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.

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