Simon Reynolds' Unfaves

simon reynolds - lost it?

Cameron Diaz fisting Brad Pitt while he reams a donkey

Works even better out of context. :-)

Perhaps we are better off without BNFs, better off finding more affable, humble, non-polarising ways of looking at pop. As someone who gets off on messianic fervour, though, I can't help finding this kind of unassuming approach ultimately lacking some vital buzz-factor: it's too mild in temperament and temperature. Where's the fiyah?

To which I think -- why does the flame need to be public? The tyranny of one's own tastes on oneself can just as easily do the trick.

I thought Reynolds writing in this months Uncut, the Streets and the BOC reviews stunk to high heaven, and was all set, when clicking on the above link, to indulge in another bout of head shaking and sighing....I was probably all ready to type that he 'was no Dave McCullogh or Johnny Waller". (note to younger readers, they were journalists for Sounds in 1980 or so).

But I thought some of the things in that page were fantastic, he nails just why Magpies Eyes was a great read, I don't quite agree with his assesment of In their own write, but its not agreeing with I am complimenting the man on, but in producing something worth reading and his view on that book is compelling too.

If pushed I'd probably say the Dylan bit sucked though not that much, but he really should be the last man to quote the critisism of Dylan about "gets away with opacities disguised as oracular wisdom".

Hmm, has he written anything else worth reading I might have missed?

Plus, he ignores garage in his "Dance music is dead" thang -- while of course he praised it in his faves article. So is he going schizo?

One of the more interesting snippet for me:

"Fabulous pop music" like Kylie or Britney is a bit like good weather: it comes along and brightens our days, but (perhaps because it all occurs on such a impossibly remote and out-of- any-of-our-hands plane) it seems beside the point to get worked up about it. There's no food-for-discourse there, unless you're a metereologist or Billboard columnist.

Together with his eagerness to jump off the R&B bandwagon, this leads me to think that Reynolds' appreciation (in the critical sense) of recent pop is pretty much limited to the situations in which it intersects with his own pre-established aesthetic rules. In comparison, I probably got into R&B/chart pop young enough that I will always now be interested in it no matter what sonic course it decides to chart (in fact since I was 16/17, it is a scientific certainty that I will listen to it for the rest of my life).

Though that remark re. house and being gay/black-Hispanic did puzzle me a bit. I wonder if you could say the same thing about Black Sabbath and being white/hetero?

Mmm...you might yet surprise yourself, Tim. I'm not saying you shouldn't, of course! But where the indefinable buzz existed for me at 16 is not the same at 31, and the reasons are multiple.

??? != Diana Ross???

This is nothing but inverted grandstanding, the rhetorical power of self-deprecation: 'Call me stupid, but...'; 'Is it just me, or...?' - jeez, Simon Reynolds can do better than *this*. I'm talking about *writing*.

>>> "Somehow, from the very earliest moment I became of Bob Dylan's existence, some embryonic (or even zygotic) form of critical perception sensed there was something stuffy and pious and un- rock'n'roll/un-pop about the Dylan Thing."

Something of the same problem here, too: the dull rhetoric of 'I'm not saying what everyone else is saying' - let down by the fatc that not everyone else is saying it anyway.

It's not that I disagree with Reynolds here. I don't share his feeling - I love Dylan - but I know that that's what we're dealing with: 'feelings'. They clicked for me with Dylan, not for SR - which is fine (and very contingent). That's neither here nor there. What worries me is his recourse to clichéd opinion. Like this:

>>> "Well, that's my gloss on it now: probably initially it was something as rudimentary as a gut non-comprehension of how anyone could bear to listen to that aggravatingly nasal and goaty vocal timbre, even if the lyrics were as amazing as cracked up to be. And then beyond that--a notch up the scale of critical sophistication--an intuition that in this ability to hear through the surface un- pleasure of that weathered leathery bleat, and find the truth or word- magick embedded in the lyric---that right there was the residual puritanical streak and scriptural bias (in the beginning, there was the Words) that underpins rock's elevation of text over texture."

In other words, Dylan = Lyrix, Man; whereas SR = Sound.

I have a lot of time for the SR position (he taught many of us to make the mental leaps). But the trouble is, the dichotomy is so hackneyed. Only the editor of the Telegraph (I mean the Dylan Telegraph, not the Tory one) still thinks it's like Every Word Bob Writes Is Scripture. That's not the point. Don't throw the bairn out with the tub. There are things lyrics can do which aren't about scripture and revelation; not about separation of 'word' from 'sound', or dull canonical formations. There are things Dylan does which are not about 'Meaningful Lyrics', but about sonic FX, combinations - the voice, the harmonica, the unpredictability of the arrangements. I'm saying: don't put Bob in a box - his work can do things outside of it.

Fortunately, I know Tom Ewing would back me up on this, and put it more persuasively than I have.

>>> "Less widely accepted, but still established enough to merit inclusion, is the idea that Melody Maker in the late Eighties/early Nineties was a golden age (perhaps the last golden age) for the UK music press..."

Spot on: thank god someone who knows what he's about is sticking up for it. This whole paragraph is the best in the thing by a mile.

I can really only care about Dylan when he's covered by someone else. So clearly the arrangements etc. don't have jack to do with it from where I sit.

Amen to that.

Mmm...you might yet surprise yourself, Tim. I'm not saying you shouldn't, of course! But where the indefinable buzz existed for me at 16 is not the same at 31, and the reasons are multiple. "

It was a joke, Ned. Seriously though, I don't think Simon having a pre-established set of aesthetic rules is a bad thing - I have one too, it's just that I've had less time to develop it. It's just that it explains points of difference between tastes; I'd been baffled by Reynolds' eagerness *not* to continue listening to R&B, whereas now I think I understand it. FWIW, I think Reynolds' rules are a very *good* set, seeing as they lead him to like more great music (IMHO) than just about anyone else I can think of.

Hm! I don't know, for some it isn't in their own listening habits, it seems! Thus the endless nostalgia market.

FWIW, I think Reynolds' rules are a very *good* set, seeing as they lead him to like more great music (IMHO) than just about anyone else I can think of.

Hurrah! No bad thing indeed.

this is bad???

Echoes of the eighties anti-rockist period when entryism, "good pop", black values were all the rage. I get the impression that Reynolds liked R&B for being the (deceptively) smoother end of black "street culture", for the way insurrectional energy was warped into being something deliciously palatable. Most of his favourites ("No Scrubs", "Bills, Bills, Bills", "It's Not Right, But It's Okay") are arguably songs which place socio-cultural ideas - specifically the idea of a battle of the sexes, emotionally, socially, economically - above the personalities of the performers, who are empty vessels. That's what thrilled him maybe about the TLC-Sporty Thieves "dual", the idea of real social energy becoming manifest in chart pop, with the stars as mere mouthpieces for processes that are bigger than they are.

The new improved "it's all about me" Beyonce in contrast probably turns Reynolds off because her focus - and the focus of much critical reception - has been on her; her as a standard for others, as a trend-setter, as a personality. Compare the hits of TWOTW with those of Survivor: in all of the former the girls talk about themselves in the midst of some social transaction. "Independent Women" and "Survivor" in comparison are very ossified, very much about reifying the DC (ie. Beyonce) persona as something that exists above and beyond the situations she may find herself in.

Generally I think pro-pop people *enjoy* the cult of celebrity, enjoy the camp thrill of setting a Britney or Beyonce up on a pedestal and appreciating how incomparably above and beyond us all they seem, even though it's obvious that it's a deception. And obviously pro-pop people love tearing them down too when the time is right. And that's why pro-pop people might be drawn to Survivor: because Beyonce is the ultimate diva, in all her tyrannical hypocritical glory. There's a certain aura about Beyonce now that just wasn't there on The Writing's On The Wall, even though the stories on that record feel more real, more tangible to me. Beyonce feels more inevitable to me now, and I mean that in a good way, as in there's something about hew that just can't be dismissed or ignored, demands attention.

Reynolds' puzzled dismissal of pop suggests to me that he finds this whole process a waste of time (which is fine, different strokes for different folks etc.), and considers there to be nothing inherently interesting about the personas of Britney or Beyonce. Their potential for magic in Reynolds' conception is how they might become inadvertant mouthpieces for something much broader, much more real to life.

(tangent: perhaps Reynolds resists the camp process because E culture in comparison is all about the abolition of pedestals. Or rather, yourself and everyone about you is on a pedestal. The communal/physical/drug-interface nature of dance music generally lends itself to the social energy preference, I'd imagine)

Of course this is all conjecture; maybe Simon will come along at this point and correct me.

Making her and Jay-Z counterparts, then, based on his last album? That's the comparison that leapt to my mind at least...

More generally -- this is what Tom was writing about with his death of pop article -- robo-divas of all genders are forced now to differentiate. Thus interchangability is lower, thus less like Reynold's sublimination of self.

a. his relentless flip-flop wouldn't be so bad if it was coming every twelve months in the form of his year end best of/worst ofs, i guess. they didn't really start becoming problems until i had to be confronted with a near daily dose of them.

b. the idea that he has to pay attention to hip-hop; his forced patronage in the face of percieved diminishing returns just bores me. if you don't like something, why keep returning to it, ad nauseum; he certainly doesn't bother writing limp-dick "scathing" attacks on dnb every week.

James--go fuck yourself.

ps. sorry if this offends you matos, not the intent.

It seems to me that *the* problem is that jaded cynicism is - point blank - not particularly interesting, especially because it's the standard form for so many writers (*especially* "this is crap this year but it might be a cycle (ergo Clinic are the saviours of music!!!?!?!)"). Simon writes well, but even he can't enliven jaded cynicism an awful amount.

As for the book, he should forget about it for a while (not least because focusing on your private golden age makes everything else look like tin in comparison, unless you spend your whole time making complicated grime = post-punk analogies), write the grime equivalent of "Feminine Pressure" and *then* return to his opus.

I think this might be the key of it but it also raises a question. There really should be room for expressions of frustration, of wheels being ground, of feeling exhausted -- it seems that in any field or private obsession there should be room for that, a bit of metacommentary. The problem is that usually the feeling of exhaustion equates just as equally to a feeling of not wanting to write or talk about that feeling precisely because one is exhausted -- my 'hitting the wall' article last year on FT and various posts and threads on ILX since have been attempts, however poorly written or expressed, to articulate a state of mind where I want to capture a feeling of distance and detachment while still wanting to engage, to somehow communicate this feeling, which to me feels as valid and as much a potential part of individual artistic reaction as full participation. It isn't easy, capturing this feeling. I might not agree with SR's take -- personally, I think it boils down to state of mind rather than state of art -- but can you truly say you're giving him the benefit of the doubt, inasmuch as you might be nettled that he is apparently not giving YOU that same benefit if you're in a different place yourself?

I'm reminded of that first line in Anna Karenina - something like "every happy family is the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It's the reverse for music criticism: there are so many interesting ways to write positively about music, but it's very difficult for complainers to not sound like they belong to a hive-mind of bitterness. The problem is not SR's intentions so much as the reader's capacity to take something fruitful from the writing.

I know you're saying its difficult but it can only be his fault. The point that he's blogging while in the middle of writing his book on post-punk is a good one. How much of this stuff would he actually say if he hadn't been listening to the music he grew up with, I wonder.

(It also helps that he honestly ISN'T very convincing on hip-hop, they/we are hardly disagreeing for the sake of it)

there is some lazy reading going on re the bashing of him for not having heard 'mo money' till this year. what he actually said was that he hadn't heard puffy's new house track, and in passing mentioned haveing seen 'mo money' on tv and that he thought it almost uptempo enuf to be a house track. no pontification on hiphop there, just a blog comment, thas all. lighten up folks.

I have just noticed how many of the Critics' Corner threads are about Simon Reynolds. I thought I would click on this thread and say so.

Haha ironic.