Excellent writings about music

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Excellent writings about music

Postby OhJohnNo » Sun Oct 04, 2015 1:20 pm

I read a lot of articles about music. It suddenly occurred to me that mayhaps we should have a thread for that kind of stuff. Articles, or reviews, or books, or whatever else - even video reviews/lectures will technically count - about music that you find to be interesting, or profound, or moving, or hilarious, or anything like that can go here. Of course since I don't want this thread to just be a linkspam, I'll also say that you should maybe include a bit of a description about what you're linking, or a significant quote from it. Obviously, feel free to discuss each other's links.

I'll start us off with a big cover feature by The New Yorker on one of MatthewNotch's favourite people in the world, and the girl whose music has, actually, become very dear to me since reading it: Grimes. A good interview with an artist can be the most fascinating thing in the world and I think this totally qualifies - people who make art do, after all, tend to be people with unique stories to tell, and Grimes is no exception.

I'll also hold my nose and link a Pitchfork piece - but a good one, I promise! Those do exist! On 808s & Heartbreak, the most perennially underrated Kanye West album, one of my favourites and almost certainly the most influential. History will look kindly upon this album, I think - in fact, it's already starting to.

Anything y'all like? Surely I'm not the only nerd here who likes to read shit about music.
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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby NudgeNudge » Mon Oct 05, 2015 10:25 pm

These were great, OJN. I especially loved Grimes' one: the more I listen to "Oblivion" the more I love it. Music is the most complex, abstract, emotional art there is so writing about it is impossibly challenging. These two examples though were great pieces of journalism that opened a little window to the minds of two of modern pop's biggest names, and that's of course really valuable to understand the music they make.

So, the article on Grimes' made a passing reference to this "KLF Manual" thing about writing a number one pop song the easy way. I was intrigued, so I googled it and voilà, here it is. It's a long read but a fantastic one. The KLF was just a couple of sonic terrorists/trolls that inexplicably got to the top of the UK Singles list with some Doctor Who remix crap that rips off Gary Glitter (it was a different time). The book tries to guide a potential pop star through the entire process of writing, recording and more importantly, selling a song, whatever it takes. Some fun excerpts:

The “cool cats” and hipsters of the early sixties might have thought modern jazz was going to finally break through when “Take Five” made the Hit Parade. The blue rinse brigade feared the downfall of decent society when The Pistols made Number One with “God Save The Queen” or the musos predicted real music was about to die because of the 1988 rash of DJ records. Had you played some free jazz to ninety five per cent of the people who had made “Take Five” a smash, they would have run for cover behind the latest release by Pat Boone. The Pistols might have been swearing on T.V. inciting a generation of kids to “Get pissed! Destroy!” but if “God Save The Queen” had not stuck rigidly to The Golden Rules* (*THESE WILL BE EXPLAINED LATER), The Pistols would never have seen the inside of the Top Ten.


You will find engineers everywhere trying to impress you with the fact that “Sergeant Pepper” was recorded on a four track. This is of course is as relevant as the fact that no JCB’s were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid.


We have just taken a coffee break from writing this lot and while in the cafe have come up with the ultimate Stock Aitkin and Waterman chorus never written. It’s called “Live In Lover”, either performed by Sinitta or ideally by a Dagenham blonde called Sharon:

“Live in lover I want you to be My live in lover for eternity”

Either use it for yourselves or we will go and blow what last vestiges of credibility we have and do it ourselves. We can see it now: we’d call the act “Sharon Meets the KLF” and of course the b-side would have to be “Sharon Joins The JAMS”. If there are any good looking Sharons out there that want to be pop stars please don’t hesitate to contact us
.


We have been doing all this writing in a county library in an old English market town. The place is crammed with dirty great books. Loads of them with more than five hundred pages in. All written properly. People must have sweated for years to write some of these books and we can’t be bothered with finishing this skimpy thing properly.

We found a book this morning. “A Dictionary of Similes”. Printed in 1807. Thought there might be something in it to spice up our writing style. Every page is a winner. We shall let it fall open. It’s page two hundred and sixty five. MONEY TO MOTIONLESS and what do we read:

"Monotonous as the dress of charity children. (Anon). Moody as a poet. (Thomas Shadwell) Mope like birds that are changing feather. (Longfellow) I am as mopish as if I were married and lived in a provincial town. (G.H. Lewis) Moral as a peppermint. (Anon)"

Moral as a peppermint! Moral as a peppermint? Moral as a sodding peppermint???

Obviously the word peppermint had some unusual connotation back in 1807 that has been lost down through the intervening years.


Really funny, insightful, angry and kinda inspiring, actually. Take a couple hours to read this, you won't regret it (and by you I guess I mean OJN, I'm not sure who else is reading this).
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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby OhJohnNo » Mon Oct 05, 2015 10:32 pm

From now on I will find every conceivable excuse to use the phrase "moral as a peppermint" in everyday conversation.
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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby Andropov4 » Mon Oct 05, 2015 11:06 pm

Steven Hyden's "The Winner's History of Rock and Roll", a seven part series, was pretty fantastic. I generally like Hyden's writing, but this set of articles really stands out as his best work to me.

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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby Matthew Notch » Tue Oct 06, 2015 12:40 am

NudgeNudge introduced me to The World Is a Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die the other day, and so I started doing a little research. I mean an emo band? In 2013? Turns out there was a whole emo revival that I all but missed that year. Give me a break, there was a lot going on.

Here is the Stereogum piece on it. It was well done, I thought, and definitely got me into some good bands, which I think is what good music journalism ought to do.

http://www.stereogum.com/1503252/12-ban ... ises/list/

Also, speaking of emo, here is a book that I read back in the day. The last fifty pages or so I read WHILE DRIVING on a car trip. I was a lot more dangerous back then.

http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Feels-Goo ... 0312308639

Image


It's interesting because, when I was reading it, I never could tell if Andy Greenwald was in reverential awe of the bands and scene he was writing about, or if he had a little snark to him that permeated the whole thing. That might not sound like a very strong selling point, but honestly it was just nice for me, at that time, to see all this music I really enjoyed validated. It was fun to look at a review written in 2007 by someone who liked the book until the last third or so, when Greenwald shifted his attention from the music itself to the online communities forming around the aesthetics and paradigms that emo had to offer. Xanga and LiveJournal aside, the attitude towards online interaction is so different than it was back in those days, and even different than 2007 if we're being honest. If anything, the book was ahead of its time in that way.

I don't typically go for writing about music, but that was a nice, quick moving read, and I think I want to read it again now that I'm thinking about it. I bet it'd be a blast reading it with the benefit of hindsight.
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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby Andropov4 » Tue Oct 06, 2015 1:12 am

Huh. Greenwald also works at Grantland right now.
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Re: Excellent writings about music

Postby Matthew Notch » Wed Mar 30, 2016 2:37 am

Rezzing this thread because I just discovered The Range.

http://pitchfork.com/features/interview ... f-youtube/

I actually did something similar with a novelty song I wrote in the early days of the forum. Sunny had said she wanted someone to write a song called "Vampire Sofa", and so I said "On it" and went to town. I remember specifically searching YouTube for a video of someone singing a song about vampires so I could have a bitty vocal sample, and what I ended up with was an acapella version of this song, which is super duper annoying. I can't even find the version I used, but I remember specifically thinking, "I sure don't want to grab the ones where you can tell the singer is preening for the camera." I found the least pretentious version I could find, and her vocals were a little shaky, a little wobbly, and she was definitely holding back, but it ended up working pretty smashingly in the finished product.

It was really really really cool to read about this after I heard "Florida" this morning on XM.



It's actually a pretty beautiful song (I personally think the way the beat hustles is incredible), but more to the point the girl walking around in the video is actually the voice of the song in the hook, Kai Mars, whose cover of Ariana Grande's "You'll Never Know" still has less than 6,000 views. When you're an electronic musician who uses samples, your single greatest goal is to find a new life for these samples, not blowing new breath into its existing life, but recontextualizing it into something entirely new and fresh. And the whole thing, this whole project, makes me love her and love Mr. Hinton and love Ariana Grande, because all these things came together into something really neat and profoundly human, and I think that's the dream for any musician.
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"I do feel that if she happens to favour attractive, successful, intelligent men I will be at a disadvantage."--Anglerphobe

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