John Roderick, via The Rich Girls Are Sweeping

Even though this was published last year, it seems pretty apt. Plus, last year I didn’t know John Roderick from a hole in the ground. (Now he’s on a podcast with Merlin Mann, so ofc. I know him as the persnickety guy in that duo of persnickety guys.) Anyway, as with most things, parts of Roderick’s piece is great and parts are way off base. I think the above is the latter.

I kind of don’t doubt he’s right, but this particular matching just gets right to the core of my listening experience: I’ve listened to MBDTF more than any other album that’s been released since 2001, and I’ve listened to Either/Or all the way through zero times. Literally. I just don’t really get Elliott Smith, and I’ve never particularly liked his work. (But I don’t dislike it enough to listen to it a lot to be able to enunciate why, you know?) But what Roderick’s saying isn’t wrong: I recall seeing tons of people last year saying they listened to MBDTF a few times, and then they never put it back on again. And that’s fine! Because people are different.

But it’s no mistake that Roderick put Kanye up against Elliott Smith, and that non-mistake has everything to do with, I think, Roderick’s era of upbringing. I mean, on one of the recent podcasts with Merlin, he basically said women suck at making music. (He also slammed Neutral Milk Hotel, so he was clearly just on a delusional jag.) He’s, you know, a white male rocker at his core.

But he strikes me as a reasonably decent, smart guy. He just has his own aesthetic style, which he gets to actually show us as a performer and artist. I found a lot of his criticisms of critics comes from his being a musician. Like, yeah, duh. It took you three years to make your album, and I listened to it once and said to myself, ‘Ehh, this isn’t for me’. Of course that’s unfair!

It’s also unfair of you to demand I spend my time exactly as you did, for three years, obsessing over this one album. I’m not going to do that, buddy. (I’m not your buddy.) (I want to be your buddy.)

If it really is true that most music writers listened more to a decade old folk rock album than an album put out by arguably the most important musician working now, his best, most-top, pinnacle work, then I am ashamed for you. Because that means you’re not a music writer; it means you’re a ‘me writer’. Which, again, is a fine vocation. I know a lot of ‘me writers’, and they’re great people. But if you just refuse to engage in the culture, even cringe and turn away from it, then I’m not really interested in hearing your thoughts about it.