A recurring feature where we pull together a bunch of the best music articles we found this week.
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The Rise Of Dress-Up And The Fall Of Pop At MTV’s VMA Awards by Nitsuh Abebe (New York Magazine): This year’s VMA awards felt like an episode of
Glee – there was Bruno Mars doing Amy Winehouse, there was Lady Gaga dressing up as a male alter ego, and there were the dancers doing Britney. Even the token rock band kind of seemed like a high-school musical version of an indie band. What was notably missing, however, was any sense that the music was more important than the theatre, and Abebe – not someone usually prone to worrying about the kids of today and their horrible music taste – is concerned that we’re seeing pop music go the way of reality TV, becoming something made to be gawked at and discussed by the audience, rather than something expressing emotion and new ideas.
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The Liberty Belle – Dolly Parton Speaks by Jude Rogers (The Quietus): Interviews with musicians are pretty weird really, aren’t they? And not only for the musician, who is being asked intimate personal questions by people they barely know; it’s also weird for the writer, who is often terrified of the famous person that they’re interviewing. Rogers really does make the most of her 20 minutes on the phone to Dolly Parton here, explaining how Parton comes across answering her questions – simultaneously funny, calculating and honest. But Rogers is also great at discussing how terrified she was, and how she made elementary mistakes while talking to Dolly (getting sidetracked, letting Dolly evade questions, blurting out an embarrassing question). Sometimes, reading interviews you just want the interviewer to shut up – you just want to know about the interviewee! But I got a better impression of Dolly from this article than from the sanitised just-the-facts interview Rogers could have written.
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The Non-Service Industries by Craig Schuftan (craighschuftan.com): When I’m not a contributor to this esteemed publication, I’m a tutor at a sandstone university. And last week, before class, I was playing music. There were three or four students who’d got there early, and I asked them, ‘What do you want to listen to?’ to which two of them replied the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’; I’m fairly sure they weren’t even born when that song was released. And I’m not sure if they just know that song from
Fight Club or whether they’re the kind of fan who has the B-Sides compilation, but either way, I reckon they might find this article interesting.
Schuftan talks about the surrealist philosophy that heavily influenced the Pixies’ lyrics and outlook; it was this rather than their musical influences, he argues, that made them sound so different. (By the way, if you’re a 30+ Pixies fan, do you want to feel old? Let me point out that there was another Pixies fan in a tutorial last year who was named Velouria – yes, someone old enough to go to university is
named after that song. How’s that bald spot going?)
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Not Fade Away by Robert Christgau (Barnes & Noble Review): This year, there are two separate Buddy Holly tribute albums, featuring everyone from Paul McCartney to Cobra Starship. That famous ‘day the music died’ was over fifty years ago now; a fifteen year old Buddy Holly fan in 1959 has probably now retired. So why should we care about what is basically our grandparents music? You could go the way of Simon Reynolds, author of
Retromania, and argue that we shouldn’t care, that retro fads are just easy pickings for the record companies. But, Christgau argues, the reason we’re still fascinated with Buddy Holly is that he wrote excellent songs! They’re simple without being dumb, and catchy without being annoying; the kind of songs where it seems hard to imagine someone actually wrote them. And musicians like My Morning Jacket or She & Him – who, to Christgau’s ears, are capable musicians who overthink it – come alive when they have such supple songs to play with.
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Glen Campbell: One Last Love Song by Simon Hattenstone (The Guardian): Glen Campbell has had a long, odd career. He started out a member of LA session band ‘The Wrecking Crew’ – if a song was recorded in L.A. in the first half of the sixties, chances are he played on it (see, for example, The Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds). Then he got successful singing overwrought/panoramic countrypolitan tunes like ‘Wichita Lineman’ and ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’, and eventually became the kind of person who was both a Vegas icon and good friends with Ronald Reagan. But now, in the twilight of his years, he has Alzheimers. Hattenstone’s interview with him and his family is both illuminating and heartbreaking.
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REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity by Steven Hyden (The AV Club): Pop music was in a very different place in early 1981, when the album
Hi Infidelity spent several weeks at #1 in the US. Kids and teenagers were spending less of their money on music, and more on arcade games like Pac-Man — the industry’s earnings were plummeting. MTV had yet to launch. And married couples were divorcing at record rates, owing to the loosening of divorce laws. So, instead of the 1981 equivalent of Katy Perry, it was the faceless power balladry of the likes of REO Speedwagon that reigned supreme upon the charts.
Hyden explains very well why stuff like REO Speedwagon sold by the bucketload - this was music for uncertain times, aimed at adults with adult relationship problems (who still wanted to buy records, unlike those pesky video game playing kids). And I suppose REO Speedwagon buying $8000 Rolex watches for the record company executives didn’t hurt either?
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Albums Of Our Lives: Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) by Manjula Martin (The Rumpus): My album of the year thus far is Gillian Welch’s
The Harrow And The Harvest, which is full of effortless grace, the distinct whiff of the Old Weird America, and unusually strong songwriting. But, Welch and her partner David Rawlings have been doing this kind of thing for a couple of decades now, and her 2001 album
Time (The Revelator) is pretty well-regarded too. And one of the things about an album that’s 10 years old now – that makes it hard to judge one album against another - is that people have led their lives while listening to that album. It’s not just one in a pile of new things, or a heap of new downloads that may or may not grab you – it’s a part of your life that you have sentimental memories attached to.
Manjula Martin here explains the sentimental memories that her brain has attached to
Time (The Revelator) – getting a lift from a college student, an earthquake in her home town, and her years of restlessness. It seems to me that there’d be more good music writing if there were more writing about music with memories attached, because this is how people actually experience music most of the time.
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Burke Reid pt 1: I’m In There For The Artist by Doug Wallen (Mess+Noise): In a previous life, Burke Reid was a member of indie electro band Gerling. But that’s done now and today he’s a successful Aussie record producer, the person pressing the buttons to record the Drones recorded
Havilah or Jack Ladder's
Hurtsville. And (TheVine contributor) Doug ‘Where’s’ Wallen’s interview with Burke is fascinating for the insight into what happens behind the scenes; how to get the good performances out of the musicians. You do get the impression that a psychology degree might be more useful to a producer than an audio engineering degree.
Tim Byron