Electric Josh

Jay Rosen enunciates (better than I've done) why I'm not reading Op-Ed pages and trying (pretty successfully!) to ignore the presidential campaign:

Our scandal culture is a deeply set formation. By now virtually anyone with a modicum of political awareness knows how to set it in motion. "Scandal" today is a mode of discourse, a tone for talking in, as much as the events that are proximate cause. Cliches like "what did he know and when did he know it?" and the suffix "gate" added for naming purposes are examples of that discourse. So are comparative declarations like this, "Can you imagine if a liberal said anything remotely like that in regard to a crime issue?" which generate the resentment required to keep the cycle going. It's a way of talking.

This is why some of us are university professors and others not.
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Thurston Moore is in the Times (or here after the paywall) talking about whatever he wants, presumably because someone noticed that Kurt Cobain—junkie, songwriter and loud-quiet-loud singer whose popularity totally fixed music for about three years—has been dead for a nice, round number of years. He's one of the main guys in Sonic Youth, who are sometimes excellent.

Before being labeled alternative rock, Sonic Youth, the band I started in 1980 (and continue in still!), was called "post-punk." By the early 90's, we existed as a sort of big brother (and big sister) group to Kurt's generation of underground America. When Nirvana became popular, we were all called alternative rock — a less threatening term than anything with punk in the title (though with Green Day and Blink 182 in the late 90's, punk ultimately became accessible and extremely profitable — at least for the new MTV punks). The original alternative rock bands — Nirvana and Sonic Youth included — never had any allegiance to alternative rock.

I'm not sure whether this is silly or not, but it does remind me of this thing I wrote a couple of years ago, and it makes me miss the days of being able to listen to the radio in the car and hear good music that I'd never heard before.
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