quoted 4 lines
> http://members.aol.com/blissout/sr2.htm
>
> Part of Wire/Melody Maker/Village Voice journo Simon Reynolds' site,
> it's basically an article on his most overrated artists / releases of 1996
To be fair, you should have mentioned .../sr1.htm, which is his favorites
from 1996. Puts things in quite a different perspective.
quoted 1 line Simon makes his points intelligently and with cohesion
> Simon makes his points intelligently and with cohesion
Hardly.
quoted 1 line Will you?
> Will you?
Well, I'll try:
Anybody who claims that FSOL "merely transferred the prog-rock notion of
ostentatious virtuosity to sample-based music" while meanwhile praising
Mokum-style Gabber (cf. sr1.htm) clearly has his head wedged a bit too far
up his arse.
He claims "Maybe Fabio and Grooverider did drop ``Bug In The Bassbin''
down at Rage, legendarily pitched up to 45 rpm - but the idea that the track
was a seminal and formative influence on the nascent Jungle sound is
preposterous." Well gee, I remember reading that Goldie said it was a
seminal and formative influence. Now who am I gonna believe, somebody
actually *making* the music and in the middle of it, or a journalist???
The fact that his favorites from '96 are 95% Drum n' Bass or Gabber (!) pretty
much says it all, in my book.
The problem with Reynolds - like most music journos - is that the music world
is not Black or White, not Good or Bad. 12 years and 500,000+ postings
about music to Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists that I've read has firmly
disavowed me of that notion. Unfortunately it hasn't yet occured to Reynolds.
I like FSOL. I like "Bug In The Bassbin". I like "Headz 2A"/"Headz 2B".
No amount of blathering by Reynolds or anyone else is going to change this.
Ultimately it's still a matter of taste and how your neurons fire in
response to sonic input, and it's clear Reynolds' neurons fire differently
than mine in some ways, and similarly in others. C'est la guerre ...
Oh, and his Web site's crap (gee, nice background, shame you can't actually
*read* anything unless you click-drag to highlight all the text with a sane
background) and his "The Sex Revolts" book snippets are a hoot - a totally
ridiculous topic (Genderification in Rock - yawn) in a field no one cares
about anymore (Rock).
Do I win?
- Greg