| Apr. 19th, 2007 @ 06:50 pm Shut up 'n' play yer guitar |
|---|
Current Mood: cartman
Current Music: South Park, "Night of the Living Homeless"
from the backhanded-product-placement dept.
| I once asked Jo Jones, "What was Lester Young's philosophy concerning improvised music?" He promptly replied, "Lester played his philosophy." | | — Yusef Lateef |
The ILM Simon Reynolds thread was bumped on the occasion of Mark K-Punk interviewing him, on the eve of the publication of his next book.
As with his previous Rip It Up and Start Again, I will be buying and enjoying the new book, mainly because this is a case where his nostalgia overlaps with mine. But revisiting that ILM thread today — it was a day full of downtime, downtime and free Ben and Jerry's — I was reminded also of why I sometimes (sometimes) can't stand my more eggheaded cyberspace brethren — Reynolds, K-Punk, Woebot, the Dissensus crew, the pop-culture-studies wing of the ILM hivemind: the froth they can produce can be more interesting than the object of their prose. It's doubly a waste of time, ultimately, to read so much interesting (though often hit-or-miss) insight about "hauntology" or the Paris Hilton album and its critical reception — I don't want to hear these objects more than the once or twice that I've heard them.
It just seems like wasted energy. Martin Fry was a lot more interesting as a co-conspirator in ABC than he was as the publisher of the Modern Drugs fanzine. Same deal with Paul Morley as Zang Tumb Tuum figure, versus his ongoing three-decade froth-fest with word processors. (My brethren are, if nothing else, the modern-day equivalents of past glorified fanziners like Morley, Jann Wenner, and Paul Crawdaddy Williams.)
What if Jonathan Richman had merely chronicled the Velvet Underground? What if Charlie Parker's take on Don Byas and Lester had come in the form of some mighty dead-tree tome, rather than in his own playing? |
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