Dissensus Blogs

version

Well-known member
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
Someone archived it a few times,
 

sus

Well-known member
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.
 

sus

Well-known member
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.
 

sus

Well-known member
Ironically, clinging too tightly to a polemic can make your writing less convincing.
Mvuent and I are so in sync, this is one of the central arguments of "Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare"
 

sus

Well-known member
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.
 

sus

Well-known member
"Balancing" Experimentation and Accessibility is Stupid
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.

is interpretation bullshit? (this one's important, probably 1st priority)
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.
 

sus

Well-known member
weight of the 20th century culture archive
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?
 

version

Well-known member
5p5cuo.jpg
 

sus

Well-known member
Re: your "Burrowing" intro, and the burden (and advantage) of an archive—the average age of Nobel Prize winners in STEM subjects, when they start the work they win for, has gone up dramatically the past century. You don't see much progress in fields being made by 20- and 30-somethings any more, which was relatively common before. It'd be interesting to think why that isn't (or is it?) yet the case with progress pop music.
 

other_life

bioconfused
mvuent and i are so close to nothing alike that our friendship is a miracle.
he eats he heats he shits he sweats he pushes and he pulls. Hineh ha-'ish.
 
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