Is everyone familiar with the notorious JoJo Dancer/MC House Shooz/The Gay
Rapper "1998 Rock Critical List?" The '98RCL is a relentless verbal tirade
launched against the sacred cows of the industry, and JoJo's vituperative
spew has the rock-crit world a-titter. It also has many a flabby has-been
calling for JoJo's blood. The full text, which veers uneasily from the
sublime and trenchant to the petty and infantile, has been posted on the Spin
Magazine website, leading many to believe that Spin's senior editor, Charles
Aaron, is the spiteful "JoJo." JoJo apparently shares enough of Aaron's
verbal quirks and personal vendettas; though there is also the likely
possibility that JoJo's rant is a meticulous attempt at framing Aaron.
See last week's Village Voice for an in-depth discussion.
So here's what JoJo has to say about Our Boy Simon. Almost merciful compared
to the thrashing that Kodwo Eshun, the symbiotic other-half of the tiny
Reynolds/Eshun Mutual Admiration Society, receives...
SIMON REYNOLDS. (ex-SPIN, author of GENERATION ECSTASY: Into the World of
Techno and Rave Culture).
Proudly, almost militantly, ignorant of American post-punk and alternative
rock, not to mention hip hop, this shaggily taciturn, rave-glazed Englishman
somehow managed to helm the record reviews section of SPIN for almost a year.
How? Because it was assumed by outsiders and oldsters that Reynolds was the
chosen oracle of "electronica," and if anyone had the key to unlocking its
Next Big Thingness, it would be Simon Sez. Unfortunately, Reynolds resents
any term he doesn't coin himself, so "electronica," unlike his still-born
babies "post-rock" and "neuro-funk," was, per Simon, a tiresome sham by which
he refused to be sullied. His editorial imperative boiled down to a dour
import column and page after page of hip hop record reviews by an army of
aggressively misinformed British fuckheads. On more familiar ground with the
release of GENERATION ECSTASY, Reynolds slipped back into his role as heady,
raver-rific tour guide-popping Es, worshipping speaker cabinets, and
blabbering about post-structuralism. As a history of rave culture, his book
is good, clean pretentious fun-an authoritatively info-crammed, Eurocentric
fan's notes (though his decision to exclude hip hop is a fatal flaw, he
apparently doesn't give a shit). As a cultural manifesto, however, which is
how Reynolds would obviously like it to be viewed, GENERATION ECSTASY is a
long, breathless slog; its adjective-addled, "post-human" theorizing about
the pre-eminence of sensation over identity is repetitive and tiring. No
writer has ever made dance music seem so hysterically important, yet so
impenetrably dull.
If you look beyond the vitriol, it does put Reynolds' self-important crusade
into perspective. I thought JoJo's dismissal of that most withering of sacred
cows, The WIRE, was also amusing. and dead-on.
THE MY-AREN'T-WE-SMART-BOYS-WITH-OUR-TOYS? AWARD:
Of course, it's the British trainspotter's catechism THE WIRE, a monthly
logjam of the most defensively arrogant, humorously dense, and gleefully
school-marmish verbiage (David Toop excepted) you'll hopefully never
encounter in any other music magazine. After institutionalizing the annoying
Euro catchphrase "electronica," lapping up everything DJ Spooky ever mumbled,
and trashing rock-damaged Americans for not inducting Lamonte Young into the
Baseball Hall of Fame, they just keep on droning. Special shout-out to
distressed beat-writers Peter Shapiro and Kodwo Eshun (who repeatedly express
disgust over the lack of critical appreciation for the music they adore): If
your prose skills ever remotely approached your passion for the sounds in
question, then we could chat. Until then, take your banal hyperbole and sod
off.
Do read the rest of JoJo's attacks. The full text can be found here:
http://www.spin.com/poplife/koolthing/art%2D19990326%2Dkoo1/page2.html
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mr. e.
np: jimmy giuffre 3: emphasis, stuttgart 1961 (hat ART)