haha I get it. I can't seem to click with much metal or screamo or anything past a few more popular post-hardcore releases but I do like the whole NY no wave scene. Honestly I listen to what I find enjoyable and I don't try to force myself to like anything else and I don't try to find real fault in things which is why it does bug me when I see reviews that seem to see no positive in a piece of art that I like and uses phrases to describe it that make me sick. Saying that it is a bastardization of music, or it's tacky, or nonsensical, or the need that you seem to find to criticize based on their class, race, or education just doesn't make sense to me. I understand that you may have a negative opinion of the album and that people have opinions that need to be respected, and that I may not like some of the albums that you cherish, but your review stood out to be because of the way that you write through an objective standpoint. You write with a real finality to it that reeks of the same pretensions you criticize the band of. And maybe I'm nothing more than a boring privileged bourgeois straight white boy, but that shouldn't detract from the feeling in my chest I get when I listen to Step.
It's the callous dismissal of all people who do like the music you don't. You act as if it makes you above them, and it doesn't. All it means is that they listen to different music than you. Perhaps that isn't the image that you mean to portray through your reviews, but it's the way that you're seen, and it isn't flattering.
Think maybe Modern Vampires is overworked? Think maybe the hosannas are reflexive, generalized? I did, and then I didn't. So now think Paul Simon instead if you insist, admittedly a great album. But Sgt. Pepper is a truer precedent, to wit: if you're smart you say where's the rebop, only if you're smarter you quickly figure out that maybe sustaining groove and unfailing exuberance don't matter as much as you believed. Each verse/chorus/bridge/intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)--each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept. And crucially, the boy-to-man themes you'd figure come with several twists I've noticed so far and more no doubt to come. One is simply a right-on credo: "Age is an honor--it's still not the truth." Another is how much time Ezra Koenig spends wrestling a Jahweh-like hard case. The Big Guy comes out on the short end of a fight song called "Unbelievers," and a DJ "spinning 'Israelites' into 'Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown'" gives Him a nasty turn. But Koenig claims no permanent victory. Too smart. Too much a man, too.
Comments