Thanks -- I think I was a bit too cynical about the project thanks to the faux-sequel title and the fact that DOOM's career arc between circa '08 (post-DOOMpostors; a year before 'Born Like This') was getting kind of frustrating, though he was going through some personal stuff that wasn't entirely clear at the time. With the original so canonical now it's probably worth indulging 2's detours a bit more.
It is exhausting. Making any sort of opinion public brings the flies to the shit. Something I've been wrestling with lately (and I feel like you touch on this a bit here but I need to re-read because you're going over a lot here and I'm whacked out on Benadryl) is this boogieman, monoculture. I actually think it's not dead, and in fact made very much alive by the way we're using all of this social media. It feels very different to have these taste-identities fed to us vs the way people have collected and cultivated them in the past—although I'm not trying to cater to nostalgia, or one-up any generation by that. I think that stranger, this notion that more variety is available than ever give us an unlimited playground of art, music and culture is having another weird effect of making "that guy (no gender)". Was it different in the 90s? In the 2000s? I haven't really been able to come to a conclusion I feel definite about. Thanks for taking the time to write this, even tweeting anything remotely on the topic exhausts me.
Yeah, this is what I meant by "and the arguments against it were rippling through the enthusiast music press and internet messageboards for several years -- hell, decades -- before that." (A lot of the early '00s rockism debates came to the fore again thanks to discussions on the I Love Music forum a few years before the Sanneh piece, where people who not only read but wrote for those weeklies renewed the debate for a wider internet audience.)
Thanks. I thought I’d read it somewhere before, but I’m now officially old and my memory is producing some fascinating distortions of what I thought I knew.
How would you reassess Madvillainy 2 after all these years? Great piece, Nate!
Thanks -- I think I was a bit too cynical about the project thanks to the faux-sequel title and the fact that DOOM's career arc between circa '08 (post-DOOMpostors; a year before 'Born Like This') was getting kind of frustrating, though he was going through some personal stuff that wasn't entirely clear at the time. With the original so canonical now it's probably worth indulging 2's detours a bit more.
It is exhausting. Making any sort of opinion public brings the flies to the shit. Something I've been wrestling with lately (and I feel like you touch on this a bit here but I need to re-read because you're going over a lot here and I'm whacked out on Benadryl) is this boogieman, monoculture. I actually think it's not dead, and in fact made very much alive by the way we're using all of this social media. It feels very different to have these taste-identities fed to us vs the way people have collected and cultivated them in the past—although I'm not trying to cater to nostalgia, or one-up any generation by that. I think that stranger, this notion that more variety is available than ever give us an unlimited playground of art, music and culture is having another weird effect of making "that guy (no gender)". Was it different in the 90s? In the 2000s? I haven't really been able to come to a conclusion I feel definite about. Thanks for taking the time to write this, even tweeting anything remotely on the topic exhausts me.
“the concept of "rockism" was introduced to the readers of the New York Times by Kelefah Sanneh nearly twenty years ago”
Wasn’t it more like 40+ years ago, in the pages of the UK music weeklies?
Yeah, this is what I meant by "and the arguments against it were rippling through the enthusiast music press and internet messageboards for several years -- hell, decades -- before that." (A lot of the early '00s rockism debates came to the fore again thanks to discussions on the I Love Music forum a few years before the Sanneh piece, where people who not only read but wrote for those weeklies renewed the debate for a wider internet audience.)
Thanks. I thought I’d read it somewhere before, but I’m now officially old and my memory is producing some fascinating distortions of what I thought I knew.