Any reason why ILM is so quiet these days?

"quite the unfortunate crosspost too"

haha, i didn't mean it to be!

"Clusterfucks and antagonism are the worst"

every long thread gets called a clstrfk now and that's not what i meant when i was talking about really long posts from the old days. they were just crazy long conversations and x-posts galore and kinda nuts but fun and not always antagonistic.

I know one when I see one -- I have been here for a decade! (???!!!) I'm not talking about verbose old posts.

all said, I can't (don't want to) imagine some decisive end to ILM. The truth is I'll probably be here till it's just six of us just going "boy, the Replacements sure were good though, weren't they?"

well, there were more debate champions in the old days.

― scott seward

yeah i don't miss those days. god knows i spent enough time flaming people on usenet and it wasn't a good use of my time. people who want to be debate champions can go on twitter.

I'm still haunted by a post I very nearly made years ago because I completely misunderstood a thread. There's an alternate world RAG still being mocked for it.

I wish some of the posters who see an incredible number of films would decribe, praise and sell the best things they're seeing a bit more.

I hope Monster Mash comes back someday after he recovers from whatever he was going through.

i liked it back then. i wouldn't have the energy for it now. and it was new to me back then. i started going online for the first time in 1999. and i never ever talked to people about that stuff in real life prior to ilx.

x-post

now i just come here to get away from Facebook. or ILE anyway. not ILM so much. facebook such a curse to me. and yet i can't stay away from it completely. i try i really try.

I quit Facebook a few years ago and never missed it. A lot of people at the time said "you'll be back!" but I have honestly never even been tempted. This isn't to brag, because I'm still on Twitter, Instagram, and, well, here. I just found that Facebook, more than the others, seemed to necessitate me refreshing refreshing refreshing and getting into long, spiraling-out-of-control debates about minutiae, and it was just made for way too much indoor staring-at-a-screen time

I'm pretty sure most people here don't want to talk to me and I often receive no responses or my post ends up being the one that kills all conversational momentum. lol and yet I'm still here.

loving your work

"we never did work out which one was his name"

As a relatively new person here (joined in 2013? 2014? around then), even I have noticed it die down a bit compared to that first year or so. I was introduced by another ILMer - she knew I'd love this place as a massive music nerd. And she was right.

Soooo invite your friends you know who would love this kind of over the top pedantic subjective discourse about the thing we love most: vibrating sound waves.

We just need to recruit one influential millennial and soon their whole network will be coming over. Let's get our core brand proposition straight before we start though.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CT6th_qUsAAp-Hl.jpg

Welcome to ILX! Your official online resource for everything Car Seat Headrest!

http://static.stereogum.com/uploads/2015/08/carseatheadrest-640x426.jpg

You do realize you killed that thread, right?

i spent a lot of time on ilm in my 20s, when i wasn't particularly invested in my day job but *was* very invested in participating in smart conversations about music and pop culture. ilx was a great distraction from work because it seemed to always be active; you could refresh every minute or two and find a new updated thread. it was also thrilling as a young wannabe critic to have a place to shoot the shit and try out theories without feeling like i wasn't qualified to join in. i quickly fell in love with the whole culture of ilx and the various personalities who inhabited it. (not that i got along with everyone, but i never felt unwelcome -- except maybe on the noise board in its early days.)

anyway, i've spent less time on ilm in the past few years for a couple reasons. the first is that i've become more interested and engaged in my day job and less interested in the specific rewards that i was getting out of ilm. while i still listen to a lot of new music, i feel like i've been gradually drifting away from "the conversation" that surrounds it; being in the thick of current music-critical discourse simply isn't as important to me as it once was. the other difference, as some people have noted, is social media. if i'm looking for a quick distraction during the day, twitter is more reliably effective at feeding me interesting/amusing content and giving me the occasional hit of attention, without requiring much sustained engagement.

btw, since it came up earlier, i've never much cared for the rolling ilm threads, because i've never felt invested in genres per se, and they seem like they're intended for people who are. i guess they can be useful as sources of recommendations, but i've sometimes felt stifled and overwhelmed by the context: "this is where people who are more devoted to this genre than you are have already been talking about it with each other for months."

But it also makes me wonder why I bother reviving old threads about some Krautrock band or some new thing I just discovered just to get one or two responses before the thread dies again (and yes, xp, in my experience, this does happen). Don't know what I'm expecting, necessarily--maybe nothing?--but yeah, I dunno.

the secret is that those threads will never die, my friend

you just have to wait for everything to come back around, one, two, five, ten years

billstevejim totally rules

btw, since it came up earlier, i've never much cared for the rolling ilm threads, because i've never felt invested in genres per se, and they seem like they're intended for people who are. i guess they can be useful as sources of recommendations, but i've sometimes felt stifled and overwhelmed by the context: "this is where people who are more devoted to this genre than you are have already been talking about it with each other for months."

This is it, I think.

But how is that different from threads about an artist or about an album? You could just as easily describe them as "this is where people who are more devoted to this artist/album than you are have already been talking about it with each other for months."

I don't get the rolling threads hate at all. Seems like a good place to find music and share music. And more convenient than dealing with 100 separate threads about a single album with just 3 posts in each. It's not like if you decide to post in them then you can no longer take part in the other kind of threads.

1. people don't like feeling like dilettantes
2. expertise was, at least until recently, over-rated
3. comfy little establishments full of regulars are not always the most inviting places

Just because: rolling genre threads from last year last updated this year with total number of posts in each:

R&B - 433
House & techno - 402
Outernational - 397
NotIndiePop/Shambhala - 220
Eno/Pop-Punk - 197
Pop - 93
Soca/Chutney/Jab - 86
Grime - 55
Eastern Pop - 37
Noise - 33

There was also a rolling rap and a rolling dancehall/reggae thread.

And a rolling afropop thread: Rolling Afrobeats / Afropop 2016

The 2016 rap thread: rolling industry plant thread 2016
The 2016 dancehall & reggae thread: rolling dancehall & reggae 2016

aye but not accessible from the 'last 1-4 weeks' links so didn't include

cue bitter people obsessed with the elusive "gatekeepers" of good hip music or whatever.

― lute bro (brimstead), Thursday, 4 February 2016 10:57 Bookmark

lol Industry Planet appears to be the post count winner by huge distance fwiw

Nice to see Outernational among the busier ones - broader scope for inclusion I guess

true ilm heads know we been had rolling threads since the early 00s but back then they were only about jay z and nas

fucking hillis

hopefully goes w/o saying that i pray evan r's mysterious antagonist is finally apprehended and brought to justice so that we may all bask in twice as many "harmless opinions"

who among us can forget shimmering, lambent pearls like Really inviting, easygoing, interestingly produced R&B songs from one of the genre's all-time most charismatic singers or the scintillating It really depends on the situation. If I'm cooking dinner or something I'll reach for this, but if I'm in car and can easily skip tracks I'll go for.... has it really only been eight years?

rolling metal is always really long:

Rolling Metal 2016

Another reason I dislike rolling threads, adding to jaymc's otm summation: maybe I use ILM differently than some of you, but for me the appeal isn't necessarily that it's always happening in real time. When I hear, say, some old Van Dyke Parks record, or an album by an artist I have somehow just discovered despite them being around for years (most recent example: Yagya), I'm not going to search individual posts to see what ILM thinks about these things, I search threads. It's always been fun to spend some time reading the accumulated thoughts of the community (not just the most recent posters with the biggest mouths). For me, ILM acts as a comprehensive archive of thoughtful people with general good taste, not a constantly active source of serotonin spikes like Twitter. Maybe I'm using ILM wrong?

This may also explain why the absence of the search function has rattled me so!

i'm the same way. though i'm sure if i scrolled down a lot of rolling threads i would hear lots of good stuff. i just don't keep up with current stuff. but i think those threads are fun for people who do. sometimes i will scroll through the metal threads and click on stuff that gott punch and siegbran post links to.

For everyone complaining about the broken search, just add "site:ilxor.com" to your Google search.

Yeah I've barely used the internal search function in years - Googling makes it easier to pull up weird shit when all you remember is a particular phrase and the fact that you posted on the thread.

baffled by that r|t|c post - who's being quoted?

google method can't turn up stuff on hidden borads though

the first quote is me, on chris brown. the second is me, also on chris brown

Rolling threads can be useful, but difficult places for lurkers to jump in. I tried to follow some Rolling threads back in the day but it was usually critics writing about advance releases I didn't have access to until weeks or months later, at which point discussion had ended.

that's the rolling metal promo thread!

This rolling threads argument again? It's not as if anyone complaining about them actually posts on single-track threads when they get made either so whatever really, if you want single-artist threads try starting them.

and the toxicity and aggression was 100 times worse circa 2008 or so

hopefully goes w/o saying that i pray evan r's mysterious antagonist is finally apprehended and brought to justice so that we may all bask in twice as many "harmless opinions"

who among us can forget shimmering, lambent pearls like Really inviting, easygoing, interestingly produced R&B songs from one of the genre's all-time most charismatic singers or the scintillating It really depends on the situation. If I'm cooking dinner or something I'll reach for this, but if I'm in car and can easily skip tracks I'll go for.... has it really only been eight years?

― r|t|c, Tuesday, 7 February 2017 12:58 (one hour ago) Permalink

baffled by that r|t|c post - who's being quoted?

So yeah, he's referring to my post. Not exactly the height of deep criticism, I admit, but I explained my relationship with an album I'm enjoying in a thread about that album, and for some reason it set him off like blood in a shark tank.

Maybe some people really get a kick out of that? But it sure didn't make me feel good, nor did it facilitate any discussion in the thread. To me it just sent the message "don't post here or I'll destroy you."

i love music

^ this

yes.

there are some weirdos here who hate themselves and mostly post shitty things on ILM but I think they are mostly Britishes and I think that's part of their national identity or something. must be the weather.

honestly adam i don't see what on earth offended him. i don't want to call out any one particular person as "The Problem" or w/e but yeah i think one of the reasons facebook succeeds for me is because public discourse on the internet is just full of this sort of thing, drive-bys wanting to score zing points on your life experience. if i'm going to say anything interesting or meaningful (and to save the zing cru time, i'm not) i'm probably not going to say it in a public forum.