Frank Kogan

I believe Tom is referring to this: http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-list-from-nme-and-some-thoughts.html

I thought his subject was a quote from the piece, but that's not the case. It certainly "feels" like a sentiment that gets bandied about by hopeful provocateurs, but that's just my impression, and nothing more. There is this line in the essay:

"For pop writing to be as entertaining as pop it's got to be diverse but the writing being put out there, the writers that are paid, are almost indistinguishable from each other, much like the middling musical mulch those writers spend most of their time boosting."

In any event, I'm one of the people who "liked" the post, and I did it so I primarily could refer to it if desired. But I did admire the... I dunno, frustration, maybe, that Tom expressed. I believe a wealth of approaches is on the table, to be selected and contrasted and discarded at will. I don't restrict myself to experiencing a particular musical form, or cinematic form, or narrative form, or comedic form, and thus I reserve the right to pull from dry biography or personal essays or structural analysis or cultural criticism or original theory or a DJ spinning on the second Sunday of every month. Would that everything were as entertaining as good pop, or good sex, or good trips, or good travel.

My thoughts on the matter are only partially-formed, which is why I've got Tom's post and the F.U.N.K. post at the ready. I certainly don't mind fervor, and I'm intensely wary of proscribed approaches. Still, bad facts are bad facts, and listicles (which the F.U.N.K. author implicitly denounces as the "capsule-review lubrication of commerce") would seem to be a writing modality that hasn't done me much good in the last 10+ years. Time and thought will likely change that, as it usually does.