Predict Sasha Frere Jones' next article in the New Yorker!!

Alex Ross wrote it, and he's been a big Bjork fan for a while (plus he gets to talk about her in the context of Stockhausen and Meredith Monk). If there was a new Radiohead album out, he'd get the assignment for that, too.

You think Hertzberg is an Amon Duul 1 or Amon Duul 2 fan?

(xpost dammit!)

-- Not That Chuck (noemai...), August 18th, 2004.

-- That Keren Ann record is #3 currently on SFJ's running Best of '04
-- list, and it seems perfect for the NYer demographic. The Times
-- recently ran an adulatory column on it too.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), August 18th, 2004.

Si, correcto.

I have, though, been wanting to see a New Yorker piece on supersilent Japanese improv for years. For real.

Just kidding. I wouldn't buy Joanna's album but she's super-nice and her music isn't THAT bad. Nor is it about "being cute."

er, no. but that is my prediction, as well.

Keren Ann = good call.

I know we've discussed her recently, so it may be the other way around.

I don't think there's anything about her music that isn't cute: her whimsical lyrics and the way she scrunches up her throat when she sings, I just...she seems custom-tailored to annoy me and me alone.

I also think I have a strong disinclination towards "girlish" woman voices because of their association to a host of unliberated woman archetypes: geisha, dumb blonde, Betty Boop, etc. This covers everyone from Ashanti to Múm's lead singer.

And what do you mean I've been cribbing from MM again? Have I been doing that? If I have, I haven't noticed.

Then you have missed out on the band Wolf. You need to remedy that right now, today.

ps. Bob Pollard's faux-Daltrey accent is way cuter.

A year or so after I got accepted to my college, I went back and looked over my entrance essay, which was about the first page of Finnegans Wake, and found that, without realizing it, I TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY AIRLIFTED SEEMINGLY EVERY SINGLE DETAIL from the intro in Joseph Campbell's book on FW. Water under the bridge at that point, but it made me wonder how much of a grasping dolt I looked like to the nameless men and women who read these things.

Well, I do listen to this guy. His name's Wolf.

ihttp://www.hot8brassband.com/images/1Keith_Wol_Anderson.jpg

Hey! That's as far as I got too!

only thing was, I had never heard any of his music, only read about in books I found in the library.

this was not readily apparent in my essay.

which says something about...something.

this got me into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music's electronic music program.

that and 20 minutes of music made with a 4 track and a casio sk1.

well, it got me on the waiting list.

but then I got in.

and the rest is (not) history.

(As for the rest, I can't say I feel jealous about any of that except for the young thing, and since there are millions of people with that quality I can't focus on him as a source of hate!)

Not to be relevant to the thread or anything, but I just wanna take the contrarian postion of "I love Sasha's work, on his blog and in the New Yorker." I'm cutting edge yo.

um thread relevancy - i bet it's ll cool j.

not exactly on point, but I enjoyed this week's writeup on mashups and I agree wholeheartedly with his assessments of good and bad mashups too.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?050110crmu_music

sure, some might argue the whole thing is already passe, but what do New Yorker reader know...

Now, I haven't obsessed about the whole scene and all but this tidbit blew me away...

"“Stroke” also inspired a fourteen-year-old named Daniel Sheldon to start a Web site called boomselection.info."

FOURTEEN! -0- lordy lordy lordy...

Ashlee also inspired a twelve-year old named Michael Sissypants to start a website called shegotbooed.com

The re-election of George W. Bush inspired a ten-year-old named Lucius Cornholt to start a website called iprotest.us.

Commercials and spam inspired a sixteen-year-old named John Sincere to start a Web site called truthabouterectionpills.org.

The critical disregard for heavy metal inspired a nine-year-old named Skreddy Pantookler to start a Website called hmisnotjustformorons.info.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/sasha-frere-jones-new-yorkers-music-critic-moves-to-news-corp-s-ipad-newspaper/

my mother in law told me recently that she skips all of SFJ's NYer articles. "Whenever I see her name, I just turn the page!"

my mother in law is also one of the only people i know who owns an ipad! hmmm.

hope he hires david shapiro

not a whole lot of predicting going on:

5 years pass...

hope they make louis menand the music critic. and the movie critic. and the t.v. critic. and the art critic.

The article says he is staying at the New Yorker too guys.

yup, thankfully!

markers, that was mean

super mean of me to still want to be able to read his columns in the New Yorker :-/

Sasha Frere Jones seems like the type of writer Patrick Bateman would read if 'American Psycho' was set in 2010

my mother in law told me recently that she skips all of SFJ's NYer articles. "Whenever I see her name, I just turn the page!"

― tylerw, Tuesday, November 16, 2010 3:15 PM Bookmark

hahaha, this is almost exactly the *typical New Yorker reader* response I imagine taking place every time he publishes.

FWIW, I predict the next article will be about... Gimme Pizza slowed down.

Whoa: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/business/media/pop-music-critic-leaves-the-new-yorker-to-annotate-lyrics-for-a-start-up.html

lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

holy moly

O_O

Mr. Frere-Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for “that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves.”

as much as this site has been the butt of jokes, i've always felt like this is basically where it would head, with just a little bit of smart leadership:

Mr. Frere-Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for “that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves.”

entirely possible, the nature of close readings of particular lyrics still seems like the kind of shit that drains the magic from popular music to me

idk

I'm old enough to remember emails that "translated" lyrics by, say, Biggie or Tupac that would circulate constantly as forwards. Never would I imagine that ever becoming a business, or becoming the go-to site for lyric verification because all competitors were too likely to infect your computer with viruses. What a world.

Wow sfj is a dead ringer for david cross

http://theamericanreader.com/sasha-frere-jones-is-a-white-man/

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-michiko-kakutani

"I am Michiko Kakutani"

worst T-shirt ever

I'm old enough to remember emails that "translated" lyrics by, say, Biggie or Tupac that would circulate constantly as forwards. Never would I imagine that ever becoming a business, or becoming the go-to site for lyric verification because all competitors were too likely to infect your computer with viruses. What a world.

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Sunday, January 11, 2015 9:27 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are you not on 77

??

shh!

I hit Ray off board & broke it down

Is 77 just a bunch of people doing rap whitesplations?

We need to know since y'all brought it up

there's also some naked pictures

I wonder who will replace him. A few contenders spring to mind.

"white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry" "white devil sophistry"

farewell review of sleater-kinney was so cut/dried & clinical. mansplaining? or musiciansplaining i guess. not sure he means to be condescending, but...

those articles are meant for middle-aged NY readers who don't follow music

Yep, despite SFJ proclaiming his love for the new album in 1 paragraph, most of the article was just a historical overview of what the group means and stands for

Well, calling AHOTBO your favorite S-K album is at least taking a stand.

good lord, all hands? really?

and now wherever anyone is experiencing text, the goal is going to be to have it annotated

When did annotation become a thing on which it was possible to have a world domination perspective?

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudMap/Mishnah/Mishnah.JPG

world domination plan probably hidden inside a DFW footnote on Schooly D

there's a really terrifying borges story to be written in all this

Yep, despite SFJ proclaiming his love for the new album in 1 paragraph, most of the article was just a historical overview of what the group means and stands for

― curmudgeon, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 10:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is every review he did for the new yorker iirc

I think that's an entirely reasonable approach to writing about music in a publication like the New Yorker.

yeah, the more context you need and the smaller a word count you're working with, the harder it becomes to avoid that (n.b. I am talking about myself here as well, this is a huge problem I have with my writing)

I like how he's right but for the wrong reasons when he says The skeptic may be suspicious when I say that, after “All Hands on the Bad One” (2000), the new album, “No Cities to Love,” is my favorite Sleater-Kinney record.

that last paragraph is such a weird, fitting-for-him note to go out on. a "sorry not sorry" about centering their praise around gender that manages to blame society and maybe even the band.

for reference:
Almost against their own history, she and Brownstein sing together, in the chorus of another song, “There are no anthems.” As in many Sleater-Kinney songs, which typically avoid storytelling, there seems to be a problem being solved, and here it is, evidently, the spectre of exceptionalism, of being that band that’s really great—for a bunch of girls.

That patronizing frame surrounds much praise of the band, especially when men are writing. But ignoring the band members’ gender in the name of fair treatment overlooks the conditions that made them agitate for fair treatment in the first place. Thinking that the excellence of any act, even Sleater-Kinney, is somehow post-gender requires a leap of imagination, as if the world were not still short on gender utopias. As great as Sleater-Kinney is, the band has not brought that about.

like...sure, ok, part of what you love about them is sociopolitical and gender-based. but doesn't that caveat make more sense to express earlier and more succinctly in a piece, rather than making "sadly the group isn't change-the-world good, as proven by my focus on their gender" your parting shot?

that's not what I hear in that

i'm obv offering a more caustic rewrite, but i'd be interested to hear the more sympathetic take

if his point is "the world is not a gender utopia, so s-k's gender is still an aspect of what makes them great" there are WAAAAY better ways to write that

He's saying their music cannot be critiqued as if it exists outside of history on some plane of platonic greatness

yes it could have been better expressed

Maybe via footnotes?

never understood that anyone could say that Weiss is a great or even good drummer. Her time is all over the place and her fills are super clattery, although my take is based more on the 90s when I couldn't avoid SK and maybe she's improved?

Her time is all over the place and her fills are super clattery

Just like Keith Moon. I did appreciate Xgau acknowledging her complete lack of groove, as plus.

Usually, receding into the background is a function of groove, and Weiss isn't a groove drummer. She's a beat and noise drummer -- a pure rock drummer devoid of swing or funk and not all that interested in simple punk timekeeping.

her drumming seems pretty sick on the new one, maybe unprecedentedly so?

compare/contrast sk before/after her drumming and you can really tell the difference

it was obviously a key ingredient one way or another

weiss drums like a third guitar player. i think it works

i'm fine with AHOTBO as someone's favorite S-K record.

SFJ's articles were always written with the whole NYer audience in mind, to the extent it's possible to write about bands like S-K and still do that. I always thought that was something he did pretty well considering, even though I never loved his articles. It always struck me as a little like having to write the jazz column in a black metal magazine.

i totally love that mode of writing.

i feel like there's a thread from 2004 in which amateurist and i talk about that.

"a pure rock drummer devoid of swing or funk" Infamous SFJ thinkpiece to thread.

SFJ's articles were always written with the whole NYer audience in mind, to the extent it's possible to write about bands like S-K and still do that. I always thought that was something he did pretty well considering, even though I never loved his articles. It always struck me as a little like having to write the jazz column in a black metal magazine.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Thursday, 15 January 2015 04:39 (8 hours ago) Permalink

I do think it's a tough gig but Emily Nussbaum manages to bring a more knowing, energetic feel to writing about TV shows that I'm sure most New Yorker readers haven't seen. I've got to thinking that this methodical, assume-no-prior-knowledge approach is the only way to do it in that magazine but I think his successor could potentially find a very different voice.

i get the audience thing i always just felt like with him the context setting was way out of proportion to talking about the actual music. there has to be a more succinct way to get people up to speed.

Remake otm, dunno how people can constantly apologize for sfj (who has plenty of unpacked, presumptuous stuff in his articles) when nussbaum and others aren't held back

Requiring unpacking I mean

Not a fan of Nussbaum. Too many of her pieces just seem like scattershot lists of TV shows shoehorned into a loose theme. SFJ veers too far the other direction. I like that mode of writing, but if you're writing for the New Yorker and have limited space, it's probably a safe gamble to leave out much of the bio and backstory and just make stronger arguments. Assuming you have something worth saying. I mean, it's the New Yorker. Its readers are generally bright, and self-selecting. I think they can figure stuff out.

If you're writing about, say, Animal Collective or Dirty Projectors in the New Yorker then you need to put in a decent amount of detail about who they are, where they came from, etc. Bio stuff, essentially. Anyone who blindly assumes the New Yorker readership knows who those artists are wouldn't last long in the gig. In short, music writing in the New Yorker isn't generally aimed at people who post on ILM.

neither are annotations on genius so maybe we should ignore him entirely

wait he actually quite the new yorker for rapgenius?

dead @ this

*quit

he didn't "quit" he's just going to write less so he can help genius burn some money

Anyone who blindly assumes the New Yorker readership knows who those artists

It's the fucking New Yorker, that's why people read it, to learn things. The subject is self-defining - it's in the New Yorker, therefore it is worth knowing about - and even the oldest New Yorker reader can google (they read about google in the New Yorker a few years back). His stuff was like 90% bio, generally and specifically this swan song. It's possible and in fact preferable in 20-fucking-15 to write about Sleater-Kinney without talking about riot grrl again, let alone their gender in the first place. They're an innately great and interesting band. We're not talking about some unearthed obscurity or esoteric Peruvian electronic act or even black metal or whatever. They're a great rock band, stick to why, not where they came from.

this might be on purpose considering he's said he wanted his pieces to more or less stand alone:

"...you’re creating these things that are very much legacy pieces. You write something that people will refer to. So figuring out how to do that and also be up to date, it’s a bit tricky."

(from http://www.newsweek.com/sasha-frere-jones-ditching-worlds-top-music-criticism-gig-genius-299223)

That's doofy. That's how you write for a daily paper, not the longform magazine of record. If he wants a piece to be definitive, he should make it interesting enough to recommend.

Average NYer reader probably cares more about context and narrative than in depth analysis of the music.

well that IS what you would yak about at a cheese and olive party

he's just not even that good at general writing imo. it's not that it's a chore to read a lot of bio before a brief analysis of the work, it's if you know the artist's bio and their work, his take on both is regularly dubious.

In the early and mid-seventies, the heyday of hard rock, only a curmudgeon would have denied himself the pleasure of Cheap Trick and Aerosmith, bands that acted like dumb hedonists but were clever and meticulous when making records, a balance that Homme has emulated. Hooks were laid end to end; guitars were played at high volume without becoming overbearingly fuzzy or indistinct; and there was a sense of humor about the entire affair. Then, in the late seventies, the advent of punk and its offshoots complicated everything. In a rejection of meticulous professionalism, amateurism was in, which was not helpful for bands that prided themselves on accurate playing, singing in tune, and making records sound huge with studio tricks, a technique that Queens of the Stone Age have mastered. The longhairs and the decadents were out—this was a party purge, in every sense. Big guitars and hooks snuck into the eighties only as guilty pleasures, before Guns N’ Roses brought back some of hard rock’s legitimacy. (Heavy metal, a separate category, is the water bug of the story; catchy hits were never oxygen to this life-form.)

Nirvana at once perfected and ruined everything. In 1991, the band released “Nevermind,” one of the four or five perfect hard-rock records. It was explicitly indebted to my favorite Aerosmith album, “Rocks,” and it quickly became a mainstream hit. Because Nirvana’s members, besides being newly minted rock stars, were also politically aware punks and weirdos, they found it profoundly alienating that they had just made the jocks’ favorite new album. This meeting of matter and antimatter contributed to Kurt Cobain’s suicide, in 1994, and helped ruin a big moment for hard rock.

would you hand this to someone who was curious about hard rock

Yeah, he claims that Sleater-Kinney are women

xpost

yes it could have been better expressed

― ancient texts, things that can't be pre-dated (President Keyes), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 8:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weird how some grafs by someone who is not louis menand, and writing about a very different subject (sociopolitics of rock) could come out w/ the same stifling knowingness that menand has been noted for, house style game strong there i guess

That is pretty bad.

Like how many people in the late 70s actually soured on Hard Rock because of punk?

And who was listening to Cheap Trick in the early 70s?

Gene Simmons

a lot of people in the UK soured on hard rock because of punk.

The longhairs and the decadents were out—this was a party purge, in every sense. Big guitars and hooks snuck into the eighties only as guilty pleasures, before Guns N’ Roses brought back some of hard rock’s legitimacy. (Heavy metal, a separate category, is the water bug of the story; catchy hits were never oxygen to this life-form.)

idk if he's talking about America here or not (I assume so?) but this is basically totally wrong in regards to what rock actually charted/was popular.

Poison was no. 3 in 1986

It's the fucking New Yorker, that's why people read it, to learn things. The subject is self-defining - it's in the New Yorker, therefore it is worth knowing about - and even the oldest New Yorker reader can google (they read about google in the New Yorker a few years back). His stuff was like 90% bio, generally and specifically this swan song. It's possible and in fact preferable in 20-fucking-15 to write about Sleater-Kinney without talking about riot grrl again, let alone their gender in the first place. They're an innately great and interesting band. We're not talking about some unearthed obscurity or esoteric Peruvian electronic act or even black metal or whatever. They're a great rock band, stick to why, not where they came from.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 15 January 2015 15:25 (3 hours ago) Permalink

You're talking about like retired 68-year-old bankers, classical music enthusiasts, etc. Expecting that audience to either already know what riot grrl is or else fucking look at the wiki page is pretty unrealistic, more likely they'll just completely tune the article out. It's perfectly understandable that if the NYer writes about an artist half of its audience is going to be too old to have been the right demographic to appreciate first time around, it's going to pitch you on why you might be interested in the band or why they matter "historically." Sometimes I think that's a futile exercise anyway, but I can't fault them for trying.

nary a punk or aggressive amateur in sight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Mainstream_Rock_number-one_songs_of_the_1980s

Well, there is a reason it's not all Tony Bennett profiles, so they're not strictly patronizing.

This was all for the sake of a ...Like Clockwork review?

Big guitars and hooks snuck into the eighties only as guilty pleasures.

http://i.imgur.com/cQQkxGt.gif

let's not forget his most famous article remains "why did indie rockers stop ripping off black people?"

tbf it did prob give us "reflektor"

back-to-back topic sentences in that piece

By the mid-nineties, the biggest rock stars in the world were rappers, and the potential for embarrassment had become a sufficient deterrent for white musicians tempted to emulate their black heroes.

In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness.

seriously, how can anyone say "well look he has to lay it out thorough and clean, it's the new yorker" when he's engaging in self-contradicting time-travel

actually i'm not sure in that first one if he's referring to puff daddy or fred durst, either way wtf

damn flipping through it now that piece still makes my brain explode, dude cannot send himself to genius fast enough imo

If nothing else, though, this:

I had written three columns for the magazine when a journalist e-mailed me some questions, all to the effect of, “What the hell are you doing at The New Yorker?” I emailed Remnick and asked what I should say. He wrote back, “We’d like it if you told them you’re the pop critic.” The audition had ended.

I wrote back to the reporter, took an elevator down to the lobby, and walked out onto Forty-third Street. My father brought me up on collections of work written by the magazine’s best-known writers: S. J. Perelman, Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, James Thurber. I looked up and down the street, imagining what Perelman might say about the enormous LED screens to my left or the Starbucks across from me. My father died suddenly in March 1997, two months before my first son was born. At that point, I was not the writer he’d always hoped I would become. I was an office drone, and played in an instrumental-rock band that my father tolerated, at best. I realized, while standing on Forty-third Street, that my father would never know about this job. I walked into the Starbucks and tried to buy a juice. I couldn’t talk, and stepped out of the line to break down properly. A woman offered me a handkerchief. I thanked her, and went back upstairs. I e-mailed Bennet and asked him if the magazine would be O.K. with my going to England to write about a new singer who had one song out, a single called “Galang.” He said yes.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/sasha-frere-jones-fade-out

When I interviewed Withers for the piece, he was sitting at home, in Los Angeles. He wasn’t friendly, but he was cordial. As soon as we started talking about the nineteen-eighties, when he was signed with Sony, his mood changed radically. I asked something vague about “Just the Two of Us,” a song he wrote with Grover Washington, Jr., which was released in 1981, with Washington listed as the main artist. Withers didn’t like that topic of conversation, so I suggested that we talk about anything else. Withers said, “This conversation sucks. I’m going to take a shower.”

response very much in character

Maybe he is the first person in new yorker history to be poorly paid? never forget the time he tried to get his readers to chip in for a new laptop.

oh come on, the magazine doesn't even return a profit iirc

genius should give some money to xhucx

oh come on, the magazine doesn't even return a profit iirc

Yeah but they pay nice

oh come on, the magazine doesn't even return a profit iirc

― Οὖτις

neither do National Review or The New Republic

I enjoy SFJ's writing sometimes, not all the time, blah blah blah, but that clip Ned posted is very sweet, imo. It's nice to remember he's just a human dude.

It really does take some balls to walk away from the best gig in American journalism to annotate rap lyrics for a startup. Tired of staying up to 4am is euphemism for time to cash in.

i think he's genuinely excited about doing this and thinks they can be a better company with his involvement.

it must be a euphemism, b/c I don't see that he would have to say up until 4AM unless he wanted to. he talked about records for NYer, and very seldom do I remember the act of seeing god knows what grime act in Bushwick at that hour being essential to his shingle.

I was startled to read elsewhere that that job didn't give him benefits? I know lots of people at Conde Nast, and the idea that that would be true for a writer at the Nyer even re: the belt-tightening occurring around the company is difficult to fathom.

from the Newsweek article katherine posted:

The writer elaborated on his reasoning in a conversation with Newsweek. Also on hand were Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (a third founder, Mahbod Moghadam, resigned amid scandal in May), who touted their hire. Zechory called Frere-Jones “a truly brilliant writer” and said he would be “working with artists and with the Genius community to create this permanent museum of songs.” Lehman added, “For us the idea of taking someone who has so much power on the platform of The New Yorker and giving him a platform that’s 100 times more powerful and more timeless was just an intoxicating notion to us.”

Timeless?

"oh, wait...that's not what i'm intoxicated on"

timeless intoxication

DRUNK IN FUUUUUUUUUNDS

sashbort

my sashbort

I enjoy SFJ's writing sometimes, not all the time,

Off topic but am I the only one who always always mentally hears the formulation "sometimes, not all the time" in Bob Dylan's voice from "Clothesline Saga"?

lol @ the idea of anything on the internet being permanent

The insights into the New Yorker process in SFJ's farewell piece are crazy from the perspective of most titles. He's flying around getting all these great interviews and access for maybe three quotes inserted into a critical essay. Saves on transcribing time I guess.

I wonder if Genius will fly him to CA every time he needs E-40 to explain some slang