Nitsuh Abebe

tweeting about stuff nobody’s really interested in is a political 👏🏾 act 👏🏾

@_motherslug You ever watch “Halt and Catch Fire?”

I’m trying to imagine the lives of these Texan sci-fi fans in the ‘80s and it’s really doing something I can’t articulate to my brain.

If I had unlimited funds I would create a museum/directory for sci-fi mags of the ‘70s & ‘80s.

Further context from Albini’s column

One highlight from his early career at the Daily Northwestern

@humanfranklin Working Holiday festival gotta be top 10

Don't know, but it was certainly not in the 21st century.

@alienvsrobbins @J_Zuckerman i’m sorry, you expect me to believe a piece of paper over some guy with a computer?? (no but i did eventually find a PDF of the source cited and it does say NJ)

@ntabebe @J_Zuckerman wiki, as i tell my students, is not a trustworthy source. Holmes explains why the family was in the American colonies, so they'd have had to ship back to England for their son's birth. obviously whoever edited this thought someone else had made a mistake about which Newark

whoa—Percy Bysshe Shelley's grandfather was born in Newark, New Jersey

@alienvsrobbins @J_Zuckerman conflicting accounts here

@en_cohen ack dude you remind someone of this song on boxing day and now i’m gonna go become a paramedic

@dada_drummer sure — though i genuinely like what the recording was trying to do here! i suspect that’s because i’m more of an 80s college-jangle/new-wave/anglophile guy than a rawk’n’roll guy, and have no issue with Tim sounding a little like the UK stuff Sire put out that year (or Dramarama)

@ntabebe Also: some bands just don’t translate to recording, like the MC5…

ok, here’s my contrarian take: the new version of “tim” is great, but i prefer it to sound like it’s from 1985! this doesn’t just “improve” the mix, it also scrapes off the era to make it sound like no particular time at all, which … i dunno

@MarkRichardson i’m sure you know most of these songs already, but when they’re back to back i think the sonic profiles are clearer. honestly i should have just told you to revisit “meat is murder” and do some A/B tests / search for andy rourke on “what she said” !

@ntabebe thanks Nitsuh, will listen!

@MarkRichardson open.spotify.com/playlist/73it1…

@ntabebe I’d love that

@MarkRichardson this'll take forever but i'll do you a mix. not soundalikes, just the mid-80s left-of-dial context in which, to me, it sits pretty naturally

@ntabebe I hear you on this & I'm generally v. skeptical of remixes like this, but to me the original didn't sound "1985" so much as just badly done, actually in a very unique way that isn't "dated" as much as "wrong"; I'm struggling to think of another mid-80s record that sounds like Tim

admittedly i’m part of the minority with really fond feelings about the sound of 80s ’wavers, but if we start looking at stylistic choices of the past (even regretted ones) as impediments to hearing some “real” “true” underlying essence, what are we even doing here, recordingwise

@emsuerob honestly not sure what could be more striking than Fido Dido on a 2023 magazine cover

this tweet is diametrically incorrect

@elite_gz i may well obsess about this; so far, looking for 1969 metrics, it seems possible a tom jones live album was somehow certified gold faster than abbey road? though the RIAA records are … weird. anyway: LOVE yr column (and music!) and will update if i learn anything useful here

@ntabebe am very interested in the economics of the record biz of that time period and the question of how to compare a sale of the white album at the equivalent of $60 in 2023 money to the way music is consumed now. would love to read the results if you do end up looking into the numbers

what’s interesting is that the artists wenner admired were the biggest and most successful artists of the boomer era. in that context, he was biased towards chart-topping celebrities in exactly the same way that cranks claim “poptimist” music media is today

@elite_gz and, of course, deeper partisans lined up to publish deep thoughts about the end-of-60s rock canon than Diana Ross, Tom Jones, the Jackson 5, Andy Williams, etc. — but maybe i should double-check the numbers to make sure i’m not swallowing a rockist underdog story here!

@elite_gz i mean, agreed that hit singles are a tossed-off metric, but i think there are two very different lanes of cultural domination here, with the narrower rock/album one tending to perceive actual *celebrity* in the broader pop/radio one

@elite_gz which is not to say they weren't huge, just that it's in the album-canon lane that poptism, in theory, hopes to get beyond by considering what more people listen to in the moment: motown singles, neil diamond, streisand, lots of stuff

@elite_gz this feels off to me: the artists he talks to were not necessarily hitmakers! stevie wonder has 10 number ones, which is 10 times as many as the who, springsteen, & dylan combined. honestly a poptimist look at the era would probably involve talking to the carpenters & osmonds too

@zunguzungu ha, coover’s “the brother”

What's an example of a short story that has a beginning, middle, and an end--that tells a story, that has conflict and resolution--but which is a single unbroken first-person monologue?