Tired of clever people

We made the Internet, and then we had to figure out what to do with it, so we created a berserk culture of perpetual dispute in which irony, dropping out or a retreat into sensitive obscurity are the only options for people interested in retaining functioning senses.

(I’ve just been vaguely scarred by reading Chuck Klosterman’s Chinese Democracy review at the A.V. Club, and ensuing thread – which is strange because that isn’t a particularly good example of what I’m complaining about; Klosterman is really such a pre-Internet, retro figure. No, I didn’t like the writing and have no investment in Guns’n'Roses. There’s already a long list of very famous bands I don’t know and want to, and I will get to all of them first. But really, it was just quite sweeping, too unironic in its worship of narcissism, and eager to make the cleverest possible points. Just, in other words, like 99% of criticism, as those lucky seven to ten readers who caught the Morrissey post I made and deleted this morning will attest.

I am tired of clever people. It’s actually very easy to synthesize the main interest points of a series of texts so that you’ve demonstrated a trend – which is, again, all that most critics do, in and out of the academy. What’s difficult is explaining a small opinion without destroying one’s subject or oneself. Who does this? Not me yet, if ever. Oscar Wilde. Susan Sontag. Roland Barthes - really, I know that the pretentious director from Slings and Arrows cites him, but Mythologies is often accessible and always beautiful and already a blog before they even had an Internet. In a poppier vein I would cite Paul Morley, Jon Savage and Michael Bracewell.

I think that the only reason Klosterman’s largely inoffensive piece triggered my Internet Complaint, above -and I’ve typed a version of the Internet Complaint in an almost mantra-like fashion more than once before- is that I was exposed to it. I clicked it voluntarily despite having no interest in the band or the writer, and this is because the Internet creates this need to know what everyone is saying about everything, all the time, for your own self-protection, and I resent that despite knowing I can pretty much break out of it at will by not clicking shiny photos of Axl Rose’s face. In other words, I resent the Internet in a brattish way.)

Stumph/”I don’t need your hug of war.”

“That’s What It Takes, Dear” by KRISTEENYOUNG and Patrick Stump has a crystalline, strange, attractive shape. Young has sometimes done verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus, but ”That’s What It Takes, Dear” -with its doubled-back structure, long discordant intro and a man calling a woman ”Queen of Shit” in Latin just before they launch into a double-speed argumentative cyclone which takes place in Young’s character’s mind- is toward the other end of her writing.

Her golden, accusatory warble combines a bit strangely with Stump’s warm and almost old-fashioned radio voice, but the contrast between the two is part of what gives the song its sense of inexplicable balance.

“Just tell me where and when.”

I am sad to learn that Nicole Atkins‘ next album will be “less soundtrack-y.” Neptune City’s soundtrackishness is intrinsic to its appeal for me; I can’t not picture the characters who would be singing these high-energy torch songs as they stride amongst stage machinery, brooding in cheap stylish outfits over painted views of New Jersey.

Seeing Neptune City as a musical is also a kind way of explaining the handful of smashing songs (“Maybe Tonight,” “The Way It Is,” title track, “Brooklyn’s On Fire!”) and their placement among the less finely-tuned, less impassioned performances – the latter are meant to disguise scene changes, or be accompanied by action. Atkins’ character can’t always be wailing “I don’t think I’LL EVER SLEEEP till MORRRRRRRRRNIN’,” even with the cooling assistance of those pleasantly robotic backup singers; that kind of stuff should be saved for album musicians, who don’t have to worry about warming people back up slowly after the intermission.