EddyFest 2011

[koganbot]

You know that uncut version of Stroheim's Greed that you somehow possess and that you finally managed to set time aside to watch this week, vowing that you would let nothing stand in the way? Well this is what stands in the way: Chuck Eddy talks to eight of his friends, it's on podcast, three podcasts, three hours, it's over on rockcritics.com, I'm one of the talking friends, the others are Phil Dellio, Ned Raggett, Alfred Soto, Edd Hurt, Amy Phillips, Kevin John Bozelka, and Christopher Weingarten. Scott Woods oversees it all. As for a preview of what was said, I don't know yet, I haven't listened, it was by phone and we didn't all talk to him at once*: but Randy Montana is good, this year's U.S. Top 40 isn't, and what's so new about mixing electro with r&b and hip-hop anyway?



The occasion for this gathering was the impending publication of Chuck's Rock And Roll Always Forgets by Duke University Press.

*Chuck and I tried to talk at once, however.

Comments

Accidents

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This was great -- haven't gotten through the whole thing (working backwards, basically), but I like Chuck's point about accidental discovery. I think that's something I've gotten a lot better at doing in the past couple years, and I notice that I've even started finding somewhat artificial ways for "accidents" to happen. Downloading based on names and covers, $1-$3 CD finds, etc. etc. And I guess a lot of the "accident" is purely in being interested despite not expecting to be. Wish I could carry on a conversation about Nadia Oh, for instance, which was semi-serendipitous, and I'm not sure if my inability to write about her says more about me or Nadia (we'll see).

Couple quotes

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Here are the bits I quoted on Twitter as I listened:

Eddy: Maybe this time 'disco sucks' is right -- maybe this time disco really does suck!

Kogan: My guess is that there's nowhere for Ke$ha to go. How many times can you throw up in the closet?

Kogan: Punks don't grow; they stop.

Kogan: Is there any everything-rock in 2011?
Eddy: Everything became everything-rock. So everything-rock is no big deal & I don't care.

Eddy: I won, sure, but everything's...
Kogan: ...Mediocre.
Eddy: If "Pump Up the Volume" came out now, I'd like it more than anything on the radio.

Eddy: Rock stopped being afraid of hip-hop and dance music, but that didn't make it better. All this fusion happened, and it sucked anyway.

Re: Couple quotes

[koganbot]

The thing is, Chuck hasn't liked the last decade and a half of R&B, so he's not really going to go wild over anything that's a fusion with it either. Whereas in 2008 I didn't see a way not to be enthralled with and excited by Danity Kane's Welcome To The Dollhouse, all that harmony and polyphony floating around like surf spray. And my disappointment is that little that followed compares with it. "Disturbia" held the promise, as if to say, "We don't even need a group to pull this off." In the context of my hopes, Last Train To Paris was actually a disappointment. Yes, it's good, and people weren't expecting a good Diddy album, but Diddy'd already fostered a better album two years earlier.

The thing about Teena Marie's everything rock was that she was excited by everything, so at the times when her everything coalesced into elements I happened to like - "Square Biz," hey, rappers can rap about anything, so (1) I can rap, (2) about Maya Angelou - the results were terrific. Whereas now we have rappers who realize that, with AutoTune, they can aspire to music that they really admire, like Coldplay.

I do think the dance wave rescued Max and Luke, whose pop-rock was degenerating into loud goo. Ke$ha saved it by making it loud spew.

But I loved Trick Daddy's "Nann Nigga" back in '99 more than I loved Welcome To The Dollhouse in '08. What's missing now is a music that's catchy, got a strong popular constituency, yet is formally extreme. So music to run up against, or to flee from, or to not comprehend, or to really stretch or alter whatever it "fuses" with. Or maybe there is such music, say in European and British dance, but it's just not very good; or it is good but I'm just not finding it (or looking for it). Hyphy and jerk never produced a genius, did it? Or maybe it did, maybe produced several, but they never reached the critical mass of interest among fans, so I never heard them. Or they did reach the critical mass and I still didn't hear them. One or two really good artists can change my whole perception.

Meanwhile, there's the Baddest Female Seoul City Ever Had, who's got rap and beauty blobs that, rather than mulching each other to death, create a great fizzy shake.