”Next time you’re watching one of those stately period films — the kind where aristocrats in splendid, elaborate costumes parade through lavish palaces — you might consider that the characters you’re watching were probably filthy and uncomfortable. For some of them, it would have been the height of luxury just to douse their gloves with enough perfume to avoid smelling themselves. No plumbing, no air-conditioning, no dentists or dermatologists. Those eighteenth-century French women with the elaborate hairdos? The hair was powdered with flour and crawling with vermin. We think about their opulence and swoon a little, but they swooned from heat, stiff corsets, and foul air. The most opulent palace was, by modern standards, fundamentally nasty.”
What was that, you ask? That was the first paragraph of New York’s new new music critic Nitsuh Abebe’s review of the new Kanye.
This is what Nitsuh has to say about himself: “I’ve been writing and talking about music for a while now — on blogs and message boards, for publications like Pitchfork and the Guardian, and of course with friends.”
If you can call it writing. Usual suspects of course, a buncha long winded blowhards. But this is even worse, 20% of his crappy review wasted on this rubbish. EVEN IF NITSUH COULD PAY THIS OFF -and trust me pop pickers, he doesn’t come within a million miles, it would suck.
Here, let me edit it for him.
18th Century aristocracy were filthy and uncomfortable before the advent of indoor plumbing and dentistry which they masked as best they could. In the masking of the decay behind the opulence they are similar to Kanye West on Dark Fantasy. In one….
Blah blah blah.
It still doesn’t get paid off, Nitsuh ridiculously references West as being “royalty and ghoul” as being the reason for the diversion. It wouldn’t work if the diversion was two sentences. It is abysmal as written.
This is my competition? This???
An editor an editor my kingdom for an editor.