fatima al qadiri ILM edition, (+ ayshay + future brown)

there are 370 likes and 22 comments on the post at last check so let's start there

I didn't like lex's piece (sorry) and I think she made a load of salient points in her rebuttal but it kind of feels like, this is NAGL.

i like a lot of producers & DJs who are very theory-minded and conceptually-driven. when the music is dope, that's a huge plus. when it's not (and especially when there's buzz/heavy PR involved), it can rankle. i think it's the idea of music being critic-proof because it's supposedly working on this extra-musical level.

xp

For consistency's sake she should rebutt the grand theoretical claims made in all her positive reviews as well.

This scene in general is not particularly used to negative criticism and this is a terrible look.

I mean, my real problem with this whole thing is like, Red Bull/Pitchfork Rising/Fader/whatever came at this from the position of boosterism ie., Future Brown is the type of thing that looks good for our brand/is fun to think about/is "interesting" in the way that, say, covering the 900th pizzaburger garage rock wimps from California is not interesting...

Which is totally fine and cool and excellent w/e!

Then you have Red Bull and Pitchfork writing these takedowns of a band that hasn't really earned much of audience whatsoever (take those 3,871 Twitter followers to the bank, gang!) as if they were this sensation when really, the people who were paying the most attention were... Red Bull and Pitchfork?

It's like, in both cases, one editor set up a group of musicians as future thinking, just for writers to take them down for not properly respecting black culture? It just reads more like insular message-board arguments between music writers than anything that has to do with a group who's actively changing culture and/or building an actual audience?

I'm obviously being very very reductive here, but it's like, it's four non-white people making some interesting music that a few trend-hopping art-fucks and a handful of dorks are paying some attention to — honestly, what's wrong with just letting them cook?

*hits a gong*

I actually enjoyed reading FAQ's rebuttal after Lex's review. I think she makes some legit points about false assumptions - points I hadn't considered because I think the album's a snooze.

Feel like Lex is railing against the interpretation rather than the intent here but the interpretation didn't seem to bother FAQ when Asiatisch was getting fawning reviews.

But interpretation matters - one of the reasons I railed against Night Slugs back in the day was because in many critics' minds they ended up eclipsing the predominantly black British scene on whose coat tails they'd come up on. And what a surprise, people stopped writing about that original scene, or worse started regarding the NS guys as it's real auteurs. The exact same thing is happening with grime now and FAQ is a (critical) beneficiary of that.

i remember listening to future brown like, man, these guys could be the brown of the future

Also I feel like scenes like this get disproportionate coverage in the first place because the writers are too close to the artists in the first place, so the scene gets chummy and backslappy and there's barely any negative criticism (and therefore minimal impetus for the artists to get better, especially when they aren't particularly dancefloor oriented).

(I've no idea how close Future Brown are to the writers covering them by the way, just describing a wider phenomenon).

every time I try writing something about this I remember Sinead O'Connor's infamous "difficult brown" quote and start giggling

"The" is an important word there, at least for me

The difficult brown

true

I'd have to agree with this:

https://twitter.com/tomewing/status/571392579511697409

"I only liked you because my friend did and now he doesn't so ner ner ner"

Yeah, that's all I got out of that too.

it does suck to see people on my timeline using the Lex as an example of the sad state of internet-era arts journalism :(

i heard of fatima al-qadiri from people who actually like the future brown record iirc

I thought the premises were generally wrong and it made a bunch of assumptions and connections that I disagreed with but I'm still not sure how you could hold it up as "shitty internet journalism". You should make those guys read more internet music writing, Jordan, I imagine they'd be quite quite upset.

You really think that is what Tom is saying there?

I was about to say, that seemed like a strange take.

A smile and a middle-finger raised to anybody who would deny a musician her humanity and require her to be stoic and silent in the face of discourse

Whether or not Future Brown sold out the ICA is irrelevant, the participants are more visible than that (I think?) (I hope?) Cool tho that Tom gets to investigate Nguzunguzu that is an awesome adventure he has to look forward to

just to be clear i was referring to electronic music scene folks on twitter, not Tom.

xp

A smile and a middle-finger raised to anybody who would deny a musician her humanity and require her to be stoic and silent in the face of discourse

I keep coming back to this. The main reason why "never respond to criticism" became a truism is because 90% of the time, the artist responding was terrible at expressing their argument. When you hit an example of someone who does a good job of outlining the objection to the critical take on their work, I'd think it would be welcomed as something that expands upon the dialogue around the music in question.

can someone explain what Tom is saying there

He's pointing out that Lex has been a big booster for Nguzunguzu and to a lesser extent FAQ in the past so this is clearly not just an ad-hominem based on whatever agenda she's claiming in her FB post.

The thing that's tiresome about this is that FAQ is falling back on the standard Bluntian kneejerk-defensive "are you saying we're not allowed to do this?" when actually the the criticism is the age old "why do these vocalists only get press when they're presented in this context?" with a side order of "the execution is very poor here". FAQ is getting defensive because of aspersions cast on her own background, which is fair enough, but the rest of it is a drum that Lex has been consistently banging for years and with some justification. I've heard Timberlee and (especially) Riko sound so much more vital than they do here and if you can make Riko sound this lifeless then you're clearly doing something wrong.

no one has gone here so I will: I find it odd that meaghan and lex have been singled out consistently when they are far from the only negative-to-middling reviewers of this record. it'd make a bit more sense if it were just people only noticing the lead review on pitchfork or whatever, but I don't see anyone, FB or otherwise, raking (say) paul macinnes of the guardian over the coals for his three-star review containing the phrases "Read a style magazine (or check their Instagram feed) and you’d know that global cool is now a thing" and "it sounds like a curated exhibition" (from here: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/26/future-brown-future-brown-review -- I don't have a problem with this review, to be clear, but this is the EXACT SAME THING.)

good to know another third white person has stepped up to fight the noble cause of shouting at Future Brown for sounding like they belong in a white-dominated space like a museum

Why is it so bad that this sounds like a museum piece?

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ... but someone includes TINK into a piece of art and it's like "gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in"

Do you think diplo like future brown

Likes

Why is it so bad that this sounds like a museum piece?

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ... but someone includes TINK into a piece of art and it's like "gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in"

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Friday, February 27, 2015 6:43 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm... booming

matt dc otm though

*hits a gong*

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, 27 February 2015 18:20 (Yesterday)

lol

whiney this isn't the first time you've referred to me as white, cut it out dickface

i was eating amazing sri lankan food last night and then asleep, i've missed literally everything so feel free to send any crucial hot takes or hot tweets my way!

whiney's "no one cares" argument is very bizarre, a huge amount of the music we write about - positive and negative - has a tiny audience. also i have written many negative pieces in my time and few, ie none, of them have ended up in this brouhaha so obviously people do care

Fatima Al Qadiri's response is a bit weird though, it's like she's suggesting that because all collaborators were willingly involved in the FB project, then there's no possibility of appropriation occurring.

"gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in" - I think the point in these reviews is more like exhibition spaces are generally sterile places. I don't think it's about where black people should or shouldn't be.

also i am keeping a tally of White People Calling Me White in the wake of this and it keeps growing!

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ...

lol i don't think any of these are hip or cool or rad

whiney vs lex vs whiteness

not sure whether to cry or wind my watch

Sure, voluntary participation doesn't mean appropriation didn't take place, but if you don't have any justifiable claim to the group you say is being appropriated and co-opted from and you aren't offering dissenting opinions from people from that group, then on whose behalf are you making the accusation? With what critical authority are you making it? Without at least that, it becomes weird to be ringing the appropriation and co-option bell. Do any grime, drill, reggae, dancehall, etc. artists have opinions about Future Brown's project that we could give attention to? Do any of them feel co-opted? Like they've been used to garner street cred?

do miley cyrus's dancers have opinions about her stage performances? do they feel co-opted?

I don't even think it has to be from the grime, drill, reggae, dancehall scene of whatever. I honestly don't think FB is really worth any of those people caring about. But I do think a critic, in lex's case an established writer, has a place to make a sustained argument about the cultural politics involved which can be judged on its own merits.

In a weird way, a big part of FB and FAQ seems to involve an attempt to present meta-statements around appropriation and global network culture in the first place (some of which also seem incoherent or at least unsatisfactory at best). So it's especially strange to me that FAQ went for such a non-response regarding what might actually be at stake. Playing strategy I guess.

Ugh, don't be deliberately obtuse. There were black women who had opinions about what Miley Cyrus was doing that drove and contributed to that larger dialogue. We actually did have examples of her dancers speaking out both in support of and against her treatment of them. So yes, I am interested in what artists from those music scenes might have to say about this if they even care. A critical conversation about the appropriation or co-option of a specific group that doesn't involve the voices of the people from that group just feels like another type of co-opting.

Greer OTM as fuck

yes, of course their voices are interesting, though my point has always been the context in which those artists receive minimal attention unless they collaborate with artists with more middle-class/privileged sensibilities, but no, you don't need to be the specific person being co-opted to recognise when co-option is taking place. if you applied that to every other incidence of privilege and appropriation being called out...

i mean: i don't have to be a grime artist to recognise that america-based oil/fashion/art money selling grime back to us is co-option

or that utopian rhetoric about global boundarylessness is dangerous stuff that feeds into the myth of the internet as a great leveller

from a critic's pov, though, i found FAQ's demand that meaghan and i should have interviewed her most bizarre; since when are artists interviewed for opinion pieces or album reviews? the whole point is for the critic to respond to the art shorn of the artist's intentions.

(i'm not remotely mad that FAQ responded, ofc, artists can do what they want just like critics can do what they want, though i don't think she really got what i was criticising) (but i do think both artists and critics should at least try to maintain a semblance of a fourth wall - less chummy, more edifying)