Intellectual Tonguing: Coley and Moore Goto Town

In the pages of Arthur Magazine, every issue is a column that can’t have it’s worth nearly estimated. The column is immense, dense, disjointed and hugely informational.

Thurston Moore (who some of you may know from Sonic Youth – maybe) and his cohort Byron Coley, compile a massive listing of new (-ish) music, books and magazines that they find useful and interesting enough to pass along to readers called in “Bull Tongue.”

The real Bull Tongue – it’s a plant - grows in shallow water and gets to be rather high from the surface. Only the later can be levied against our two scribes here.

There won’t always be something in the column that you end up loving, but there will be countless items that will be at the very least intriguing. That’s in direct contrast to the rest of the magazine, where you’ll find commentary on music, art and life in general that really is indispensable – well that pot cultivation article wasn’t too useful now that I think of it.

But in this latest installment of Bull Tongue, Coley and Moore round up some literature and recall the glory of Punk Magazine. They praise Rusted Shut, Formerly Fat Harry, RSO, Nothing People, the tape label Excitebike and too much more to even consider right now. Unless you have yourself a good half an hour to try and digest all of this, don’t try. It can be hard to get through and from item to item there’s no real broad connection or general stream of thought. In some ways it’s similar to the Skyscraper column “Goin’ to Heaven in a Split Pea Shell,” but both are indispensable to voracious music dorks the world over.