The news cycle churns on, so I didn't have too much googling time to devote to this, but I did find a Casey interview where he talks about how the Murphys have a huge skinhead fanbase and how skinheads are misunderstood and shit-on. Also, skinheads make fun of skinheads all the time; "Skinhead On The MBTA" isn't so much anti-skinhead as anti-that particular skinhead. And is it even anti-that particular skinhead? It's a celebratory song!
But OK, yeah, they're not skinheads, good to know.
Gah, my bad, fixing. Channel Warfare, I guess, is that thing at the beginning of Poltergeist where Craig T. Nelson and the neighbor are using clickers to fuck with each other's TVs.
If you want a couple of concrete critical examples, there's Stephen Deusner's Pitchfork takedown of Sigh No More and Steven Hyden's Grantland piece about learning not to hate the band so much. Also, this is an imperfect metric, but Babel finished at #111 on Pazz & Jop, which is crazy low for an album that's both rootsy and popular. (Back in the day, half the stuff that did well on P&J was both rootsy and popular.)
That was not the strongest strain of Slime Flu. The one that got away is actually Joe Moses, who made a really good tape that I probably won't end up writing about now.
Really? Really? I'm like the Miz going babyface. Really.
No but actually, a couple of points here:
• I'm not sure you necessarily get this, but there's no such thing as objective taste. Iceage have always sounded to me like Petulant Teenage Wire, and it pissed me off two years ago when every major publication was making them out to be the future of hardcore. This new Iceage song, I think, is pretty good, better than anything off the first album, but it's still not moving me the same way that some of these Murphys songs move me. Their sound is still thin and emaciated and scratchy. It's possible that 25-year-old me would've raged way more passionately against them, but this isn't a case of me disassociating from everything that's new and important because I'm old and have kids. It's a case of me liking something else, and sticking with what I like.
• To me, importance "to the culture's tapestry" certainly isn't an irrelevant concern, but it's way, way less important than the question of whether I like it.
• I could be wrong here, but your Dropkick Murphys objections seem to have more to do with their cultural positioning, and with their fans, than the actual music they're making. I went through the same thing, for years and years, with the Grateful Dead, before realizing that I was being an idiot. If you start disregarding music because you don't like the music's fans or whatever, you're going to miss out on SO MUCH good stuff.
I mean, people can google it if they want. But I found his piece so self-aggrandizing and preachy and righteous that I was sorry I read it, and I didn't much want to direct traffic in his direction. I don't think I mischaracterized his argument at all.
Fun fact: NME is also the place where Jack White once called me an "asshole actor" in an interview.
http://www.themodernage.org/2005/11/09/fans-discuss-jacks-latest-statements-about-american-audiences/
Seemed like the obvious important choice, Michael was really into it, and I wasn't high enough on Ke$ha or Wiz Khalifa or Memory Tapes or whatever to write a big effusive thing about any of them.
I hadn't watched Night of the Hunter when I was 13. Also, Adventures in Babysitting is a better movie with better child actors. That kid who played Pearl was the worst.
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