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Popped open The Wire 320 to see I got my letter published: its the one from Fred Palakon[1].
The intent was sincere and I'm glad to see my opinion was shared by Scott W (and I assume at least... I dunno, five others). The Wire really is a great resource and worth its cover price. It shifts between the truly experimental and the popular really allowing fans who sit on either side of that divide to get refreshingly disoriented a few months out of every year. It will celebrate the provincial understanding that some of the best art is conceived out of sight and under darkness. I'm definitely a child of FM radio and MTV so I like something that can challenge my own distorted view of history.
It is one of the few remaining media that instead of being consumed and discarded is best collected. The Wire can be returned to like a good book or library, providing new revelations.
A few months ago I finally got around to Basic Channeland I knew I could go back to my stack to get individual interviews with Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. The depth of content and lack of shameless self-promotion saves the writing from depreciation.
I guess in that way it is like a good lit journal: McSweeney's but with an English desire for taxonomy and replacing American earnestness with British wit.
So when 'hautological' showed up... well I wanted to punch someone in the face. If someone was going to mention the downside to the British thirst for artistic exploring[2] is their own discomfort within their own cultural skins. When something crosses that threshold from new and exciting to whispering masses, a mental switch is clicked and the thing is reevaluated (and often found wanting). At this point something is usually slagged as inauthentic, failing to reach the potential eluded to in its earlier works, yobbish, not yobbish enough, cultural imperialism, cultural monoculture, American, French, etc. There are often then secondary shockwaves that critique the whole culture of this with history thrown around casually, the result being a bloody awful mess.
A method of dealing with this discomfort is to often try to find ways of rebranding a topic and getting it moved to a different part of the store. Suddenly we aren't dealing with if British Techno genuflects enough at the temple of Detroit... all of these Skam artists do "IDM". When everyone gets into the cyclone of "What is IDM then eh?" its all kind of harmless and folks can still listen to their Autechre in peace.
But 'hautological' was just always too much of a kludge. It was borne out of Burial, although on Hyperdub and doing stuff with Spaceape, not reeaaally being dubsteppy. Old fuddies of the heavy science thought that "Eh, it's breaks, some ambient, some house, some soul samples. Call it any combo of those things and you'll always be about 80% right". I mean, no one felt we needed to run out and give Scorn, TRS-80, or DJ Krush some ur-genre so why do so at this time? Personally I've never been the biggest Burial fan but the man got hit with a Mercury Prize nomination so he's got worse burdens than some a-hole shrugging at his sound.
The problem was that as the years since Untruecame out, 'hautological' just wouldn't fucking die. Either by cabal or individual force-of-will, the fucking thing started popping up in The Wire in the most random ass places. I was half expecting to see a copyright symbol after a while. The problem was that it wasn't even a great term. It wasn't being used for the aforementioned Scorns and Jack Dangerseses or to align similar yet disparate artists[3].
And then it started appearing as a crutch. Its a common thread in closed artistic communities. The unique provincial revelation can soon devolve into incestuous and repetitive sounds. No one cares about the Akron or Bristol scene any more. A good example in writing was the way 'on the nose' came to be used everywhere on the Onion AVClub website reviews. Luckily they seem to have struggled through it and buy some thesaurii. So there's still hope for The Wire.
That said I felt I needed to do something. And complaining about a niche music magazine to people who don't give a shit doesn't help. So I wrote a letter. But if you come off with too much anger it'd be too easy for the audience to laugh it off as American petulance. But the Brits always respect a good dry one after a long day at the docks. Gauging a letter can be tough but it getting published makes me feel that it succeeded in some ways (and cheers to Scott W for his letter getting in a good one-two that will hopefully wake up the staff). If one is bored, try reading it with a Dick Van Dyke chimney-sweep accent to the delight of your coworkers.
One critiques because one cares enough to give a damn. And hopefully now we can get back to important things: like getting Mick Harris on the Invisible Jukebox or Jay Rajeck and company exposure on the other side of the Atlantic (really, The Manhattan Love Machineshould get mentioned up there with MBM in terms of classic break science).
1 It never hurts to have a Bret Easton Ellis nom de plume. If you were inclined you could look around because there are... others... elsewhere...
2 It's a culture where Damon Albarn's Mali Music was greeted as being late to the party. Do Amadou & Mariam blow up the charts in London and we don't know about it 'cause all that Duffy/Amy Winehouse stuff set off like chaff?
3 A good counter example would be all the hypnagogic pop noise, which too is a definitely Wire-ish term. On the US Side we're more partial to the Tao Lin/Carles/HIPSTER RUNOFF chillwave/fuzzwavelabels. So I guess we still are two peoples separated by a common language.
26 sept. 2010, 22h16m
Popped open The Wire 320 to see I got my letter published: its the one from Fred Palakon[1].
The intent was sincere and I'm glad to see my opinion was shared by Scott W (and I assume at least... I dunno, five others). The Wire really is a great resource and worth its cover price. It shifts between the truly experimental and the popular really allowing fans who sit on either side of that divide to get refreshingly disoriented a few months out of every year. It will celebrate the provincial understanding that some of the best art is conceived out of sight and under darkness. I'm definitely a child of FM radio and MTV so I like something that can challenge my own distorted view of history.
It is one of the few remaining media that instead of being consumed and discarded is best collected. The Wire can be returned to like a good book or library, providing new revelations.
A few months ago I finally got around to Basic Channeland I knew I could go back to my stack to get individual interviews with Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. The depth of content and lack of shameless self-promotion saves the writing from depreciation.
I guess in that way it is like a good lit journal: McSweeney's but with an English desire for taxonomy and replacing American earnestness with British wit.
So when 'hautological' showed up... well I wanted to punch someone in the face. If someone was going to mention the downside to the British thirst for artistic exploring[2] is their own discomfort within their own cultural skins. When something crosses that threshold from new and exciting to whispering masses, a mental switch is clicked and the thing is reevaluated (and often found wanting). At this point something is usually slagged as inauthentic, failing to reach the potential eluded to in its earlier works, yobbish, not yobbish enough, cultural imperialism, cultural monoculture, American, French, etc. There are often then secondary shockwaves that critique the whole culture of this with history thrown around casually, the result being a bloody awful mess.
A method of dealing with this discomfort is to often try to find ways of rebranding a topic and getting it moved to a different part of the store. Suddenly we aren't dealing with if British Techno genuflects enough at the temple of Detroit... all of these Skam artists do "IDM". When everyone gets into the cyclone of "What is IDM then eh?" its all kind of harmless and folks can still listen to their Autechre in peace.
But 'hautological' was just always too much of a kludge. It was borne out of Burial, although on Hyperdub and doing stuff with Spaceape, not reeaaally being dubsteppy. Old fuddies of the heavy science thought that "Eh, it's breaks, some ambient, some house, some soul samples. Call it any combo of those things and you'll always be about 80% right". I mean, no one felt we needed to run out and give Scorn, TRS-80, or DJ Krush some ur-genre so why do so at this time? Personally I've never been the biggest Burial fan but the man got hit with a Mercury Prize nomination so he's got worse burdens than some a-hole shrugging at his sound.
The problem was that as the years since Untruecame out, 'hautological' just wouldn't fucking die. Either by cabal or individual force-of-will, the fucking thing started popping up in The Wire in the most random ass places. I was half expecting to see a copyright symbol after a while. The problem was that it wasn't even a great term. It wasn't being used for the aforementioned Scorns and Jack Dangerseses or to align similar yet disparate artists[3].
And then it started appearing as a crutch. Its a common thread in closed artistic communities. The unique provincial revelation can soon devolve into incestuous and repetitive sounds. No one cares about the Akron or Bristol scene any more. A good example in writing was the way 'on the nose' came to be used everywhere on the Onion AVClub website reviews. Luckily they seem to have struggled through it and buy some thesaurii. So there's still hope for The Wire.
That said I felt I needed to do something. And complaining about a niche music magazine to people who don't give a shit doesn't help. So I wrote a letter. But if you come off with too much anger it'd be too easy for the audience to laugh it off as American petulance. But the Brits always respect a good dry one after a long day at the docks. Gauging a letter can be tough but it getting published makes me feel that it succeeded in some ways (and cheers to Scott W for his letter getting in a good one-two that will hopefully wake up the staff). If one is bored, try reading it with a Dick Van Dyke chimney-sweep accent to the delight of your coworkers.
One critiques because one cares enough to give a damn. And hopefully now we can get back to important things: like getting Mick Harris on the Invisible Jukebox or Jay Rajeck and company exposure on the other side of the Atlantic (really, The Manhattan Love Machineshould get mentioned up there with MBM in terms of classic break science).
1 It never hurts to have a Bret Easton Ellis nom de plume. If you were inclined you could look around because there are... others... elsewhere...
2 It's a culture where Damon Albarn's Mali Music was greeted as being late to the party. Do Amadou & Mariam blow up the charts in London and we don't know about it 'cause all that Duffy/Amy Winehouse stuff set off like chaff?
3 A good counter example would be all the hypnagogic pop noise, which too is a definitely Wire-ish term. On the US Side we're more partial to the Tao Lin/Carles/HIPSTER RUNOFF chillwave/fuzzwavelabels. So I guess we still are two peoples separated by a common language.
