November 24, 2005
seasonal
Thanksgiving is here at sugarhigh! world headquarters, and as we listen to Cinderella's "Heartbreak Station" and metonymically miss Buckcherry more than ever (you know how there's all those movies about families split apart by the death of the kid, from which no one can ever recover? That's how I feel about the loss of Buckcherry), we remark that the season is upon us: the year-end voting season, that is, where publicists drop us notes reminding us to hold slightly-better-than-expected band X from back in April in mind as we confront the plethora of ballots heading our way like a snowstorm of democracy, and the boys over at ILX (they really are mostly boys, despite the periodic apparitions of j-ho and Kandia) lube themselves up for the annual OCD jerkfest that is the Top 10 list and, far more importantly, expressing how much you hate someone else's Top 10 list which proves that they are a nitwit or patzer.
Ooooh, I can hardly wait.
Actually, there will be good parts. The critical form of the year-end ballot comment is to Rob Sheffield as the rhythm track is to Tim Mosely, and all one can do is wonder, how can someone be so good at this, in so many different ways, for so long? And there's something amusing about watching the tortured monologues around the year's R. Kelly, whoever it may be (often R. Kelly), in which various individuals who seem incapable of surviving the fact that one might like a song by a bad person have to explain at some perverse length either that the artist in question (or the lyric or etc) is not actually "bad," or that the song in question is not actually "good." The amusing part is that these two sides are certain they have contrary stances—that they represent antithetical cultural ideas, the I hate hate speech team and the ...but life really ain't nothing but bitches and money team. And yet these are fundamentally identical stances, in the context of art criticism: a need for the ethics and the aesthetics of art to be coherent and continuous. As they surely will be, in utopia. This year the action will concern the Ying Yang Twins et al. And perhaps R. Kelly, though I think the initial shock about the vulgarly majestic scope of the Closet Project may have worn off and folks are slowly recognizing the similarities with, say, Sigur Ros. Just as the Icelandic twits don't make hypnotically form-breaking pop so much as dull classical music, R. Kelly's cycle is not elastically grand narrative pop, it's medocre light opera.
Meanwhile, if you have one of those CD players that can be programmed to play only the odd-numbered songs, you'll discover that the Liz Phair record is really pretty good. Not Top 10 good, mind you...
Posted by jane at November 24, 2005 09:22 AM | TrackBack