Really bizarre, embarrassing shit from The New Yorker (merged)

[Hardbopjazz]

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words

My favorite

Jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with. The band starts a song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play

whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the audience claps.

I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

[colinmce]

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words

"Satire" or "humor" apparently. Getting at what I don't know. This offends me less as a jazz fan than as a thinking person and a reader. Prose journalism has been in a state of free fall these last several years and inane junk like this only solidifies my opinion. But yeah, it's also terribly insulting to use a living person's likeness in this way without their knowledge. I'd say TNY could do better but these days I don't really think so. The twin evils of "Gladwellification" and "Feedification" have torpedoed the balance of intelligent print institutions but I guess that's another conversation.

Pathetic.

[7/4]

I think it pretty disturbing. A friend suggested that's Woody Allen's writing.

[mikeweil]

I'm afraid I' not sure whether he's just kidding or turned plain cynical. When I heard him live a few years ago, he was noodling a lot himself.

[7/4]

Satire, we think.

[Van Basten II]

On Twitter Rollins or the people handling his account answered

Sonny Rollins @sonnyrollins · 15 h

Hey folks, this is some guy’s idea of a joke.

From what I get from this comment is that he does not understand the purpose of the article but he does not see the point of people fussing about it either.

Edited August 2, 2014 by Van Basten II

[Leeway]

I'd like to know the context of these quotes. Were they from a recent conversation? Were they culled from interviews over a long period of time? Do they really reflect Sonny's point of view--then or now? Sonny's always been ambivalent about laying jazz, thus some of his well-know hiatuses. But this sounds seriously depressed or at least seriously self-deprecating. Hard to say without more context.

[Leeway]

I don't really get the purpose of the article either but I like this quote (if that is what it is):

"We always dressed real sharp: pin-stripe suits, porkpie hats, silk ties. As if to conceal the fact that we were spending all our time playing jazz in some basement."

[aparxa]

from DJ. Gold, senior-writing for The Onion. Embarrassingly tacky.

[kh1958]

It reads exactly like the twitter account, "Jazz is the Worst."

[Van Basten II]

We have two threads covering this maybe put them together

[colinmce]

It's made up. Sonny had nothing to do with it.

[Scott Dolan]

The "worst day of my life" one made me chuckle, but that is one of the dopiest attempts at humor I've seen in a long time.

I have no clue what the point was.

[ArtSalt]

It's clearly been ghosted by a moldy old fig!

[BFrank]

According to Twitter, Django Gold is a "Senior Writer for the Onion"

[clifford_thornton]

the Onion hasn't hit a good game in years, really.

[AllenLowe]

I did like their "overfunded public school forced to add jazz band" :

http://www.theonion.com/articles/overfunded-public-school-forced-to-add-jazz-band,5919/

[Joe]

Sub-McSweeney's irony (one joke stretched beyond thin), but a few good throwaway lines in there.

[CJ Shearn]

Yeah, it wasn't very funny.

[xybert]

Whoa, yeah i think jazz is fair game for a bit of piss taking but that was just... ugly. Was trying to put my finger on what it reminded me of... it actually reminds me of stuff i used to write for History class when i was 13 or 14... the exercise was to write from the point of view of someone who had 'been there when it happened' and were being interviewed after the fact... so, like, someone who was at Pompeii or Hiroshima or D-Day... anyway, my answers to all the interviewers questions were all like: "I don't know," "Because i'm stupid and everyone was stupid," "Who cares" etc. That's what this article reminded me of: a 13 year old having a perpetually bad day taking it out on his assignment in all his juvenile glory, knowing it's shit and not really funny but not really caring.

[Rooster_Ties]

"The the fuck was that?"

...was my reaction. And Sonny Rollins isn't very well represented in my collection (to put it mildly), so my reaction had nothing to do with any particular fondness for Rollins.

Seriously, though, WTF?

Edited August 2, 2014 by Rooster_Ties

[medjuck]

"The the fuck was that?"

...was my reaction. And Sonny Rollins isn't very well represented in my collection (to put it mildly), so my reaction had nothing to do with any particular fondness for Rollins.

Seriously, though, WTF?

Amen, brother. Though Sonny is well represented in my collection.

[king ubu]

wtf indeed - and definitely not funny

[Larry Kart]

Don’t know if it’s worth speculating why someone at the New Yorker thought this was funny. Maybe the writer is an inept Jack Handy disciple. The cadences are vaguely similar:

E.g. "I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur.”

"To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other."

[Hardbopjazz]

Sonny never said these quotes. Maybe this thread should be deleted.