As hard as this is to imagine, considering the amount of ink and pixels that have been devoted to OFWGKTA in the past several months, the collective’s first commercially available release just came out today. Despite all the think pieces out there, Tyler the Creator’s Goblin is the first Odd Future album that the mainstream press is actually reviewing. The responses are mixed — but not for the reasons you’d think. No one seems especially scandalized; in fact, the debate centers mostly around whether Tyler’s ratio of shock to substance justifies his meteoric rise to fame.
Spin gives Goblin an 8 out of 10, the A.V. Club praises it as “a deliberately crafted work of art, one of the densest and most provocative statements that independent rap has produced in years,” and John Caramanica at The New York Times calls it “shockingly good.” What’s more interesting to us, however, are the many ambivalent and negative reviews, many of which get at the contradictions inherent in Odd Future’s brand of “shock art.” From pointing out that Tyler needs an editor to pointing out that he’s second-guessing himself to arguing that we don’t have to like his work to agree that it counts as art, we’ve posted excerpts from some of our favorite reviews after the jump.
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Eileen Myles exists somewhere outside of neat binaries. We know her as a legendary queer poet and novelist, a respected professor, and a one-time presidential candidate. In this book, she shows us yet another side of herself — that of art critic and travel journalist. Myles’ latest work combines broad, universal experiences with a pinpointed mapping of gay and lesbian art-intelligentsia; a large portion of these essays offers up personal and continually relevant analysis of her friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Sadie Benning, James Schuyler, and Jill Johnston. Myles also witnesses the brilliant art spectacle of Björk in concert and interviews Daniel Day Lewis. Read More »
District 9 is currently sitting pretty with a nearly unprecedented 97 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t come out until tomorrow, and as far as we can tell, the New York Times hasn’t reviewed it yet, so all of this attention is resulting in some major hype. The sci-fi film from first-time director and Peter Jackson protege Neill Blomkamp takes place in South Africa, where aliens complicate an already-tense societal racial divide. District 9 is bringing out exclamation points and hyperbole in critics, who, judging by their tone, haven’t seen a movie this good in…a long time. Check out our favorite lines from the reviews after the jump. Read More »
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel officially comes out today, and it seems like every book critic in the world has already weighed in. The debate over the book’s merits reminds us of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Inherent Vice is a detective noir set in ’70s L.A.; the Times calls it Pynchon Lite, but the Wall Street Journal wonders if the book could actually be “a classic Pynchon opus masquerading as a light read.”
After reading seven different reviews, the only thing we can say with certainty is that the reviewers seem to share a lot of the same reference points. Read More »
