wrote up a little interview he did with Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy, referring to Wilco as "America's most critically lauded rock band" which apparently means something to some people.
I've always gotten a kick out of critics like Riemenschneider. Like so many of his ilk, he is so deeply immersed in an intellectual and pyschological (albeit subconscious) bog of Being Cool that he simply cannot cogently tell us, the reader, if a band is enjoyable or not.
To a critic like Chris, bands that people actually like (Matchbox 20 for example) are to be sniffed at like chain restaurants. The true geniuses are the bands that only Chris and his band of musician friends can appreciate, bands most people have never heard of, will never see and could care less about.
So I have to ask, why the hell does the Star Tribune employ this precious little guy? The City Pages isn't covering the hipster club scene properly? The 46 people who show up at the myriad crappy area clubs to revel in their own uniqueness on a given night are an untapped market for a major newspaper?
I would say less than 1% of the readers of the Star Tribune give a damn about what's happening at the Turf Club or 7th Street Entry, but week after week Chris appears to breathlessly inform us of Where We Should Go. The other music critic of the paper (boomer John Bream) looks like HE is being given the job writing up the stories about bands people actually listen to, like Toby Keith. Chris couldn't soil his rep with such hackery.
I can imagine a conversation when Bream--a boomer who came of age on classic rock and Riemenschneider--a hipster who nursed from the teat of punk, post punk and various assorted "important" music in his formative years first met:
After a few name-droppings of bands Bream has never heard of, he finally breaks down "You don't know the band Grand Funk? The wild, shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner? The bong-rattling bass of Mel Schocker? The competent drum-work of Don Brewer? Oh, man!"
So back to Jeff Tweedy. I've said before that owning a Wilco CD is more about how you want people to perceive you than it is about actually enjoying the music and reading the interview solidified that. Chris writes: "His cough was rougher on the ears than the 10 minutes of feedback at the tail end of his band's quirky new CD, "A Ghost Is Born."
10 minutes of feedback? That sounds like it would be fun to hear! Did someone set a guitar against an amp during a weed break and forget to turn the tape off? That, folks, is what it takes to be "America's most critically lauded rock band". Check out this exchange between Riemenschneider and Tweedy:
Riemenschneider: The song that people are saying is abrasive and challenging is "Less Than You Think," because of its 10 minutes of soft feedback. Explain that one.
Tweedy: We had this song that was a pretty simple, straight-forward kind of folk song that described a very specific kind of chill that you get when you start to feel your insignificance. Like a microscopic existential crisis. But it never felt like it quite completed the thought. I think time expands in those moments.
What happens afterwards was designed to comment on what we were just saying. So the song that might be the most contentious song on the record is in a lot of ways the most thoughtful song for us, and I think the most beautiful song, actually.
What the hell is "Soft feedback"? And I love it, "challenging" to describe atonal noise (which Tweedy thinks is "beautiful"). Are you up to the challenge of actually sitting through 10 minutes of feedback? I challenge anyone to do and tell me it was an enjoyable experience.
I guess the bottom line is why would anyone want to enter Jeff Tweedy's misfit world of such nerdy, dark, nihilistic, depressed (in the interview Tweedy refers to his severe depression, which is unfortunate) garbage? Everything doesn't have to be puppy dogs and ice cream all the time, but is it actually ENTERTAINING to enter the mind of a depressed hipster?
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