people vs. money
Just a quick reminder that M.I.A.'s "People vs. Money" tour stops at the Palladium Ballroom here in Dallas tonight. If you haven't had an epileptic seizure from looking at her website or the above gif, you can still get tickets here. Gorilla vs. Booze party-rockers Holy Fuck open the show.
mp3:
M.I.A. :: Paper Planes (Holy Fuck remix)
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elsewhere:
animal collective, probably talking about how rad nature is
Animal Collective: racists, nature fetishists, both, or what the shit is this guy talking about? Nice try dude, but no.
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Dallas/Denton:
Tapes 'n Tapes + White Denim roll through Denton tomorrow (Saturday) night. Doors at 8 PM. Also:
Tapes 'n Tapes will stop by Good Records on Sunday afternoon for a free in-store performance. Free beer + food, too.
33 comments:
now there's a guy who reads theory for fun. it sounds like Andrew Beckerman just wants to show off that he's been to grad school. he must of concocted an argument about economic privilege and hidden racial fetishism in music and then picked a band out of a hat to apply it to. poor Animal Collective.
I would hope this guy hasn't been to grad school, because if he has that school should lose its accreditation...
I AGREE WITH CHRISTINA.
once you stop looking at his theories as legitimate ones, it's actually pretty funny.
yeah i guess it's possible that he was just kidding. then it is pretty funny
If you read more of that dude's reviews, it doesn't seem like a joke.
http://dustedmagazine.com/writers/beckerma
yeah that review is insane. he should not be allowed to write anymore. he never once mentions how the ep sounds or what it's like. pretentious and offensive.
i feel like this is someone i might go to school with. someone who i have urges to scream at after lecture for asking inane questions. someone who NEVER leaves his critical theory at home.
i mean, who the hell namedrops hegel in a record review? seriously!? not even i do that, and i thought i was bad...
There's the ghost of a couple of worthwhile ideas in there, but it's definately the wrong place to write about them, and I think he picked the wrong band to single out (plus, it's not cool to drop loaded phrases like 'racist' and 'classist' in like that when he has only the most tenuous speculation about the intentions and beliefs of the band with regards to their alleged cultural appropriation). I had to laugh once it became obvious that the guy was trying to shoehorn some thesis on ethics and social trends that he'd seemingly been brewing for a while into a review of an EP.
Wow, that read like a poor college thesis for a class on theory. Contrived, rambling, and a sad beggars need for acceptance from both sides of a seemingly pointless argument. Beckerman loses his point (if there ever was any) by failing to choose a side and stick to a singular thought process for two minutes. One second the man is writing about pop music, then unintentional racism, and then a call to the wild. Honestly it sounded like the man was scrambling to write a paper with a required amount of sources to use, randomly pasting quotes and forcing them to work for his writing. And after all his effort and tangled up reasoning, he closes with a statement that implies that he would like to take most of what he said in the article...
haha Well, i have now overanalyzed something not worth the analysis. I'm still confused at what he was getting at though... Is it that Animal Collective should make music that they don't choose to make in order to become some sort of underground sound gods? So what if they have pop in their music? It's impossible to separate influences from one's music (and it would probably sound boring).
You guys have let society pull the wool over your eyes! Beckerman is right - the classist, bigoted hate screed of Animal Collective is right in front of your faces.
Hell, I've been saying that Animal Collective is racist since Danse Manatee.
Agreed, academic name-dropping can be pretty obnoxious, especially outside the classroom.
Nevertheless, I would guess that the people commenting here who say that 1) Beckerman has no idea what he's talking about or 2) that what he wrote is just theory wanking and has nothing to do with Animal Collective's particular aesthetics probably don't understanding what the guy is actually saying. He is in fact talking about the particular aesthetics of this band and trying to separate out what he sees as the politically problematic aspects of those aesthetics from the music that he seems to appreciate (but doesn't really get into in the review).
To be honest, I don't strongly agree or disagree with what he wrote. I don't think it's likely one of the great pieces of cultural critique to emerge this year. But it's pretty obvious that nobody on THIS site was willing or able to engage with Beckerman beyond "Go back to you ivory tower, dude!"
To those who say that his argument doesn't make sense, cool, but you could at lease explain yourself - respond to what he actually wrote. To those who say that academic criticism has no place dealing with pop culture, that's just ridiculous. If there's one big problem with the academy, it's the people who think their pontification DOESN'T have to move beyond the academy.
Anyway, the comments on this page reflect much more on their own authors than they do on Beckerman.
clearly, "Phil" = Beckerman.
to put the onus of engaging with and responding to Beckerman's pseudo-intellectual drivel on the readers/commenters is ridiculous. the only response his garbage "academic criticism" deserves is dismissal.
Oh yes, excellent sleuting.
Actually, I'm not Beckerman (I'll link to my own disused site below) and actually, before this, I had never read anything he'd written before.
You certainly do not have the onus of responding to Beckerman. The fact is that you, the generally anonymous commenters, took it upon yourselves to respond - but not to what he had written, only to him in person.
It's the point at which you label him a pseudo-intellectual that you grant yourself the onus of having to explain why he's full of shit, otherwise it is you that deserves to be dismissed, because you're not saying anything of substance.
The first line should of course read "sleuthing" rather that "sleuting".
it was simply just a small EP review that he was handed. An EP review does not exsist for the purpose of creating a long winded argument about the speculations of racism in society. An EP review is about reviewing the qualities of an EP. This was not an article about any of the topics he discusses, this was an EP review. I don't really care about the points Beckerman makes-- most of it is just rhetoric and long winded speculation being tossed around by people with above average vernacular and never making a point that actually will make a difference in the grand scheme of the society they are discussing. Beckerman's point is immediately invalidated by his urge to throw his oafish rhetoric into an EP review. Sure-- you can speculate about all that "racist appropriation" BS all you want, but there are 2 things here at play that negate that argument: 1) No one can even explain why it's "racist" to appropriate from another culture, especially when everyone is aware anyways of where it's being stolen from and 2) no one can explain why any of that bullshit even matters in the grand scheme of things. If they do even attempt to address that issue, they bring up more empty rhetoric about how "whitey's always keepin' blacky down", usually painting with a broad brush about the whole of society and, again, they opt to display their "grad school art theorist vernacular" rather than concisely make a point. (case in point--Beckerman)
in the end, an EP review is an EP review, and the reason why people might be responding the way they are, Phil, is because the guy doesn't even make a half assed attempt to address the music. he doesn't even pretend. he does the same thing in his Flight of the Conchords review. it wasn't necessary to explain why his points were bullshit, because of the arena of making his points in was just ridiculous. The issue for most people wasn't the point he was making, but the fact he was seriously making those points in an EP review for an underground psychedelic band. But, hey, I bothered to argue so maybe you would read my whole point instead of negating what everyone's telling you because they're not addressing an issue that doesn't need to be addressed.
Okay Phil, I actually went and re-read the review with the intention of writing a response to his essay, but it feels sort of like hacking through blancmange with an axe.. There's no substance to back up his points at all, he frames vague outlines of arguments (i.e. they fetishise nature as a mythical untouchable concept, they borrow liberally from other cultures in a way that is somehow reinforcing colonial oppression) but he provides no specific examples whatsoever of how this applies to the band in question. He makes almost no reference at all to their music itself, it's all speculation about what he thinks their motives might be. It's impossible to respond properly to his argument because the argument is so hazily defined as to be insubstantial.
Richie, I generally agree with you insofar as I don't think Beckerman manages to apply the theory he cites to the concrete context of this particular band, though I do think that I can generally see where he going in terms of the white masculine nature mythos. The fact that he can't seem to tie his argument to specifics does make it pretty ineffective.
The fact that he doesn't reference the music itself I think is a bit beside the point, because he's trying to make a comment about the aesthetic sense that the band is trying to nurture more generally. He does in fact say that directly.
Some people tend to see music existing on some separate plane, devoid of history or politics (Richie, I don't think you are making that kind of argument), but I strongly disagree.
In other words, Sam (here) does not get to tell us or Beckerman what an EP review "exists for" (nor, for that matter, does he get to of-handedly make issues of race disappear by simply calling them "empty rhetoric", but I guessing that REALLY not the kind or argument people around here are looking to have).
Beckerman is clearly not writing a straight up music review, but I'm sure that plenty of those kind of reviews already exist for this particular EP, so what's the problem if the release of this EP gives Beckerman an opportunity to voice some opinion on related topics?
So here's one question: why do I give a shit?
I think what annoyed me was the fact that regardless of whether Beckerman's argument holds water or not, and whether or not the tone seems kind of self-satisfied, he clearly had something to say and made the effort to put some thought into in and write it out. In that context, I'm really not impressed by a series of anonymous condemnations that seem to simply harp on the fact that Beckerman wasn't writing about the stuff they wanted to hear about, or that it was somehow inappropriate for him to deal with his topic at all.
I mean, I know that is the kind of thing we've all come to expect from the internet, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
Phil, I'm not trying to define an EP review, I'm just saying, just because you have something to say doesn't mean the place you're saying it is the right place. I'm glad Mr. Beckerman has some over intellectualized societal theories floating around in his overblown head, but I think there's a time and place for it. The correct, tasteful time and place is not a Flight of the Conchords or Animal Collective record review. Yeah, sure, there are other places to get the EP review, but that doesn't make it OK for one reviewer to go rogue, especially when he completely negates his point by making everyone laugh at his ignorance in his place of discussion. That's like if movie critics all decided that, "well, somone else is going to write a straightforward review of this movie, why don't I untastefully throw my opinion of racism and society into this next review?" fuck it, your job is to write a music review, especially in this context, not to go at lengths to tell everyone how "racist" (a dead, age old, baseless argument) these artists are. It's obvious this guy has no idea how art works and decides that appropriation is somehow evil and racist if it belongs in a certain context. Also, if you're going base on anonymity, then you might want to rethink your case. Andrew Beckerman is about as anonymous as you or I: no contact information, no picture, no anything. he has more or less the same anonymity as the rest of us. If he wants to adress those issues, how about they give him a time and place to do so?
"I'm really not impressed by a series of anonymous condemnations that seem to simply harp on the fact that Beckerman wasn't writing about the stuff they wanted to hear about"
like, the actual music on the EP. in a review. about the EP. of music.
An appropriate time and place for talking about "dead" ideas about racism...yeah well there's white privilege for you.
While it is wrong to attack the author simply to attack him, many of these commenters (anonymous or not) are simply stating the truth and bringing up valid points. The man wrote a bad article, whether it was a good idea or not, he still failed to make it decisive. It's not an attack on his character, he just didn't really write a review on an EP. And a good writer would know to write something relevant, even if their ideas are interesting ones. If it doesn't fit the article (a review) then it doesn't belong in that particular article.
(I am not claiming to be a good writer).
So, criticizing bands with the object of delving not only through but past the actual music on the albums seems to be this guy's thing. I'm sure someone had something to say about his ripping up Apples In Stereo too, but that didn't make it on GvB and so the outcry wasn't heard on this side of the internet. This guy is either struggling to find his place in whatever scene it is he's critiquing, or just thinking about a style of music that is so new it hasn't really been able to get all introspective with itself. My main problem with the dude is what he's talking about with the idea of people like Devendra Banhart strangling poor ol' Nature with his dastardly comments about magic. So nature is magical and surreal and some musicians think other musicians are otherworldly. I, personally, don't see the ruinous quality in those ideas. The guy is spouting a lot of criticisms without any substantial action to back up his points. This review might work in a better context 20 years from now, when there's some other terrible classist music breaking down those oh-so morally concrete walls of American music.
well, i saw the # of comments on this thread and figured i'd join in on all the 'm.i.a. was tight as fuck' discussion, but alas, no such discussion. so i'll be the first to say, m.i.a. was tight as fuck and then i'll be the 300th to say, that music review had absolutely nothing to do with music. not even a single song name was mentioned. blah.
Am I the only one who thinks that MIA is totally overrated? From what I can tell, she's just a product of her own popularity. From the cover art to the instrumentation everything is just too busy. Her lazy vocals are the only exception. I implore her to move her lips "sings." Woad wunnuh woad wunnuh! Please slur your words a bit more so you are even more incomprehensible.
sam is beckerman.
Anon 236, please show me some respect and present a valid counterpoint. I don't deserve your slander.
The thing is, for a rock band (or whatever you'd call Animal Collective) to ignore the black roots of popular music, they'd pretty much have to be playing European classical music. I'm not a musical historian or anything, but I'm going to say that just about anything in popular music going back to the Dixieland Jass Band in the 1910s came directly or indirectly from black music. So its pretty impossible for Animal Collective or Arcade Fire to be easily shrugging off the influence of African Americans.
I guess I, as a musician who is influenced by white people, should feel guilty? Whatever...with all the bullshit I'm supposed to feel guilty about (drinking bottled water, driving a car, not devoting all my time to saving starving children in Senegal) I think naming my musical influences shouldn't be one of them.
The guy backs in and out of his overly-wordy argumentation before finally giving up on making an actual music review at all.
The guy obviously doesn't get high.
well, the dude is certainly no sasha frere-jones, that's for sure.
keep working on that critical theory, buddy. you'll make a cogent point someday.
hey, phil.
I mean beckerman.
beckerman sounds like a pinko commie bastard.
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