A brilliant piece of literary criticism for a novelette I loved and am looking forward to the next installment of. As a metaphor for acculturation into empire, this works almost too well. You can walk in the halls of empire, yes, as long as you're willing to accept invasive alien tentacles into your mind, to put alien needs above your own, to allow yourself to be instrumentalized.

In real life, people don't talk the way they do in movies or television or (especially) books. Real locations aren't styled, lit, or shot the way they are on screen. The basic conceits of point of view in literature actually make no sense and are in no way "realistic." Realism isn't verisimilitude. It's a set of stylistic conventions that evolve over time, are socially agreed upon, and are hotly contested. The presence of these conventions is not a sign of quality. Departure from them is not a sign of quality's absence.

I’m saying the current model for sharing and more importantly for publicizing music is detrimental. Here’s what happens: young musicians make okay records that show they’ve got something but haven’t yet figured out what. The music industry then sells the shit out of it while the music press hypes it equally to death.

Author Devon Powers on how Village Voice writers Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau helped create rock journalism, and the evolving role of music critics.

Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

Bustillos hopes that a nonjudgmental dialogue with Hoinsky will help us discover an ethical form of seduction. I doubt it. If a woman must be seduced, either (a) the desire is not mutual and she is in fact being coerced (he is waiting until she is weary enough, drunk enough, or feels guilty enough for leading him on), or (b) the desire is mutual but she can’t express it, for any number of sexist social reasons.

Smart takes.

A lot of people writing seem to think that trainspotting, being able to identify sample sources and lyrical allusions, is the essence of criticism, and to me that kind of identification in and of itself is not very interesting unless it goes into these other realms, of thinking more deeply how the music works and (especially) articulating how it feels from the perspective of the listener.

To listen to this LP on headphones is to be air-dropped into a teeming megacity in 2017: industrial runoff, overgrown wild vegetation, human multitudes, handheld devices, improvised survival technologies, strange weather; bodies and machines in a necessary, dignified symbiosis.

But as much as he was teaching me about movies, Roger Ebert was also showing me how to write-- I became a student of clean and concise sentences that emphasized clarity and the right balance of humor, thoughtfulness, and accessibility, as well as how to shape my raw impressions into well-rounded opinions that cohered on the page into narratives. The idea that the most interesting part of a movie happens after you see it-- during the post-mortems you have with others and with yourself in your own head-- was something that carried over easily to the songs and albums I was discovering at the time.

What endures more, for me at least, is the pleasure of thinking about a work of art, arguing with myself over it, getting frustrated while going nowhere and then coming out of that mess with a slightly clearer sense of what I believe. Or maybe it’s a better context to put the work in. Or it could be as minor as solving the problem of striking the right tone to end a review in a way that captures exactly what I think with a bit of flair. The privilege of calling that your job is, to steal a phrase from Hamlet, devoutly to be wished.

At his worst, he’s an immature egomaniac whose insufferableness comes from being too aware of his own faults. For a guy who was tempered in internet culture, whose personality was always reflected in some digital form or another, it’s an understandable tack to take. Thankfully he’s done a fine job of making the journey to the center of his id a curious and engaging one.

Record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good. Beyond that service, writers don’t provide much real value. They are unlikely to establish a strong connection with their readers, as no sense of prejudices and predilections can emerge from four sentences (at least one of which is going to be strictly informational). And you can’t even blame space. They are simply kowtowing to the preferences of those readers who care the least.

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers' innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own "stories" (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke "WTF" headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

Everyone's relationship to music has changed because of the Internet, and in a way that invalidates year-in-review summaries: We rank and file music all year long on our blogs and web magazines, in the list-drenched advertorial press, and even on our iPods. If everyone's a critic, do we still need a critics' poll?

Still, it would be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The fact is I’m particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation one sensitive and intelligent individual’s subconscious thoughts. Like a mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail.

Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste…

what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

It’s scary how the Memo makes Sandler and Murphy whipping boys, simply to sustain true Hollywood vulgarity. It perpetuates the collapse of critical thinking. When Sandler-bashing (and I don’t just mean the ludicrous Razzies, ratified only by tabloid media) turns into excoriation, it is necessary to examine the media’s cowardice and prejudices. The Sandler Memo has reduced criticism to a profession of chain letters.

Comparing the excellent work and perspective of seminal music writer Ellen Willis and the horribleness of ‘Record Collecting for Girls’ by Courtney E. Smith.

This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album.

A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP.

Nicki employs street hardness as a signifier of how great she is at rapping, not as an attempt to actually convince anybody that she's "hood" or any of that authenticity nonsense. She's successfully occupying the trap, ground zero for hardness, and calling its inhabitants "bitches," all to prove that she is the consummate rhyming bad-ass.

There is a tendency among music critics to create sub-stories with records and impose narratives. We might identify with a hardcore punk group this year because we are a restless generation, or with a work of hyperactive pop because the internet has made us incapable of concentrating, and so on. But sometimes we take a record for what it is: a resistant piece of art, existing as a singular entity. In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own.

I’ve spent the morning listening to Skrillex’s three EPs, and they’re fun, but they’re not really any indication of what this guy does. Maybe he’ll make a great record some day, and his tracks certainly bring the hooks, and sometimes they sound the way people wish that last Justice album sounded. But at this point, listening to Skrillex at home is almost like listening to Gwar at home. The live experience is the thing.

That’s the realm that Mercer is working in now, and when he has the confidence on Morrow to follow through on his glossy pop ambitions, his music manages to be as likeable as it always has been. It’s when Mercer tries to update the old Shins playbook with big-budget production that Morrow sounds awkward and dangerously sleepy.

‘Del Rey doesn’t have the emotional and psychological depth to support all the satin and spotlights. Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks, but, when it comes to lyrics, she and her collaborators get lost in a tangle of keywords.’

‘Like so many spotlit debuts, Visions displays a young singer developing a relationship with her own voice and the seemingly infinite possibilities for shaping and representing it. The mirror stage for emergent artists who spend a lot of time online and work alone with inexpensive tools often can (and does) lead to merely replicating the surface qualities of the stuff that streams their way. Boucher's talent lies in the balance of exploiting her gifts and leveraging what's come before her, but judiciously.’

‘The vast majority of this record is given over to rhapsodizing over some hunky, dangerous fella, and none of the alterations — sonic, biographical, cosmetic — allegedly made to the real-life Lana/Lizzy could distort the truth as thoroughly as her unrelenting Ooh He's a Bad, Bad, Sexy Man routine. It's instructive to picture what this guy would actually look like IRL, some clown with a real emotional haircut, Crocs hanging off his feet, Urban Outfitters leather jacket hung over his IKEA futon, remnants of that Taco Bell burrito with the Fritos in it congregating at the corners of his mouth as he binges on Skyrim, blasts "Pumped Up Kicks" on infinite repeat, and gargles dozens of shots of, like, Goldschläger.’