Comments on: Elizabeth Wurtzel Really Misses The Monoculture, Man

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:41:12 +0000

Well, I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people still care about Pete Yorn. A lot more than car about your gibberish filled rants. Pete also had a number 8 video on VH1 this year. Maybe you should brush up on your music before you comment on it.

By: RaptorAvatar

RaptorAvatar — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:35:51 +0000

I like her false nostalgia for the 60s the best. She talks about running out to buy Beatles records when they were broken up before she was even in kindergarden and she talks wistfully about Dylan changing everyone’s perspective when he only put out like two notable records in her lifetime. I really wish that boomer hagiography would quit trickling up the chain like this. I mean, fuck, I hope that kids born in 2005 aren’t someday writing about “Fifty Cent boldly ushering in post-feminism” or “Disturbed feeding the war hungry id of a nation.”

By: deusner

deusner — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:58:43 +0000

“…the days when lines formed around the block at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater because the latest installment of Star Wars had opened…”

Two things wrong with this assertion: a.) the latest Star Wars installments are not even George Lucas’s idea of worthwhile American popular culture, and b.) The Dark Knight.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:47:45 +0000

@breedavies: Hear, hear!!

By: mishaps

mishaps — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:36:25 +0000

Also, seriously? The offhanded argument that America sucks at the fine arts? That because Pollack was no Picasso (and nobody else was Picasso, about which we should be very very relieved), we should focus all of our energies on movies and music? I just… there are no words.

By: mishaps

mishaps — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:33:39 +0000

"It's a toss-up between August being a slower-than-molasses news month or this piece taking that long to edit just to get it to a place of relative coherence."

My vote is all of the above, plus Wurtzel having a friend in editorial.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:06:32 +0000

Wurtzel's article is an opinion piece, not hard journalism, and as such I don't really have a problem with it. I don't agree with everything she says here--people do still listen to albums, and downloading, IMO, is far from bein' the devil's work--but her points are fairly well articulated, and she makes some accurate observations (like the thing about new Mac products making more of a splash than new albums.)

Not sure what's so awful about the op-ed itself, other than that it was written by Wurtzel, whose previous work was admittedly obnoxious.

By: breedavies

breedavies — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:42:48 +0000

Good to know Wurtzel is still sucking at life, and seriously, what was the Wall Street Journal thinking? I can't believe I wasted a good week of subway-riding reading that pile of crap, Prozac Nation, when I could have been reading Cosmo. After years and years of hype, I decided to take a stab at her book...which read like a wannabe Sassy Magazine reject piece. The plight of the privileged white girl has NEVER been interesting to anyone, even people like me, privileged white girls. I want to pack teenage girls a lunch of Live Through This and a copy of Henry Rollins' Get in the Van and tell them that there is more to life than drama queen drug overdoses and the elitist college experience.

Elizabeth Wurtzel SUCKS.

By: Ned Raggett

Ned Raggett — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:11:51 +0000

Someone out there still cares about folkie Pete Yorn

It's almost tender. Like someone pointing to their dead Weeble from 1975.