one exemption

that the following is buried on a secondary blog instead of the last thing posted at pitchfork before the staff commits ritual suicide is why i agree with myself about music criticism mostly being a waste.

guess who

SR writes that maybe the energy expended on the politics of pop should just go back to politics and that that may be a good thing. on some level i agree but then the same bland pluralism and flattening that he sees in the pop landscape is what was turning me off from OWS. lady gaga:underground music::1%:99%. if totalizing change can't even be conceived of in culture, you know, good luck with global political ontology. also peter green:eric clapton::mikhail bakunin:karl marx?

my 2011 in music

I don't think I can write a long post. I am sick of opinions. Especially mine.

Like:

Jacques Greene

Chelsea Wolfe

Clams Casino

Can't Decide:

Grimes

Hate:

Hipster House (ironic distance and dance music don't go together well but people who should know better seem to become enraptured by the pomo bullshit that some people in this scene use to defend this crap - makes me wonder what a lot of people liked about house in the first place)

Vapid "Ethnic" Influences (black people be dancin', yo! "they burn so bright whilst you can only" buy)

Music Criticism ("a latticework of reference points and sources that span the decades and the oceans but never quite manages to invent a reason for itself to exist")

Notes from the underfoot

I guess I haven't been writing because things just feel pretty fucking bleak. Although I have people to commiserate with, as close as here in NYC and as far away as the UK and sometimes Australia, it's not quite comforting to know that we are all in the same boat. It's actually quite distressing. If only because I can't imagine that anything could really be accomplished if we were all in the same room together. The hacienda won't be built.

I have been drinking a lot more than usual lately. Don't worry, I am taking the next weekend or two off. Maybe I'll get some more writing done then.

I do plan on writing a bit about music again. Or maybe I will do so now. I don't know what I mean to say when I say write. Because you all expect paragraphs. Arguments. I don't want to do that. I just want to say that what I find disappointing about music now is that I wish there was something large enough, a statement, a concept album, even, or just a sound, that could really describe an encompass what the world feels like now. I can bitch and moan about how there is nothing new, idea-wise, but that's not quite the problem. Novelty has always been relative. But music now and the discourse surrounding it has concerned itself solely with music, and that is why it is all dead. Music is no longer an interpretation of life as it is or should be, but rather of music itself. Nothing can be accomplished in this way.

You may say to me that this is all my fault. I am depressed. Lots of people aren't. So why should I expect others to have a desire that makes no sense to them. Well. Maybe some people are not fucked, but we are fucked. Which is more arrogant? Trying to speak for more than one person, or asking me to listen to a record about your feelings just because you are you? I prefer a general lie to a specific truth. At least it is a vision.

Am I making sense? I don't know. My mind is still hazy.

People should know better than to accept things the way they are. Don't tell me that when you first heard whatever it is that made you who you are that you wanted taxonomy. "Who would care to contribute to a culture that cannot be satisfied no matter how much it devours, and at whose contact the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is changed to 'history' and 'criticism'?" Only historians and critics, apparently.

Bullisht

Some dude said that life without music would be a mistake but I can't help but feeling that the opposite is true. In my experience, there is no human endeavor that has drawn the distinction between what life could be and what it is better than music. Compared to the sublime feeling I have had listening to music, the drudgery of daily life has been aberrant. I spent too much time listening to music with friends this evening. I haven't been able to fall asleep yet and now I have to be at work in five hours. Surely that is the mistake!