What does Sup Forums think of Simon Reynolds?

What does Sup Forums think of Simon Reynolds?

rateyourmusic.com/list/jackintwat/simon_reynolds__the_best_the_worst_of_the_nineties

The odd nifty catchphrase and deft rhyme, but c'mon, this man was a pig---Notorious P.I.G. more like; Piggy Smalls, heheheheh-and with a little help from his buddy Sean he almost singlehandedly set rap down its current path of spiritual bankruptcy. And he had the most unappetising vocal timbre in all of rap- asthmatic and adenoidal and mucus-bunged-up and fat-fuck wheezy all at once.

In this age of cultural overload and aesthetic surfeit, GBV is monstrously, disgustingly prolific. The band averages about 24 songs per album; singer/songsmith Robert Pollard has a backlog of some 2000 tunes, but is still planning to write a 'Tommy' style rock opera. Who among us has a life empty enough to accommodate such a glut of undistinguished creativity? GBV is basically America's very own Oasis. Both bands are led by incorrigibly incontinent songwriters morbidly obsessed with English rock of the mid-to-late Sixties. If you're gonna stick with a craft as quaint as songsmithery, you should at least make sure you have something compelling or uniquely idiosyncratic to say. Oasis don't, but are at least shameless about it: Noel Gallagher's lyrics are a jumble of doggerel and epic-sounding phrases that allow fans to read whatever they like into them. But with Pollard, you can't be absolutely sure he has nothing to say, because every expression is convoluted and coded; he gets in the way. Titles like "The Official Ironmen Rally Song", "Bright Paper Werewolves" and "Rhine Jive Click" are the most daftly, wilfully oblique titles since Amon Duul II (who at least had LSD as an excuse). Another similarity with Oasis is GBV's relentlessly upbeat mood: a neo-mod, bright-eyed poptimism that proclaims "it's 1966, the future is wide-open!". In England, such empty triumphalism elevated Oasis into a huge pop phenomenon, by tapping into young kids' desire to fly in the face of grim present reality. In America, GBV's Anglophile/necrophile quasi-anthems made the band a hit only with rockcrits and others steeped in the canon of classic rock (and thus able to appreciate the reverence and the references). All their songs are tuneful in that deja vu, Tom Petty/Sebadoh way, while the riffs trigger your kneejerk-reflexes, conditioned by years of exposure to classic rock.

Can I be the only listener for whom half-liking a GBV song is unavoidably accompanied by a queasy sensation of shame and lameness? GBV is just one more fat fly crawling over the dungheap of rock history, sucking it up and pooping out endless additions to their copious trail of disgrace.

Rip It Up is a pretty good book on post-punk. Sadly my version doesn't have the chapter on the more "artsy" hardcore bands, like later Black Flag and the Minutemen.

Energy Flash is a good book

2001 was a tough time for the aging Anglo vanguard of first-wave IDM: Squarepusher reduced to parodying 2step garage to achieve even a mild frisson of novelty, Autechre alienating even their hardcore devotees with the ultra-abstruse Confield (which I actually quite enjoyed). Meanwhile Richard D. James had reportedly retired from music-making in order to probe the deepest recesses of computer programming, in the hopes of total aesthetic rejuvenation. Which made it doubly disappointing how so much of Drukqs sounds merely like a slight extension of the Aphex sound --- pretty splintered melody colliding with hyperkinetic breakbeats---circa 1996's Richard D James Album (which wasn't especially groundbreaking anyway). Tracks like "omgyjya switch" offer the same old drill'n'bass caricature of drum 'n' bass, whiplash beats evoking the torsions and impacts suffered by crash-test dummies. Clearly we too are meant to be stunned, concussed, by the splattery extravagance of ideas here. But the useless protean energy contorting these songs just reminds me of The Boredoms. When James slows the pace and attempts minimalist simplicity, though, the results are equally unimpressive: witness the series of short interludes in which he drops the digital arsenal and plays inane chord sequences on various acoustic keyboards---piano with reverb-pedal on full, a wheezy harmonium with clacking foot-pedals, and so forth. Let's just say he's no Erik Satie, no Harold Budd.

There's a fab four-track EP languishing within this double-CD's busy bloat: "gwely mernans" is a gloomcore crypt of ambient gabba, the distorted kickdrum sounding distant and suppressed, its frantic pulse overhung by a spectral synth-melody that lingers like a pall of luminous vapor; "bbydhyonchord" glows and clanks like prime Boards of Canada; "gwarek 2" brilliantly pastiches avant-classical composers like Stockhausen and Nono with a collage of agonised shrieks, insectile percussion, swarming sounds, and quaint tape-effects; the madcap electro of "Taking Control" sees a robo-voiced James using his personal superlative "decent bit!" to herald a particularly demented segment of drum machine mayhem. And doubtless there's probably a fair few other "decent bits" scattered across this double-CD, if you can be bothered to excavate them. But like the legion of IDM producers he's influenced, James seems paradoxically trapped by the "infinite possibilities" offered by today's software and plug-ins (the computer-music equivalent of guitar pedals), resulting in infinitesimally detailed tweakage, but no song-shapes or moodscapes that actually leave an imprint in your memory, let alone your heart.

NME, The Face, Vibe, and Rolling Stone all put Destiny's Child on the front cover this year. Mainstream pundits like The New York Times seriously assessed Beyonce Knowles's credentials as postfeminist icon. Give or take a few stubborn hold-outs, just about everybody---lapsed indie types, electronica fiends, non-aligned pop fans--joined the unbroken consensus that nu-skool R&B is the bomb. Owing to the timelag/folks-who-are-slow-off-the-mark syndrome, Destiny's lame follow-up album Survivor gleaned the benefit that should have accrued to the brilliant debut The Writing's On the Wall (c.f. Rooty getting the praise that Remedy deserved). There's two big problems with Survivor: no Shek'spere, and Beyonce's self-conscious sense of herself as icon and issuer of "statements". The debut communicated its ladies-first sass through story-songs and real-seeming scenarios ("Bills Bills Bills," "Bugaboo", "Say My Name"), but Survivor replaces that with bald declaration.
The stiff, harsh beats of "Independent Women Part 2" (not a sequel but a remake/remodel) bring out the true coldness of Destiny's take on modern love: after making the bootie call, and having her itch scratched, Beyonce dismisses the spent stud with "when it's all over/Please get up and leave... Got a lot to do/ I am my number one priority/No falling in love, no commitment for me." Likewise, the bombastic arrangement on "Survivor" matches the histrionic lyrics. The album credits salute those who've made it through "bad relationships, health issues, discrimination, being abused, death of a loved one, loss of a friend, not being popular, low self-esteem...". Beyonce, by contrast, appears to have "survived" a coup d'etat in her favor instigated by her manager/father (and involving the downsizing of two of Destiny's original four members) and.... fame/money/adulation beyond her fan's wildest dreams. Tough life, eh?

Vibe's Destiny's cover had the trio dressed as the Supremes. But the Motown-style separation of singer/songwriter/producer roles that worked so brilliantly on Writing is junked on Survivor, with Beyonce credited as co-writer/co-producer on every song. Although the results are uniformly inferior, it's a shrewd move in credibility terms: being an spokesperson for female empowerment but not writing your own songs wouldn't wash, really, would it? As a self-portrait, though, Survivor is incoherent, cutting from the coquetry of "Bootlylicious" ("I don't think you're ready/for this jelly") to the prudish "Nasty", which reprimands a scanty-clad tramp for flaunting her flesh. And even when the bump'n'grind is rhythmically in full effect---the almost-great "Sexy Daddy"--the raunch is sabotaged by tame, lame lines like "sweety pie/I think it's your lucky night". A crap Christmas album and the departure of the new recruits to DC point ahead to a failed solo career for Beyonce.

It wouldn't take that much argument to get me to concede that Tool, Faith No More, Marilyn Manson, Alice In Chains, Primus, Nine Inch Nails, Korn, Kid Rock, White Zombie, Monster Magnet, they all have at least some redeeming qualities.
Marilyn Manson---upsets Christian heartlanders, creative use of colored contact lenses; White Zombie--as industrial disco-metal goes, pretty darn hooky; creative use of mud as hair gel; Alice In Chains--good doomy melodies, creative use of mud as lyrical tropes; Tool--good Quay Brothers plagiarism, creative use of mudpeople; Kid Rock--employs a fine drummer; like name like nature; Korn--strange "rapping"/primal yelp therapy bit in the middle of the song/video with the bullet in it, the perfect vocal counterpoint to singer's uber-dweeb-as-nu-kool transvaluation. And so forth... However, if you were to take all these bands least redeeming attributes, add extra flava from purely irredeemable cases like Insane Clown Posse, the resulting composite of beyond-redemption godawfulness would be a lot like the latest crop of post-nu metal gracing MTV (when it deigns to show videos at all). Like Mudvayne, whose miasma of tats, grimaces, zany hair, and agonized rock-out body-moves is audio-visually like some three-way fusion of Blue Man Group, Primus, and Slipknot. There's a whole other bunch whose names escape me, all seem to share with Mudvayne this two nouns composited into one word moniker thing (a la Godsmack, Buckcherry, et al), names like Silverdung, Bloodrivet, Twisterfelch, Sikkbuccit (I'm making these up but it can only be a matter of time they're real, because of the global band name shortage crisis--it's getting desperate out there). The connection to the old pre-grunge perm-and-spandex metal is that the music seems like an afterthought to the creative use of hair (facial and scalpal), tattoos, piercings, gurning.

Or maybe you just can't hear it for the retinal glare of sartorial/tonsorial shock-effects, grand guignol theatrics, exhausted signifiers of rebellion/outrage/excess/maladjustment, all being piled on in a desperate attempt to revivify some faint sense of the forbidden, the transgressive, the extreme, the anti-boyband. These gateaux of grotesquerie makes me think video-oriented rock (definitely a genre now) has become a bit like breeding pedigree dogs--the art of deliberately cultivated genetic travesty. Mind you, from a certain slant of thought, that makes it kind of an interesting phenomenon....

I was struggling for the words to describe what ails the Craig David album, and the word I came up with was "balls". As in, "this music's got no balls". What was deliciously androgynous about CD on "Rewind", now sounds insipidly epicene; not so much between-genders, as neuter. Maybe it's just a case of nice in small doses, like fudge or butterscotch. The voice that was wonderfully light and fluttery and melt-in-your-ear delectable on 'Rewind', here, en masse, is revoltingly cloying---like drowning in caramel. And the music itself is like cotton-wool or candy-floss, insubstantial without being ethereal. Much the same applies to the over-sugared Dodger album. Like Shanks & Bigfoot, Artful Dodger were prime movers in the grand transvaluation of London underground principles that made 2step circa 1999 a form of pop music in waiting, future-pop in exile. It was captured perfectly by the line in "Re-Rewind," where Craig David sings about being "real hardcore" in the most fey softcore croon imaginable, and by Mark Hill and Pete Devereux's hallmark production blend of dainty and ruff. But with the exception of the singles and moody bass-bubbler "Something", Stragglers proves that A/ 2step's pop life is almost used up B/ the perennial incompatibility of dancefloor-targeted genres with the album format.

For what is thrillingly singular as a 12 inch is inevitably diminished when surrounded by similar-but-not-quite-as-good material (marked by the sort of semi-songfulness that's the downfall of all crossover house and jungle). It forces you to notice the faceless prowess of the "featured" vocalists, the over-used arrangement mannerisms (pizzicato off and come back with some new ideas). That treble-intensified gloss and effervescence that you got with peak-era 2step has been muted too: these tracks sound like radio mixes, mid-frequencies flattening out the polar extremism of club-oriented garage (all top-end tingle and sub-woofer boom) into a dulled sheen. The result: disappointingly mild, characterless, and adult-oriented; pop music without the POP!

Seldom has a group's "we're cutting edge and you're not" arrogance been so groundless and unwarranted. Typical middlebrow pseudo-progressives, they have merely transferred the prog-rock notion of ostentatious virtuosity to sample-based music; their great bugbear is "obviousness" in sampling. And so every last drop of "vibe" and "aura" is addled out of their sources by their onanistic knob-twiddling; their music sounds as disgustingly denatured and plasma-morphic as those godawful videos and Buggy G. Riphead cover images. As sampladelic auteurs, 4 Hero (whose studio, funnily enough, is next door to FSOL's in Dollis Hill) piss on Cobain & Dougans from extreme height. It blows my mind that back in '93, darkcore EP's like "Journey From the Light" and "Golden Age"/"Golden Age Remixes" were universally ignored, while dreck like "Lifeforms" was hailed to the heavens. Amazinglyly, FSOL are still getting rave reviews.

Fuking asshole kept propping up his shitty country's electronic music while casually dismissing almost all American electronic(dismissing Detroit Techno, really?)

Just listening to a bit of brit oldskool rave, bleep and madchester is enough to show you that all the music he gushed over is trash

Carl Craig's original 1992 versions--mystified out of all proportion, largely because they've been for so long impossible to hear--revealed themselves, on their re-release late last year, to be engagingly peculiar and damn fine pieces of music. But for the life of me I can't hear them as drum & bass prototypes: the breakbeat is looped, sure, but not fucked with or chopped up, and the jungalistic feel just isn't there. Maybe Fabio and Grooverider did drop "Bug" down at Rage, legendarily pitched up to 45 rpm--but the idea that the track was a seminal and formative influence on the nascent jungle sound is preposterous. It's one of those myths cultivated by A/ drum and bass producers grasping for a supposedly more elevated ancestry for what they do, and B/ johnny-come-lately technoheads and breakbeat-niks like James Lavelle (i.e. people who would never have gone within sneering distance of Rage), for whom the idea that Carl Craig and Black Dog devised the blueprint for drum and bass is reassuring. It allows them to avoid the truth: the real inventors of jungle were oufits like 2 Bad Mice/Kaotic Chemistry ("Waremouse", "Bombscare", "Drum Trip II"), Noise Factory and the rest of the Ibiza/Third Party crew, Urban Shakedown, the Suburban Bass acts (Krome & Time/Q-Bass/Hype/Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era,etc), DJ SS and the Formation crews, Shut Up and Dance, hell, even The Prodigy. These people, utterly ignored and marginalised, invented the future. Rave producers, in other words; 'ardkore, in all its pilled-up, made-in-two-minutes, spotty teenager, Amiga-in-the-bedroom glory. Belgium had more to do with jungle than Detroit, ferchrissakes.
Anyway, the "Bug In The Bassbin" remixes constituted one of the year's great non-events, although that didn't stop that organ of Detroit-pietism Jockey Slut from running a 5 page feature.

I've often wondered why it is that American rock critics seem to root for Moby. They appear to have decided half-a-decade ago that he was the one that was going to translate the alien aesthetics and protocols of electronic dance culture into albums that you could listen to like regular rock records (ie. no attitude shift or change in listening habits required, no journeys to dark, noisy, drug-infested clubs to experience the site-specific reality of the culture). No matter that nobody within the rave scene has really given a hoot about Moby since "Go" back in '91, or that conversely he's never come close to pop stardom; for rock critics, he is still and will always be the pop ambassador for techno.
Having made that emotional-critical investment, they are delighted and relieved when he comes up with anything half-decent. Play is pleasant enough background music, mildly haunting now and then, but it strikes me as a shrewd and calculated attempt to marry last year's rockcritical crush (the Harry Smith/Revenant/Alan Lomax/Dock Boggs roots Americana bandwagon) with the gospel-house bricolage approach of Fatboy's "Praise You". (Another track on Play is a blatant rip of Stormin' Norman's remix of Beastie's "Body Movin'".) People have been doing this kind of gospel-blues sampling for years within house culture and far more artfully-- e.g. D.H.S, Green Velvet/Cajmere, the sublimely poignant vocal tapestries spun by Todd Edwards, St Germain/Ludovic Navarre sampling ragtime and 1930s Lighning Hopkins (on "Alabama Blues"), ad infinitum.

I hereby disown my unpopular child (loved least, it seems, by those whose careers it gave a massive boost, but that's another bunch of gripes altogether). Oh, I still think it's a good idea in theory--it's just the praxis that's left me cold these last eighteen months. Too much post-rock fails to supply what people get from trad rock (iconicity/iconoclasm, charisma/neurosis, big riffs, catharsis, meaning, something to look at on stage, tunes you can hum in the bath), without ever really rivaling what dance music offers either (kinaesthetic kicks, hedonic science, surrogate drug-sensations). The most adventurous post-rock types --your Techno-Animals, Thomas Koners/Porter Ricks's and Third Eye Foundations--have gone all the way into the studio-bound aesthetics of hiphop/techno/house/jungle, and abandoned the live-performance model altogether. The rest of the post-rock fraternity (and you can count the number of women involved on one hand) have remained stuck in a profitless intermediary zone, a sort of mildly dub-inflected math-rock. (And math-rock really is rock with all its good points removed -- prog rock with the grandeur stunted, punk without the visceral release).

Dude post-rock lmao
Dude uk dance music lmao

Re. 2000, two words: post-rock lives! What with Kid A, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Sigur Ros, it was the best year for that most "so-called"-called of genres since records have been kept, or even made. (And Tortoise's new album's is a bit of a return to form too). Actually, I'm still on the fence about Godspeed and Sigur (see "Still On the Fence" section below). Kid A, though, is undeniable: if anything fits the post-rock definition, this record--the consummate guitar band making an almost-no-guitars album, informed by listening to the entire back catalogue of Warp Records, then this is it. Of course, the very post-rockness of Kid A made many people hate it all the more, from silly old punkies like Howard Hampton in the New York Timeswielding the "it's just like the Seventies"/new Pink Floyd big-scare argument as if A/ the idea of the pre-punk 1970s as a cultural void hadn't been thoroughly discredited B/ the present doesn't makes that period look like a fucking golden age, to Nick Hornby in the New Yorker whose complaint boiled down to the fogie-ish claim that the album is simply too demanding for grown-ups to listen 'cos they don't have much time to get into records and they get back from the office totally shagged-out and want to hear something relaxing and familiar, so how dare Radiohead "indulge" themselves. The thing about Kid A, though, is every single track on the record, with the exception of "Treefingers" maybe, is constructed like a song and is incredibly melodic and memorable. Guitar or not, quite a bit of it rocks.

My initial astonishment faded quite quickly and the record seemed quite palatable, possibly too palatable even. I haven't listened to Kid A much since I wrote a Radiohead versus Britrock thinkpiece for Uncut (which I'll post up here eventually) so I'm not sure what I think about it now: to some extent the juggernaut of coverage around it slightly tarnished and interfered with what was originally a purely sensuous experience of delight and wonder. What follows is the initial, purer response, written up for Spin based on a listening party on the bizarrely inappropriate penthouse roofdeck of a hotel (incredibly fierce sunshine, critics milling around trying to avoid each other's gaze--keeping their cards close to their chest, and just plain awkward at the public airing of such private music) followed by four hours alone with it an office at the PR firm. Things I wish I'd known: that there was hardly any guitar on the record, and that one of the guys was playing an Ondes Martenot (spacey-sounding proto-synth much favored by Oliver Messaien and used for the Star Trek theme apparently).

UK NOT MASSIVE
LMAO

Fabulous record -- that astonishing woozy-oozy vocal, the cocaine itch 'n' dazzle of the Chic-like rhythm guitar. And yet in its very neo-disco perfection and near-universal appeal it seems to symbolize the reversion of rave culture into club culture into disco; a reduction in scope and stakes; a feeling of circularity--back where we started. It's the sublime anthem of a new complacency, dance culture as "routinized transcendence" (Simon Frith on disco), banalized bliss.

Disparate as hell out there. No idea, frankly, what's coming around the corner. It was interesting when ILM had a thread on emergent trends, and the trends everyone cited were uniformly ones that had been going for a year, if not two. In other words, I don't think anybody really knows what is the coming thing or leading edge in pop culture.
For me personally, certain areas that have been thrilling or sustaining for various lengths of time (last two three years, in the case of R&B/street rap; last nine-ten, in the case of rave/dance) feel like they have petered out (hence the dearth of represensation on my faves charts), although how much this is personal burn-out and how much is a real objective downturn is hard to determine. Still, my demand of any music-zone is to be constantly surprised, and both those areas fell short dramatically this year. Whether it is a terminal exhaustion of novelty-resources or just a cyclical thing (in R&B the end of one Beat-Geist, but not yet the onset of a new one), who knows.
What else? The experimental end of electronic music--meaning everything from glitchcore to microhouse--is as stimulating as ever, but suffers somehow for being hermetic, incestuous, sealed off from the wider pop world (bar TV ads and Bjork's Vespertine, of course). Not enough "social energy" there, basically.
As for electric guitar music... The back to raw rock'n'roll/rebel danger/black leather thing in rock just seems laughable wishful thinking, played-out before it even starts. It's just a middle class snob/rock scholar alternative to nu-metal, which arguably is genuinely threatening on some levels (if only coiffure) and certainly resonates with the youth.

The currents of interest in postpunk and synthpop/New Romance seem more productive, potentially at least: so far it's either on the level of hipster scholarly reconditeness (although it's exciting in itself that one of the American bands on Troubleman Mixtape would care enough to rip-off an early A Certain Ratio tune riff-for-riff), or still too couched in hipster irony (Electroclash) to betoken a real regeneration (which would anyway take the wholesale reconstruction of an entire culturescape/episteme of attitudes, extra-musical inputs, social/political context, etc--i.e. neither possible, nor desirable). Still, the idea of music based around angularity, awkwardness, tension, wilful oddity, abstruseness (without actually being math-rock), nervous energy, a certain lack of warmth and flow, seems both appealing and potentially resonant; as do pretentiousness and over-reach and excessive literacy. Conversely, right now, for whatever reasons, the idea of psychedelia and space-rock, dreampop and blissed sonic blurriness, seem totally uninteresting. So, please, I know it's been ten years since Loveless, but please no shoegazer revival!
What else? Oh there was pop, which even the pop fans and Britneylecctuals thought had a bad year.
So, in summation: the same-old-same-old sense of exhaustion on multiple fronts and of lack-of-pattern, coinciding paradoxically with an absolutely unmanageable surfeit of good-to-great and interesting/stimulating records. Go figure.

>names like Silverdung, Bloodrivet, Twisterfelch, Sikkbuccit (I'm making these up but it can only be a matter of time they're real, because of the global band name shortage crisis--it's getting desperate out there)
nice

Did he change his opinion on post-rock again after all the trash that GY!BE spawned or did he love it?