You have no style and no taste, lady. You suck.

1. ^^Best comment ever? Too bad it wasn't on Haloscan, not even sure which post that was in response to!

2. Congrats to Nia for starting a fab Platinum Weird fansite. Still haven't heard all of either album.

3. I need to respond to the last post now that I'm back, but I want to formulate some ideas first, so maybe I'll just go go go now and then actually respond to some comments (Eppy had more insightful things to say about SR's comments than I did). As for what SR's quote represents to me, I can't say for sure -- I think he just happened to tick me off in the right way at the right time, and that my gripes are largely with myself and "everyone."

I think I've been a lazy critic, and I hate to see lazy criticism from figures I've come to understand have sort of "made it" at this gig. Because it's harder to write well about music than to do anything else I do; it's a challenge in part because it puts me in touch with things I don't always like to confront, which are less apparent in more academic pursuits, or even cinematic ones (which even at their most personal are still somehow distanced by the process itself -- and my only significant work as a filmmaker ever was made from home movies, baby pictures, family interviews, etc.): vanity, fear, ecstasy, shame...value judgments, the question of why anything I do was, is, and continues to be important (to me, to anyone else). One problem I struggled with reviewing indie music, which is part of why I don't review it as much, was that for me it could be a fast track to semi-bohemia, to cool, to "importance." I could pretend. It could be something that signified importance without my needing to really think it was important or about why it was important. In the warped little world I was entering, where I still am, rock critics were rock stars -- all signs pointed to rock star. And I still believe that lots of things (I hesitate to say "anything") can lead one to rock stardom (in academia, on PBS), but what I want from rock star has changed. I'm still working out what it's changed to, but (ironically enough) I think for me being a rock star has a lot to do with earning the distinction. Which isn't to say I give a shit whether or not Paris earned it, but she certainly helps me earn it, so you go girl.

4. I don't think the Arcade Fire were just signifying importance on their first album, and I really connected to it as something that was important. My review of it signified importance from the get-go, but my main contention with it two years later (aside from the score -- duh it was a 10!) is that I didn't really give a sense of how much fun the album was, or how much I enjoyed listening to it, aside from it being some kind of cathartic experience, which I guess it could be occasionally but wasn't primarily.

I do think they're signifying importance on their second album, which isn't to say it's a bad album. But "our parents' bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends"...call me a sucker but it took me somewhere (like, back to my parents' bedroom). The music was...nice, yeah, pleasant, whatever, but those lines really did it for me! "Spread the ashes of the colors"...well, I heard it as "ashes of our mothers" (which would have been a terrible line) and I was in the mood for some relatable histrionics, I guess, and also projecting, but why shouldn't I have been projecting? So maybe I could have been more honest about that, but I'm guessing it would have been more embarrassing than how it turned out.

To be embarrassed, to be exposed as a fraud, these things obviously get to me, as they do to Aly and AJ and probably the Arcade Fire, and it doesn't help to have my paranoia kindled recently with a couple of these reviews. One specific complaint: despite what Nick Sylvester claims, I didn't stop reviewing after the Funeral review, and his comments are a little strange from someone who had some (not much) contact with me during that time. I reviewed at P4k for about six months after that, but I got worn out trying to juggle two reviews a week that didn't make me cringe (to say nothing of the song reviews, which I still suck at) with the rest of my work, so I stopped and I took a long break. And when I felt a little better, I realized I had a lot more to say about teenpop, and that it had a lot more to say through me, and more things to teach me. I wasn't a fraud here, or at least I didn't feel like one. And for the most part I still don't feel like one -- but I'm sensitive to frauds like me, especially when they're smarter than me, better writers than me, and capable of more. Coasters, bullshitters, Simon Reynolds and Avril Lavigne, making easy choices, taking easy shortcuts.

So if my attacks of SR (or AL) seem arbitrary, if sorta merited, in part it's because they are. (I'm fishing for a good idea, goofing around, which seems similar to but is essentially different from coasting -- coasting is settling for a bad idea, or maybe a boring idea, and pretending its a good one, a vital one -- in a review, a term paper, a book, a blog post. Goofing around is plowing through lots of ideas, many bad, until you get a good one.) It's too easy to say there are few people willing to do hard work to challenge themselves about why and how they're listening/reacting to this music, create knowledge using this music, music that really does change us (how could it not?), but
it's harder to come to grips with the fact that no one's gonna do this work for us (for me), either, and it's even harder to keep doing it.