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"Everything but the fungus kingdom, sir. Somehow, fungus thrived after The Ben Ratliff Event."By his own account, Ben Ratliff was a college radio DJ back in the 1980s. That should set off alarms to anyone who was alive in the 1980s—there was a certain type of college-radio DJ pedant who became dominant as the decade went on, the type who always bragged about how their favorite artists are great because "they don't take themselves too seriously." I never understood why that was supposed to matter so much, but it did—and everything went the way of They Might Be Giants, and that was the last of that scene I remember.Welp, Ratliff's brought it all back to me now. His review of the new Fall album starts out harmlessly enough describing The Fall's sound with a lot of fancy high-diction footwork. My first thought was, "Poor Ratliff's working up a serious sweat trying to make himself look smart—go easy on the elbow grease son, you'll hurt yourself!" Which is understandable—the average Times subscriber probably equates high diction with genius, gotta please the customer, etc.It wasn't until I started paying more attention further down the article that I sensed an oddly vindictive tone underneath all the rhetoric of detachment, and I couldn't figure out why. He wants readers to know that no one cares about The Fall except for some crusty dead-enders who subscribe to The Guardian, whereas in our country the band is "noticed, if at all, for still being around."
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Oo, that's gotta hoit!Well, yeah, maybe. Depends. If you don't like the Fall, it might be a good excuse you can tell yourself—the ol' "Grateful Dead of [GENRE]" insult that was also big back in the 80s. The analogy doesn't hold, of course—the Dead couldn't cut a decent studio album if their lives depended on it, so they finally gave up and became a non-stop touring band with little new material after the first decade or so, whereas the Fall is all about work ethic in the studio, putting out fresh material like clockwork. The Dead is about "organic" drugs; whereas Mark E Smith is "one of the 2 percent of the population meant for speed," as he puts it.But that's just nitpicking—who cares if the analogy doesn't hold. Did Thomas Friedman care? Did the Germans care when they bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! The clumsier and dumber the analogy, the more effective it is, so long as it's accompanied by pure self-confidence. So "the world is flat". Globalization puts a "golden arches straightjacket" on you. The Fall has a "Grateful Dead Situation". And it took Ben Ratliff 25 years to understand an album title.In conclusion, Ben Ratliff is an idiot.PS: It's just a shame that the editors can't move a fool like him to a beat he's more capable of handling--like Iran's alleged nuclear warhead program, for example. The Times must be itching to get a new Judy Miller or Michael Gordon pumping that threat up, and I gotta hunch this Ben Ratliff is the guy for the job. There are plenty of disasters just waiting to be misreported—this guy's got a future, folks. So get him out, please, just get Ben Ratliff the fuck out of our little culture ghetto. MARK AMESexiledonline.com