Words Fail Me

I was prepping for the Pitchfork Music Festival -- which wasn't really necessary, since you could stand essentially between the two main stages and catch everything anyway -- and turned to Chicago's favorite free alternative weekly, The Reader, for guidance. Instead, I got this:

David Berman, poet and sole constant member of the Silver Jews, reminds me of Jesus. When biblical scholars study noncanonical gospels, trying to separate the real Jesus lines from the fakes, they look for pithy puzzles that speak to an absolute truth. Berman's lyrics, unmatched in both their literacy and their dry humor, are much the same: with lines like "When you are 15 / You want to dress poor," for instance, he pierces the voluntary amnesia that's part of our diaspora into adulthood.

I have this vague notion I've called out this rhetorical masturbation from Reader critic Jessica Hopper before, but wow. I think one of those noncanonical gospels has a story about how Jesus was stalked by a sycophantic big-city music writer who wanted to bear his hyper-literate, dryly humorous children.