Posted 8:33 AM by Gene

This morning we were thinking of all the news hacks who have jobs who don't deserve them. We were thinking of their constant excuses for poor behavior -- like Sharon's, positing (or rather, depositing) that these folks are busy fighting for truth, justice and the American way and thus have carte blanche to be news hacks. We got to thinking of all the mistakes they make omitting and committing, how set they are in their ways, how many of them make fabulous sums for parroting the conventional wisdom, how they spend less time exposing corruption than plugging Harrison Ford, and we thought again, this business deserves to be punished, and punished hard.

We thought these thoughts again when an ArtsJournal link got to us to this 1,743-word blah about "serious" music. It wasn't long ago that Prof. Shafer rightly blasted the hacks for goosesteppingly admiring some zillion-dollar collage fabricator, and here we must have another waste of time that skirts the obvious -- namely, that today's serious music is no good, it's no good for reasons beyond the comprehension of a music critic, that no amount of adjectives will make it better, and though Mark Swed is a decent writer this informs us yet again that cultural hacks strive too hard to be tastemakers, and strive too little to have taste.