OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Argh, nu-ilx has shrunk it slightly past readable; here's a direct link - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Screengrabs/onsellingoutexepose.jpg

I just boggled at this over my lunch.

"Jonny" is a name for gaywads

This only proves again that editors and writers are two different professions. Hence the two names.

You are actually posting a scan of an article from a student newspaper as the basis for a thread, aren't you? Good lord.

It's a screengrab from the pdf off the website! They didn't have a normal text version...

can you link to the website? photobucket seems to be banned here.

http://www.exepose.ex.ac.uk

goes from strength to strength -- feeder mention is possibly the high point.

System of a Down's top 20 single was six and a half years ago, fact fans.

"Recent developments in music have given Architechs a top 5 single"

surely this can't be THE jonny garrett?

http://www.myspace.com/chasingfaces

(yeah, they have a myspace already, the sellouts)

I suspect it must be, StanM.

I assume, from their name that they like Snow Patrol and The Small Faces.

um, holding up articles by students as examples of 'bad music writing'? talk about shooting fish in a barrel. Matt DC OTM.

Following in the footsteps of West Country acts like Muse and Thirteen Senses by already winning over interest from various major and independent record labels, things are definitely looking good for the boys. Having recently been asked to support New Zealand favourites The Checks who have just finished touring with the likes of JET and Oasis.

"I know someone who knows someone who knows the guy from Young Heart Attack quite well"

blueski and Matt DC offtm, this is the new web2.0 media era, we're all critics now, user provided content is the new professionally written content.

Even in the realm of student media this is BAAAAAAAAD though, Steve - I flick through Exepose every week and this is BY FAR the worst thing I've ever seen in it; hence not starting a thread every week.

Haha I used to write for that paper. I wonder how long before he Googles his own name and finds it.

It would be so wonderful if he googled this thread and responded. What an utterly thrilling discussion and exchange of views that could lead to.

Hey, with any luck he might hop over to ILE and start posting about his sex life or something.

(my question: is the article motivated by his own band possibly signing to a major soon?)

Maybe I should unleash the views of Chris Erasmus at you all?

Haha, yeah, I'd imagine so, StanM.

Hello Jonny's mom! No, he hasn't posted about his sex life yet. Try again later. Bye, ILX.

blueski and Matt DC offtm, this is the new web2.0 media era, we're all critics now, user provided content is the new professionally written content.

-- Dom Passantino, Monday, 18 June 2007 12:36 (11 minutes ago) Link

Dom is entirely correct here. I mean, the chuckle factor is diminished by him being a student, but the democratization of criticism basically leaves us with this sort of landscape (coughcoughP.E.W.cough).

also why do nearly all student newspaper writers write in what feels like the same voice? there's certain syntax and word choices that only student newspapers ever seem to have.

Nobody knows how to sub-edit when they're 21, that's why.

^^not unrelated to why writers in the say, New York Times tend to sound the same. for that matter, ever read Blender? Despite the bylines it seems to be written by one many-armed poprockbot.

that really is quite incredible.

New York Times doesn't have sub-editors? That's crazy!

Hey Jonny, your band fucking suck.

Jonny Garrett of Exeter University, that is.

I think you mean <a href="OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?;>Jonny Garrett</a> of Exeter University.

BOO HTML

Kudos on sticking it to Westlife, tho, Jonny Garrett of Exeter University. Those bastards have had it their own way for too long.

Does Westlife even exist anymore?

highlights:

"...bands like westlife who can, quite frankly, go screw themselves with a rusty spoon and get tetanus"

"had nirvana not signed to sub pop... we would probably never have heard one of the most influential artists of our time and dave grohl may have never founded the foo fighters."

the pathos!

but the democratization of criticism basically leaves us with this sort of landscape (coughcoughP.E.W.cough).

democratization of criticism = people slagging this shit off just because they can rather than for any constructive cause. it's just easy target practice, who gives a shit? no-one/nothing is ever going to stop under-grads inheriting these absurd ideas about 'how things should be' in the music industry. surely we've all read this same article many times in the past.

i'm just more relieved than ever my music writing from college days was too soon for blog-era internet heh.

"had nirvana not signed to sub pop... we would probably never have heard of..." Sub Pop.

Was there ever a thread for people to post their own abysmal juvenile music writings from uni days?

Not that I'd post on it, my capsule reviews of Kinesis singles were all fuckin bang-on.

perhaps one day i will post my 8/10 track by track review of 'Be Here Now' from the time.

Yeah, you real writers are all jealous that you've lost the ability to write like that, aren't you?

I wrote a two-part article in my uni paper called "Rhythm & Sound", which basically stated that all rock music that's based on melody or lyrics is boring crap, and that beats and sound are the essential components of good music - hence electronic dance music (and fusion jazz) is the best music there is. I got some angry comments from the indie kids.

Kudos on sticking it to Westlife, tho, Jonny Garrett of Exeter University.

and kudos to you lot for bravely and relentlessly going after such a signifivcant target as jonny garrett. sure showed him!

ts being one of many thick students w/ bad music taste who can't write, vs being someone who actually gives a shit about what said student writes in some minor student rag

or, matt'n'steve otm, u r all losers

but the democratization of criticism basically leaves us with this sort of landscape (coughcoughP.E.W.cough).

student newspapers have nothing to do with the "democratization of criticism"

I can't copy and paste from the Exeter Expose, but if you Google you can find a review where our Jonny talks about "Indy music".

also why do nearly all student newspaper writers write in what feels like the same voice? there's certain syntax and word choices that only student newspapers ever seem to have.

paul please, please tell me you don't actually care about the answer to this

imagine thinking there's any difference between rock and pop in 2026 ffs

using the resurgence of MBV, one of the greatest pop bands of all time, in an argument for why pop is dying. great work m8

Seems like this could have been written at any point in the last 20 years. Like when were certain people not listening to indie rock? Maybe Julian Casablancas' subway takes made this a Jacobin concern.

I only got two paragraphs in before I had to stop and verify that the writer was a privileged looking white millennial academic.

‪maura johnston‬
✧@ma✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 2m
protecting my peace by not reading that jacobin piece and just wishing that everyone involved in its publication would fuck off into the sun 🥰🥰🥰

‪former flyboy‬
✧@thatguywas✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 7m
It seems like Jacobin is making another concentrated effort to ragebait people for clicks so just a reminder that this is all they do now, and it’s best to just block them and not link to their website.

to be fair, I don't think it's ragebait per se, most people who even know of the word "poptimism" in the first place think it's "they made music writers like Taylor Swift or else!!!11"

whelp that was awful.

also weird internal link to unherd, a website that publishes transphobe Kathleen Stock, and Richard Hanania.

Ugh, Unherd, vile piece of shit.

WTAF

yeah that caught my eye too

I do not know this fellow, and also loathe Jacobin. No way am I clicking on it.

He apparently is a prof at Temple

I've gathered this guy was a managing editor at Alternative Press and has an unpublished book on 70s NYC rock, along with a music theory background. Strikes me as someone who was introduced to all of the poptimism discourse late in the game and has the benefit (or detriment) of hindsight to say "why were people so bullish on pop music while shoving rock music in the corner" and introducing bullet points that read as ahistorical.

Which, overall, is grating but I'm fine with. History is by definition a retrospective endeavor but there are so many clunkers in here and he's somehow recreated the rock vs. everything else dichotomy

noped out of this after a few paragraphs, jfc

I skimmed it because I'm having a weird day and needed a distraction to be confused and annoyed at. Would not recommend for others not wanting the same.

quite often I feel embarrassed or sorry for the writers in this thread, this guy otoh needs to be publicly shamed before he kills again

I think you're preaching to the choir on ilm

I think he needs to be invited to join ilx.

He has an essay about Patti Smith and the occult. Would probably fit in here.

You can't relitigate both poptimism and 2016 without including the Madonna Hillary gonna Snatch that Presidency so Watch out!! She's A GIRL GONE WILD! tweet

somehow way dumber than i expected, like i love the strokes but lol at trying to argue that actually pitchfork was wrong about the new abnormal being a bad album because it got a lot of spotify streams, in an anti-poptimist article. it's also like, if you listen to anything casablancas says it's clear he has incoherent dumb as hell conspiracy theorist politics just in a vaguely leftist way not an alex jones way lol.

the cherry picking is off the charts in that article

let’s name a bunch of artists who may or may not have been written up in a poptimistically way and also pretend saying a song is catchy or culturally relevant is the same thing as endorsing them politically? two different things

there are plenty of articles evaluating Morgan Wallen from that perspective, very few of which fail to question his political slant or go out of their way to excuse it. bizarre “endorsing pop did nothing for leftist politics” drivel and pretending that the same people did not, at the time, like the ~white boys~ endorsing Bernie Sanders. yeah, pitchfork writers hated… Arcade Fire? Fleet Foxes? what in the heck

I don’t think anyone has ever explicitly linked the popularity of a musical act to the legitimacy or relevance of their political endorsement unless it was someone like this looking for an article angle

This is a really bad article

The Strokes strike me as, if not the absolute worst indie rock band to choose as your standard bearer against poptimism, then pretty close to it.

(To be clear, I like the Strokes)

The Strokes strike me as, if not the absolute worst indie rock band to choose as your standard bearer against poptimism, then pretty close to it.

(To be clear, I like the Strokes)

well exactly

He apparently is a prof at Temple

fwiw, Temple is enormous and i haven’t knowingly seen a colleague from the English department who isn’t a friend since January— they removed the computer from my office and so i had no reason to go there and just held my office hours in one of the cafes on campus.

it's a minor element in the overall mess, but citing Mark Fisher in defence of these particular aesthetic choices is somewhere between bizarre and repugnant and I'm not even a big Fisher guy

Lot of anti-woke left types in love to cite Vampire's Castle as their bible, overlooking the context in which it was written (i.e. London intra-left beef) or Fisher's wider intellectual project, which was very much feminist, pro trans rights and all the other liberatory causes these reactionary idiots dismiss as lib idpol.

It's notable how poor Jacobin's cultural coverage is compared to its UK sister, Tribune. I've skin in the game as an occasional contributor, but you've got folks there like Alex Niven, Owen Hatherley et al who were very much in with Fisher and are well-versed in UK cultural studies, so they have the language and frameworks for analysing popular culture from the left. Not that there aren't US equivalents, but Jacobin seems to draw on a more reactionary current.

Sorry, some typos in the above! "love to cite" not "in love to"

otm

Xp table — I was asking as a means of acknowledging that you are also a leftist academic in Philly who could have written a much better article about music trends and politics than this clown lol.

Lot of anti-woke left types in love to cite Vampire's Castle as their bible, overlooking the context in which it was written (i.e. London intra-left beef) or Fisher's wider intellectual project, which was very much feminist, pro trans rights and all the other liberatory causes these reactionary idiots dismiss as lib idpol.

It's notable how poor Jacobin's cultural coverage is compared to its UK sister, Tribune. I've skin in the game as an occasional contributor, but you've got folks there like Alex Niven, Owen Hatherley et al who were very much in with Fisher and are well-versed in UK cultural studies, so they have the language and frameworks for analysing popular culture from the left. Not that there aren't US equivalents, but Jacobin seems to draw on a more reactionary current.

I agree Fisher has been badly appropriated by antiwoke voices who understand very little of his work.

VC isn't one of his better efforts, but yes, it's absolutely maddening. Em Colquhoun's work has been a necessary corrective to this.

An interesting note from Eric Weisbard on FB:

Jarek Ervin, who wrote that Jacobin piece on rock and poptimism, is my Facebook friend and was an absolute pleasure to work with when he was IASPM-US secretary back in the day. Jack Hamilton and Karl Miller were two of his dissertation readers (topic: New York punk) at the University of Virginia music department a decade ago, with Amy Coddington and I think Vic Szabo among his cohort. Did none of that history and pedagogy register? Did the shitty job market change Jarek's perspectives, to an extent? Most of the people I have read commenting on all this are far outside the micro world I am sketching, but that -- and the bigger question of punk's relationship to pop, which I can't tackle just now -- is what sprang to mind for me when all of this came up.

I had to google IASPM … I am more familiar with IAPMO

Another frustrating aspect is that Ervin is squarely focused on the mainstream, when there is plenty of forward-looking and politically radical rock music going on underground. I mean, Guttersnipe have just dropped the wildest sci-fi noise rock album of the year and they're talking about xenofeminism and queer liberation, but they're not cishet dudes making classic rock, so don't fit in with Jacobin's reactionary populist agenda.

I guess Ervin would say that underground acts are largely preaching to the converted, whereas mainstream acts who use their platforms to push progressive ideas will have a bigger impact, but you need both. And what the underground does have over the mainstream music industry is models of community, ways of organising etc that the left can learn from.
I've never got the sense that Fisher, Jeremy Gilbert, Simon Reynolds et al are particularly interested in contemporary weirdo rock, noise, improvised music etc. Fair enough, it's not their thing, but they do offer some potent examples of the left modernist aesthetics they're interested in. I also think the stylistic fluidity of the contemporary underground, where genre boundaries are being torn up, really helps us get beyond the boring and reductive binaries the Jacobin piece trades in.

the site that counts Richard Hanania, Sohrab Ahmari, and Julie Bindel has thoughts about music criticism: https://unherd.com/2026/05/the-day-the-music-critic-died/

(I didn't read the whole thing bc obv I'm not paying for that shit)

https://archive.ph/3pO8j

Xp - that’s the odd thing about a lot of those writers imo — there isn’t the examination I would want to see about the structural aspects of what becomes mainstream and why.

Though perhaps they consider that “subculture studies” or some other term that removes them as writers from thinking that they have “the right” to write about such music? … Maybe it’s an intellectual factionalism in re the Birmingham School? Idk … There definitely is a faction of left/Marxist criticism that just avoids discussion of subcultures and the aspects of “protest” involved because the writers prefer to look at the “bigger picture” which is the mainstream. I think it also reflects older Marxist ideas about “the revolution” and “the proletariat” and vanguardism that have evolved into ~this~

For some reason this makes me think about anthropology as an academic practice… like perhaps writing about the Miami noise scene would be the equivalent of studying hierarchies in a remote island in the Indian Ocean … as in, how significant is this subject to “our reality”?

In 2002, the site had declared the great cult band Pavement’s yearning slacker classic “Gold Soundz” the best song of the Nineties: in 2022, it was now Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” — and not even the original but, inexplicably, the even duller, inferior Remix version. Between the tops of these two lists lies the whole silly history of music criticism in the 21st century so far.

I absolutely agree with this insight on its surface and absolutely serves as a great synecdoche of music crit writ large for the last 20 years. The real caveat that this guy is too blinkered to see is that it really was just moving from one bad decision to another bad decision

Damn, Pitchfork went from one corny way of thinking about music to a different corny way of thinking about music

Anyone who thinks that the worth of a music criticism site can be judged by the choice of best song of a decade alone doesn’t really understand music criticism IMO, and perhaps shouldn’t try to write about music professionally.

Which isn’t to say these choices aren’t corny, but this isn’t the QED the writer thinks it is.

Complaining about a publication becoming broadly popular and then growing into a generalist platform you no longer have an interest in is pretty much cultural criticism 101.

Article would have been much shorter if he just wrote “I liked their earlier stuff better”

Was never a fan of Pitchfork, but I do not see any problem with niche music websites when there are already plenty of generalist sites out there.