agreed on the part about her similarities to weezy being sort of a double-edged sword. that's why i'm hoping at some point she just decides to release 5 bazillion mixtapes in a year like wayne did.
i'm not averse to glossy chart pop, but i feel like she (like wayne) would shine brighter in an environment when there are no commercial expectations to live up to and she could just focus on rapping her ass off. weezy's got some good album cuts for sure, but i dont think any one of them can touch the kind of stuff he was doing on dedication 2/drought 3.
If you're going to make this point, you have to tell us what about Skrillex's music makes it not worth "listening to," rather than just "hearing," to use your terminology. Also, a lot of fantastic music is as physical as it is intellectual, and the assumption that physically-oriented music is somehow less worthwhile is reductive.
Think about a band like CAN. Everybody I know likes tracks like "Halleluwah" more than they do the drifty, tempo-less pieces CAN albums are occasionally peppered with. The reasons, in my eyes, are physicality, movement, rhythm.
Serious question: do you like rock and roll?
Seriously diggin' this, Tom. I don't think it's going to change my personal opinion on Skrillex or anything (maybe I need to see him live, like you say), but I appreciate the fact that you aren't afraid to occasionally buck the groupthink about what's lame-by-default that many young-ish music fans subscribe to. Besides this, I'm thinking specifically about the Joshua Tree and Use Your Illusion appreciation posts you did recently (U2 and GNR being pretty frequent targets of scorn for many a twentysomething music fan).
I know it's totally unfair of me, but I can't get into this band because i still associate them with the mediocre Prefuse 73 LP on which i first heard them.
as a early 20s springsteen who just spent WAY too much money to see him play next month, i emphatically disagree with your bass player. it's pretty clear to me that he's still doing it out of love for the music and his fans, and even if he never makes another darkness or born to run (or even another tunnel of love) i'll still happily support him as long as he's making records.
honest question: aside from this incident, does he really come off as trying to be a shapeshifter to you? for me, his whole deerhunter/atlas sound career arc has been marked by the same set of ambient/kraut/punk/pop set of aesthetics, filtered by a an increasingly sharp melodic sensibility. nothing really comes off as erratic or anything--it all fits into this arc in a pretty coherent way. not trying to put you down or anything, just wanna know what you think.
Good points, all. Upvoted to neutralize whoever is downvoting you. I plan to write out a more thoughtful response to this, but for now, my job beckons.
The iPod on stage thing seems to me like an odd thing to focus so much vitriol on. Plenty of musicians have used prerecorded material as part of live performance: Animal Collective, Steve Reich, Mario Davidovsky (these two among many, many other new music composers who've written for live instrument accompanied by tape) anyone who uses a sequenced drum machine onstage (Radiohead I think?), I could go on. Thoughts? Is it that the prerecorded stuff plays such a central role?
For a short time, I worked as a stagehand at a club in Boston. There generally wasn't much for us to do while the bands were playing, so if we wanted, we could sit at the side of the stage and watch. It was a pretty nice gig--well-paying, considering the amount of actual work that went into it, and it meant seeing lots of shows for free.
Les Savy Fav played one night, and as I watched, rapt, I noticed that Harrington kept looking over in my direction as they played. I couldn't tell if I was being crazy or if he was repeatedly making eye contact with me. (Mind you, I didn't know him personally or anything, so it's not like he was looking over at me like one would at a friend) After a few minutes of this, he came over to stage left, grabbed my head, and sang/screamed through the next 10 seconds of the song with his face about three inches from mine, shining a mini flashlight in my eyes. I was soaked with his spit and sweat, and he continued his disarmingly intense eye contact all the while.
At first, I figured it was all for the benefit of the audience. After all, this was a guy who had specifically requested a hardwired mic because he liked the way the cable looked when he hopped off stage and wandered around the venue, leaving a virtual trail behind him. He was no stranger to the theatrical.
But then I realized that, from where I was sitting, only 10% of the audience at best could see what was going on. I guess he just felt like grabbing me and spitting in my face, and so he did.
All of this is basically to say that Tim Harrington is the greatest, and if you've never seen LSF live, you should get on that.
HEY I thought this was great. The kind of substantiative criticism the internet needs more of. I hope this doesn't get killed off by angry commenters like Brandon's old "second opinion"-type column (can't remember the name of it)
Comments