this article thingy

[Dr. M]

http://www.soul-audio.com/features/10-2 ... lectric-2/

This guy makes me really, really angry. It seems he's gone out of his way to be as utterly and absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong, about everything, as humanly possible. The Tick Tock Treasury is Ronnie's greatest album. Joy Electric is constantly changing it's techniques. It's not like this guy doesn't know anything, it seems like he knows everything and is saying the exact opposite, just for fun. I'm going to write an article about how the sky is down and in means out and it will be grand.

[Fred]

I, too, found the article totally bewildering. I admit that I might be too familiar with JE to be able to take an objective look at the entire catalog, but calling 4T a great "headphones" record is a little too much for me. I mean, what can be said about an article that chooses as it's pull-quote:

"Joy Electric – The operative word with Joy Electric is “change.” Change for better, change for worse, just change."

Excuse me, what? I thought I couldn't imagine a statement more wrong than this, until I remembered that he also says that "Hello, Mannequin" finds Ronnie in a "brighter mood", and that this album "conveys a broad smile".

It's also pretty clear that he didn't listen to anything pre-ChristianSongs, and simply extrapolated the feel of that record to everything before it. It's fine that he didn't listen to the earlier records - I don't think he should have to in order to write an article, but I do wish he'd just left them out.

It's sad that there's so little serious commentary on JE that Ronnie thought enough of this article to link to it. Really sad.

[Dr. M]

He's doing a big retrospective of Joy Electric as if he's a long-term fan, which he's obviously not. How about just reviewing one album and calling it a day?

Who could ever call The Boy Who Never Forgot or A New Pirate Traditional "stumbles"??? I almost take personal offense to that. Besides the fact that they're great songs, they also fall perfectly in line with the rest of the album, how could you like the album but dislike those two songs in particular?

Oh, and let's not forget that the opening to The Ministry of Archers is "vintage Joy Electric".

[hokusman]

He also obviously never looked at the inside liner notes for The Otherly Opus where it says legacy volume five.

[Dr. M]

And The Ushering In of the Magical Era has no melody.

Any fair, balanced review that's generally positive and attracts attention to JE should technically be a good thing. It would just be nice if he wasn't wrong about everything.

[Cletus]

I thought the same things you guys did...as I read the article, I kept thinking "total bs".
His overall assessments of Treasury and Archers are what I disagreed with the most.

[WhiteSongBoy]

I score that review a good 1 out of 10. Right topics, wrong facts.

[Nikmis]

does anybody see the comments on that article? Mr. Woofford/Whamford/Wutfford/Wilford/Wamfford
I was Wooford, but not any of those other guys

[WhiteSongBoy]

Wow... I totally missed those comments the first time through...

Comment #2 makes me rather angry... Rather being as intense as you can get. If you want stale, listen to the music at TJ Maxx. I really don't understand why music has to be about failing relationships to be popular. 90% of the radio music I hear is on that topic.

SO over-used, SO overrated.

[Heretic]

Honestly, I don't think this article is as bad as you all are making it out to be--and the comments on the board beneath the article sound like someone is just taking a lot of this too seriously. So some of the facts are wrong. I used to write a music column for a newspaper years ago (and even did a JE feature, I think) and I used to get hate mail all the time whenever I gave a lukewarm review or even a bad review...but the really nasty emails and letters came when I gave a largely positive review and picked out some flaws. If you've read any classic rock journalism (like Lester Bangs, for example), you know the facts aren't so important as is whether the journalism can capture what is good about the music.

That said, what I can appreciate about this essay is that JE is probably a very difficult artist to appreciate unless you already speak the symbolic and aural language, and this is true of any artist who's been around for so long. I like that Ronnie has found a niche audience and still finds deep creativity in that very narrow space. But there are few people I know who I would play "The Ministry of Archers" to if I wanted them to like JE, unless they spoke some of the musical language at work already. If you have to listen to the entire context of an artist's catalogue to appreciate one particular record, that is OK, but you can't blame someone doing a retrospective--someone who may not have taken the time to inhabit that world as long as we have--for speaking to the uninitiated. This essay does, however, capture a little bit of the obstruction of aural language that JE presents. I don't think it's a great article, either, it's just not awful.

And to be honest, if I were writing something like this on JE, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time talking about the pre-White Songbook stuff beyond setting the context and perhaps a discussion of the Art and Craft collection. I would pick one of the post-WS records that I would feel is a good entry point and go from there. For this guy, it's the TTT; I would have selected TOO.

[Gildas]

well said Heretic....I agree...you articulated what I was thinking.

[Fred]

I don't have any problem with someone disliking/dismissing everything pre-CSongs. It's just a matter of taste. I don't have a problem with doing a retrospective on an artist without listening to the first few records - there's enough grist post-CSongs to fill out an article. What I have a problem with is someone saying something that's demonstrably false to cover up the fact that they haven't listened to those records.

I completely disagree that it is unimportant to get facts right. I understand that part of making an engaging, even accurate, review is imposing and constructing narratives, especially when you're writing a career retrospective like this one. These kinds of narratives are almost never completely right, but the important thing about them is to capture something true about the artist and their career. (Lester Bangs was the master at this). There are any number of narratives that aren't quite true about Ronnie that could have been used to understand and critique his development. It just so happens that ALL of the narratives that Wofford used are completely wrong! It's not just that his facts aren't totally accurate, it's that they are so backwards that they lead him to completely wrong conclusions.

I don't have a problem with the fact that I disagree with the guy: I like TMOA, and this guy doesn't, and he's provided reasons for why he doesn't. That's fine. And honestly, I don't think you need to listen to Melody and WATMM to understand something about Ronnie's career. What I do have a problem with is the telling of false stories, and that's what I think that the author ends up doing here.

[Nikmis]

i have been reading his other reviews, that author and not just other people on that site. he is just a bad writer.
"Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, aka Slim Shady, is the most controversial figure in modern music"
the most controversial? really?

[Heretic]

Are there any genuinely controversial musical artists today??

[Fred]

No. It's extremely difficult to do something transgressive in the current musical environment.