Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Wednesday, December 02, 2009
More Thoughts On Sand

"Birds on the Beach", Staten Island, 31 January 2009. Larger here.

I don't read a whole lot of music criticism or even music writing these days, but every once in a while I'll flip through some reviews or read a feature or two. But if I actually find something that makes me say, "Fuck! wow!", rest assured it was a piece written by Pitchfork writer Mark Richardson.

I have read a lot of writing on music in my life and I can say without doubt that Mark Richardson is the best music writer I've ever come across.

To be clear: there are certainly more gifted writers who cover music in their writing, and others still who are able to write about music with a grand romanticization befitting our near-desperate need to blow up life balloons with emotional helium to lift our clippers into the sky and sail us to special lands. But none of these people or anyone else are able to write about music like Mark Richardson, to talk about the sounds heard and meanings meant, and describe it all in a fashion that is simultaneously analytical, emotive, discursive, ambiguous, and personal.

I won't espouse any further on Mark's talents because he's the humble sort of man who would prefer his writing itself to speak louder than my blubbering about his royality. But let me just say that there's a reason why he's the only music critic I've ever written to directly for a reason other than to question decisions made or opinions posited.

It could be though that one of the reasons I love Mark Richardson is because his brain seems to draw many of the same connections as does my own***. Case in point: I've been going on for the past few days about the awesomeness of the lo-fi glory Real Estate and in particular their majestic track "Beach Comber"--well, sure enough, Mark has been too, as he discusses in his latest Resonant Frequency column on Pitchfork.

This article, which is actually a very uncharacteristic and atypical stitching together of "Nine Fragments on Lo-fi's Attraction to the Natural World", gets directly at the heart of the some of the ideas I was trying to get at in my post on Real Estate and others in the past few months. I love that, like with my own assessments, Mark appears clearly engaged yet still sort of fails to actually hit a nail on the head in defining what exactly is happening, and why--because sometimes you just can't get more precise than "fuzzy", even though it might still be worth talking about.

Check out all of Mark's Resonant Frequency column at Pitchfork here. A few of my personal faves are this (the first piece of his that really hit me), this, this, this, this, this, and this. Seriously, read all seven of these. I could have easily put up 1o or 15 other faves.

I fucking love this man.

Good night.

NOTES:

*** - Our lone point of genuine disagreement: Mark loves the fuck out of Bruce Springsteen, while I personally have always been disinterested in the Boss at best and a total hater at worst. But Mark is also older and, hey, no one's perfect.

LISTEN:

Santo & Johnny - "Sleepwalk"

Modest Mouse - "Sleepwalkin'", from Interstate 8 EP and Building Nothing Out of Something

Labels: heroes, music, quickthoughts, thoughts

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 12/02/2009 04:54:00 AM 0 comments

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