Listening to albums is too much of a chore

[koganbot]

Quote of the day, from skyecaptain:

Why on earth won't someone who wants to talk about Taylor Swift's "image" please listen to her album fucking ONCE before they write things about her? PLEASE.

Have only read some of the essays, but of the ones I read Chuck's was the only one I understood.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Maura's and Rich's are great too, as expected. The-Dream one is not, the Animal Collective one makes me want to throw knives at everyone and if I read the Das Racist one I will ACTUALLY throw knives at everyone so it's best that I don't click on it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think the AC one is good actually - a pretty honest, open explanation of their appeal to at least some of their audiences. If you hadn't heard them and read it you'd be well equipped to work out whether you'd enjoy it or not, and the essay wisely leaves the "not" angle quite open.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

it infuriated me. as per ilx:

the constant "white guys in their 30s"..."adults pretending to be kids"...refrain just made me think, oh fuck the fuck OFF you tiresome dudes and your tiresome mid-privileged-life crises, just fuck OFF, these things are not interesting or worthwhile.

I've encountered this a lot more in film, but in short I AM SO BORED OF THE STRAIGHT WHITE EDUCATED MALE'S MID-LIFE CRISIS. JUST GO AWAY FOREVER.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Lex, read my comment again. The essay takes your reaction into account, says that's fine, stay well away.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Surely this has to be closer to quarter-life -- if I'm not mistaken, Panda Bear doesn't actually have any kids yet. The only thing that infuriates me is how demonstrably stupid and earnest the lyrics are -- if they were one or the other I wouldn't mind (in the past, when I liked them, AnCo were pretty self-evidently stupid, but also quite a bit of fun lyrically, as in the gibberish of "Who Could Win a Rabbit." The trouble started when Panda Bear made the memorial album about his father -- but that one had the benefit of NO ENGLISH SPOKEN, and I quite liked it at the time).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As I said in the interview with Rockcritics, re: teenpop I've staked out territory on both sides of the confessional/bubblegum divide (divide is the wrong word, perhaps "sphere"?) and enjoy both for various reasons. Occasionally they overlap, but for the most part I keep my enjoyment of, e.g., A*Teens distinct from my enjoyment of Ashlee. The problem with AnCo is that they're trying for Ashlee (that is, not-humorless earnestness) and end up sounding much dumber than they would if they just said some dumb shit. Whereas I think Ashlee doesn't pull off dumb shit nearly as well as serious shit, though she pulls off dumb shit more convincingly than AnCo pull off serious shit.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Here's the offending passage I was referring to, may actually write a post about this:

Actual schoolgirl innocence was bliss for Taylor Swift, the red-state sweetheart made all the more innocent by Kanye West's interrupting-cow bit at the MTV Video Music Awards (triggered when Taylor beat out Beyoncé for a statue, and overshadowing Gaga's own bloody theatrics). Straight from the school of Mad Men's Peggy Olson, Swift commands attention through virtuosity, not sexuality, her teen rebellion cloaked in giddy couplets. By casting herself as Juliet in the blissful "Love Story," she reduces a Shakespearean tragedy to a dreamy, doe-eyed lunchroom crush: "Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone/I'll be waiting, all that's left to do is run/You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess."

Does she know what she's doing? Not really. At just 20, she's merely playing to her strengths. But Swift, like Peggy, is increasingly aware of her power. She certainly owns the coyness, as was evident during her Saturday Night Live opening monologue, wherein she (adorably) sang, "I like writing songs about douchebags who cheat on me" and referenced "that guy, Joe [Jonas, you'll recall], who broke up with me on the phone," offering a quick shout-out: "Hey, Joe, I'm doing real well." It's true, Joe. Swift had a great year, the alpha female in sales and accolades, if not aggression.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The thing about "Love Story" is that Taylor does know what she's doing - I assume from the smarts and precision she generally exhibits that she does actually know how Romeo & Juliet ends - and this fact actually makes the song astonishingly arrogant (in a good way): she's saying, no, my worldview believes in happy endings, and I'm going to rewrite the plot of Romeo & Juliet to make that point.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

That whole essay was bullshit, though. I mean, first of all, if you're writing an article about the state of women in pop in 2009, quoting an AskMen article -- from 2006 -- is not the best way to bolster your argument.

I don't know if I really need a second of all, but second of all: was Rihanna that unsuccessful? By what standards? And what "blurring of gender lines" does Lady GaGa do? She doesn't blur, she opens up Photoshop and applies a "sharpen" filter over and over until the lines are super-stark -- exaggerated "femininity" is half her schtick. Which the author herself acknowledges: Her way of shunning feminine ideals is to embrace them to a repulsive extreme. So, um, she shuns feminine ideals by not shunning them at all? And, um, Taylor Swift doesn't know what she's doing but makes sharp and self-referential comments that indicate she knows what she's doing? I hate to break it to you, Clover Hope, but you kind of suck at this whole writing thing. (And PS - Blurring gender lines does not make you a hermaphrodite in any way, not even in "theory.")

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Agreed on all counts. But none of this gets wrong what those artists do quite as profoundly -- I don't think she makes much of a claim for GaGa (or Rihanna's) music (she's right at least that the Rihanna album is "dark" and there isn't a standout single, sure), but with Taylor the whole picture is ass-backwards. With the others it just feels like contextual speculation that may be misguided (or even factually wrong), but with Taylor it's a wholesale misrepresentation of what she does at the most basic comprehension level -- she's not just interpreting Taylor questionably, she's not taking the effort to even try.

[koganbot]

From the essay:

Actual schoolgirl innocence was bliss for Taylor Swift, the red-state sweetheart made all the more innocent by Kanye West's interrupting-cow bit at the MTV Video Music Awards

Straight from the school of Mad Men's Peggy Olson, Swift commands attention through virtuosity, not sexuality, her teen rebellion cloaked in giddy couplets.

Putting aside whether or not I agree with what Clover Hope is trying to say, what is she trying to say? These sentences seem to be written in code. "Bliss" possibly means "Taylor made a lot of money without knowing what she was doing" (though why Hope doesn't think Taylor knows what she's doing isn't explained). The experiences recounted in Taylor's songs about her schoolgirl days - like her getting tormented in junior high and her best friend getting her heart crushed as a freshman - sure don't seem like bliss, and as Dave suggests they may be something Hope never bothered to find out about by, e.g., listening to the songs.

"Commands attention through virtuosity not sexuality" possibly means "Taylor's singing and songwriting is at a virtuoso level but she doesn't wear blatantly revealing costumes" - though I'd say Taylor's sexiness comes through powerfully, the dresses not remotely suppressing her figure or her breasts. Not to mention that sex is an actual big issue in some of her songs. And not to deride her singing and songwriting, but it's not as if her looking so good and dressing so appealingly don't also command attention. And if she didn't look so appealing she might not have gotten the attention, no matter how much she deserved to.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I'm reaching a little bit here -- not least bcz (i) i've barely given t.swift a listen and (ii) ditto AnCo -- but it strikes me that there's more going on than just a recalcitrant old guard failing to give uyp to the New Thing within a coherent culture; this gulf is beginning to remind me of the near-absolute non-communication between the plateauing midbrow jazz of the late 50s and the rock that rockwrite was seeking and celebrating from the early 60s

in lots of ways there were lots of potential routes from one sensibility to another -- and interestingly many of the key voices actually stood more between the two worlds than is always easily recalled (bangs and meltzer and leroi jones) -- but it felt like a stubborn inability to cede worth, on the part of the jazzniks mostly (older, and with an achieved aesthetic they didn't want to let go of); the "new thing" (free jazz or "fire music" as people today seem to prefer to call it) was a lot more a response to rock than it generally let on, or at the very least an expansion into the same kind of territory...

obviously there are differences also: i suppose i'm kiting the idea that the gulf WON"T be bridged, as it wasn't (and isn't) between the midbrow jazz sensibility and the dylan-jagger-iggy sensibility... ?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

oops, the two uses of "new thing" there are very confusing: they indicate quite different elements in the two situations i'm claiming are analogous!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What's very interesting in this is, per the (dumb) Azzerad comment about how "quiet is the new loud" (or whatever), the newbies are taking up their middlebrow jazzbo defensive stances. And the shut-out seems interesting, too -- Dirty Projectors v. R&B (as comparison point, anyway, not necessarily WAR) reminds me of something a jazz prof said once along the lines of "Herbie Hancock invented rock music," using the new (old?) ideal to say "even when we deign to play your game we do it our way, hence it is better." Which isn't giving indie-centralia any more false "power" or clout than, e.g., jazz had compared to rock at that time (commercially less popular, at any rate).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What is the gulf between here? Boomer-rock and modern indie? Surely not? Newly semi-mainstream indie and R&B headz? But then who is the old and who the new?

[koganbot]

Yikes, I go away for a few hours, and people actually start posting on my livejournal threads. But anyway, I can't figure out who is who in your gulf, not just in the sense of a gulf between types of music, but between types of critics, and between types of fans - not that I mean to separate out "musicians," "fans," and "critics" as separate classes, but critics who like Taylor Swift and critics who like AnCo generally belong to the same class, whereas the bulk of Taylor Swift fans don't belong to that class but the bulk of AnCo fans do (very loosely speaking) - the quasi-intelligentsia, I call it. And the bulk of Taylor Swift fans don't know AnCo fans exist, whereas the bulk of AnCo fans do know that Taylor Swift exists and may have tiny inklings of what some of her music sounds like - though I'm guessing that they have little clue of what that sound does, unless it does it for them.

But anyway, I think you're wrong about there being little crossover. My guess is that in the general broader market for AnCo, the fans don't like Taylor, but the fans of AnCo who are or became critics do like at least some Taylor, or at least are willing to acknowledge that someone like Taylor could be good. Anyway, you should peruse The Singles Jukebox, because lots of critics there are repping for some indie, whereas only one or two of those people dislike Taylor Swift, and some of them prefer Taylor to the indie they like. Whereas the full-throttle anti-indie people at the Jukebox are much more anti-indie (not that there are a lot of full-throttle anti-indie people there).

But the article I was referring to, which was dumb about Taylor, may not have been written by an AnCo fan.

And now I have to go away for several more hours.

[koganbot]

And the bulk of Taylor Swift fans don't know AnCo fans exist

Meant to write "don't know AnCo exists," though it would follow also that they don't know AnCo fans exist.

[koganbot]

Here's the essay that Dave and Lex and Erika and I are objecting to. The gulf here seems to be nothing more than the classic gulf between journalist and subject matter (also between way of expressing oneself and ideas).

[koganbot]

But the article I was referring to, which was dumb about Taylor, may not have been written by an AnCo fan.

In fact, her ballot is mostly hip-hop and r&b. The only indie artists on it are Phoenix. (She listed Eminem's Relapse third, a vote I found astoundingly strange, but it does mark her as potentially interesting.)

[koganbot]

Why on earth won't someone who wants to talk about Taylor Swift's "image" please listen to her album fucking ONCE before they write things about her?

I'll take a serious shot at answering this, though my answer is speculation, since I don't know anything about Clover Hope other than her lousy P&J essay: she doesn't listen to the album (or doesn't listen with engaged attention) for the same reason that someone will reference my book without reading it, or critique what I said about Paris Hilton without reading what I said about Paris Hilton, or will explain my PBS metaphor without reading the passages in which I created and used the PBS metaphor, etc. It's that these people think they already know what's going to be there, so they don't think they have to listen or look. Or when to a small extent they do listen and look they do so with no understanding, since they only see and hear what they want to and go in with the idea that there's nothing new to learn here.

You ought to check out Geoffrey Himes' essay for this year's Nashville Scene Country Music Critics Poll, since Himes thinks Taylor is pretty great but he nonetheless ends his essay insisting that Taylor needs to learn from country mentors about the country heritage, but he doesn't grasp (1) that she already has mentors (e.g. Liz Rose) and a heritage that she almost certainly knows something about, whether or not it matches up with what Himes thinks her heritage needs to be, and (2) that he and we and some country artists etc. have something to learn about country and about life from her.

The affliction here is the need to always feel that one knows better, in advance.

[koganbot]

Clover Hope's review of Love vs. Money isn't penetrating but it is competent, and she obviously put work into listening to the thing. One of the problems with her P&J piece is that she was trying to fit too much into too small a space.