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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Reggae music is racist.
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Nonsense, as well you know.
On the Wire debacle of a few pages ago, the Wire can be pretty dull Its constant pushing of an incredibly marginal scene (the LMC/ AMM/ MEV/ company/ Bailey/ Cardew thing) grates a little. The 80-centric writers ('Sonic Youth changed the face of etc') annoy me. This month's edition has a slew on Erasure whilst espousing Depeche Mode - Depeche Mode were shit for people who aren't even cool enough to be goths (with the odd tune here and there that's alright); Erasure were fearlessly brilliant pop - and I've noticed that they can't write about 'academic' music without having a pop at tonal music. Which is, patently, utter arse - just because Webern or Cage or such weren't on the coattails of melody doesn't mean that everyone gave up on the idea. I like a lot of contemporary stuff, but it does annoy me that people who were VERY VERY GOOD INDEED get ignored by the Wire because they didn't inspire certain jazz musicians or electro-acoustic improvisers.
Nonetheless, the Wire very often features some music that I'm interested in, and once one gets the hang of the writing style it's pretty perspicuous - which is to say, the journalism comes the closest of any mag I've read to actually describing the music, rather than its social contingencies. Ok, so there's a few jazz mags (as opposed to porn) which do that, but I'm not terribly interested in reading about contemporary jazz.