what is the worst thing about this article?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/27/music-writing-bangs-marcus

the total disregard of the internet? the filler-esque quality to the long descriptions of bangs and marcus? the suggestion that "older voices" are "growing ever louder" with nothing to back that up except the fact that people like john harris write repetitive and irrelevant encomia to them? this article is 1,000,000,000x aggravating but i need you to help me identify exactly why.

he does mention online stuff near the end.

given that any article that suggests that anything isn't as good as it used to be is going to be greeted with catcalls, i thought it was a decent — if a bit heavy on the long quotes — article.

I posted this on the rolling Guardian zing thread but I guess the weekend ghost town explained the deaf ears

But yeah, I think a majority of the observations are true and valid (albeit nothing that made me think 'hmm, never looked at it that way', which would hold true for most ppl on here I suspect) but it's, being polite here, light on self-awareness given the writer's own career arc

Perhaps Bangs's greatest gift was the ability to slice through cant and sentimentality

(yawns) the worst thing about this article is the cant and sentimentality about the 60s & 70s! it's like an encore performance of every reverent baby-boomer cliche in the book.

yes.

oh yes i forgot; he mentions pitchfork.

There is interesting, expansive writing about music online - as proved by the US website Pitchfork, and a new generation of writers including the New Yorker's Sasha Frere Jones and K-Punk (Mark Fisher). But if music writing is at least partly a descriptive enterprise, you begin to understand why it might be falling away: when the main event is only a click away, there isn't always much point to rhapsodies or forensic critiques.

there's a lot hurriedly going on in this graf: the internet, "new writers", and the questionable, article-worthy contention that if music is easy to find and listen to, then music writing has less of a reason to exist. which could be true, for all i know. but if it is, writing that appears in magazines would suffer from this new kind of pointlessness just as much as writing that appears on the internet. i suspect it actually may not be true anyway.

Seems to me that the 'music writing' that's been rendered more pointless by illegal DL culture is the perfunctory downpager/capsule review where it's half-intended as a consumer guide for people who might be keen to have an idea what they're getting before they spend £10 or whatever on a CD. In which case why does it start and finish with this sort of detached sneer at the idea of someone putting together a journal of music writing that is at least supposed to have substance and literary value?

for me, capsule reviews are just as important as they've always been. how else am i going to decide what to illegally preview?

the last sentence might be the worst.

how else am i going to decide what to illegally preview?

Ha, well you could look at it that way

I have never understood people getting passionate about music writing. Music, yes, but music writing, wtf? I've never seen it as anything more than a tool, I don't think, and so these kind of rhapsodic articles about it confuse me. I don't give 2 shits for Lester Bangs.

cant take all the 'music writing is crap now cos rock is a museum' stuff seriously as harris was such a britpop fan. some of what hes saying is actually not that inaccurate but its just too much of the usual 'i miss how things used to be' moan.

"I have never understood people getting passionate about music writing."

how about people getting passionate about food writing or nature writing? do you understand that? how about people who own multiple books on cricket or bridge or chess? do you understand them?

cuz it's really not that hard to understand.

gosh this was long

also not that awful, i know it's not exactly 'vinyl reckoning' but for a mojo/uncut type it seems, you know, not dreadful

LOOPS! i love that name. i wanna write something for LOOPS! who do i contact? someone has to publish my Michael Franks essay.

as far as this article goes, this guy should have looked harder for new good stuff. it's out there, it's just all over the place. takes some digging. and investigating.

I don't give 2 shits for Lester Bangs.

― Sickamous Mouthall (Scik Mouthy), Monday, June 29, 2009 7:16 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

challops alert

the worst thing about this article is the writer's haircut. he looks like shrek's prince

I don't think those things are the same. People own books about cricket, bridge, chess, etc, because they love cricket, bridge, or chess. Writing about music I don't mind. I've done enough of it. I own a handful of books of music writing.

Writing about music writing, though, fucking baffles me. That's not the same as owning a book on cricket or food or whatever. The reason I own Nigel Slater books isn't because I'm into the history of food writers; it's because his recipes taste great and are written in a way I find conducive to cooking. I didn't get into writing about music because I was into music writing; I was asked to do some because I love music and I can string a sentence together (allegedly). I never really enjoyed it and I certainly didn't ever feel like I was part of some shared history, or that music writing was some kind of artform in its own right. I'm not devaluing criticism here - I think it's important, massively - but this article isn't bemoaning a lack of criticism; it's bemoaning the dying of an artform that I don'\t view as an artform. I don't understand people who follow music writers like they'd follow a football team.

I don't understand people who follow music writers like they'd follow a football team.

Neither do I; if someone makes a bad record, fucking drop them!

(I don't understand people who follow football teams either, to be honest; I just watch whoever's playing the most attractive football and scoring the most goals.)

youre the anti-LJ!

haaa

props to a departed warrior, btw: http://ichlugebullets.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/steven-wells-conor-mcnicholas-gianni-rivera-and-where-the-fuck-are-we-going-right-now/#more-1303

a slightly different perspective, i think you'd agree

(and doing that whole football/music writer thing without seeming like a fool)

"Writing about music writing, though, fucking baffles me."

how long have you been on this board?

okay, let's take this slow. some people are interested in music writing and criticism. some of THOSE people have opinions about the people who write about music professionally and what they would like to see more of/less of in the world of music writing/journalism/criticism.

it's a crazy mixed-up world we live in.

Don’t get me wrong here: the last thing we need right now is a return to the days of Daniel Booth, Dele Fadele and Steve Sutherland dropping opinions4u all over the gaff.

Yeah, we do.

During the lack of actual insight or talent, a good punchup will suffice.

Look at this place!

writing about music writing is like dancing about architecture dancing?

tracer i think the worst thing about the article is that it doesn't even consider the huge changes in material circumstances and media production over the last 30-40 years. music isn't the same, the media isn't the same, the way people read and buy isn't the same, but this dude thinks it's all somebody's fault

ps i skimmed this it cos each sentence i read was just bullshit

a++ skimming

Moreover, though we may miss prose as vibrant and irreverent as that written by such rare talents as Kent and Bangs, its shortage is not a matter of any editorial failures, but of huge shifts in the way rock music is produced, consumed and understood

ok, so what's his problem?

i don't know, tbh i only skimmed it myself

i think we have comprehensibly proved that the worst thing about this article is that it is too dull for anyone to bother reading all the way through