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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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Neutral Milk Hotel at the Hollywood Bowl

September 19, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hoQprz2ypgmwVraWLQKLkTyU9PmJUJUE"] WHAT would the world look like if a bomb wiped out everyone who wasn't a Gen Xer? A lot like the crowd that filed into the Hollywood Bowl last night. I kept telling myself that we were a very small generation as I saw the rows of empty seats for a show by the Breeders and Neutral Milk Hotel -- both cult bands who only released two … [Read more...]

Scorning the Great American Novel, and The Return of Beck

February 27, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Jai56XiddmTkDBhUq1fwtKRmcQk3eCCw"] WHO wrote the Great American Novel? Does such a category make any sense? Did it ever? A provocative essay argues that we've outgrown the term, and that it was wrong to begin with. Whether we're talking about Melville's Moby Dick or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, my old colleague David Ulin writes, we're missing the real point of … [Read more...]

Remembering David Foster Wallace

September 3, 2012 by Scott Timberg

DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of … [Read more...]

Indie Rockers Finding Second Wind

August 15, 2012 by Scott Timberg

IT seems, sometimes, that every awful band from the past is back together again for a lame-ass shed tour. And it's also started to seem, at least since the heavenly Go-Betweens reunion of about a decade ago, that some of the groups reuniting were not only good, they were better -- or close to it -- the second time around.How can both of these things be true at the same time? It took me 2,000 words … [Read more...]

Simon Reynolds Goes Retro

August 8, 2011 by Scott Timberg

HAS the end of cultural history ever been so much fun? Your humble scribe has been reading Simon Reynolds since his work was a well-kept secret of the British music press. (He was also, during the ‘90s, one of two rock-crit Simons in the Village Voice, the other being the code-cracking rock sociologist Simon Frith.)He’s written with insight and intelligence about rock n roll, subculture, shoegaze, … [Read more...]

The Return of the Archers of Loaf

June 16, 2011 by Scott Timberg

WHEN the band filed at the Troubadour the other night, I wondered if this might be an Archers of Loaf cover band -- a Chapel-Hill-meets-'90s nostalgia version of Beatlemania. But despite the fact that gawky, bespectacled Eric Bachmann has transformed himself into a lumber jack since the band's late-'90s breakup (don't rock musicians usually waste away?), this was the Archers of old -- all the … [Read more...]

LA Band Spain, and a Celebrity Fan

March 18, 2011 by Scott Timberg

THE other night I was lucky enough to catch a short, hypnotic set by Spain, the Los Angeles "slowcore" band that's now back together and starting to appear in low-key shows around town. (The last time I saw them they played at tiny but wonderful Origami Vinyl in Echo Park.)In any case, the show itself was both completely gripping and without any surprising jolts: Mellow songs with a brooding … [Read more...]

Versus Tours the West Coast

February 23, 2011 by Scott Timberg

I MUST admit, I'd forgotten how good a live band the New York trio Versus could be. Last night's show at the Echo -- part of their first full-scale tour in a decade -- was devastating, reminding me both how strong their playing is and how bogus the notion that indie rock is wimpy.In some ways Versus were typical of '90s indie bands in their use of jangly guitars, strong melodies and distortion. … [Read more...]

Social Network Producer Mike De Luca

February 16, 2011 by Scott Timberg

From the outside, The Astaire Building, the early-‘90s structure on the Sony lot where Michael De Luca Productions is housed, is about as rock ‘n’ roll as the dancer which lends the edifice its name.But De Luca’s office – which includes the usual neat stacks of scripts on the desk, scattering of books, and LCD television – shows that something a little more personal is at work here.           The … [Read more...]

Nada Surf at the Troubadour

May 26, 2010 by Scott Timberg

The Brooklyn band Nada Surf are one part '90s indie, one part chiming power pop, one part '60s songcraft, and last night they melded all three styles in a loud, forceful Troubadour show that left my ears ringing. The tour -- which continues tonight at the same club -- supports their new record of idiosyncratic covers, If I Had a Hi-Fi.The show, of course, wasn't perfect, with a few songs that … [Read more...]

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Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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