I've been going through mvuent's blog from the beginning today. It's good from the off, but there's a noticeable improvement once you get to 'Burrowing in for the Long Winter' (2020) leading up to the now-famous Neon Screams review.
Someone archived it a few times,funny, i'd actually been looking at your blog a bit recently, but to be honest it gets a LOT worse once you realize the whole thing no longer exists
The master’s study is also a place of solitude, but for a different reason: no one else could make the same kind of progress. They don’t have the same arcane, specialized knowledge, and you’ve already progressed far enough that it’s clear that the vision beckoning you is unique. You don’t have to stop thinking, but at this point thoughts aren’t enough. You need to produce concrete evidence that you’ve been doing more with your time than, you know, endlessly rewatching Sniper Special Ops or something. You need to make your progress real so that it won’t all die with you.
What's truly special about Neon Screams is how it makes this case. Most music journalists, if tasked with writing this book, would have taken one of the following approaches: (a) assemble an exhaustive Wikipedia entry, dutifully running through every notable purveyor of autotune and related technology or (b) focus on connecting the music to the hard social realities that surround and shape it, thereby legitimizing it as worthy of Serious Consideration in an explicitly political sense. Although writers adhering to these paths can produce invaluable work, there's one crucial question that they don't answer, which is... what are the dreams of this music?... Other people have noted that autotune can sound a bit "cyborg", but Mackintosh expands this vague scribble into a mural, a religion with its own mythology and beliefs. If you want to posit a new universe, it helps to have a good creation story.
Mvuent and I are so in sync, this is one of the central arguments of "Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare"Ironically, clinging too tightly to a polemic can make your writing less convincing.
Music criticism is only worth reading when it can help listeners get something more out of what they're hearing.... Seraphic light, reptilian shapeshifters, imps, gorgons, resurrected gang members, the cold glare of an iphone screen in a dark bedroom–are these the dreams of the future, the recent past, or the present? Perhaps the vision is so wonderful that it doesn't matter.
I'd like to read this one. I have my own thoughts on the importance of balancing the foreign & familiar, but am curious to hear a rebuttal."Balancing" Experimentation and Accessibility is Stupid
I feel like your above argument about music criticism earning its way making the music a richer/more saturated medium answers this, unless I'm misunderstanding what you'd wanna say.is interpretation bullshit? (this one's important, probably 1st priority)
I'm also curious about this one, I thought a bit about it while on a mushrooms trip in Oaxaca, when you spend enough time in the archive it changes you, your whole sense of situation. Ever read anything good on the topic?weight of the 20th century culture archive
I had the same feeling re: some of the stuff in 'Burrowing in for the Long Winter I', 'Reaching the Far Lands' and 'Revealing the Map'.Mvuent and I are so in sync, this is one of the central arguments of "Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare"
no he's lankyDo ya reckon he's part of the simulation
A mere reflection of our own self-images
you literally shouted it out in the town square. everyone knows now.you don't know that.