How the Avant Garde Got Popular (Or Not)

Me, in The Advocate, on David Stubbs' Fear of Music, which came out about one month ago. It's a really smart book, but it spends too much time trying to convince people to like avant garde music and not enough time explaining why it hasn't become popular like visual art. Me, I think it's institutions.

RichardBeckAvantGarde

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Not Batman

It's time for everyone to listen to Joker all day.











And one more for good measure. Doesn't he seem like a lovely kind of weirdo? Also the secret theme of the interview seems to be coat hangers coming out the back of their jackets. Joker has a bunch under each arm as well, but that seems like cheating. The hoodie hanger is where the action is.

Wu Note

You can find the Blue Noted ODB album cover above here, along with a bunch of similarly reworked Wu Tang family covers. Pretty fantastic . . . I guess some of them (Cuban Linx) are a little too easy, and the seams show pretty much everywhere.

Imagining Wu Tang as something that happened forty years ago, as these covers do, got me thinking about the "classic" status of something like 36 Chambers. It's hard to imagine the record soundtracking dinner parties like so many Blue Note albums do now. Last year Wu Tang came to play at Harvard's Yardfest–I reviewed it for the Phoenix, here–and I was completely surprised to see almost ninety percent of the students react with complete indifference or hostility. I could just be too wrapped up in talking to the same people all the time, but I had thought Wu Tang had made it at least into the periphery of "We-will-respect-this-if-not-exactly-embrace-it" territory. This has something to do with what a nice job upper-middle class white cultured types have done concealing a pretty broad disdain for rap. Nobody minds pop music with rapping in it, of course–and the point of this post is not to criticize rap that hangs out with pop–but Yardfest was a straight-up rap concert, and a lot of people just wished they could eat their hot dogs in peace.

This is also why I picked the ODB cover. Talk about someone who's going to stay disreputable. Also one of the most creative people of the last two decades.

Sonic Old

K-Punk is really good on what makes Sonic Youth such a gigantic waste of time these days. Money quote:

"Kim Gordon in New Statesman last week: "Are Sonic Youth political? Well, they are, in that they offer an alternative to mainstream music." Well, they may not have hit singles (but neither did the prog dinosaurs of the 70s); but here they are on Later With Jools Holland; here they are doing compilations for Starbucks; here they are, the darlings of the broadsheet press, their pastiche-of-themselves records not exactly guaranteed a good review, but always automatically accorded event status. In what way is the so called mainstream perturbed by any of this? In what way, in the decentred era of web 2.0, is this not the mainstream? Their avant credentials rest on a few hoary old formal innovations - just as the prog rockers' did in the early 70s. SY have disconnected experimentalism from social and existential maladjustment, just as prog rock did. But while punk annihilated prog after a mere half a decade of flatulent complacency, Sonic Youth are still lauded as countercultural heroes even though they have been making variations on the same record for over twenty years now."

There's also a good bit about Juno.

I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching

Me in the Advocate on the history of creative writing in higher education. Mark McGurl's new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, was the excuse for the piece. It's great . . . I'm a little surprised to see that it hasn't picked up more attention. It's a completely new interpretation of more than half a century's worth of fiction.

Right. Here's the article, complete with nifty illustration by Dana Kase:

Get With the Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth Century

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