Rick Moody Sings!

Here’s a little indie rock by Rick Moody, better known as an author:

http://www.rickmoodybooks.com/audio/Empire.mp3

So sensitive, I almost wept.
No, I’m lying. That song is wretched.
Some people know this, many do not; I actually studied with Rick Moody when I was a teenager. That was at a summer program at Bennington College summer of 1993. He was at the time in many magazines for his then new novel, the Ice Storm. I suppose at that time I was young and impressionable. His approach to literature means really nothing to me anymore. I have not read a full Rick Moody book in over 10 years. Where he lost me completely as a writer was when he wrote an entire essay on the indie rock band the Magnetic Fields. Why he did this I have no clue, but it was a good indicator of something I would run into later- in the last few years he’s released his own terrible indie rock. Now I know that terrible indie rock is redundant, but this is terrible even for indie rock. Listen to the mp3 link above.
My relationship to literature is that every once and a while I pick up a book like I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond or Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown and chuckle at how utterly sick the book’s premise is.
Rick Moody playing the indie rock with his acoustic is on his own.
That is actually the best track on what constitutes one of the worst albums ever made. My previous pick for the worst album ever made was the woman from X reading the Unabomber Manifesto with the free jazz in the background. Rick’s album, The Darkness is Good, is at least nearly as bad. That was a very bad idea of his to try and put out an album. He shows that he learned a few guitar chords and that’s about it. It is a very sparse album. The songs are accompanied by acoustic guitar a back-up singer. Some of the songs are just his voice. There’s simple piano parts on a few songs. It’s annoying more than anything else. He has an understanding of music that I find annoying. It doesn’t work.
He has a blog full of his annoying ideas about music, which can be found here:
http://therumpus.net/2011/06/swinging-modern-sounds-30-what-is-and-is-not-masculine/
He spends pages and pages wining about a profile on a musician I’d only vaguely heard of (John Lurie). People who consider themselves artists are completely full of it a lot of the time. He’s among the worst of them.