hi mr big genius cokeparty! Was hoping your giant brain could follow that I meant "being a creep to girls." As well, excuse my typo. I was hoping that communicating in pinegrove's native cadence (see: their newsletter, social media, etc) would help me connect with their fans. Tryna "rap" with the "kids" if you catch my drift. Alas.
I maintain Stereogum has an incredibly stupid and naive commentariat, both on this thread and at large. Even at its most disingenuous (which this Facebook post could EASILY be), Stephens Hall is clearly saying that he is and has been culpable in a situation/situations, of which he does not give the full or clear details (which for that reason alone, I will ignore). Why not take him at his word? Why have commentators instead taken up arms to throw the other party under the bus, who has issued no statement? Feels a loooot like the extension of the misogynistic and age-old "crazy woman" trope to me.
It is incredibly enlightening about the national conversation that (making assumptions about the demographic here, feel free to call me out on it) a "liberal" mostly white, mostly male comments section seems to feel like the line of consent and negotiating power differentials starts at outright assault. The idea that rape must be the result of physical force, and that not fighting back makes it the victim's fault, is one of the many reasons male sexual violence has been almost impossible to prosecute in Western society - as well as hard to identify for law enforcement, abusers, and even victims - who many walk away, around for years feeling bad and weird and crazy before understanding what's happened to them. I believe in restorative justice, and that STARTS with offenders (and, let's be real, everyone) examining their own actions and recognizing how some behaviors they unconsciously coded as the "norm" or acceptable cross a line. I think ESH's post falls short on a number of levels, but at the very least I hope it's a step in that direction.
One fascinating aspect to this absolute waterfall of public apologies from left-identified men of power has been watching men embrace them as redemptive while women simultaneous reject them until the tide turns (e.g. Louis CK's famous sorry-less pseudo-apology). The women I know are not satisfied with what this statement displays.
Idk if you (all of you! the entire comments section!) identify as a feminist or ally, but PLEASE try to have some empathy for victims of sexual violence and abusive relationships before you dismiss what again amounts to an outright ADMISSION OF GUILT of misconduct.
how bah dah.
what I take from this incident is that the majority of yall are incredibly stupid.
breathtaking that the (overwhelmingly male) response to a statement admitting to sexual impropriety is "Evan Stephens Hall is TOO nice. He's just sensitive!"
why do you think dirtbag artists have been getting away with this FOREVER.
"This sort of thing simply does not happen anymore."
yeah, but to be fair, people who buy adele's album actually buy the album, if you know what I'm sayin.
just because the music may be crappy or cliched or banal doesn't mean it's ill-intentioned or these dudes deserve 400 words of mockery. get off your high horse.
gus: that was in april 2016. a number of artists staged similar boycotts or statements (eg Laura Jane Grace burning her birth certificate onstage) subsequent. The 3 hours was about springsteen, whose shows are regularly that long despite his age and how much sh*t he's lived through, because he respects and loves his fans and playing a damn good show for them is part of what he values as a performing artist.
i liked that part when he mentioned no other artists making political statements in their performances when a man "bored in the USA" owes a lot to, bruce himself, canceled his performance in NC as a political statement rather than waste a buncha people's time by doing nothing on stage for 3 hrs
about to write a short essay please excuse me
he's not wrong. it's just a certain format that, when enough time has passed, will become a little hip again, the way VHS has or (o god) tapes. tapes are shitty! they don't sound great, are easy to break, and it's tough to skip between tracks. it annoys me so much that tapes are a cool diy thing to do now. know what's just as cheap and easy to copy? CDRs, duh. I have never heard anyone give a cogent defense of the revival of tapes, just anti-lamestream obscurists who are happy that katy perry has never tainted the magnetic reel (though pop is becoming cool in its own way in a way that delights me, but that's a whole nother thing).
To get back to the point though, CDs probably WILL have their own inconvenient revival in the near-ish future by kids born in the aughties with enough disposable income to hunt down a walkman, especially because all the thrift stores they'll frequent will have a large selection of old Gloria Estefan and Cranberries CDs to choose from for a dollar apiece (I can get behind a Cranberries revival, though).
However, I would posit (dbag alert) that Antonoff isn't writing specifically about the FORMAT so much as the time--about being young in hte 90s and craving music and hunting it with your fellow weirdos and organizing them on your bookshelf and in general just being a dweeb and being shattered if your jewel case from your favorite album gets cracked. CDs had their own generation and quirks.
To tangentially touch upon fidelity, format matters so so little when you're young. You probably don't even understand the word 'medium' and how it applies and how it gets between you and the music you're listening to. Read William Gibson's first essay in Distrust that Particular Flavor and he starts with this great description of crouching next to his neighbor's wire fence with his crystal radio, and jumps back in time to that as his audiophile friend presses a top-of-the-line soundsystem on him. Does it sound that much better? No, he thinks.
It's not the format, it's the listener. How badly do you want to listen? enough to fetal-position next to a lightning rod, adjusting that crystal radio? The song is there and it's good enough to live for.
Also yeah I bought some CDs the other day because my car is from 2002 but only because of that.
"I submit to you that R. Kelly might mean different things to him than he does to you or me." And I submit to you, Tom, that this may be true, but it's still shitty to use it as an excuse.
"If I ever get asked to do Warped Tour I'm doing it on the principal of exposing teenagers to music that is not sexist, garbage disposal rock" - Mish Way
https://twitter.com/myszkaway/status/581591175456387072
Ok, that read trollish, but I agree with Runyon above -- the choice to leave the stolen car thing just hanging is a really curious one to me. Who stole it? How did he get it? How does that complicate his status as some hippie? Like, where's the critical question-asking going on here?
Furthermore DIIV as a band isn't interesting enough to me to merit the 4000-some words or whatever this was to me without at least some larger commentary on why they're significant to the current music scene. Is it because of this boring stoned white garage-rock genre that's never gone away and fuels its fires with drug-riddled martyrs? Is it because we care or don't care about the personal lives of these artists? Is it because ZCS plays stereotype to the point of caricature? Maybe I just wasn't the audience for this, but for a "cover story" this felt pretty weak.
This reads as sort of long-winded dick-sucking. Maybe when chris deville gets over hanging out with moderately popular artists he can step back enough to actually write about something.
yeah I don't think it's grimes 2.0 at all... it's a pop song that she wrote for another artist (something she has done many time) that didn't fit on her album so she decided to just put it out on her own.
Comments