I have no problem with intellectualizing music, and I appreciate reviewers who don't feel the need to condescend, but I really can't get my head around this.
The arguments he puts forward re the link between evocations of nature and white, male modernist alienation are fairly standard but the only way he seems to tie this in to Animal Collective is through a couple of song titles that reference natural elements. This is probably because lyrically, I don't think AC really do fetishize nature; most of the imagery I've picked up on seems to do exactly the opposite. As for the comment about Karen Dalton, he conflates nature and culture, which I'd argue actually contradicts the point Banhart was trying to make, which is precisely to link her voice to nature; either way this doesn't make her "wholly Other," although it might preclude her of agency. Anyway, here's the link:
http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4276
Also, more prosaically, anyone want to tell what the Water Curses EP sounds like after reading that?
That "review" actually gave me AIDS
Seriously, it's been a long while since I've read such unmitigated bollocks.
The guy's not doing his job
Nobody goes to a music review site to read a social studies essay.
In a nutshell he's saying the album's average because music is racist to nature.
And AC should
be using their privileged backgrounds to make nature racist back to people and thus reverse global warming.
This, however, is the best review ever
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/38853-shine-on
I've not even clicked on the link,
but I know you're right.
jesus
jesus, his soul wilted and dried up a long time ago didnt it?
my sides...
...they ache! genius. thanks for the link!
HAHAHAHAA
you're not wrong. Stroke of genius.
thank you
from the pit of my soul. That link has made me joy myself!
Sod that, try his
review of the Flight of the Conchords LP:
http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4248
Unbelievable, he's like a crashing bore on day release from SOAS.
The guy is clearly a spectacular tool; he's read some literary theory and can write in cogent sentences, but he doesn't think before he flops out another undergraduate-dissertation style reference. Like in that AC review; where he begins "In a Hegelian mood..." - does he really mean that the 'ends' of the music (whatever they might be) embody a particular sense of Geist in the sense of an immutable human spirit? No, of course he doesn't, he means that it's influenced by the particular milieu in which they were raised. So don't say it.
In fact, don't say anything at all. Ever, again.
I liked
Flight of the Conchords but have now been enlightened. Fucking racists.
I just read that now...
Why doesn't he just write "every single bit of white popular culture is racist appropriation from black culture?" and save us the agony of another 2000 words of his florid, pseudo-intellectual militant-student twattery?
Imagine...
...getting stuck next to that tool at a party...
what a fucking knobend...
"It has inspired me though to go to New Zealand and peddle my brand of humorous Aborigine joke songs and see if I can get a show on TV One."...and an ignorant one too...thems called Maori innit.
That it total shite.
I actually perservered with that review, tried to make sense of it, and it's just utter tripe. Supposedly he'll want to critice people like me for not getting exactly what he's on about, but what is it about? Other than just shockingly bad music criticism.
It's all dressed up in wannabe intellectual thought, in citing articles, obscure quotations, whereas the point he's making (I think he's making?) to support an utterly empty discussion. If I get it, it's because Animal Collective celebrate the weirdness of nature, they are indirectly representative of an enviromental crisis.
What the hell am I supposed to make of that? It's such a deeply vacuous point, such a smug, masturbatory argument, such a useless thing to be happy to point out. You're not a fucking philosopher or a psychoanalyst.
You're not Jung. Or Kant. Or Foucault.
You're a music reviewer.
This is a music review.
Right a fucking article about it if you must, but quite frankly, when I read a music review, I want to know what the music sounds like, your personal opinion of its quality, and a rational explanation of these points. Creatively, maybe, using an extended metaphor if you absolutely have to, but stick to those guidelines.
This does not offer any of these.
Thus it is not a review.
Thus it is a waste of time.
They are also taking black music and making it white, apparantly. Making something that denies folk music's roots as well.
Guess what, you tosspot, when people grasp hold of something striking in art, they tend put their own spin on it. There is no copyright on fucking amazing ideas and to believe that there should be something similar is to deny what art is all about.
Tosspot.
Andrew Beckerman is a raging cum flannel
Ha Ha
...i was bored after the first 2 lines
It's just such a weird thing to do,
to write a florid, semi-dissertation instead of a music review.
Word of advice; never just use massive quotes unsupported Andrew.
woah
thats worse than one of Diver's reviews
steady on
that review
makes me angry and confused
I'm certainly confused.
i love the way he
manages to bring racism into absolutely everything. yes, Flight OF The Conchords are racist masterminds. What a fud.
it seems pretty rasist
to think that just cos they are white and do a bit of comedy rap that they are rasist.
Albi, (Albi), Albi, (Albi)
Albi the racist dragon
Well, not anymore!
Don't touch my tail, you'll make it dirty
What I find hilarious...
...is that he's 'intellectualizing music', as you say, but that his writing is AWFUL.
Who writes in a concluding paragraph "to return to the beginning", a twelve year old? That's AWFUL. The whole thing is written like a really confusing and terrible university essay. FAIL.
Exactly
that was kind of my point. It reads like an undergraduate sociology essay. I'm sure there are many interesting ways you could approach the music of Animal Collective but this, manifestly, isn't one of them. Again, his whole point seems to revolve around the fact that he read some sub-Foucauldian wankmark of an essay and then noticed that AC have an album titled Here Comes The Indian and an EP which includes the word Water in the title.
I don't think anyone's in denial that white musicians appropriate "black" musical forms but I'd actually say that he's pretty much just re-primitivising those very same musical forms in his reviews.
Surely this guy will get a job at Pitchfork soon?
Thats painful reading
that guy sucks he should keep his writing to him self. I'm pretty sure he has completly missed the point on Flight of The Concords too hehe he needs someone to flip the birdy at him for trying to make it a race war.
we're not Australians, we're from
New Zealand
ah right, hey did you still want that Golden Delicious?
Yis
:)
i've no problem..
.. with analysis of a work that links to wider cultural conditions and critiques it accordingly, but this prick manages to studiously avoid talking about any of the sonic qualities of this record. Ok, he references a few song titles, and briefly refers to AC's general deconstruction/abstraction of the pop format... but it ends there. Did he listen to the record?
I was wondering if he listened to the records
it doesn't read like he did.
My fave bit:
"The problematic is this"
Can we arrange for Hemingway's corpse to Bismark this man?
Bismark?
thats somat a bit wrong to do with balls aint it or bodily functions? eithter way I agree with you whole heartedly.
Jesus
I thought that review was bad, but out of curiosity I read the article that he quotes by Kandia Crazy Horse on freak-folk/the New American Underground:
http://www.furious.com/Perfect/freakshow.html
It's very long, but stick with it. Apparently, all white rock musicians are racist. Especially ones from California.
'Object d'art'
I love that. So many memorable typographical and lexical mishaps. That 'article' makes about as much sense as a hat made of live stoats. Twat.
I'd love a hat made from live stoats...
...but you're right, it wouldn't be very sensible. It's a shame that there's no way of leaving comments on Dusted- I'm sure this guy would love some feedback on his essays.
I'm not inclined to agree with everything there
but thanks for posting that. Some of it is very, very interesting. And it's written by somebody who can write, too. Unlike that barrel of fudge about AC above
that's the Kandida Crazy Horse thing, btw
This (Crazy Horse thing) was far more interesting
Not sure I agree with her, and I think the conclusion (where she demands that the nation come and meet her and reshape itself in her image) reveals the article as the exercise in ego-rubbing it is.
But the writing was good and occasionally funny, and it's nice to see someone with the proper amount of love for Gnarls Barkley and Arthur Lee.
She seems to be considering culture, race, and nationality to be the same thing
When they're clearly not.
So whilst I'd agree with her conclusions if she was talking purely about white musicians appropriating other musical cultures, whilst simultaneously portraying anybody who really is from those cultures as something other-worldly, I think to conflate that with race is not just misguided, but a little dangerous. It seems to come from some kind of personal experience more than any kind of rational objectivity - I sincerely doubt that it's race that motivates most of what she says.
But to regard race, nationality and culture as completely unconnected is also a little misguided
Indeed, a lot of culture is overtly tied into questions of racial and/or national identity, from Public Enemy through to Skrewdriver. (Bet no-one's ever had them in the same sentence before!)
I certainly think she's onto something (although nothing new) when she refers to the tendency of traditionally white genres to 'un-black' any black man who excels therein. Jimi Hendrix is the example she goes for, Bob Marley might be another. Indeed, the force of this is so powerful that it can take Michael Jackson and drag him kicking and screaming into literal (and frankly terrifying) whiteness.
Oh, they are very much connected
But race doesn't actually mean anything. It's just skin colour. People unfortunately divide on those grounds, though, giving rise to separate cultures, and it's the cultural artifacts that are borrowed.
I'd agree with her if her examples could be laid solely to blame at the feet of ingrained racism, but I can't consider that valid. What I see is that Western culture either keeps the "other" outside (thus keeping it mystified - Indian music in the 60s, etc) or it absorbs it and takes off the edges and corners so it's more palatable (most obviously this happened with hip-hop). I think it can't be based on race because this pattern tends to accept different races without objection - it only tends to apply to music and cultural traditions that are either indigenous to an area that were displaced by colonialists, or to the Far East and parts of Africa. I don't see much "whitening" going on with Latino artists, for instance, or even Arabic, or those from the Indian sub-continent, let alone the different areas of Europe.
Also, I'm not sure what her criticism of freak-folk is coming from. Regardless of what exactly is being copied, altered, absorbed or rejected, she seems to see people taking on alien concepts as similar to minstrel show - but those shows were primarily based upon satirising and stereotyping, whereas these artists and bands do it more out of a general interest in the sound. I fail to see why that can be a negative thing, and if anything the music press should be the object of criticism for picking and choosing what is acceptable and what is not, not the bands.
Race isn't just skin colour!
As I recall the Hutus and the Tutsis were both black. And if it's the racial distinctions that give rise to separate cultures, as you say, then surely culture is dependent upon race. Parasitic, almost.
I'm not sure Indian music was being kept "outside" in the 60's: George Harrison was doing his best! But to say that Western culture either alienates or dilutes is her point, surely? In the way that she feels that freak-folk is taking it's influences, wearing them, and looking silly while doing so.
I think her point - and I don't agree, FWIW - is that the "general interest in the sound" that you mention is inevitably coloured (!) by one's racial/national/cultural identity, and so it is impossible for the freak-folkers to "get" native American culture in the way she does. They are at best tourists and at worst minstrels.
Ah, well
We're getting onto the question of what a race is, and that's a little bit too complicated, and not necessarily relevant here (for the record, I view race as arbitrary). Just the fact that there are races is, and that cultures come out of the divisions between them. You're right that cultures are in effect parisitic upon race, but that doesn't mean it's the race that's being appropriated.
Essentially, she seems to be accusing Western musicians of insincerity. This annoys me - if we're going to use your tourism analogy, whilst of course many people are merely using the stuff in a light-hearted way, people can uproot themselves and move to a new place and eventually become naturalised. Bands like Vampire Weekend are the tourists taking snaps of the Chichen Itza, but there are groups willing to spend time and love living amongst the homeless of Mexico City and truly wanting to understand a different place.
Her view smacks of the same kinds of prejudices people have towards middle-class people who profess left-wing beliefs, as if anybody who's materially comfortable can't possible understand (or, indeed, *want* to understand) what it's like to be poor, or help those people out, and therefore must be at best naive and at worst simply rebelling against their parents.
isn't this just this
guys review style? Like he's consciously trying to look at the social implications of an album release rather than the actual music itself... comes off a bit painfully self conscious and smug but still he's attempting something
no.
its just rubbs
least he put
his balls on the line
I actually agree
with what he’s saying. It seems fashionable at the moment for bands with little personality of their own (yes, usually cos they’re white and middle-class) to cling to this frontier/nature theme in an attempt to absorb some ‘identity’. But this is a music review. And to use such a tossy style, with half of the text belonging to quotes from other people, with no mention of what the f---ing music sounds like is just a bit rubbish…
freak-folk – a willful, aesthetic adoption of colored signifiers
hang on...is it?
That is so far up its arse...
...and doesn't even make any sense.
reminded me of this
one of my favourite sources of amusement ever.
http://wps.ablongman.com/long_hult_nch_3/0,9398,1483993-,00.html
PF writers are brilliant
because they walk up to the line of writing completely pretentious drivel and then back away. This guy plows on and on and on... I stopped reading when he used "problematic" when "problem" would have sufficed.
The guy employs Water Curses as the metaphor for some pseudo-intellectual essay when obviously it ought to be the other way round.
He probably be a great reviewer if he remembered what his original assignment was. As it stands, I've no idea whether he like the ep or not... and I have little interest to find out.
Fucking incredible
They're racist because they are "folk" even though they clearly aren't. They constantly cite madlib as a influence - especially with the new sample based stuff musically they have more stuff in common with modern hip-hop than devendra banhart.
They fetishize nature part has literally nothing to do with any of the songs. Street Flash is about going on a walk around town. Sea Lion is about global warming (which probably could be called critically reflecting and creating positively). Cobwebs is about having fun with family and friends and being positive. Water curses is about god knows what.
It sounds good as an EP, it wouldn't have sounded good on strawberry jam. What should they have done to break free from the economic status quo?
The EPs great, everyone should get it.