Nitsuh Abebe

magazine editor. email grammarlog @ gmail. save your speeches, flowers are for funerals

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

tweeting about stuff nobody’s really interested in is a political 👏🏾 act 👏🏾

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@_motherslug You ever watch “Halt and Catch Fire?”

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

Further context from Albini’s column

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

One highlight from his early career at the Daily Northwestern

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@humanfranklin Working Holiday festival gotta be top 10

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@alienvsrobbins @J_Zuckerman i’m sorry, you expect me to believe a piece of paper over some guy with a computer?? (no but i did eventually find a PDF of the source cited and it does say NJ)

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@alienvsrobbins @J_Zuckerman conflicting accounts here

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@en_cohen ack dude you remind someone of this song on boxing day and now i’m gonna go become a paramedic

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@dada_drummer sure — though i genuinely like what the recording was trying to do here! i suspect that’s because i’m more of an 80s college-jangle/new-wave/anglophile guy than a rawk’n’roll guy, and have no issue with Tim sounding a little like the UK stuff Sire put out that year (or Dramarama)

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

ok, here’s my contrarian take: the new version of “tim” is great, but i prefer it to sound like it’s from 1985! this doesn’t just “improve” the mix, it also scrapes off the era to make it sound like no particular time at all, which … i dunno

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@MarkRichardson i’m sure you know most of these songs already, but when they’re back to back i think the sonic profiles are clearer. honestly i should have just told you to revisit “meat is murder” and do some A/B tests / search for andy rourke on “what she said” !

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@MarkRichardson https://t.co/WmtoMEwWKD

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@MarkRichardson this'll take forever but i'll do you a mix. not soundalikes, just the mid-80s left-of-dial context in which, to me, it sits pretty naturally

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

admittedly i’m part of the minority with really fond feelings about the sound of 80s ’wavers, but if we start looking at stylistic choices of the past (even regretted ones) as impediments to hearing some “real” “true” underlying essence, what are we even doing here, recordingwise

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@emsuerob honestly not sure what could be more striking than Fido Dido on a 2023 magazine cover

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@elite_gz i may well obsess about this; so far, looking for 1969 metrics, it seems possible a tom jones live album was somehow certified gold faster than abbey road? though the RIAA records are … weird. anyway: LOVE yr column (and music!) and will update if i learn anything useful here

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@elite_gz and, of course, deeper partisans lined up to publish deep thoughts about the end-of-60s rock canon than Diana Ross, Tom Jones, the Jackson 5, Andy Williams, etc. — but maybe i should double-check the numbers to make sure i’m not swallowing a rockist underdog story here!

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@elite_gz i mean, agreed that hit singles are a tossed-off metric, but i think there are two very different lanes of cultural domination here, with the narrower rock/album one tending to perceive actual *celebrity* in the broader pop/radio one

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@elite_gz which is not to say they weren't huge, just that it's in the album-canon lane that poptism, in theory, hopes to get beyond by considering what more people listen to in the moment: motown singles, neil diamond, streisand, lots of stuff

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@elite_gz this feels off to me: the artists he talks to were not necessarily hitmakers! stevie wonder has 10 number ones, which is 10 times as many as the who, springsteen, & dylan combined. honestly a poptimist look at the era would probably involve talking to the carpenters & osmonds too

[Nitsuh Abebe @ntabebe]

@zunguzungu ha, coover’s “the brother”