How many people have never seen American Psycho and have just seen the Hip To Be Square scene
I kinda wonder
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I don't think he got it at all. He just thought it was hilarious.
I have not een able to get over this David Foster Wallace quote about Bret Easton Ellis that I saw recently.
I just started thinking about what I actually got out of American Psycho and realized his point about it being ugliness for its own non-helpful misanthropic sake was an entirely fair one.
(Talking about a dead author in the same terms as a living one who barely writes anymore is tricky, isn't it?)
i mean, just bringing it up whenever one of them is brought up in a vacuum is annoying, but if anything this seems like one of the few times where having this discussion is fully warranted
I think I own a DFW book that I haven't read, and apparently shouldn't bother because it's Wrong, or something? No one has ever fully articulated why though.
But for fuck's sake, there are numerous things I cannot enjoy anymore because of the way discourse on this site goes
that said it's not like i'm familiar with the topic...probably a good thing i'm no longer mod here anyway because i just wouldn't know how to deal with stuff like this when it came up
also i've been temped to make this a comparison between @Bee and the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolitan area but no one would really care for a joke that stupid
I have long had a lot of respect for the music criticism of Patrick Bateman. In his three oft-praised (and deservedly so) essays in American Psycho on poptimism and the rise of 1980s adult-contemporary, he scrutinizes the inescapable radio sound of the time, examining albums and artists so iconic, so popular, that they could have seemed too ubiquitous to bother to assess, to omnipresent to secure any critical distance from. Analyzing monoliths like Genesis’s Invisible Touch or Huey Lewis and the News’s Sports could easily have seemed as beside the point as evaluating the sunshine, or water (which Bateman also takes on, in a tour de force, back-of-a-cab lecture on the differences between mineral, spring, distilled, and purified waters and brands). But Bateman finds a way in by resolutely remaining on the surface, generating an implicit, searching critique through what his intentionally impoverished discourse — a masterful parody of vapid promotional press releases, as well as the indifferent “service journalism” music reviews that derive from and populate them — can’t say.
His discussion of Invisible Touch is illustrative in this regard. It is not that the critical voice Bateman adopts is incapable of cogent insights: His claim that the album is “an epic meditation on intangibility” is plausible and not entirely banal, and the argument that the songs are “questioning authoritative control whether by domineering lovers or by government (“Land of Confusion”) or by meaningless repetition (“Tonight Tonight Tonight”)” is a provocative imaginative leap. But these points rest beside limp sub-clichés like “You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument” and “In terms of lyrical craftsmanship and sheer songwriting skills this album hits a new peak of professionalism,” not to mention the casual factual errors (Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks of Genesis are identified at one point as Mike Banks and Tom Rutherford), racist asides, arbitrary comparisons, and unsubstantiated assertions of personal preferences. One grasps Bateman’s point that critical intelligence is easily muted by a variety of biases, driven both by privilege and ignorance, and authorized overall by a crypto-“positive” attitude mandated by the culture industry’s commercial orientation. Commercialism and “poppiness” and “clean” (as in ethnically cleansed as well as digitally pristine) sound are all equated with one another and elevated to the level of transcendent, self-evident social values. Of course music should be “clear and crisp and modern,” and lyrics “positive and affirmative.” These generalities license the underlying bigotry necessary to preserve the status quo that commercial pop music is always ultimately committed to.