I Fucking Hate Music

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's blues, folk and country, and rock like a rolling stone and all that bullshit.

I just spent way too much time working on some retarded shit for a retarded webpage about a (not very retarded) band...3 hours of transcribing, annotating, figuring out chords and different ways of writing "more noise effects" and then I get hooked into reading this fucking pitchfork article about the top 50 records found in music bins.

Except, of course, it's not about that, it's about examining in microscopic fucking detail every misstep of the great 90's alternative sellout. I fucking hate this shit.

OK, so there's tons of recorded music out there, covering all sorts of genres. And I'm not talking, "oh, there's emocore and also c86 and powerpop," I mean there are whole fucking continents of music out there with long, rich histories. You see, not only are there countries outside of the fucking US and UK, but there also was music before 1991...heck, before 1970, even! Millennia of that shit, all over the fucking world.

These pitchfork fuckers beat one fucking horse to death, the tiniest of tiny puddles formed to the side of the big ol' blues/rock river...going back as far in time as 199 fucking 1, lauding that fucking nirvana suicide as the one true genius...

Well, it bothers me. It's what's always bothered me about the music scene. It's all about the fucking scene, about making and enforcing norms amongst a very particular peer group, whoever is fucking down with the scene. What you like and dislike is a signifier of group participation, meant to exclude huge chunks of people. It's in no way about the music, it's all about fucking fashion. They're a bunch of fucking heathers, the whole lot of the fuckers.

Think fucking pavement is so fucking revolutionary? Go listen to some fucking Harry Partch, that shit'll make your fucking mild melt it's so fucking different. Better yet, go listen to some fucking Arab music, or some fucking Chinese music. That shit is made up of notes that literally do not exist in any of the fucking music you namecheck, you rotten slice of donkey fuck.

Yeah, that's right, fucko, pavement and nirvana and i don't care who the fuck else you want to name...all of em used (at most) twelve fucking notes. The same twelve fucking notes. Not everybody on the planet, though, has used those same fuckers for all of history. While your busy with your fucking emocore and shoegazing bullshit, all shit that, in the big picture, is essentially the same, there're fuckers out there making music in a totally different fucking language than all those shitty Washington, DC bands. Or Oklahoma bands. Or Whereever-in-the-US-or-UK of the week bands. You fucking suck.

Sorry, I just had to vent about that. I just get frustrated reading this stuff. I'd like to find out about interesting new music, or really about the best bands and songs that are out there in the various scenes, yet so much of what I read falls into either the categories of bitchiness (which I understand can be funny and therefore attract readers) or scene-chat. I've seen more variations on the label "emo" than I have the names of actual "emo" bands, by an incredibly significant factor. I couldn't name you a single "emo" band off the top of my head.

I'm not proud of that fact, by the way. I like to listen to all types of music, and new styles are interesting to me. But this gets to the real heart of my complaint. The writers for such publications are clearly knowledgable folks. They know a lot about the scenes I'm talking about. I would love to read some intelligent, witty writing about musicians that I don't know, about styles that I haven't heard. I'd love to soak up the new ideas and hear cool new records. Music is an incredibly broad category, and there's more there to hear than anyone could in a lifetime. When I read these articles, instead of being inspired to go listen to some neat record that I didn't know about, I feel shamed for liking what the author despises.

I like to learn about music, and a part of learning is the willingness to try different things. placet experiri and all that. Tastes being what they are, inevitably you're going to find you like something that someone else doesn't like, or vice versa. By creating an atmosphere of paranoia regarding music through snark and snobbishness, you make those mistakes crimes, and the desire to have fun, to try something new, is so much lessened.

And, you know, it wouldn't hurt to know more about music than just what happened in the death of the alternative scene in the 90's.

OK, I'm just being cranky, I guess. Bad mood after that work and all, but that fucking article dissed on New Order's Technique, which is just flat-out wrong.

Although I will give credit - Monster is a bad record, and rightfully took the number one spot. And the piece was very nice to Black Grape's It's Great When You're Straight...Yeah!, which is a very good record, I feel.

Posted by mattb at September 24, 2003 04:41 AM