Well HOT DAMN!
Mr. Carly Carioli paid a very kind tribute to RF last week (Friday, August 18) on The Phoenix.com: in his "On The Download: 10 Things That Are Better Than Kelly Clarkson Singing Guns N Roses" he put us at #6 and declared:
"6. Ex-Takers and In-Out homeslice Nick Blakey's new blog, Retrospective Foresight. <--Knowledge jewels by the crate right here. Now if only we could get him to post some mp3s. (Yes, it's true what Nick says in his first post: we passed on RF as a column in the Phoenix. Not because we don't love close-readings of old American Music Club and John Cale albums, but because ultimately we aren't Mojo.)"
Thanks Carly! Truth of the matter is...I don't know exactly how to post mp3's...but I can learn.
Carly does bring up an interesting point here, however, when he states "...because ultimately we aren't Mojo." True, yes, but I don't feel that RF is going for the Mojo crowd. Most of the time when I look through Mojo I sigh and shake my head, especially at their current music reviews. This sort of homogenization of the underground, a place in which Conor Oberst, Ian Curtis, and Roky Erickson all sit entangled, where Forever Changes is the reference point from which all others will be measured and not Love's 1966 debut (which I find to be a far superior album), and where in issue after issue they proclaim the Willard Grant Conspiracy to be the best American band there is, hand down (look, I like Robert Fisher, and used to know him personally, but the man is not re-writing Biblical history as we know it and simply doing his version of Americana...but of course, the Brits just eat up that shit. Hence their feelings for Mark Eitzel/AMC and [gasp] Ryan Adams).
I do realize that the line between what Mojo is doing and what RF is trying to do is thin, but I am not presenting histories and sagas, merely albums. Some of the writing in Mojo is certainly worth reading, especially when they cover subjects outside of the usual underground/indie splee (such as a Uriah Heep tour where John Wetton served as bassist or Sly & The Family Stone's drug nightmares), but the idea of tying it all up in one bundle as good music as opposed
to music in general is where I start to get that uneasy feeling. Obsessive Cantabridgian Tom Waits fans, the born again cult of Mission of Burma, and people over 45 who still believe Lou Reed is capable of churning out another Berlin or even Street Hassle ("he just needs some inspiration"...hoo-boy...) are some of the reasons I tried very hard to disengage myself from all of that. I think I was partially successful in the Chunklet Overrated issues (still no death threats-damn!-though this response is pretty amusing) and book, as well as in my initial condemnation of deliberately lo-fi recordings for EQ (one piece of hate mail-yes!), and I am still not apologetic for the things I wrote in either place (though my estranged father would have been horrified and thoroughly disgusted with what I wrote. If he had not already removed me from his life at that point, he most certainly would have after seeing the family name attached to such vile and unmitigated garbage. I have no idea if he has actually seen the pieces or not...but frankly, it doesn't matter at this point.)
RF is me going the other way. Instead of lashing out at the "overrated", again, we are here to discuss "underrated" and "overlooked" (though Henry Owings of Chunklet once told me felt everything was overrated but even more was underrated...think about that for awhile). Nothing to necessarily build a catalogue of "good music" to, but certainly something to catch your interest and take a few moments to note. In some future essay I want to discuss the concept/idea/Zen proposition of letting the music find you as opposed to you going out to deliberately find the music, and how it has made the "graying of the record store" (in more ways than one) a much easier transition to endure. It certainly has made my music consumption a much more interesting and ever changing place.
Stay tuned...
"6. Ex-Takers and In-Out homeslice Nick Blakey's new blog, Retrospective Foresight. <--Knowledge jewels by the crate right here. Now if only we could get him to post some mp3s. (Yes, it's true what Nick says in his first post: we passed on RF as a column in the Phoenix. Not because we don't love close-readings of old American Music Club and John Cale albums, but because ultimately we aren't Mojo.)"
Thanks Carly! Truth of the matter is...I don't know exactly how to post mp3's...but I can learn.
Carly does bring up an interesting point here, however, when he states "...because ultimately we aren't Mojo." True, yes, but I don't feel that RF is going for the Mojo crowd. Most of the time when I look through Mojo I sigh and shake my head, especially at their current music reviews. This sort of homogenization of the underground, a place in which Conor Oberst, Ian Curtis, and Roky Erickson all sit entangled, where Forever Changes is the reference point from which all others will be measured and not Love's 1966 debut (which I find to be a far superior album), and where in issue after issue they proclaim the Willard Grant Conspiracy to be the best American band there is, hand down (look, I like Robert Fisher, and used to know him personally, but the man is not re-writing Biblical history as we know it and simply doing his version of Americana...but of course, the Brits just eat up that shit. Hence their feelings for Mark Eitzel/AMC and [gasp] Ryan Adams).
I do realize that the line between what Mojo is doing and what RF is trying to do is thin, but I am not presenting histories and sagas, merely albums. Some of the writing in Mojo is certainly worth reading, especially when they cover subjects outside of the usual underground/indie splee (such as a Uriah Heep tour where John Wetton served as bassist or Sly & The Family Stone's drug nightmares), but the idea of tying it all up in one bundle as good music as opposed
to music in general is where I start to get that uneasy feeling. Obsessive Cantabridgian Tom Waits fans, the born again cult of Mission of Burma, and people over 45 who still believe Lou Reed is capable of churning out another Berlin or even Street Hassle ("he just needs some inspiration"...hoo-boy...) are some of the reasons I tried very hard to disengage myself from all of that. I think I was partially successful in the Chunklet Overrated issues (still no death threats-damn!-though this response is pretty amusing) and book, as well as in my initial condemnation of deliberately lo-fi recordings for EQ (one piece of hate mail-yes!), and I am still not apologetic for the things I wrote in either place (though my estranged father would have been horrified and thoroughly disgusted with what I wrote. If he had not already removed me from his life at that point, he most certainly would have after seeing the family name attached to such vile and unmitigated garbage. I have no idea if he has actually seen the pieces or not...but frankly, it doesn't matter at this point.)
RF is me going the other way. Instead of lashing out at the "overrated", again, we are here to discuss "underrated" and "overlooked" (though Henry Owings of Chunklet once told me felt everything was overrated but even more was underrated...think about that for awhile). Nothing to necessarily build a catalogue of "good music" to, but certainly something to catch your interest and take a few moments to note. In some future essay I want to discuss the concept/idea/Zen proposition of letting the music find you as opposed to you going out to deliberately find the music, and how it has made the "graying of the record store" (in more ways than one) a much easier transition to endure. It certainly has made my music consumption a much more interesting and ever changing place.
Stay tuned...
posted by Retrospective Foresight | 11:05 PM
1 Comments:
The NY Times article referenced in this post, "The Graying Of The Record Store" by Alex Williams, has been archived by the paper, and getting it out of the archives costs money or the sacrifice of an e-mail address. The newsgroup that sent it to me excerpted the article which I will then excerpt for y'all here. Please enjoy:
"At Norman's, which is 15 years old and just around the corner from New York's epicenter of punk, St. Marks Place, shoppers with nose rings and dewy cheeks are not unknown. But they may only be looking to use the automatic teller machine. A pair of teenagers - he with ink-black dyed hair, and she in ragged camouflage shorts - wandered in one evening recently and promptly
froze in the doorway, stopped in their tracks by an Isaac Hayes cut from the 70's.
They had the confused looks of would-be congregants who had stumbled into a church of the wrong denomination; they quickly shuffled off. Most of Norman's other customers were old enough to remember eight-track tapes. Steven
Russo, 53, for instance, was looking for jazz CD's. Mr. Russo, a high school teacher in Valley Stream, N.Y., said that he values the store for its sense of camaraderie among cognoscenti as much as its selection. "It's the ability of people to talk to people about the music, to talk to personnel who are knowledgeable," he said."
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