Tuesday, November 18, 2003

What I particularly like about this review of the Icelandic band Mum is the section on beard-scratchers:

"You know the beard-scratchers. It's a sub-category of music fan that bleeds into all genres, but seems to gather at electronic music shows featuring skinny, articulated men on stage, keeled over sampling units and PowerBooks. And as the man on stage continues to build his bed of white noise, stopping occasionally to scream nonsense into a microphone, or bring someone from Norway or Germany onstage to blow incomprehensible noise into a series of horns, the beard-scratchers will nod their heads and chat to their friends about their latest "project." While the beard-scratchers have certainly extended the careers of many the experimental music artist out there, their counterfeit appreciation of music – which is essentially grandstanding to determine who's the hippest, most "down" cat in the room – can tarnish the work of an electronic-based band that's actually worth the money. Luckily, it was too hot for beards Thursday night."

Here's another great usage of the term in context:

"I hate Radiohead, I hate them as people, I hate that fuckin' beard scratcher and his crew of intellectual stuff-stuffy-cuntfuckin-twats, but the new album sounds like it could be the best they've ever done. "

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