I think this guy should be nominated as an honorary FB member:
http://www.salon.com/ent/letters/200...us/index2.html
"Who the f--- cares about Stephin Merritt and his opinions on anything? That dude is responsible for some of the most tuneless shite to have ever been inflicted upon human ears. The fact that y'all ofay music critics went so absolutely ape-shit for the Magnetic Fields and "69 Love Songs" proves to this Negroid that we should strongly consider banning white intellectuals from listening to popular music altogether, or at the very least from espousing opinions about it.
It was rather unfortunate that Thomas Bartlett chose to write a profile on this monotone-singing, pretentious pedant. His article on Björk was most booyah, indeed, and he should have retorted to Merritt's pooh-poohing of Björk thusly: "F--- you, you sorry piece of indie bullshit. Make an album half as good as 'Vespertine' or 'Post' and then get back to me."
Come on, dude! Even if I were to concede the point that Merritt's a great songwriter (when one of my indie-dude ofay pals lent me "69 Love Songs" attempting to elicit the opinion of an eclectic brotha such as myself, I was so nauseated by that godawful somnambulant singing and the utter lack of anything resembling a bass line beneath all of that tinny pinging and planging that I couldn't stand for it long enough to appreciate the actual lyrics that he was droning) and the next Cole Porter and yada yada, there is probably a reason why Cole Porter didn't actually record his own tunes. Merritt. Can't. Sing.
And I'm not one of those people who don't appreciate singers who can't "sing" in the Marvin-Sinatra-Aretha-Barbra sense of the word, but who still convey incredible emotion and feeling in their vocals: I'm the biggest black Tom Waits fan that there is, I like Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello when he's not trying to go all classical on us, Morrissey, Vic Chesnutt. But Merritt isn't a non-singer who's expanding our perceptions of what good "singing" is; he's just a smart white dude that can't sing a lick -- and who makes tinny, boring music that ofays with a master's in English literature go apeshit for. He, Belle and Sebastian, Cat Power, and several score more indie ass-suckas should all be flogged for persisting to sonically torture those of us who actually listen to music and don't just fall all over ourselves to write about the brilliant lyrics if there is no ... um ... musicality there.
-- Jeff Hughes"
