Somethings we do even though our heart isn’t in it, it feels like a waste of energy and vitriol and any way it is bad karma and jealousy. So it is with slamming Bob Lefsetz. Mostly I agree with his business and consider him a musical halfwit. But other are times, he just needs a swift kick in the tush.
Lefsetz is like the guy who explains the score after the game is over. He lacks the slightest ounce of prescience when it comes to pop music until after the fact, which isn’t prescience at all. He is really clever once there is nothing to be clever about. he will tell you how important Toto were till you want to beg him to just stop and think about what he is saying; how much more important his opnion would be if, like Jon Landau, HE DISCOVERED THE FUTURE OF ROCK AND ROLL BEFORE ANY ONE ELSE. Lefsetz won’t stop telling us how wonderful the Beatles were. Sure, they were wonderful, it is a shame everybody isn’t the Beatles. Now what?
On tech he is better. He has gotten twitter’s downfall (I know, you don’t see it yet, but you will) correct and he grasps how Apple has lost is way. I agree with him nearly entirely on music streaming services. But music?
Here he is on the completely average Avicii: “Could single-handedly kill hip-hop.
You know, the calcified art form that’s all imitation and no innovation.
The very first thing that crosses your mind as you listen to Avicii’s “True” is…how did he come up with this stuff?
We live in a world where white kids in Canada employ gang signs. Everybody’s a follower and no one’s testing limits and pointing the way. Until Avicii takes the stage at Ultra and leaves the audience with its mouth agape, like “Springtime For Hitler” in “The Producers.”
This is nonsense of a high order.
Avicii is doing nothing new and what he is doing isn’t all that hot to start with. If Lefsetz has any interest in the evolution of EDM (today, it will change by tomorrow morning), let him listen to Zedd or Krewella, both are much closer to a new dance zeitgeist than Avicii is. But Lefsetz follows the charts, he isn’t really trying to figure out what is happening with EDM, he’s Monday Morning quarterbacking and it is way irritating. For one thing, he is a crappy writer.
This is my main complaint about modern rock writers, they are a boring buncha guys who cant turn a phrase or kick it up a notch to save their lives. At his most excited, Ryan writes like he is waiting for a limo to take him to the funeral parlor. When I read a well written sentence, not grammer but something sparky, and amusing and insightful and reads like it was written for the joy of forming sentences than to get to the other side, I wanna jump for joy. As recently as the 1990s, there was always a new Bart Bull somewhere to thrill you with his words.
Lefsetz never thrills you with his words: “In other words, if you go to the electronic show to get high and hang with your buds, get ready for a whole new world, where you need to get right up front and sing along while you dance. Because there’s nothing more fulfilling, nothing more exciting than becoming one with the music as it pours out of the speakers and you lift your head to the sky and sing along.”
What the fuck… Avicii? Are you joking me… has he actually seen this DJ on stage???? Avicii brought out this gushing nonsense. Avicii. Lemme tell you, Guetta and will I Am when they are together and working in tandem change the game, while Avicii is still throwing bass line on synth samples. Mark Ronson wrote the book on this TWO YEARS AGO AND THE RECORD SUCKED. Ronson also perfected what would be the final steps before Drop The Lime and Trouble And Bass changed the rules in 2010, with one Amy Winehouse back in 2007. Avicii? What does he think LCD Soundsystem were up to? What does he think Reflektor is gonna be about.
This guy’s is so out of it, he claimed Taylor Swift was out of it because of one off vocal performance. TAYLOR SWIFT?
I’ve said I respect him on the business side and I do but he doesn’t listen to enough music to have an informed opinion so he overreacts to every passing trend just after it has reached the tipping point.
“Once upon a time music blew up because it was all about the bleeding edge. We were all caught up in the slipstream. We were all agog. Long before it became about how you looked and making a mini-movie to become rich and famous. You don’t need to know what Avicii looks like to get “True””
The last line of his Aviciii post? “P.S. Rock’s already dead”. What a putz.