Saturday, September 09, 2006

Sure sign "rockism" as a subject is dead dead dead: Glenn Kenny's back-page rant about anti-rockism on the back page of the new issue of Spin. His second Joshua Clover quote is meant to prove that Clover is smug, only the quote is pretty damn harmless (there are acres of others that would do the job just fine, starting with the first one Kenny uses, which he seems to applaud, oddly enough); then he misconstrues the tone of his Douglas Wolk quote of choice ("agonized"? Hardly) and tells us that "one trait the anti-rockist shares with his or her natural enemy, the so-called rock snob, is a petulant refusal to 'lighten up'"--the scare quotes an easy demonstration that Kenny, as much as anyone else under discussion, is both smug and unable to lighten up. He winds up: "And so, a few ill-advised letters to the editor and e-mails aside, I've been happy to stand on the sidelines in this struggle." In other words, "I care about this so little that I just wrote 1,000 words about it for a national magazine." Loan me the world's tiniest violin.