[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

Not dumb, exactly, and of course I get your point about intellectually stimulating music, but when someone really smart and skilled devotes their talents and their entire life to writing about rock, just feels like a waste to me, personally.

right, but i am not concerned with people's wasted talent, i want to read good writing about music i enjoy. thing is though, "rock" (whatever that may be) is a dead form and at this point sort of irrelevant to the culture-- a lesser genre, soon to be confined to museums and preservation halls and academic departments just like jazz or the study of "the classics". i was reading some garbage article in gawker which is always garbage but the writer made one good point (almost makes me want to believe in miracles to find something worthy there) that the last time there was some kind of mass "youth" thing centered around rock was in the early 90s… that's 20 fucking years ago! (oh yes, the article was about the dead nirbano and what he meant to people etc.)

back in the 90s though there was also this utopianist writing about raves and electronic/sampled music and the poor suckas in mondo 2000 claimed that with the death of the rockstar and its supplanting by electronic music without "stars" performing onstage but instead drugged out people immersed in some communal experience, some sort of great anarchist era was about to happen. haa haaa haaa haaa.

poor people.

Originally Posted by evollove

Because:




I sort of still make the distinction. And there are still museums and literary journals with discriminating taste, and they still give out Nobels.

well sure there is good and there is bad. on that note, the boomer idol bob dylan has been nominated for the nobel literature prize before.

Originally Posted by evollove

Actually, I think now we have a choice about whether or not to accept any sort of cannon, which is even more liberating.

unless you're in ukraine and the cannon is shooting at you and you have no choice! (sorry, terrible joke on many levels). but yes. we can read/ listen to/ watch whatever the fuck we want. which is why i want writing about the irrelevant thing i listen to!-- just like that whiny article that inspired this thread. he whines for me (but not for thee, in this case).

Originally Posted by evollove

So from my antiquated perspective, I find it hard to take Camille Paglia's academic take on the Rolling Stones all that seriously. (Also, I'm sort of dumb, and I have to be selective about firing my brain cells.)

but paglia was not talking about music! she was talking about archetypes in popular culture-- she was talking about the popular imagination. she was not doing any kind of musical analysis. warhol is the one who put tin cans in his high-concept paintings, and everyone has followed since. also, frank herbert's "dune"--pulp or masterpiece?

Originally Posted by evollove

Or it may be I'm feeling my mortality, and with only so much time left, the number of things I take seriously has dwindled.

that, for sure. same goes for drinking budweiser. my problem now is to find books i want to read. i found some chekhov translations online and i'm happy to say i've finished a short story. a sort of miracle. i used to devour books until i went to grad school. the force-feeding gave me a delicate stomach and i haven't recovered since.

Originally Posted by evollove

But I use to care a lot about rock theory, and this book used to get me hard. I think many will enjoy it:

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythm-Noise-A...ythm+and+noise

that i had never seen. i might check it out. thanks for the link. though these days i read mostly how-to books on farming and making bricks out of mud and that sort of shit.