Monday, January 5, 2009

Animal Collective

I still don't get Animal Collective. I don't get the blogboy fascination. I don't get the critical darlingness. I'm more likely to successfully explain string theory to a retarded nine year old Chinese than make any sense of the common obsession with AC.

Rejected album art 1:



Or wait: I have one idea. Have you ever had that feeling that like you're lost and out of touch with shit and can't make sense of life and you tried reading Camus and Judy Blume and Harper's and tripping acid and smoking pot and searching for some experience that felt real or something like there was some piece of information out there that if you could just get your hands on it that maybe then things would all work out?

There is no book out there that everyone else is reading that makes them get it. There is no drug. There is no band. Animal Collective is not the second coming of jack shit. Their music sucks and I can't imagine a single working thinking person out there hearing AC and having any other thought than "What the fuck was that?"

I read the unreadable Pitchfork review and it's not that I disagree or think it to be bad writing or anything but I don't see how anyone who has ever read less than 100,000 words of music criticism could have made it through a paragraph. I didn't just pull that number out of my ass. Indie music has this stupid barrier to entry that punk and metal and rap and electronic and... don't have.

Lower it? Well maybe not, but let's save our exaltations for something that everyone can appreciate.

I guess that's all I really got.