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

[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.)