qwerty south
no use for a witticism
david toop (the encyclopedia?)
nik cohn
pootle and nikesh @ www.ukhh.com
byron crawford @ xxlmag.com
jeff chang
nik cohn
pootle and nikesh @ www.ukhh.com
byron crawford @ xxlmag.com
jeff chang
Favourite rock writers - and why?
- Thread starter Buick6
- Start date
Part of the problem is that everything is restricted to word-count.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKEN HATE all the smart-arses that write for the Villgae Voice in this cooler-the-thou tone pseudo-street smart tone, informing you of nothing.
It's like none of them actually like music coz they're all smarter than it or something, it's really pretentious and demeaning.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKEN HATE all the smart-arses that write for the Villgae Voice in this cooler-the-thou tone pseudo-street smart tone, informing you of nothing.
It's like none of them actually like music coz they're all smarter than it or something, it's really pretentious and demeaning.
F
foret
Guest
the vv critics are like the fifth derivative of simon reynolds, all cultural ephemera and undercooked telelologies with nothing underneath the formulized structure. the film critics do the same with j hoberman (another fine critic with too many epigones trailing behind for his own good) except they're writiing about hou hsaio hsien or ron howard rather than some execrable pitchforkindie or m.i.a. or whatever so it's even more shit.
the number of good (meta)pop critics is necessarily small, outside the usual coterie of sites everyone here probably visits anyway.
the number of good (meta)pop critics is necessarily small, outside the usual coterie of sites everyone here probably visits anyway.
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ian penman
simon reynolds
sasha frere-jones (i wish more music magazine editors in the uk would read his new yorker stuff - covers anything and everything from the mainstream to the really avant - boredoms this week - in a fantastically clear, accessible way).
carl wilson
barney hoskyns
jeff chang
philip sherburne
peter shapiro
julianne shepherd
tim finney
also been loving a lot of stephen troussé's longer reviews in uncut lately.
these are only a few of the people i like. there are many, many more, but these would probably form the core of any magazine i would edit.
jockey slut was a terrible, awful, horrible magazine – and i used to write for it now and again! it was virulently soulboy-snobby, stultifyingly middlebrow and everything that was bad about the acid-house generation of writers. it ignored jungle and drum & bass until it was all over, only really covered 2step/dubstep/etc after a massive fuss. (there's a bit of history here. i actually wrote a piece criticising the mag's lack of coverage of "urban" music and the possible motivations for it, which caused way more trouble than i ever imagined.) seriously, none of those "dance" magazines were any good really and that assertion is pretty much borne up by how few of their writers have gone on to write for anywhere else after they all closed up. (come to think of it, most of those who have aren't a great advertisement for their alma maters, either.) strangely lots of former jockey slut writers are still around, but that's largely due to the OMM. steve yates, when he's writing about hip-hop, martin clark and a few others being notable exceptions to this dreadfully sweeping generalisation.
simon reynolds
sasha frere-jones (i wish more music magazine editors in the uk would read his new yorker stuff - covers anything and everything from the mainstream to the really avant - boredoms this week - in a fantastically clear, accessible way).
carl wilson
barney hoskyns
jeff chang
philip sherburne
peter shapiro
julianne shepherd
tim finney
also been loving a lot of stephen troussé's longer reviews in uncut lately.
these are only a few of the people i like. there are many, many more, but these would probably form the core of any magazine i would edit.
jockey slut was a terrible, awful, horrible magazine – and i used to write for it now and again! it was virulently soulboy-snobby, stultifyingly middlebrow and everything that was bad about the acid-house generation of writers. it ignored jungle and drum & bass until it was all over, only really covered 2step/dubstep/etc after a massive fuss. (there's a bit of history here. i actually wrote a piece criticising the mag's lack of coverage of "urban" music and the possible motivations for it, which caused way more trouble than i ever imagined.) seriously, none of those "dance" magazines were any good really and that assertion is pretty much borne up by how few of their writers have gone on to write for anywhere else after they all closed up. (come to think of it, most of those who have aren't a great advertisement for their alma maters, either.) strangely lots of former jockey slut writers are still around, but that's largely due to the OMM. steve yates, when he's writing about hip-hop, martin clark and a few others being notable exceptions to this dreadfully sweeping generalisation.
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Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
I know I'm veering off topic here but I read a lot of sportswriting (review it too) and I must say I'm surprised by these comments. Simon Barnes is, without doubt, one of the most pompous, tiresome, misinformed, smug and complacent gits who's ever written about sports and that's saying something). Unbearable flatulent waffle that lacks all merit, drips with self-congratution, and makes sixth form stabs to appear authoritiative and 'learned' by dropping the most crass references to 'high culture' etc. Christ the man deserves a long, slow painful death. He represents all that is wrong about English broadsheet journalism. Which brings me neatly onto... the Observer Sports Monthly. That magazine is so bad it actually made me stop buying the paper. The writing is at best non-descript, the stories dull and the editor relies, tiresomely on the staid format of the 'star interview' which is dubious enough at the best of times, but almost universally disasterous when it comes to sportspeople who, with a v small number of exceptions, have little to say worth reporting. If you read the best American sportswriting, say, you'll be knocked over not only by the quality of the prose, but by its imaginative range of the stories it covers and the approaches it takes. There's just nothing of that in that excrable rag the OMM... oh and the tw*t who edits it got arrested in Germany in the World Cup for racially abusing an official who refused him entry to a stadium because he didn't have a ticket. Just about sums it up really. Nice.
Anyway, sorry to interrupt. I'm glad I've got that off my chest. Please, carry on...
Rambler said:
I was reading that with an increased sense of bewildered outrage, until I went back to the top and saw the by-line. John Harris makes Simon Barnes look like Edmund White. What a c*nt.
Where Gek-Opel now? His comment a couple of weeks back that broadsheet coverage of music is the worse thing to happen to music journalism ever is so so right.
swears
preppy-kei
Rambler said:
The problem with this sort of journalism is that it's writing about music for an audience that doesn't care about music, so anything that isn't the blandest MOR or second hand NME tips, is brought down to the level of a corny human interst piece.
His position seems to be that he's a boring nerdy fuck that's trying to explain to other boring nerdy fucks something they have no interest whatsoever in. It has this undertone of suspicion towards anyone that likes non-mainstream music. As if they're just posing, and when nobody's watching they like to slip on a bit of Joss Stone.
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Is that why it eventually gets around toswears said:
"Listening to a song called Wow-Is-Uh-Me-Bop, everything coheres, and I actually start to get it. I thus go back to Trout Mask, and despite the fact that the really difficult stuff is still vexing me, it palpably begins to open up. I now understand: it is not about verse-chorus-verse or any of that prosaic nonsense. At its most extreme, I am not sure I even like it as music. What matters is the fact that it pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together, and those lyrics."
Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
John Doe said:
Okay... I admit I tend to avoid any star interviews like the plague. The best pieces I have read in OSM recently have been non-interview pieces and usually built around lesser known sports like freediving.
I still think it's better than the music mag, but here's the thing: I've only really got into sport over the past 2 years and there's a lot of stuff that's still quite new to me - so a piece doesnt necessarily have to be brilliantly written or coming from a brand new angle to engage me. By contrast, I've been reading about music for almost 2 decades - so it takes a lot to get over my seen-it-before threshhold.
John Doe said:
Care to post any links to reliable online sources of quality US sports writing?
John Doe said:
Well, I'm sure some of our most revered music writers must have pulled stunts like that in their time... Not that it's an excuse.
The human interest I could live with; it's the apparent contempt he has for the music itself (and the smugly assumed kinship that this gives his readers) that I can't stand. Just look at the implied reader that is set up in this first paragraph:
Or, "most music fans, people like you, with iPods, with so many CDs you can only listen to them a few times before moving on, people reading the music section of the Friday broadsheets, know that we're pretty unadventurous, unimaginative types with conservative tastes, suspicious of the new or strange. Mostly we buy 'off the wall' albums because, let's be honest, we're a little bit vain, its certainly not because we actually like this weirdo stuff. Well, I'm one of you, and I'm going to write about this unsettling experience so you don't have to feel guilty at never having unwrapped that CD."
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Eh? I may not be reading between the lines adequately, but it sounded to me like he took an album that he (and yeah, he assumes a lot of his readership) knew was 'seminal' but had never really appreciated, spent a lot of time working at 'getting into it', more or less succeeded, and implied that this might be a worthwhile activity for anyone else who had been in the same position.Rambler said:
Broadsheet music journalism gets a lot of flack around here, some of it justified, but people often seem to forget that Dissensus is a bit of a bubble, and not everyone in the world listens to Japanese noise while they're doing the dishes. Complaining that the OMM doesn't say much to Dissensians (although I quite like it to find out what people outside of the bubble of 'good taste' are actually listening to) is a bit like complaining that a pop science book doesn't say much of interest to nuclear physicists...
I think John Harris is one of the better Guardian music writers, or at least several thousand miles ahead of cretins like Kitty Empire (then again, so are the 3am Team..). For some real grade-Z excrement, check this
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/live8/story/0,,1520268,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/live8/story/0,,1520268,00.html
Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
Try this:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b...st+American+Sport+Writing+2005&Go.x=10&Go.y=9
'The Best American Sports Writing' is an annual collection. I used to buy mine from Sportspages off Charing Cross Road (that fine institituion is, alas, no more) - it's now a website. Try here:
http://www.sportsbooksdirect.co.uk/
You can scroll through sport by sport or search for title. Oh - I've just noticed they've got the Best American Sports Writing 2004 and 2003 collections:
http://www.sportsbooksdirect.co.uk/search_results.asp
I haven't read this collection for three years or so (might invest meself) but from buying in the past I've found the quality of the writing and the brilliance of the stories to be really astonishing at times.
I think maybe one of the reasons you hate the Observer Music Monthly so much is because you know about music and journalism - and so it's half-hearted, p*ss weak, middle brow approach to the subject just doesn't wash with you. You see through it's approach to music because you're so clued up. Well, I feel the same about the Sports Monthly (although I dunno if I'm exactly as clued up about sports as you obviously are about music). Once you get a basic grasp of sports and what makes good sports writing, you really see what a god-awful, complacent, unimaginative piece of shite that magazine really is. It could be so much better it's painful. While it wraps itself in self-congratulation it represents, to me, the most enormous missed opportunity - and I think that's why I despite it so passionately.
And I take your point about (ahem) misbehaving music journos. It's just that OSM editor Jason f*ck nuts Cowley is such a look down his nose middle class stuffed shirt that to hear about him losing it like a lagered up hoolie made me laugh out loud. I think he had one of those 'Do you know who I am?' moments - and came off worse.
Hope the links are useful btw
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I just don't get that at all. Tthe whole point of the article seems to be the transition from that tone ('this seems to be just stupid stuff that weird people listen to to pretend to be clever') to actually getting at least a glimpse of what's going on and why there's more to it than that. It's a ploy - admittedly not a particularly subtle one - to get people who aren't dyed in the wool Beefheart fans to read about music that to them doesn't make any sense. It's only real sin is in assuming that the readers are a bit suspicious of that sort of music and trying to alleviate those suspicions, but given that it's a sunday suplement, that's probably true for at least some of them.swears said: