Head Over Heels about "shitpost-modernism"

Gutted about what's happened to Pitchfork.

Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run. 

One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".

One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.

In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon.  And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.

On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarily anguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points: 

"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects.... What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen.....  I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight....  In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"

Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.

the original doomscroller

As the end of a year approaches, Sasha Frere-Jones invites writers, musicians, and artists to come up with some words about that year.  "Reflections on 2023" went up on his Substack on January 1st and it includes some thoughts from me about doomscrolling. You'll have to - haha - scroll down a ways to find it, though, as he's got a hell of a lot of guests and some of the contributions are quite lengthy. 

The gist of my micro-essay is that the doomscroll is a new affect, brought about by a convergence of technologies. To achieve that specific mental-physical sensation in the pre-digital era would have required cobbling together a Professor Branestawm/Rube Goldberg-style construction, a rotational contraption through which would pass at speed a ribbon onto which was glued stories clipped out of the newspapers. But the ribbon would run out... and it's the inexhaustibility, the endlessly renewed quality of the scroll that induces those fixated feelings of panic and paralysis. 

About a week after the reflections went up, though, I stumbled across a precedent! 

Something on Twitter (more on that in a minute) led me to look up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall":

Bob Dylan attributed his inspiration to the feeling he got when reading microfiche newspapers in the New York Public Library: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."

Dylan, original doomscroller! 

And the microfiche reader is a machine that you crank manually - so not unlike my mad-inventor contraption. (You can watch someone actually using one in the 1960s here).

The reason I was looking up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a Twitter thread, started by someone who proclaimed that: 

"the music opinion I have that people would hate me for is that I truly think Bob Dylan is underrated, like severely underrated. and that he’s maybe the single most interesting person alive on earth right now. and that no other living artist even comes close to his significance"

Someone else chipped in with a hard agree: 

"It’s like living at the same time as Shakespeare"

Then someone else co-signed using a George Harrison quote: "There’s not a lot of people in the world who I see from a historical point of view. Five hundred years from now, looking back in history, I think he will still be the man. Bob, he just takes the cake.” 

And then - in what was turning into a competition between Dylan nuts to say the most Dylan-nutty thing ever -  yet another person declared that the line “Where black is the color, where none is the number” alone merited the Nobel Prize.

Not being a Dylan-nut, not in the least, I had to google the line, which led me to "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

An enduring bemusement for me, this phenomenon of the Dylan-nut. D-nuts are forever quoting lyrics, brandishing them as if the most profound utterances ever uttered -  oracular, Bible-level stuff. They seem to like the parable-like cadence, or the old-timey American quality: plainspoken yet poetic. Sometimes, they'll talk about how funny a particular line is. (I'm always like, "really?") 

"Where black is the color, where none is the number” - partly it's the way it's sung, I should imagine. But as a stand-alone line, stripped of intonation, taken out of the mounting intensity of the rest of the lyrics, that particular line strikes me as.... fine.  

Of course (I've written about this before), Dylan would not make my Top 1000. Not contesting the  objective eminence, the historical importance, here - just talking about what I personally would reach for as something to listen to.  

Still, Bob did invent doomscrolling, so there's that.  

I wonder if he owns a dumbphone and actively doomscrolls today. Perhaps he'll write another "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". Then again, he doesn't need to. It's a hardy perennial. 

postcript: A Britrap doomscroll from the mid-2000s

the final (connect_i)cut

Talking about blogs operated by musicians, word comes that the last ever album by connect_icut, also known as Sam Macklin and whose nom de blog was Bubblegum Cage III - is now out on the Blasted Gorse label. 

And it's really excellent, weaving Sam's abiding passions for early UK post-rock (Disco Inferno and that kind of thing), left-field electronic music, glitch, et al, into a shimmering final statement. Nice late period ECM-ish cover design too.

But it's not the last we'll hear of Macklintronica -  simply the retiring of a particular identity and the launch of a new direction. 

Check out his back catalogue while you're about it.