To build a new sanctuary the old sanctuary must first be destroyed.
Lil Wayne: Gossip (xpost, but Ryan Dombal had it first over at Blender)
EVERYONE, PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK!!!
The New York Times frequently publishes articles and opinion pieces offering boilerplate solutions to the problems of low-income schools. For example, Bob Herbert recently wrote a column under the headline "Our Schools Must Do Better." In it, he says, "Let's identify the good teachers and find out what works." If this argument doesn't seem painfully, meaninglessly obvious to you, you're reading the wrong blog.
Sadly, such work is typical of the Times' and other major newspapers' superficial coverage of schools in low-income neighborhoods. All we need is higher standards, better teachers, and tougher coursework... right? When our schools don't do better, the Times' education reporters and editorial pages can come back with the same bromides the next year. And the next. And the next. (Rarely, however, do they recall a troubling figure that Herbert himself used in 2005: "By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind non-poor students.")
To state the obvious, simply stating the obvious about inner-city education doesn't help kids keep from falling behind. And if low-income fourth graders already read three grade levels behind non-poor students, the problem might be something that can't be fixed by simply raising standards, hiring more experienced teachers, or passing out books the kids can't read. Who, then, does this stuff serve? What is the point?
Well, I'd speculate that it makes the writer feel good. It makes the editor feel good. And it makes the readers feel good. Hooray for everyone for caring so much about black kids. Won't someone please think of the black kids?
The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones will. SF-J is one of my favorite music critics, which is to say he seems crazy to me slightly less often than most of the other music critics I like. Lots of people have posted about his recent article in favor of indie-rock "miscegenation." Friend of offnotes Tom Breihan blames the Velvet Underground. Lots of other people said lots of other stuff. I was kinda bogged down with CMJ and a cold and work and other work I should be doing even RIGHT NOW but here we are. In lieu of an opinion (not worth it, because what is "blackness" in 21st-century pop music, is it inherently better than "whiteness" because if not why does this matter, should white guys proud of their racial consciousness keep using the word "miscegenation," etc.), please enjoy the following abbreviated (unexpurgated!) list, which, because this entire conversation is meaningless and self-aggrandizing, lists whatever anyone wants it to list:
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM !!! SPOON VAMPIRE WEEKEND MOUNTAIN GOATS DEVENDRA BANHART THE TOUGH ALLIANCE M.I.A. DIPLO GIRL TALK JENS LEKMAN SHOCKING PINKS KING KHAN CHROMEO WHITE STRIPES STUDIO AIR FRANCE SPANK ROCK CLIPSE LIL WAYNE
A legacy so far removed.
Billie Holiday: What a Little Moonlight Can Do
There's also been a lot of debate recently over who's to blame for blog-era insta-backlash. Is it the guy who thinks a new band has four great songs, and says so? Or the guy who backlashes against that band for not having a dozen great songs, plus a laser-light show? Or is it the the guy who doesn't particularly care for that band, but instead of backlashing against them directly, backlashes against the very idea of saying a band has four great songs? This guy thinks the backlash is the first guy's fault, though of course he doesn't name names.
When Belle & Sebastian released If You're Feeling Sinister, their live show was terrible, and there was no guarantee Murdoch could continue to write songs as good as the ones he'd composed in his years of chronic fatigue-imposed solitude. (Basically, he couldn't.) Many of the bands championed by the late, legendary John Peel must've recorded one or two great singles, tops-- should Peel not have proclaimed his love for those singles? What of the Desperate Bicycles? The Subway Sect? The Undertones? What of-- as an Idolator commenter noted-- the scores of bands who released much-hyped EPs and actually went on to live up to the hype? (Buzzcocks, REM, Pavement, arguably Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, etc.) Is the measure of four songs' excellence really contingent on whether the artist writes an album's worth of equally excellent songs down the road-- on whether their career is "built to last" (thanks, Tracks!)??? Is rockcrit just A&R now? O.A.R. now? "Oh, are they?" OH SHIT SCOOPED!!!
The rapidly accelerating hype cycle is something that has annoyed people since the moment the major labels' grunge-era signing spree started catapulting bands to fame on the basis of a couple of good live shows in Seattle. A more serious discussion ought to center around the music-- why it works, or why it doesn't-- and not the process, which we professional fogeys have been lamenting since the dawn of fogeydom, without ever finding a way to freeze time just yet.
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,250,000 for "is no exception". (0.23 seconds)
Sambassadeur: Between the Lines
It's not the band I hate, it's their fans.
UPDATE: I really should've linked to Matthew Perpetua's excellent post on related topic. And I should clarify that my complaint isn't talking about process vs. music-- context matters, and sometimes describing how art reaches us can be more interesting than describing the art itself. What I'm sick of is hearing arguments about process that are as banal and self-evident as "Our Schools Must Do Better" was for the issue of education. BLOGGERS, RAISE YR STANDARDS!
