Okay, "consensus" isn't and shouldn't be an exact synonym for "unanimity," but the way I use it and dictionaries define it is far closer to "unanimity" than to "some people sometimes have similar opinions on something with some overlap as to who has similar opinions and some overlap as to what the opinions are." The latter seems to be how Robert ( Read more... )

Posted this comment over at rockcritics.com:

Xgau likes to imply ideas rather than spell them out, which I find frustrating. When he says "the atomization of taste known as the long tail may have a cutoff" I think he means a cutoff in time (it's the atomization not the tail that's being cut off), and what he means by cutting off the atomization is ( Read more... )

Dave (and anyone else), did you ever happen to run across the recombinant dub piece I did for the Voice back in '02? "Recombinant dub" isn't entirely what the piece is about, it's just the name for one of the concepts in it, one of the poles of attraction in a multi-poles-of-attraction environment. Also, I actually discuss no dub music in the piece ( Read more... )

At the very end of my Why Music Sucks broadside of February 1987 I wrote a paragraph that in retrospect might seem supernaturally prophetic. Whereas now, such a paragraph, with a few of the words changed, would be the common, received wisdom. However, despite almost every sentence of it being right, I think it's fundamentally wrong. But see for ( Read more... )

Tom posted this on his Blue Lines tumblr (the main motive being to make a funny about rolling joints, I think):

( The Trade-Off )

Remember when we all used to listen to Conway Twitty?

( Buncha questions about whether culture really is getting more fragmented )