tht

akstavrh
Wow those video clips are great! Now, I certainly wouldn't want to actually sit down and talk with her too long about her favorite element (my favorite's the back right one on my stove), but I think I've upgraded her from successfully pretentious hipster to bat-shit crazy hipster. Of course, the question of whether it's an act or not doesn't really matter, as you have to be at least a bit bat-shit crazy in the first place to even decide to act like that.

did she contrive it all by herself though?

And really, what else are you supposed to do when you're from a well off family, have gone to all the right schools, and actually have some skill, than go incredibly incredibly prog? It's the only way out. I think the fact that there are people who take themselves and their music so seriously is great. Serious hipster >> ironic hipster, right?

sofia coppolla redux

If Brian Wilson made a new album with Van Dyke Parks and Steve Albini critics would be selling their grandmothers to get a hold of an advance copy.

fairly serious equivocation error there
 
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nomadologist

Guest
her affectation is sickeningly stupid and cloying. i hate it when madonna pretends to be english, i hate it when joanna newsom pretends she's really whacked out on hippie juice when she's clearly all well-slept and fed and sober. performativity is great, just save it for the stage. kate bush didn't have to act like an idiot offstage in order to make really great over-the-top music.

it's great to be over-the-top, but do it about some genre of music that hasn't been beaten to death by baby boomers kids' throwbacking for 2 decades now. have fun liking her, suckers. i would rather listen to paint dry for the rest of my life.

i don't like steve albini either. "losing my edge" was about hipsters and music obsessives and their attitudes toward music, not really new york and williamsburg and gentrification.
 

turtles

in the sea
did she contrive it all by herself though?
who cares? It's even better if it was a committee decision.

sofia coppolla redux
is that really a terrible thing to be? Maybe I missed the "sofia coppolla is the scourge of human civilization" debate.

fairly serious equivocation error there
I'm just commenting that Brian Wilson has seemingly earned the right to be pretentious, while Newsom has not. For some here, the mere mention of Parks and Albini working with Newsom was enough to put them off, while I'm guessing it likely wouldn't be for Wilson. I don't think this is being all that intellectually fair.

nomadologist said:
her affectation is sickeningly stupid and cloying. i hate it when madonna pretends to be english, i hate it when joanna newsom pretends she's really whacked out on hippie juice when she's clearly all well-slept and fed and sober. performativity is great, just save it for the stage. kate bush didn't have to act like an idiot offstage in order to make really great over-the-top music.

Screw saving it for the stage, if I had any chance at being some famous musician, I'd try hard to make me up as interesting a persona as possible. I imagine playing around with image and the [per/re]ception of your music would one of the really fun parts :)

Basically I think my whole point here is, why not go all out? she's got all the tools at her displosal, GO BIG!


anyway, happy new years all :)
 

turtles

in the sea
Oh yeah and I wanted to say that I generally hate indie rock type music and Ys is the only peice of music that would fall into that category that I've enjoyed all year. So I think there is something that Newsom is doing that pushes her above and beyond most of the "music that's been beaten to death by baby boomers kids' throwbacking for 2 decades now" (to paraphrase nomadologist).
 
she should hook up with Benga I reckon...

...get some of that black atlantic dubstep ghetto steez happening in her life and music

i love the way she forms her words when speaking though, maybe she should stop singing and just do the spoken word thing...
 

tht

akstavrh
"losing my edge" was about hipsters and music obsessives and their attitudes toward music, not really new york and williamsburg and gentrification.

sure, i'm just thinking of a synechdoche for the nascent nu-noise/ mutant disco stuff that was written about a lot a few years ago, often namechecking williamsburg and suggesting it was the best time since no wave and all of that (i used to read the village voice a lot when i was about 17!)

so when 'hipster' comes up, i'm not sure whether it's referring to some sufjans/newsom/decemberists postcollegiate howard dean types or the black dice crowd (unless they are one and the same!)

the word doesn't really have much currency in england from what (little) i've seen but if it did it would probably refer to art school kids

turtles.....i'm not really taking the rockcritic pretentiousness argument, all very 'ideas above your station' which is fine when disparaging suburban restaurants but it's pretty offensive when applied to a kindly old schizophrenic who wrote some amazing songs whilst fucked on lsd, and fairly redundant when referring to the ms noblesse oblige flowerpixie nuisance who is very competent at doing something very stupid
 
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nomadologist

Guest
THT: a hipster is basically any child of a baby boomer and/or a young member of the upper middle class. their taste in music runs the spectrum. i don't think "hipster" is a very relevant term over here anymore--it was a lot more meaningful 4 or 5 years ago in terms of referring to a homogenous sociological "type." there are DFA hipster types and joanna newsom hipsters over here now. folk hipsters, hippie hipsters. if you ever see a copy of the "hipster handbook" that explains everything.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Screw saving it for the stage, if I had any chance at being some famous musician, I'd try hard to make me up as interesting a persona as possible. I imagine playing around with image and the [per/re]ception of your music would one of the really fun parts :)

Basically I think my whole point here is, why not go all out? she's got all the tools at her displosal, GO BIG!

uck. sure, go big, just keep your feet on the ground. ever been around a musician who doesn't know when to turn it off? i'm all for living your myth but taking it too too far alienates people and is just plain self-indulgent.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
I don't like hipsters and rich kids and people who make music and stuff

A limitless capacity to moan about hipsters is a trait almost all hipsters share :)

If you're passionate enough about anything, even your loathing of hipsters, you could be and probably are labelled as one by someone out there.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
A limitless capacity to moan about hipsters is a trait almost all hipsters share :)

If you're passionate enough about anything, even your loathing of hipsters, you could and probably are labelled as one by someone out there.

No doubt. I would never try to deny I am a "hipster", because the biggest deniers are the worst ones, but also because "hipsters" are just my generation of hyperconsumers. I'd never claim I wasn't a hyperconsumer. I'm not a hipster by birth, though--my parents are too young to be baby boomers and I am not from the upper middle class. I got a full ride to my liberal arts school ;)
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
don't know if anyone put this up yet, but YOU CAN'T BLAME THIS ON THE WIRE:


Joanna Newsom documentary. I think I just ruined my New Year's. I'm serious.

Top find. I just spent the last 5 minutes laughing my bollocks off to that. What an advert for private education! Send you kids here, folks: they'll take 30 second to enunciate a simple sentence, and think a seahorse is a mythical horse that lives in the sea (as opposed to a 'real horse', and maybe the look so sad because they're underwater and they CAN'T FUCKING BREATHE).

And actually aren't harps just guitars for stupid people? With a seperate string for each note, in case the whole fretting and chord shapes concept is a bit too much to deal with?

So I'm rapidly coming the conclusion that Ms Newson is actually just really, really thick. And just like Michael vis a vis the Charlise Theron character in Arrested Development Series 3, the indie media are getting kookiness mixed up with a lack of mental development.

And no, I don't want to shag her. There's no way she'd put out anyway, and can you imagine trying to make post-coital conversation? I'd rather chew off one of my own legs.

But I don't think any the worse of Ys for this. As someone's already said, you have to be a bit nuts to make music like this anyway, and good performers and musicians are often not really people you'd want to hang around with (this phenomena can be observed in it's inverse, in the form of all those neighborhood bands that get continual support because they're nice, friendly people, even though there's a tacit understanding that they aren't actually very good. I'm sure we all know people like that).

Ys isn't as profound a listening experience it's being held up as in some quarters, but I don't regret buying it. It might only have one mood, but it's quite nice and cosy. I can see myself putting it on every few months to chill with the missus or read the papers to. It's like hippie lounge music.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
the best part is where she realizes how dumb it was to have said "real" horse, then she qualifies that by saying "a wild horse" and then very seriously with a grave expression "not a horse anyone owns."

jesus fuck. my liberal arts school had its share of hippie wannabe morons who drove brand new $45,000 VW station wagons but wore no shoes and had white dredlocks. i was even friendly with some of them. but this heinous bitch is completely whack. joanna newsom's music plays in some imaginary hippie lounge that haunts my dreams of hell and eternal damnation.

PS the musicians i've met, especially the most successful ones, are not so hard to be around. if they are, it's not because they're busy playing "i'm a hippie airhead who talks about little fairies and ants and fruitpies in the sky", it's because they're very intent on avoiding people like joanna newsom. i think that's a myth up there with the "mental illness is a glamorous side-effect of being an artist" line of bullshit.
 
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swears

preppy-kei
If I had that kind of dough from my parents, I'd be wearing tailored designer suits, not hippy fucking rags. What a bunch of chumps.
 

turtles

in the sea
Okay so we've ventured pretty damn far from discussing the MUSIC that newsom makes here, aren't we supposed to be good little post-modernists and disassociate the art from the artist?

Of course not, that would be no fun ;)

I think one of the reasons that I don't get so annoyed at Newsom, and find her more just kinda nuts is the fact that, unlike nomadologist, I have zero interaction with these types of people in my life, and have generally completely avoided the whole liberal art school scene. Viewing from a distance, I'm all for ridiculous people striving to make ambitious music, and sometimes succeeding.

Even if she is a completely arrogant, self-centered spoiled brat, she made some damn lovely music inspite/because of it. I'd like to think that even if I knew more of these people my opinion of Ys would stay the same, but realistically I'm guessing that I could only take so much seahorse talk before the music started to go sour as well. So there you go.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
People have amply discussed Joanna Newsom's music here and why they hate it. Scroll back for my explanation of why I dislike it sonically.

I don't know what a "post-modernist" would possibly be, because "post-modernism" is a condition not a praxis, but I'll ignore that and say--I have no idea who the "real" Newsom is (nor do I care), but whoever that image/icon is she's trying to create annoys the hell out of me.
 

swears

preppy-kei
She failed the "What element would you be?" test.
The correct answer is not "earth", it is:

"What the fuck are you talking about?"
 
funny thing is, i'm now more inclined to make allowances for her music given her percieved kookiness...

...i like kookiness and i'd still hit it. She'd love it and we'd talk about elemental horse fantasies for hours afterwards if she wanted

of course we should disassociate the arts from the art...

...I've got good friends who make shit music but just cos their music sux doesn't mean they do
 
turns out the winsome ms newsom is playing right here in Christchurch NZ in a couple of weeks so i might see if i can get her to sign my chest...:D

...I might even try to blag an interview of her so if anyone's got any questions worth asking

fire away...

...BTW I know some right proper cunts who make some shit hot music too but I don't hold that against them
 
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