Moment when it became like cool to like commercial pop music?

liking music is not cool a anymore because of spotify, i read a cool thinkpiece on it a few weeks ago

http://media.giphy.com/media/ToMjGpDP1FHvHOTWuNa/giphy.gif

hope nuki remembered to flag all those off-base posts as he was c/ping them

Chefs are the new cool musicians. I only listen to music made by chefs.

who's the coolest poster in this thread

i mean what's the coolest post, didn't mean to be so rockist

us realizing we're uncool in real time
http://media.giphy.com/media/S8Dv4JCz6wWBy/giphy.gif

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--XtSSOkmA--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/195m0cuduh4asjpg.jpg

haha the gore gifs are making it really tough to look at this thread at work.

Seriously, although this thread doesn't need feeding, does anyone remember the name of the reviewer at New York Rocker whose beat was specifically pop music? His column was actually very eye-opening to me in the early 80s, when I was pretty much only listening to punk and new wave. I remember reviews of everything from Abba and Bucks Fizz to BB&Q band.

slothpro and feng is an angry dude who spends their time obsessivly following me around a low post forum along with a few other dsiciples because i don't like taylor swift, now THAT's cool

Dan: Ken Barnes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOKpDidUq-w

everyone has their own "exact moment" that's what makes it beautiful

http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk95/AggromanLives/Reagan.gif

http://media.giphy.com/media/qwEUso0sqlGRa/giphy.gif

from Regan to Reagan and back again

ILE in a nutshell

moment it became absolutely clear you were never going to make even minimum wage money writing about Bob Pollard ever again = moment many writers discovered their love of vacuous mainstream horseshit

wow, in that context, the endurance of magnet magazine is all the more impressive

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

the wisdom lit of Bob Pollard

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/off-topic-31/whenwhy-did-it-become-cool-to-be-a-hipster-546639/

Clemenza, that's it, Ken Barnes, thanks! I owe my appreciation of Bucks Fizz to him.

I knew I knew who it was--Chuck Eddy often cites him as an influence--but I did have to Google it; found an early Charles Aaron singles column in Spin where he cited Barnes as the column's inspiration. I only ever bought one copy of New York Rocker myself, the Johnny Thunders/Alan Vega cover.

I still pick up the occasional copy of NYR on ebay when I can find them cheap.

moment it became absolutely clear you were never going to make even minimum wage money writing about Bob Pollard ever again = moment many writers discovered their love of vacuous mainstream horseshit

― Jimmywine Dyspeptic, Friday, November 14, 2014 5:38 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

indie rock definitely takes up a smaller (but still disproportionately large) slice of the music writing economy pie than it used to, but i kinda doubt anyone focusing on it saw their money slow up more than anyone else in the industry or started covering (gasp) other stuff simply as a matter of survival

moment when it became cool to take the thread seriously?

THE MOMENT PERPETUA STARTED GIFFING AT BUZZFEED AND DON PASADINO GOT BANNED FROM ILX

THAT WAS LITERALLY THE SAME MOMENT IIRC

Blame the internet. People no longer had to be silently judged by the rockist at the cash register. People were no longer ashamed of listening to Donna Lewis at their homes.

the first "like" in this thread title is underrated......

tanuki is my favorite kind of message board idiot, the one who goes "everybody, gather round, look at me!.....stop following me, you stalker"

I do think this is an interesting question, even though it invites derisive responses. I alluded to something similar in a year-end ballot a couple of years ago; a friend who’s usually on the same page as me when it comes to this stuff disagreed--saying that nothing much had changed in the last few years--so that gave me pause.

To prove that nothing has changed, people will usually point out that there have always been rock critics who wrote enthusiastically about chart pop (true: the aforementioned Ken Barnes’s name will turn up, a few others), and that there have always been certain pop singles that did really well in Pazz & Jop (also true--“Jump,” “MMMBop,” etc.) I’m not sure such songs are the best place to look for counter-evidence.

Things feel different to me. And I don’t think it’s just age (it’s partly age), but I don’t know.

http://i.imgur.com/Lipwcyr.gifv

Blame the internet. People no longer had to be silently judged by the rockist at the cash register. People were no longer ashamed of listening to Donna Lewis at their homes.

― Moka

Hadn't actually thought about this, may be more than something in that.

I do think this is an interesting question, even though it invites derisive responses. I alluded to something similar in a year-end ballot a couple of years ago; a friend who’s usually on the same page as me when it comes to this stuff disagreed--saying that nothing much had changed in the last few years--so that gave me pause.

To prove that nothing has changed, people will usually point out that there have always been rock critics who wrote enthusiastically about chart pop (true: the aforementioned Ken Barnes’s name will turn up, a few others), and that there have always been certain pop singles that did really well in Pazz & Jop (also true--“Jump,” “MMMBop,” etc.) I’m not sure such songs are the best place to look for counter-evidence.

Things feel different to me. And I don’t think it’s just age (it’s partly age), but I don’t know.

― clemenza,

Ill come back to this, but short stupid ans is rise of corporate commercialism as not being a thing to be cynical about

something about Davos and Ted Talks

Awaiting long stupid ans w bated breath

rise of corporate commercialism as not being a thing to be cynical about

― Raccoon Tanuki, Saturday, November 15, 2014 9:58 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually think there might be something in this, though not pertaining to pop or any genre in particular but in terms of how music fans and critics obsess not only over the music but about the promo campaign and the overall brand-building without too much cynicism (i guess this is partic evident around daft punk, jay-z etc?)

apols for dignifying this thread w a serious answer, carry on as you were

At what point did it become cool to care about the branding and promo surrounding a campaign promoting a pop star?

Warhol, so somewhere between the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the founding of Interview Magazine.

The rest of the thread is basically the equivalent of "Moment when it became cool to like girls and stop thinking they have cooties" which is, y'know, it's a different age for each of you, and some of you may never get there.

guys there's one thing that we are forgetting here that fantado also layed out in his aezlia banks review that is one, how branding and consumer culture is basically in what is the same as how aggressive it is and permeates the culture, and two the whole social media and things are so much faster now on the internet, streaming

just my $0.02

At what point did it become cool to care about the branding and promo surrounding a campaign promoting a pop star?

It's called marketing, and it works. But that's only a minor part, really. Only the marketing for commercial pop (Lorde, Lana, Taylor, Miley) has changed its targets, become smarter and cooler, has more of an influence on the cool market that it never used to, or that the cool market never cared about, i/e you were never ever getting a radiohead fan to ever be also respecting of the talents and buying the cds of britney or backstreet boys in the 90s. Now they can overlap.

The rest of the thread is basically the equivalent of "Moment when it became cool to like girls and stop thinking they have cooties" which is, y'know, it's a different age for each of you, and some of you may never get there.

― Nicki Minaj - The Pink Floyd (Branwell with an N),

That's either them missing the point, or you. The game has changed coposter. Embrace the mechanical irony in the game of Kim Kardashian or step off.

"you were never ever getting a radiohead fan to ever be also respecting of the talents and buying the cds of britney or backstreet boys in the 90s."

Yeah, see, this shows you don't know what you're talking about, which is what makes this thread so stupid. Read 90s issues of the NME or Melody Maker, and you'll find plenty of appreciation of commercial pop from people who mostly wrote about "cool" indie music. And that's been continuous back at least since the post-modern re-appraisal of pop in the 80s; meanwhile, before the late 60s, there wasn't a widely understood category of "cool" which was all that distinct from commercial pop. So what you maybe should be asking is, how and why did the ideas of cool and commercial briefly diverge in the 70s?

lol missingNO credulously quoted theneedledrop, i'm done

Yeah, see, this shows you don't know what you're talking about, which is what makes this thread so stupid. Read 90s issues of the NME or Melody Maker, and you'll find plenty of appreciation of commercial pop from people who mostly wrote about "cool" indie music. And that's been continuous back at least since the post-modern re-appraisal of pop in the 80s; meanwhile, before the late 60s, there wasn't a widely understood category of "cool" which was all that distinct from commercial pop. So what you maybe should be asking is, how and why did the ideas of cool and commercial briefly diverge in the 70s?

Yeah man!!

I do think this is an interesting question, even though it invites derisive responses. I alluded to something similar in a year-end ballot a couple of years ago; a friend who’s usually on the same page as me when it comes to this stuff disagreed--saying that nothing much had changed in the last few years--so that gave me pause.

To prove that nothing has changed, people will usually point out that there have always been rock critics who wrote enthusiastically about chart pop (true: the aforementioned Ken Barnes’s name will turn up, a few others), and that there have always been certain pop singles that did really well in Pazz & Jop (also true--“Jump,” “MMMBop,” etc.) I’m not sure such songs are the best place to look for counter-evidence.

Things feel different to me. And I don’t think it’s just age (it’s partly age), but I don’t know.

― clemenza,

Literally a few posts later someone here cited "NME and Melody Maker" as evidence that pop has always been cool to cool people in exactly the same way it is now.

sd otm that kind of credulity is a lil embarrassing

Xp yeah how ridiculous that ppl keep citing actual instances dates & songs which clearly don't count, why aren't they taking into account your & clemenza's vaguely-defined feeling that "things" are "different" now

'Cool' isn't the same as it was back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It got popularised and democratised.

Let's say cool people started liking pop in June 2013 how's that

Now I'm off to listen to Justin bieber, so beloved of cool music buffs across the internet

this thread is a corpse without lefsetz

real answer =

http://rodrigomattardotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/new_zealand_a_hard_days_night_lp.jpg