From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V6 #94 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Friday, May 19 2006 Volume 06 : Number 094 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] Re: Brad Jones question (No Scott) [2fs ] Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire [Aaron Mandel ] Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire [Dave Walker ] Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire [AWeiss4338@aol.com] Re: [loud-fans] dvd bittorrent ["Paul King" ] [loud-fans] Third/Sister Lovers ["Paul King" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:33:20 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: Brad Jones question (No Scott) On 5/17/06, Brian Jones wrote: > > Michael asked: > been recorded?> > > Brad was in an Iowa City power pop/rockabilly trio called Boys With > Toys."Big House," their lone LP, came out on Hot Fudge Records (a Cedar > Falls, Iowa label, I think) in ... hmmmm ... must have been 1985. > > BWT added a couple members, became the Dig Mandrakes, and moved to > Nashville. Or moved to Nashville, added a couple members, and became the > Dig Mandrakes. The details are fuzzy after 17+ years. They didn't > release anything, but I'm pretty sure I remember Brad talking about > sessions. Not Michael, but - thanks! Does anyone know if (Brad) Jones is recording anything new? And Brian - that was a long swim, but welcome back. Even if to our rather laconic-these-days list... - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 16:16:11 EDT From: AWeiss4338@aol.com Subject: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire Rock critics, their pet peeves, and is Merrit guilty? From the NY Times. Andrea By _DAVID CARR_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/david_carr/inde x.html?inline=nyt-per) Published: May 18, 2006 People argue that the music someone listens to says a lot about who he is, but that discussion rarely concludes in descriptions like "cracker" and "racist." _Skip to next paragraph_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/arts/music/18rock.html?_r=1&oref=slogin#se condParagraph) Kate Lacey for The New York Times Stephin Merritt, who was labeled a "rockist cracker" by one critic. Rahav Segev for The New York Times Stephin Merritt performing with his band, Magnetic Fields, in 2004. Last week a two-year-old argument over the preferences of Stephin Merritt, a New York rock musician and songwriter, for music by white artists mushroomed into a tempest in a digital teapot. What in times past would have been a whisper, a cut of the rhetorical butter knife, is now making a noise for anybody who tunes in. The Web is the great enabler when it comes to turning what once were parlor debates into clamorous viral feuds. This one has all the pretension of academic politics but even lower stakes. In 2004 Mr. Merritt, writing in The New York Times, chose seven records for a feature called Playlist. None of the records he chose were by black artists, prompting Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, to conclude at the time on his personal blog that Mr. Merritt had a bias against black music, calling him " 'Southern Strategy' Merritt." A series of posts ensued from Mr. Frere-Jones suggesting that a list of the best songs of the past century that Mr. Merritt made while he was a critic at Time Out New York underrepresented black artists. Mr. Frere-Jones's indictment might have been lost to the electronic mist, but then late last month Mr. Merritt, an indie demigod for his twee, compelling work with the band Magnetic Fields, served on a panel at the Experience Music Project's annual Pop Conference in Seattle and endorsed the catchiness of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," the famous feel-good tune heard in Disney's "Song of the South," a 1946 film many consider racist. Reacting to his statement that it was "a great song," Jessica Hopper, a contributor to The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, criticized Mr. Merritt on her Web site for his "obsession with a racist cartoon." That Mr. Merritt said the movie was terrible was drowned out in kerfuffle. (Ms. Hopper has since retracted that criticism but maintains that Mr. Merritt is a racist judging from his musical and rhetorical choices.) The renewed argument caught the attention of John Cook, a contributor to the online magazine Slate, who wrote an article last week titled "Is Stephin Merritt a Racist Because He Doesn't Like Hip-Hop?" He said Ms. Hopper had misrepresented Mr. Merritt's comments and argued that Mr. Frere-Jones's attacks on Mr. Merritt were based on "the dangerous and stupid notion that one's taste in music can be interrogated for signs of racist intent the same way a university's admissions process can: If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights." Race in pop music has been a point of contention since before _Elvis Presley_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/elvis_presley/i ndex.html?inline=nyt-per) first picked up a guitar, but artists are not usually clobbered for failing to integrate the legacy of black music into their playlists. Bands ranging from the Rolling Stones to the White Stripes have been accused of a kind of reverse minstrelsy, exploiting black sounds to their own ends, but Mr. Merritt is being accused of doing the opposite. Mr. Merritt, who would not agree to be interviewed, is certainly no fan of modern hip-hop. In an interview in the online magazine Salon in 2004 he said that much of contemporary rap engages in "more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19th century." He singled out OutKast, a critically adored African-American duo. Mr. Frere-Jones has said Mr. Merritt's disrespect for OutKast specifically and rap in general was intended to provoke. He has apologized, after a fashion, for calling Mr. Merritt a "rockist cracker" but sticks to his core argument. "Is it possible to look at your own preferences and find something that your consciousness was not letting you in on?" he wrote last week in response to Mr. Cook's article. Mr. Frere-Jones also pointed out that in citing his white musical sources, Mr. Merritt, interviewed in Mojo magazine 10 years ago, was not above racial provocation: "I think my records could be listened to by the Ku Klux Klan!" In an interview on Monday, Mr. Frere-Jones emphasized that his personal blog was just that, since it is neither linked to nor edited by The New Yorker, and that the "cracker" crack was just that. "Calling him that was a dumb thing to do," he said. "It is a little bit of inside baseball, a nerdy music fight. I was just sort of rising to the bait." "It was probably not the most effective way to attack those issues," Mr. Frere-Jones said. "It does get the idea up in the air and the discussion going. If I have to take some heat for it, so be it. If I had to it to do over again, I would not have been so hot-headed and taken some words out of it, but that is the nature of blogging." Some bystanders could not help but be amused by all of the dancing on the head of a guitar pick in spite of the serious accusation at the core of the argument. "It's been a lot of fun to follow," said Mike Doughty, a blogger and a singer-songwriter who formerly led the band Soul Coughing. "Stephin is this depressed, angsty guy who is trying to displace his feelings by saying provocative things. But he has a point. You can't say that just because you don't like the artists who played Lilith Fair, you hate women." Then there's the fact that Mr. Merritt is openly gay. Trying to defend him against the charges of incipient crackerism, Mr. Cook observed: "Merritt is diminutive, gay and painfully intellectual. His music is witty and tender. He plays the ukulele. He named his Chihuahua after _Irving Berlin_ (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=5711&inline=nyt- per) ." Unless the Chihuahua drinks a lot of Bud, the thinking seems to be, Mr. Merritt probably is not a Bubba in the making. The broader contextual argument seems to be that Mr. Merritt is a "rockist," a term highlighted by Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times in October 2004. Mr. Sanneh summed up the mind-set in part by saying, "Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star." Mr. Merritt was tagged as a rockist for disparaging the music of OutKast, Beyonci, _Britney Spears_ (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=301848&inline=ny t-per) and _Justin Timberlake_ (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=277738&inline=ny t-per) . Yet in the past Mr. Merritt has pleaded guilty to embracing Abba, perhaps the whitest band in the history of pop music, as a not-so-guilty pleasure. That is not clear evidence that Mr. Merritt is a racist or event a rockist, but he clearly needs help with his bubblegum issues. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 16:28:17 -0400 (EDT) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: [loud-fans] dvd bittorrent I got Photo Robert's LF "home videos" in the mail the other day and have put a ripped version up for BitTorrenting. http://kermit.ecloud.net/~aaron/lf Thanks for sending this around, Robert. Among other entertaining things, the live fragments of "Last Honest Face" are really amazing. a (P.S. Never used BitTorrent? Get a BitTorrent client-- bittorrent.com is one option-- and open the file you got from my webpage with it. Your download should start; once you've downloaded some of the file, your client will also start sending it to other people that have joined more recently. It's like a tape tree with everyone overlapping. Mac users, if you can't play the file, try it with VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc ) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 17:05:25 -0400 (EDT) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire On Thu, 18 May 2006, AWeiss4338@aol.com wrote: > Rock critics, their pet peeves, and is Merrit guilty? From the NY Times. God help us. I think the word they're looking for is not "rockist", but "snob". Anyone else remember Stephin's occasional reviews in Chickfactor? However much effort the man has put into developing his own aesthetic, you can't tell me that until this flap, everyone expected that Merritt would give something other than an offhand dismissal when asked about music he didn't personally enjoy. I could buy an argument saying that racism is pervasive enough in our society for vapid criticism of 'black music' to be worse than equally vapid criticism of 'white music'; kicking someone when they're down, after all, is considered unwholesome even if your motivations for kicking the guy are completely different than those of whoever put him on the ground in the first place. But at most that just says that it's a good deed to keep bullshit opinions about "Hey Ya" to oneself if one is the kind of music snob whose putdowns lack insight. It doesn't seem racist as such to be glib. On the third hand, it's hard to call Frere-Jones crazy for thinking anxieties about race get channeled weirdly into conversations about pop music. It's just that the whole thing is so tenuous as to fall apart if you give Stephin Merritt the benefit of the doubt at any point in the chain of thought. a ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 20:01:48 -0400 From: Dave Walker Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire Ho-boy... This black Magnetic Fields fan calls bullshit on the whole kerfluffle. -d.w. who hasn't done an ethnic census of his iPod, at least not recently, and is provably self-hating, thanks to willfully insensitive usage of the word "kerfluffle" ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 20:18:58 EDT From: AWeiss4338@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Merrit Under Fire In a message dated 5/18/2006 5:12:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, aaron@eecs.harvard.edu writes: God help us. I think the word they're looking for is not "rockist", but "snob". Anyone else remember Stephin's occasional reviews in Chickfactor? However much effort the man has put into developing his own aesthetic, you can't tell me that until this flap, everyone expected that Merritt would give something other than an offhand dismissal when asked about music he didn't personally enjoy. I agree. I just can't believe one person's personal tastes would get blown out of proportion like this. I could buy an argument saying that racism is pervasive enough in our society for vapid criticism of 'black music' to be worse than equally vapid criticism of 'white music'; kicking someone when they're down, after all, is considered unwholesome even if your motivations for kicking the guy are completely different than those of whoever put him on the ground in the first place. Yep. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And that NY Times critic has done this more than once. He slammed Matisyahu for many of the same reasons he slammed Merrit. But at most that just says that it's a good deed to keep bullshit opinions about "Hey Ya" to oneself if one is the kind of music snob whose putdowns lack insight. It doesn't seem racist as such to be glib. I don't know about the others, but that NY Times critic certanly is. He once wrote a feature length article for the Times where he proclaimed Rap/metal "the future of rock and roll." And he hates indie rock. On the third hand, it's hard to call Frere-Jones crazy for thinking anxieties about race get channeled weirdly into conversations about pop music. It's just that the whole thing is so tenuous as to fall apart if you give Stephin Merritt the benefit of the doubt at any point in the chain of thought. And people should give Merrit the benifit of the doubt. I sure do. His remarks were never put in context, and it would be interesting to read the article in question where he supposedly did say these things. Andrea ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 23:48:21 -0400 From: "Paul King" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] dvd bittorrent Thanks for that. I d/l'ed it and kept it on a while longer so that others can have a chance to download while I was viewing. Certainly falls under a "home video" category. On 18 May 2006 at 16:28, Aaron Mandel spaketh these wourdes: > I got Photo Robert's LF "home videos" in the mail the other day and have > put a ripped version up for BitTorrenting. > > http://kermit.ecloud.net/~aaron/lf > > Thanks for sending this around, Robert. Among other entertaining things, > the live fragments of "Last Honest Face" are really amazing. > There actually seemed to be at least two of every song in the video. I found how they were putting together "Inverness" to be interesting. Looks like an LF video when they just started out. Mostly PABARAT stuff and late GT. Interesting video. > a > > (P.S. Never used BitTorrent? Get a BitTorrent client-- bittorrent.com is > one option-- and open the file you got from my webpage with it. Your > download should start; once you've downloaded some of the file, your > client will also start sending it to other people that have joined more > recently. It's like a tape tree with everyone overlapping. > > Mac users, if you can't play the file, try it with VLC: > > http://www.videolan.org/vlc > > ) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 00:01:28 -0400 From: "Paul King" Subject: [loud-fans] Third/Sister Lovers I downloaded Third/Sister Lovers from E-Music recently. I like the album, and already had two tracks (Kangaroo, Holocaust) on a Vertigo/4AD compilation of This Mortal Coil CD set whose fourth CD featured tracks from the original artists, including the two Big Star tracks. Reading bios of Alex Chilton, I got an impression (not directly from what is written, but from my interpretation of it) from various web sites that Alex was treated like garbage by the record company, and decided later to take it out on his audience by treating them like garbage. I find Third to be somewhat depressing, but "Thank you friends" is on high rotation in my head right now. I agree with many critics that most tracks outside of this and at least one other are sloppy, although one critic even questioned the professional standards of the album. Don't know diddly about the reputations or knowledgeability of these reviewers: http://www.jackfeenyreviews.com/bigstar.htm http://www.markprindle.com/bigstar.htm http://www.capnmusic.org/bigstarshort.htm The last one mixes up Kangaroo and Holocaust, which while still readable, makes him look sloppy. It cheeses me off that no one mentions LF or GT as independent artists being influenced by Big Star. Paul King ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V6 #94 ******************************