Frank Kogan

Both your and dubdobdee's comments (moving fast and confusedly because stuff was cohering in my sleepy head just as I was to call it a night - but on some level I trust you to unpack ahaha): music (to me) is a core of non-textual unresolvability surrounded by flaking onion skins of text, and the fun (to me) lies in attempts at translation to/from the world of words where I reside (being a Writer) that are doomed in entirety but fruitful in partiality.** The books, film, TV, theatre that get talked about in popular culture and online have a core of text - they start with words, with a narrative, unless they're of a consciously deconstructive/non-linear/imagistic sort (and we've been taught what to do with that stuff). Ultimately you're right, there is no reality, but the former is still a translation while the latter isn't. In a way this makes Music more fun for me, but I also rarely feel like I'm able to actually solve the issue by dissecting it in words - or even come close, or even that it's worth attempting in that sense - which makes me take it less seriously. If I write a 2000-word essay about class issues in Titanic or Harry Potter, I feel like I've actually said something about Titanic or Harry Potter. If I write the same 2000-word essay about class issues with regard to Vampire Weekend The Band, so what, I haven't said anything about Vampire Weekend THE MUSIC. Or I have, because I've dyed a whole bunch of onion skins and stuck them under the microscope, but it would feel to me as if I'd said proportionately less.

So this may be me projecting my own feelings onto music critics/writers/bloggers at large. But I really do suspect, feeding back into yr frustration w/r/t what conversations music writers are willing to engage in to what extent, that most ppl who're attracted to writing about music in particular, are attracted because certain strategies appeal to them, and maybe that means certain other strategies are less appealing to them as a group, or they'd be drawn to dissecting other stuff instead. Again, coming from Media/SFF whose online chattering class is rife with ppl whose day jobs are in academia or the sciences... I think the urge is spottily there, though, and that (being a baby steps urge) it wants to feed into a clearly markered "srs academic talk" channel, or Simon Reynolds wouldn't be so popular ahahahaaaa. (He really is! I went to a dubstep gig with a music blogger who said the only critic he read was Reynolds! He was OK with making fun of him though.)

As I said in the earlier comment I'm not 100% appreciative of this tendency in media/SFF debates - I feel like the pendulum has swung too far toward earnestness, and in particular that a great deal of the (dark) energy of fan production is its willingness to be offensive/messy/in bad taste, which also means offensive to us, the in-group. But the issues raised are important. And, yes, all of the above doesn't mean music writers avoid That Stuff entirely, it means that they GEDDIT RONG in a piecemeal fashion. <-- reaaaaally long version of "I agree with agrammar, his was a valuable essay that wasn't about Vampire Weekend The Music at all".