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Nitsuh Abebe on a particular review of David Foster Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ on Amazon. “No true human contact is possible without a certain amount of presumption, and these presumptions are precisely what self-consciousness, over time, whittles away at.”

My friend Niko Rivas interviewed me and wrote up this great column on my Lapwing EP.

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

“The chillwave-cum-funk master gets a job he likes in Honolulu.”

I’m going to write about this post in a few days. “I don’t personally care much about finding ‘great unsigned bands;’ I am not in A&R or publicity. If I was going to spend all of my time focused on listening to the first four or five songs written by a series of unknown acts I would lose my mind, because I am increasingly interested in issues of style and craft that are usually lost on people who are just starting out. I’d rather have people at record labels deal with that and facilitate the process of making finished records. There’s a lot of great labels out there — if I’m going to find something new, I trust them more than anyone else other than my friends and colleagues.”

Good oral history. This quote is a good takeaway: "I think the thing I've really learned from James is a) patience, b) only work with people you love, and c) be very, very, very, very stubborn about everything. Because when you're capable and able to say no to stuff, when you're capable of writing your own story and being very adamant about the way that you're portrayed or the way that your records are made, people respond to it."

“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”

Tim Quirk tells the story of the Walkman, and how it’s “changed the way we listen, and what we listen to.”

Nitsuh Abebe on Odd Future's energy, and their unfortunately exclusionary lyrics.

“RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead. Good. Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.”

“I stumbled on this unsettling story of an obscure Pokémon bootleg/art-hack that I thought might be neat to share on here. I think this originated from 4chan, so I’ve no idea if this hack actually exists. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a great concept/tale!”

Ends with Paul’s and Mo’s vows, which are great: “I will not hide anything from you except surprises. I promise to let you make fun of me. I promise to meet you at the emergency room with a book and a sweater. I promise to always see and treat you as an equal.”

“Perry’s ouevre is nasty, sticky and a little bit stupid; it’s a kind of Hello Kitty-themed update on Carry On; fruit-scented lube on a rather imposing black dildo. It works perfectly because the American ideal of the teenager - wholesome and optimistic - is of course at odds with its reality of unprotected sex and casual drug use.”

“A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding.” In which Maureen Tkacik engages in a number of jobs she wouldn’t otherwise take to explore them journalistically and try to get at the heart of the ‘nothing economy’. This is a great piece, and I think the reactions (in the comments and in my knee, occasionally) questioning her ‘legitimacy’ and hypocrisy illuminate the very problem she’s talking about. I think the idea of injecting a journalist experience into a piece are wonderful, because so-called straight journalism is often a myth and because it can make the writing and reading better.

Nitsuh explores the Black Eyed Peas iPad app, and why so much party pop music — which is so often aspirational — has been sounding “rote and blanched of purpose”.

Mike Powell takes on ‘Kaputt’ to grand results.

In spite of the potential for people being ignorant or abusive with what he writes, Marco writes because ”I’m freely expressing my ideas in public, which helps me clarify my thoughts, enhance and alter my views, and improve my writing over time. I think I’m getting the better end of the deal.”

An exploration of the author’s gambling addiction and meta-talk about writing and public perception in general thereon.

On why Altered Zones is Pitchfork’s *younger* ‘sister site’, and the fundamental difference between music producers and consumers who don’t remember music before the web, never knew it was something you paid for, and aren’t as concerned with the rating of certain music as ‘bad’. I like this, but I have some big issues with this and want to return to it: 1. Altered Zones has its own set of problems, heavy among them the double-standard to which they hold DIY music. Baby bands at AZ get heaped with over-the-top praise, which at once unfairly removes them from helpful critical influence and subjects them to fame for which they aren’t prepared. As a result many are left in the dust of the Next Small Thing. 2. These music producers and writers don’t remember music before the web? I think this is patently false and that they absolutely do remember it; they generation that doesn’t isn’t reading Altered Zones yet. And what about those music producers sampling and being influenced by music that happened before the web (the 90s, the 80s)? 3. I don’t think Pitchfork is incapable of critically assessing the bands on Altered Zones; they just don’t have the time and energy for it. Which argument means I also don’t believe Altered Zones is not a filter for Pitchfork. How many bands debut on AZ or an AZ-affiliated blog, move on to the Forkcast, get a feature, and then get a bona fide Pitchfork Review? Several. Pitchfork’s own ‘The Week at Altered Zones’ pretty much is a filter by definition.

A heartbreaking, fascinating profile of a postman with LSD-induced (-abetted?) schizophrenia.

I saw this linked as a ‘great article from 2010’ and thought ‘WTF I read about this a long time ago’ and looked in my bookmark history, and there's this little page by David Carkeet (http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html), and this Popular Mechanics article makes no mention of that (why would it?) but it is totally great.

“Sometimes I just NEED things because I LIKE them. And I LIKE the color of these PLATES.”

“Both albums are like brainwashing, insular symphonies to a painfully reactive public awareness. The music doesn’t drive outward but, instead, falls inward, bouncing along the various fractured feelings of its singer and his mates. While ‘The National Anthem’ may suggest that ‘everyone is so near/everyone has got the fear’, the reality is that Yorke feels like a misidentified Pied Piper, the ‘rats and kids follow me out of town’ tenets of the Kid A title track pleading his case to be set free. This could be the main reason why the reaction to its release was so incredibly strong. Newness and novelty can help, but there is more to it than a differing direction. Kid A sounds like the start of a surreal psychological dissertation. Amnesiac occasionally comes across as whining.”

Thoughts on the tendency of the internet to empower and break down niches. “You can be a niche, but you’re a public niche, so you can’t expect to be left alone about it, or understood on your own terms. The internet makes niches possible, but it’s also a massive space in which loads of different people communicate — and spaces like that tend to pull everyone toward the middle, developing conventions and enforcing a cultural center. So far, this hasn’t stopped plenty of corners of the internet from getting extremely insular and specialized, but it’s still a form of cultural policing on this front.”

"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."

A good overview of where music creation and criticism is in late 2010. At least in terms of the sorts of bands who are making music for the sorts of people who are reading these sorts of blog posts (a lot!).

"If somebody you care about is bleeding profusely, it’s not loving to insist that she’s flawless and has nothing to worry about. The loving thing is to stop the bleeding then get her to a doctor. If a guy is clearly suffering from blood poisoning, ignoring the problem isn’t loving. Instead, say, 'Dude. You need to get that looked at immediately.' Or, better yet, go with him. Do what you can to make things better."

"What kind of noise are you feeling, and how far do you feel like sinking into it?"