece is a trend piece; he's not writing about the McSweeney's crowd out of inherent interest in what they're doing, but because they represent an important development - which of course is a reason to write about something. But in this instance, though Cherkis disdains this trend in criticism - his putative subject matter - he hardly seems interested in learning about it, much less being surprised by or learning from his subject matter. So the piece reads like a pot talking about kettles.

Real criticism can be a lot of different things, and different people have different strengths, therefore write different styles of criticism, or would if they were allowed to.

Gypsy, lots of liberals are defensive and smug, just as lots of liberals are stupid. Ditto for conservatives and everyone else. This is because lots of people are defensive and smug. So I wouldn't call defensive smugness a strain in liberalism, just a failing of some liberals.

I don't know if you came up with this one, Maura, or if I just haven't heard it before, but it's a fantastic phrase ("asshole-spelunking of the self variety").

Anyone else remember the issue of Musician magazine where they had Chuck D. extol the virtues of "Born in the USA" (the song)? Now *that* was some poor writing, inappropriately assigned.

Now Kissinger I'd read......

Now Kissinger I'd read......

-- PB (non...), July 9th, 2005.

Exactly. It's kind of like if the New Yorker started regularly publishing fiction by rock stars and actors. Of course, they have published Steve Martin, whose proven himself to be a good writer, which is fine. I feel the same way about novelists and the like -- it's ok to publish them if they happen to also be good music writers. If not it's just name-driven bullshit.

Frank said: I wouldn't call defensive smugness a strain in liberalism, just a failing of some liberals.

Both of which are of course true, when you're talking about the old semi-strawman of liberal elitism. And I know it's hard to talk about this stuff without falling under that shadow, so I'll try to pick my words more carefully. Because it's not the smugness so much that bothers me; I don't even think all of these guys are smug. Eggers comes across that way sometimes, but Hornby (for example) doesn't really seem smug. He seems like he'd be a nice enough guy to have a beer with.

But both of them seem emblematic to me of something larger, which I also see/hear reflected in, say, NPR, my parents and their liberal Boomer friends, the Op-Ed pages and arts sections of big-city daily papers, and assorted other gathering places of the liberal intelligentsia -- and what it is, basically, is a sort of sense of time having stopped moving forward at a certain point. Part of it has to do with the canonization of the '60s as some kind of high point of civic engagement/cultural revolution (as opposed to Cultural Revolution), the mythology of the great slide into hedonism and egoism of the Me Decade, the Rise of the Yuppies in the Reagan era, and this general sense that things have just gone right off the rails into the hands of Oil Men and Snake Handlers, leaving the rest of us with nothing to do but throw futile snarky middle fingers and/or write futile nonsnarky pasionate sincere odes to the Flaming Lips. Which I think is a lot of bullshit, is the thing. There's so much going on culturally in this country and globally that either doesn't register in the places of Boomer-controlled liberal consensus I'm talking about, or that register only as sort of novelty items ("Hey, Sleater-Kinney! Girls with guitars! And political songs! Like the '60s!"; "Oh look, a rapper who can play guitar and sing! And he sounds like the Beatles!").

So it's not smugness, and it's not even really elitism. It's a self-satisfied resignation. And I don't mean to Boomer-bash, but I think we're dealing with a generational, uh, ethos here, and I think the next-generation stuff that has inherited that ethos (refracting it through the gen-x/slacker prism) is kind of trapped in its amber. And that's what bothers me, the sense that things aren't moving forward in interesting and unpredictable ways, when they very much are. Like I said, a Democratic Party that understood hip-hop (or that understood file-sharing, for that matter) would be at least better equipped than the one we have now. That's not McSweeney's fault or anything, I just see them as symptomatic and therefore irritating.

Especially at sites like Pitchfork, which presents its inimitable pastiche of gushing, snarky, and ill-wrought five days a week.

Speaking of ill-wrought, isn't a noun missing?

fwiw, i like a lot of these authors, though find in general that they work better as audio books because their writing styles are often distractingly rehearsed.

lethem is particularly good this way, and he himself is an excellent reader.

It seems hardly coincidental that the one piece in the recent Believer that required heavy lifting (The Fall) was farmed out to a ringer.

This article somewhat reminds me of how many professional sports journalists and broadcasters are offended when athletes become journalists when they retire.

So yeah, maybe Dennis Miller hosting MNF is a more apt analogy to the situation at hand. A failed experiment that was. Sports fans dont want to hear comedians doing sports commentary like music fans dont want fiction writers giving music advice?

Not necessarily. I think if Miller was more insightful and it didn't always feel like he was doing a pre-planned routine it could've worked. If you're a fiction writer or just a celebrity and you know little about popular music and how to comment on it then you're in trouble. Or to top it off you're trying to sound like a hip writer by indulging in insane hyperbole and stuff then that's bad as well.

frank otm about the article.

but mothra not otm about thomas frank who actually seems to be saying some of what mothra is saying, except maybe now he's trying to say it to the ppl too busy listening to eggers instead?

sarah vowell i actually used to like back when i didn't read much music-crit and i read some of her stuff for salon and i thought she was MAINLY a music-crit. culture-tourism is just shallow generally, i think, and that's what most of the bad stuff comes down to.

O: "not really populist" isn't what I mean here--I don't have a problem with writers who aren't populist (I'm an editor and I use many writers who aren't). I suppose I mean that a lot of the stuff I'm referring to has this discomfort with the everyday, culturally speaking, and because in a lot of cases that's where pop is coming from, there's a strange disjunct there. a lot of folks here have already expounded on this better than I can above.

Matos - "disliking a person's singing voice can ruin a well-played, well-arranged song". Fair enough, but if someone asked you if the song itself was any good, what would you say?

I'd say that if it was, it got ruined on the way. That's true of loads of pieces of writing, too--I remember a novel called Homo Zapiens by a Russian novelist named Victor Pelevin. It was smart, well-written, had interesting ideas . . . and I didn't make it past the halfway mark because I couldn't stand the tone. And I was left with the idea that this wasn't the translation's doing, it was the writer's.

a lot of these fiction-writers turned rock critics aren't doing the same kind of criticism as people like S/FJ, and criticising them on the same terms seems a little daft. it's totally fair to criticise them for bad writing, but i think it's off the mark to say they suck because they don't "actually know what [they're] talking about on the level of band history". i find that eggers quote (abt weeping to beethoven) more affecting and invigorating than the last sasha frere-jones piece i read, even if it's rather whimperingly written.

I should point out, though, that (as per this thread) most music critics seem interested in reading "think" pieces on bands, exploring their history/influences/etc, and the same may even be true of most music-writing readers overall - but i do think that this sort of stuff has a niche, and is totally valid.

Yeah, I mostly mean Thomas Frank as a phenomenon more than as a writer. He's smart and says lots of useful stuff, but I'm afraid his book has mostly become a vehicle for more of the kind self-satisfied resignation I was talking about a ways back. I think he wants it to be a call action, but I don't think it's functioned that way.

Not really. "Paper Lion" almost did because it was a book about being in training camp with the Detroit Lions before anyone did even fair books on life in the NFL. Plus it was made into a movie. But for me it was never high on the list of good books about pro sport.

Plimpton was treated like a jackass by many of the Detroit Lions who resented him being there and having to put up with him. And you can sympathize with them. I remember wanting to read more about them without the feeb who couldn't even take a snap from center without getting his fingers jammed getting in the way.

And he was a jackass, even for "Paper Lion" he came to realize the element of this in the assignment and tried to make accomodation and amends to the Lions for it. He and his editors had enormous conceits about experiencing pro sport from the "inside" via someone with absolutely no physical attributes to justify being "inside," just a reputation as a writer.

Anyone who ever saw Plimpton lecturing on TV would have a really hard time imagining him lasting in any pro sports camp without being carried, which he was.

He used to when he was still living in Chicago and publishing The Baffler. Now that he's moved to Washington, DC, he's become corrupted by the city's near-total absence of culture, popular or otherwise.

Phil, contrary to the stereotypes there is plenty of culture in DC.

(For what it's worth: as the guy who wrote the Fall piece, I can tell you that I pitched it to the Believer, and that it's the third piece I've written for them--the second hasn't run yet.)