The XX are a new British band of two boys and two girls that are getting great press for their debut, titled XX. I bought it the other day and it is lovely. I am sure it's going to be ignored as Humbug is released today (more on that later I suppose). One of the things that's not true about the reviews is the claim that their sound is original. It isn't - but it is a clever melange of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Lou Reed, Interpol, and perhaps most of all, Joy Division - that is, the post-punk guitars and spare arrangements, and horse-calmed vocals - most remind one of the artier end of indie. Some of the music even seems like Glasvegas, but one austerely pruned. It's haunting, sweet, sometimes eerie, and often moving - and intelligent in an understated way. It'll be an album of the year. My favourite track is 7.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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