Wednesday, January 18, 2006

He really IS suffering, you know...

Ok, since I stopped reading Modern Drummer even before I started I didn't know that the video of Tony Royster Jr. from the previous post was some years old, and that he in fact didn't turn out to be the new Tony Williams after all, but more like the new Dave Weckl, and I know which one I prefer. (He's still young, though. Maybe in time...). Favirotie current Jazz drummer? Hamid Drake! And maybe Paal Nilssen-Love.

Caryn Rose at Jukeboxgraduate had an interesting post recently. I like her Greil Marcus quote. Too many critics and regular readers and listeners/fans are too concerned with the factuality of art. They seem to measure a given artistic work on whether it's based on real life experiences or not, which I find irrelevant. Any good writer/artist/musician should be and is able to create stories that are good in their own right regardless of whether it actually happened or not. Nor must we take for granted or even expect that a writer's persona is in fact the author him-/herself. I remember Robert Christgau's review of The Magnetic Fields' wonderful 69 Love Songs, where he correctly states that had Stephen Merritt "lived all 69 songs himself he'd be dead already". But the songs are great anyway, don't you agree?

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