EVERYONE AGAINST THE WAR IS GAY

So hood that Ludacris should've been on the original version.
X-Ray Spex: Identity (live in 1977) (via Dennis Cooper)

You all know the cliché that music critics are just failed musicians. What I've also seen bruited, though less often, is the notion that political journalists are really just failed music critics. Makes sense to me, sort of. Looking at the work of the Washington press corps' highest-paid, it's tough to tell who are the ones supposedly collecting checks just for telling people what's cool to think (in the parlance of our times), and who are the ones talking about, I dunno, stuff that actually matters.

The oft-cited (around here) Bob Somerby recently posted some old Lexis-Nexis excerpts that are pretty illustrative. A typical scene on Chris Matthews' influential MSNBC show (oxymoron?) "Hardball," back when Al Gore was on the campaign trail:


MATTHEWS (7/29/99): Is Al Gore just incapable of putting, like, one foot in front of the other in this campaign? He’s a professional politician—

REP. JOE. SCARBOROUGH (R-FL): Yeah. He’s awful.

MATTHEWS: —who acts like an amateur. I don’t get it. Did you ever see the movie “Altered States?” I mean, his face is, like, getting contorted in some of these—there’s bubbles coming out of his forehead!


So now every journalist at the D.C. cocktail party will totally know about that snarky zero point zero concept review young Matthews just handed out. Watch the zany Irishman go:

MATTHEWS: What mode was he in? Was he in, was he in the quiet mode, or that sort of Clutch Cargo craziness he gets into, or was he—

MARY BOYLE (former Democratic Ohio Senate candidate): No, no, but he was—

MATTHEWS: —or was he in the “Altered States” where the head starts to bubble? What state was he in today?


And the highbrow policy discussion continued. Pay these men millions of dollars, please:

SCARBOROUGH: She says, “Al Gore was loose.” That’s when he’s at his worst. Remember the Olympics, when he was clapping like this? And you’re, like, “My God, the guy can’t even clap.” Did they—what—did they teach—

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCARBOROUGH: I mean, he—he’s in trouble. And it feeds on itself and he looks more like a dork than he, than when he’s not trying.


One of Matthews' favorite lines was to say Gore was the White House "bathtub ring." At one point, Matthews would opine, "He doesn't seem very American, even." Why, Gore would lick the bathroom floor to be president! (His opponent, by contrast, obviously had no interest in wielding power.) Women probably think Gore is a "wimp," Matthews would muse. This went on for the two years leading up to the closely fought election of 2000.

Pretty much every journalist in Washington, D.C., (update: even ones I respect!) would like to be on dude's show. We're not talking about Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or William Kristol, or even their more polite face, David Brooks. We're talking about Chris Matthews, who actually has some pretense of objectivity because he was once an aide to Tip O'Neill. Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of the ostensibly left-leaning Salon, wrote earlier this year about how much she just luvvvs Matthews-- and by golly, now she's a regular on his show. This is how your George Bush / Fred Thompson / Rudy Giuliani sausage gets made. They're bringing 1888 back. Everybody else is totally not cool, and I mean like A.R.E. Weapons or Jet here. Or Plain White T's.


The managers are on my case, and are waiting for me to slip up.
Hello Saferide: I Wonder Who Is Like This One

Criticism, especially pop music criticism (though maybe it only seems that way because pop crit is, well, what I do), gets derided a lot. "Dancing about architecture," or "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read," etc. But done right, articulate expressions of how another person is affected by a piece of music can be an integral part of how we process it, and come to appreciate it, ourselves.

For instance, I can tell you that when I set out to write about a record, well, sometimes there are definitely those fortunate instances where I listen to something once or even a few times and all of a sudden I feel as if I understand exactly how it works for me. So then I write about that. More often, though, I have to listen and listen, take tons of notes, and then reflect carefully on the experience to pick out the most interesting aspects of the music, the elements that helped draw me into it.

Writing about those points should ideally become a key to help other people enjoy the music, too, or at least understand why it affected you a certain way and compare/contrast their own experience. Like a cheat guide to a video game, but an inexact, subjective one. If the elements that turned you onto a certain record are things that another person hates, then they'll know they are probably going to disagree with you.

I didn't really see the appeal of Burial's previous effort, even though I'd read the praise in Wire and heard the next-big-thing hype revolving around dubstep. What I never saw (maybe I just missed it) was much writing explaining clearly what people actually LIKED about the stuff; I remember presuming it must just sound awesome if you're at a club with great subwoofers, but maybe not at home. It's not so much that people need description of what music sounds like, or a context for why the artist is hip or, god help us, "important"-- if you're like me, anyway, you just want someone to point out why a song is aesthetically pleasing (or not) to them, and show you what to listen for to feel the same way. In some cases, the hooks are obvious, but not always.

Burial is an imperfect example. Much of the writing out there, even by people I really like, remains of the "It's genius, duh! Plus, I heard it first!" variety. Still, the more I've read about the new one, the more it has made sense to me-- thanks, Philip. (Of course, this album is an especially imperfect example because Burial made this one easier to "get", by adding vocals and trimming out a good deal of the fat.) Or, like, if someone sends you the Atlas Sound album and you don't know where to begin, I can point out the track that seems like a good entry point, and why.

Whatever, I'm not getting paid to write this and in fact should probably get back to writing what I'm paid for before the Bobs have to threaten to stop bringing in Dunkin Donuts on Fridays.

A big chunk of writing that includes my own has been decried as "pretentious" or "elitist." But even to whatever extent those charges are true, I'd like to think I'm usually pretty populist about it-- not, ugh, "middlebrow" (now there's a LOADED term), but rather, just someone who helps make those flashes of unfamiliarity accessible for bigger numbers of people, by laying out one person's path for making them familiar, how one dude made these moments part of himself. As we all get exponentially more inundated with new media, technology, and ideas all the goddamn time, I think that's a pretty useful metaphor for how we increasingly go about our lives. Not horse- and buggy-era (rich, influential, computer-illiterate) geezers like Larry King, maybe, but certainly those of us who spend a portion of our working and personal lives that once would've been embarrassing-- and now seems only typical-- on the internet.

Larry Kudlow is a Steve Martin character, not a real person.


And I don't even have time to practice.
Josh Ritter: The Temptation of Adam (live at Webster Hall)