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James Joyce’s Bloomin’ Valentine
But sometimes you get the real thing, as with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Like Chinese Democracy and Vineland, Finnegans Wake took 17 years, as everybody wondered how Joyce could follow a masterpiece...
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Nina Hagen vs. Journey
But I hedged my bet right from the beginning too, and kept my day job at the welfare department all the way through, as I was a family man and it provided regular income and medical coverage, etc. That...
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Kid Rock
I have been a professional rock critic, more or less, for 15 years, and as such my friends and family naturally assumed I would be “music-training” my son from birth, regaling him with Sonic Youth and...
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Critical Collage: Rush vs. the Critics
A by no means comprehensive or conclusive survey of a Canadian power trio who once upon a time (much less so now) got under the skins of more rock critics than any other rock or pop artist going. - – -...
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Stunted notions
In the early 1970s certain journalists described James Brown’s music as boring. The reason they did so was because they were white and couldn’t see beyond their own stunted notions of what constitutes...
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Buzz and Joy under the influence of
In truth, by criticising pop music NME are merely biting the hand that feeds them. Pop music as every person who’s gone from clutching a copy of Madonna’s Immaculate Collection to owning Sonic Youth’s...
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There is little
Critical language has for the most part been borrowed from other fields — few writers have been able to shake their liberal arts educations. The few new terms (tight, together, heavy) are vague and...
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Moral inadequacy
He’s a case study in the moral inadequacy of authenticity. - Christgau on David Peel’s 1972 album, The Pope Smokes Dope. Classic one-liner, positively Wildean in scope, though I leave it up to you to...
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Painting red doors black
Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my...
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Good vs. Bad vs. What
… in dealing with new things there is a question that precedes that of good or bad. I refer to the question, ‘What is it?’ — the question of identity. To answer this question in such a way as to...
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Getting Mighty Crowded
Are we too aware of everyone else to understand music anymore? Are we too embarrassed? - via Teenage Art - For some reason, these feel like good, relevant questions to me.
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The Magnificent Dance
“To the fiercest Clash fans, rockers till death, ‘The Magnificent Dance,’ with its tipsy percussion and Chic bass humming ‘bumm bumm (pause) tn-m mana-ma” for a groove — aided by ABSOLUTELY NO LYRICS —...
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“The thing about rock music…”
The thing about rock music, in all of the forms that I’ve worshipped, is that it’s not about thinking. You have your cerebral performers, but rock music is about the body: the corporeal sensations of...
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Finding the Perfect Fit
“When it comes to Pitchfork and scoring, I would say that you would be shocked by just how democratic the rating process is. Without giving much away (because I don’t think that’s fair to Pitchfork),...
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Stuffing it in a Box
“And so I took a break. I put ‘music writing’ in a little box and stuffed it up in a cabinet in the back store-room of my brain and I left it there. It’s still there, and that feels right. To be clear:...
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Down and Out
“I’ve never for a second regretted pulling away from being a Professional Music Critic almost immediately after feeling burned/burned out. There were folks willing to support my writing –and they were...
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A Generation in Rapid Retreat
“I haven’t written a god damn record review in well over a year. The last several reviews I managed to crank out before I quit should never have been written. There just came a point for me where the...
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Couldn’t Help Himself
“Still, I continued to try to fool myself that this wasn’t really me. I was a novelist who happened to be writing about music, strictly as an avocation. When I finished my first book, Feel Like Going...
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Radio Static
“Other times, the AM radio in my bedroom, when I was listening very quietly to music late at night in the winter, would have intermittent bursts and pulses of static noise. I’d noticed that the heat...
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