taxi, of course:
something so understated and lonely about it; that horn part at 0:33 exhales like a sigh.
arguably just as good, but the horn fart at the end of the theme kind of nullifies the melancholy:
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
hi
sorry i've been lean on the writing here lately. i'll be in vegas over the weekend and will no doubt be out of blogging commission until at least next week, so this is going to be a ghost town for at least a little while in the meantime.
i happened to read a favorable review of a new jay reatard album on the onion's a.v. club site yesterday, and thankfully, we live in a day and age where we can bone up on most subjects in a flash, so i youtubed the hell out of the guy, and i found out that while he and his mates are pretty good at what they do, they're not exactly reinventing the wheel, nor are they supplying enough memorable hooks or hitting with enough ferocity to signal that they're doing a particularly great job of going through the motions of making spiky, punk-inflected rock.
the problem here has to do with the assigned rating of an 'A'; if you take a look at the review, there's really nothing terribly hyperbolic or gushy about it, aside maybe from the line 'Jay Reatard is making the freshest, most exhilarating records in the indie world today' (which, if taken at face value, would really limit the scope of the indie world immensely, considering there HAVE TO be a few thousand bands under the radar playing music indistinguishable from jay reatard's), nor is there anything written in the short patch of text that more modestly hints at some undeniable, titanic greatness, and one gets the distinct sense that the 'A' that punctuates the review represents one of those instances where a reviewer casts aside the impossible yoke of arbiter of immutable truths on objective greatness and basically hijacks the scoring system to let us know, 'hey, this music, while maybe not capable of blowing peoples' minds and ears, has REALLY struck a chord within me'.
my points, and lord knows i'm stepping in and out of and dancing around them, are really stupid simple, and are maybe elusive to me only because my mind's going in a bunch of different directions right now: grading systems are often ancillary to the raw content of a review, and on those grounds alone, ratings should basically never be taken but with a grain of salt, and hey, don't ever let grading systems, impenetrable names, lofty prose and comparisons to esoteric indie sacred cows (only one of these really applies to that onion review -- just speaking generally here) obscure the fact that music critics are most certainly not omnicompetent, even if the pretense is pretty much built into the mechanics of writing authoritatively, and remember that a world of listening, especially if you're able to access and read this, is at your finger tips, so go listen to shit so that you can put other peoples' personal epiphanies about the arts into a perspective that's meaningful to you.
i happened to read a favorable review of a new jay reatard album on the onion's a.v. club site yesterday, and thankfully, we live in a day and age where we can bone up on most subjects in a flash, so i youtubed the hell out of the guy, and i found out that while he and his mates are pretty good at what they do, they're not exactly reinventing the wheel, nor are they supplying enough memorable hooks or hitting with enough ferocity to signal that they're doing a particularly great job of going through the motions of making spiky, punk-inflected rock.
the problem here has to do with the assigned rating of an 'A'; if you take a look at the review, there's really nothing terribly hyperbolic or gushy about it, aside maybe from the line 'Jay Reatard is making the freshest, most exhilarating records in the indie world today' (which, if taken at face value, would really limit the scope of the indie world immensely, considering there HAVE TO be a few thousand bands under the radar playing music indistinguishable from jay reatard's), nor is there anything written in the short patch of text that more modestly hints at some undeniable, titanic greatness, and one gets the distinct sense that the 'A' that punctuates the review represents one of those instances where a reviewer casts aside the impossible yoke of arbiter of immutable truths on objective greatness and basically hijacks the scoring system to let us know, 'hey, this music, while maybe not capable of blowing peoples' minds and ears, has REALLY struck a chord within me'.
my points, and lord knows i'm stepping in and out of and dancing around them, are really stupid simple, and are maybe elusive to me only because my mind's going in a bunch of different directions right now: grading systems are often ancillary to the raw content of a review, and on those grounds alone, ratings should basically never be taken but with a grain of salt, and hey, don't ever let grading systems, impenetrable names, lofty prose and comparisons to esoteric indie sacred cows (only one of these really applies to that onion review -- just speaking generally here) obscure the fact that music critics are most certainly not omnicompetent, even if the pretense is pretty much built into the mechanics of writing authoritatively, and remember that a world of listening, especially if you're able to access and read this, is at your finger tips, so go listen to shit so that you can put other peoples' personal epiphanies about the arts into a perspective that's meaningful to you.
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