Billboard, Nov. 3, 2001
Announcement
Posted by s woods on October 6, 2011
Posted in Archival, Obits, Tech & Leisure | 1 Comment »
Kellow & Kael I
Posted by s woods on October 6, 2011
Couple early previews of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:
Kellow writes from the point of view of an admirer of Kael’s — like many of us, he came under the spell of one of her review collections when he was a movie-mad teen and then followed her week-by-week for the rest of her tenure at The New Yorker.
The book explores some of the critic’s eccentricities — she would never see a film more than once — and some problematic ethical areas (she became very close to filmmakers but did not disclose that fact in both positive and negative reviews).
Todd McCarthy (Variety):
Pauline is very fortunate in her biographer. Kellow, an erudite movie lover, features editor at Opera News and author of a book about another formidable woman, Ethel Merman, writes beautifully and dexterously interweaves the story of a career long-thwarted with a sensitive reading of his subject’s youthful enthusiasm and intellectual growth. To an impressive degree, he gets inside the head of a precocious, fearsomely smart young woman from small-town California and is able to describe what drove her, which authors turned her on (James, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Woolf, Proust), her love of jazz and her distaste for aesthetic, religious and political dogma. So thoroughly does he portray the development of Pauline’s character and passionate engagement with matters aesthetic that it comes as no surprise she was able to burst onto the scene, at the relatively advanced age of 48, as one of the most dynamic cultural arbiters of the past century.
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Kael, Movie Critics | Leave a Comment »
Spin Going Bi-monthly
Posted by s woods on October 5, 2011
A New Schedule and New Feel for Spin Magazine (Ben Sisario, NYT)
Starting with its March issue, Spin’s print edition will be published six times a year in a larger format, which the magazine says will allow it to run longer features and better showcase its photography.
After having its dimensions gradually shrink over the years, the revamped publication will measure 9½ inches by 12 inches, nearly the same size as its first issue in 1985, and be printed on heavier, higher-quality paper stock. (Its current size is 8⅞ inches by 10⅞ inches.)
Posted in Zines | Leave a Comment »
Dead Critics
Posted by s woods on October 5, 2011
I once resisted the urge — partly as an attempt at black humour, partly as meta-commentary on what seems to comprise 75% of the posted content here, partly as a self-examination of why I even bother continuing to do this — to change the title of this website, just for a day, to “Dead RockCritics.com.” Well, I’ve been superseded in my aims. Dead Critics is an excellent looking new blog by Lisa Levy about “dead critics, a few live critics, and the nature of critical inquiry.” With current entries on Bangs (which I enjoyed) and Dwight MacDonald.
Posted in Blogwatch, Obits | Leave a Comment »
Stats update (“We’re number just-south-of-seven-million!”)
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
A couple months back, I noted that rockcritics.com, according to the website Alexa, ranked 9,190,864th in the world. As of this second (it could change by the time you click through), our stats ranking is 6,904,770, a not entirely insignificant jump of two million two hundred and eighty seven thousand. To which I say …
Posted in Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Susan Whitall interview
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
At Music Monday, the first of a two-part interview with Susan Whitall, former Creemster and current author of Fever, a biography of Little Willie John. Keep your eye out for part two, apparently a week from now.
Growing up in the ’60s, music was really revolutionizing society, and vice versa…to be a kid and immersed in it to such an extent that the latest Beatles or Temptations album mean standing in line for hours outside a record store, there was an intensity there that I think may not exist today. Having said that, if there had been a hip, exciting magazine about film in Detroit, or books… I may have drifted there. But in the ’60s music was the top form of expression, so to have a magazine about music in almost my back yard, was too tempting. Really, Creem was more than a music magazine too, we had stories of cultural interest, on movies, books etc. There really were few limits, as long as it was entertaining, so it was a great laboratory of writing.
Posted in Creem, Interviews | Leave a Comment »
Rolling Stone: Why Don’t I Love You Anymore?
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
A pretty interesting perspective on RS by Martha Nichols, an early reader.
RS has long been criticized for its boomer music sensibility and cluelessness about race and gender. I was a feminist in the ’70s, and while that’s not why I read Rolling Stone, it’s ultimately why I got tired of it. That essentially male voice is so relentlessly sure it’s right, that it knows the best albums and the best songs of a decade — or a generation — but The Voice will never cop to being influenced by personal preference or (worse) industry hype.
From the vantage point of three decades gone by, I know that tastes in pop music change, listeners get older, we enter different life phases — and start receiving solicitations from AARP. But even in 1984, when I had that subscription to Rolling Stone and was reading the first installments of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, I felt my interest draining away.
Posted in Links, Zines | Leave a Comment »
Race and Jazz Criticism
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
A Conversation with John Gennari. By Greg Thomas at All About Jazz.
Haven’t read all of this yet, but I’m anxious to dive in. Even if you’re just a casual fan of jazz or jazz criticism, I can’t recommend strongly enough Gennari’s excellent book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics, the sort of book you wish every critical sub-genre had at least one of (I know of only one such overriding attempt to tell the story of rock criticism, though I’m sure there are others).
See here for some previous thoughts on Gennari’s tome.
Posted in Book (P)reviews | 2 Comments »
Fusion Critics Poll, 1972, continued
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
Last week I reprinted the chart. Today, the individual ballots. (Will remove if some actual participant in the poll or former Fusion board member requests as much. That includes any of you former “Stone” critics.)
Posted in Archival, Polls & Lists | 6 Comments »
Pet Shop Boys Headline Watch
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
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Chuck Eddy Triptych
Posted by s woods on September 30, 2011
A twin feature from the Los Angeles Review of Books: King of the Contrarians: Josh Langhoff introduces Chuck Eddy, the man with more voice per square inch than any other rock critic, and Michaelangelo Matos finds out what makes him tick.
Also, in PopMatters: Chuck Eddy Will Piss You Off with ‘Rock and Roll Always Forgets’ by W. Scott Poole
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Interviews, Links | Leave a Comment »
Fusion Critics Poll, 1972
Posted by s woods on September 29, 2011
A friend sent me this, so I’m posting it, a little nervously… more fascinating archival material.
Just one short comment: fairly delighted (and surprised) to see Pagliaro’s “Some Sing Some Dance” rank #6 on the Top 6 (!) singles list. To put this in some perspective, it apparently only needed three votes to attain that position. Still, we’re talking about a bilingual pop craftsman from Montreal, who never once cracked the Top 100 in the States. “Some Sing” has always been a personal favourite (it made my recent Top 100), and it’s odd to see it played back in this context. (Odd enough that even the Fusion eds felt the need to clarify in the introduction to the poll, “That Pagliaro song is from Canada, near as we can tell.”)
Posted in Archival, Polls & Lists | 6 Comments »
Gleason and Stavers
Posted by s woods on September 28, 2011
Ralph J. Gleason dug 16 Magazine!
Posted in Gloria Stavers | 1 Comment »
I Want My Monoculture
Posted by s woods on September 28, 2011
Why I miss the monoculture by Toure, in Salon.
Fretting about where we are and where we’re going is clearly the rock critical meme of the year, and you can add this article to the evidence (I fret also, though most of my fretting tends to be about why and how I seem to be tumbling headfirst into a do-I-really-give-a-shit-anymore attitude about the entire operation — music, writing, etc. — while still cranking up the latest Britney Spears single every time it comes on the car radio). See also Christgau, espousing similar ideas about the “monoculture” in this 2006 PopMatters interview.
I don’t know, “monoculture” made very little sense to me when Christgau posed it (footnoted, not-irrelevant question I’ve thought about for a long time: did African-Americans, en masse, give a shit about the Beatles during the ’60s?), and, given the respective eras each writer is drawing upon, it makes even less sense to me when Toure poses it. Toure writes: “We no longer live in a monoculture. We can’t even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.” Huh? Disco sucks-ers (and who, by the way, is “we”?*) were a “monoculture”? You mean as opposed to the zillions of citizens buying disco records, listening to disco songs on the radio, and dancing to disco in roller rinks and whatnot (across a rather large portion of the the entire planet, no less)? Colour me extremely confused, if not downright skeptical.
* Um, I realized after posting this, that I employed that godawful royal “we” right in my first sentence here! But just to be clear, I am referring to a fairly specific if nonetheless ridiculously diverse species: people who are in some shape or form pop music writers (or “rock critics,” same thing in my book).
Posted in Blabbin' | 1 Comment »
Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam (audio)
Posted by s woods on September 21, 2011
Hard rock critics Phillip Freeman and Jeanne Fury engage in a Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam debate, only to have Vernon Reid (of Living Color, once upon a time a sometime music critic himself) jump into the conversation as well.
Posted in Podcast | Leave a Comment »
