From: kdotdammit	Date: May 27th, 2004 06:53 pm (UTC)		(LINK TO SPECIFIC ENTRY)

Dang. That's most excellent.

From: sittinginaroom	Date: May 27th, 2004 11:18 pm (UTC)		(LINK TO SPECIFIC ENTRY)
Cutting my BANGS

Reading (and rereading and rerereading) Bangs sends me out of my skull -- confronting his writing as someone who wishes to improve and distinguish their own writing on music, I am frustrated. When I'm writing anything about a band, whether it's a CD review, an article, a blog entry, or an e-mail to a friend, I always find myself trying to write against that "Bangsian" style -- I try to go more Poundian -- stick to the subject with as much clarity as humanly possible -- nobody gives a fuck about who I am or how I'm related to a band or the effect a band has had on me, write about the music -- however discussing MUSIC and MUSIC only is (I think) one of the most difficult things to do in writing -- you have to spend so much time building metaphors, metaphors that are always insufficient. I feel like the points I make are more about the metaphors, more about the writing, than about the music the writing is supposed to describe. It's a problem of representation. On the other hand, Bangs' writing was fully aware of the problem of writing about music. Bangs had no problem with writing about himself and so closely associates his identity with the continuously formative processes of "experiencing" music that, for him, there is no line to cross between "personal" writing and writing about music -- thus is the conundrum (for me): either feel like I'm aping the style of the most-aped music writer ever, or end up writing in a style essentially ignorant of its own status as writing -- obviously writing more about music will help.