2 VERY interesting pieces on slate.com today about music. I'd love to hear Gaz's reaction to either or both:
http://www.slate.com/id/2141418/?nav=navoa
http://www.slate.com/id/2141421/?nav=navoa
Jody Rosen, who wrote the first piece, is a really bright guy; I had a few brief conversations with him over the weekend and he's a regular at the I Love Music board. I don't feel like "rockism" is a well enough understood meme to trot out without fuller explanation but otherwise he wrote a great piece.
As for the drama with Ms. Merritt: Some people want to knock him down a peg, it seems to me, because he's a very distant person, with a shyness that looks an awful lot like dismissive arrogance. Jessica Hopper, as far as I'm concerned, is an ADD-addled miscreant who thinks journalism amounts to the ability to squirt someone dead in the eye with a water pistol and call it "insight." She was tacky enough to send her old blog postings as her contributed comments to Pazz & Jop last year (comments that were no more decipherable the second time around), and her willingness to outright ignore facts in the name of making someone look bad is almost as pitiable as it is despicable. I've never met her and I don't wish to. Disappointing to see that Sasha Frere-Jones, a terrific writer whose acquaintance I made last year, has dropped his principles in this case and gone for the ad hominem.
I wonder if much else has been written about the conference. Haven't seen much apart from a few expected blog postings.
