Any reason why ILM is so quiet these days?

I think there's maybe a divide between ppl who see posting to ilm as a kind of music journalism, a way of conveying ideas and hypotheses etc, and ppl who see it more as a way of socialising, like chatting about football or the weather or whatever. if you're in the latter camp then it doesn't matter if the content of your opinion is interesting or original, because that's not really the point.

sometimes I would like a board I could post to for ppl who don't have anything worthwhile to say but who are lonely and would like to poll some 35 year old album or something so I wouldn't feel guilty about cluttering ilm up with that sort of thing

there were a handful of migrants from other music communities over the years that populated ilm in waves. maybe finding the right spot to plant a seed would lure in unsuspecting new blood. or lead to catastrophe

― mh 😏, Tuesday, February 7, 2017 10:53 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

christ I know (hope?) this isn't what you were going for but I can already see it:

A: man, we really need more new posters, particularly women
B: I KNOW LET'S POST ON /mu/

NO

what's the 2017 version of a belle & sebastian email list and do we want them here

xxp Yeah, I mean, ilm can be both, right? You can exchange substantial arguments as well as quickie opinions. And often those quickie posts stir greater conversation. Look at the Carly Rae Jepsen thread, for instance. There's not a lot of profundity in any given post. Users are discussing a song they like, not filing a Pitchfork review. But that casual discussion can still yield some interesting takeaways

Liking music is not all opinion-jockeying. I barely even care about my own opinions; I'd like information/context/history. Clearly I'm in the minority but I still exist.

^^ tom

I think there's maybe a divide between

classic koganian 'hallway / classroom' theme on ilm, in this thread on simon frith and others:

Simon Frith's "Performing Rites : On the Value of Popular Music "

otm rather. I'll tell you what's changed in the last decade: the proliferation of Autocorrect

includes skippable tracks in a transcendent and artistic way, which is an empty bullshit opinion from an empty bullshit person

erm is this truly such a headscratcher my guy? it is only really bullshit if u float around deciding thgat trax are empirically good/bad and remain rigidly discrete regardless of context, which is... not the case... like... at all, so welcome to 20th century art i guess

guys stop it, this is the war room

it's funny because people seem down on the rolling threads but to me those threads have some of the best discussion and also pretty friendly sense of community IMO

also the 70s album title thread is the best thing in the history of the Internet

I actually feel like ILX has a much healthier relationship w/classic rock now, a sort of acceptance of its awesomeness but at the same time not overly reverential and a kinda ironic silliness about it, much better than the GET OUT OF MY ROOOOM DAAAD petulance or YOURE A FUCKING IDIOT IF YA DONT LIKE THE BEATELS stances of early ILX

frankly look at really old ILX threads and check out shit from like the early 2000s a lot of opinions that aren't very high level that wouldn't fly back then

if anything we've just had a lot of opinions and learned to be better at posting and so lots of old posts i would have made i wouldn't make now because i recognize them as dumb, so that's probably some account for the decline in volume

tbh i am starting to suspect that bamquern has maybe not been hkm all along after all

Yeah, I'm with soref and Evan R. on this - miscellaneous non-groundbreaking, non-artist-discovering chat about music can still be a wonderful thing, and it is still better on ILM than anywhere else!

I don't think I've ever helped nurture a new artist here or, probably, introduced anybody to anything at all but if I'm gonna shoot the shit about 90s rock I grew up with or 70s no-cred bullshit I'm getting into now, or indulge in some trainspotting diversion like New Jersey hunting or whatever, it's gonna be more fun on this website than with most randos I might meet at a bar. I mean out there in the world ''they're inauthentic and don't play their own instruments'' still counts for critical insight into pop, in most small-talk situations.

Then there's stuff like artst ballot polls, which might seem to the ''ILM is where the cutting edge reveals new music'' crowd like the most pointless of exercises, but I find that kind of deep book-club (mixed with giddy fan club) thing really great- there are like hundreds of songs I hear differently because of some story someone on here told about what it meant to them at a certan time in theiir life, or how the way this one line is sung is the key to the whole thing, or check out the mournful bongos coming in after the chorus, or whatever the fuck.... I think all that's super great and ime hasn't really gone away at all?

New blood, and more diverse blood, would absolutely be good things, but I don't think it tells the whole story to say ILM's on the skids just because it's no longer the #1 place where a certain critical mass of crtics and young listeners go to eagerly consume and parse out what's current and hot.

Liking music is not all opinion-jockeying. I barely even care about my own opinions; I'd like information/context/history. Clearly I'm in the minority but I still exist.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Tuesday, February 7, 2017 11:27 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree w/ this. like i remember making some offhand post a long time ago in one of the solo guitar / post-fahey folk threads about listening to zia mohiuddin dagar a lot and his influence on jack rose and then a bunch of people chimed in w/ very knowledgeable and interesting posts on the dagar family, structure and compositions of ragas, influence of indian classical music on a bunch of these american guitarists, it was great. ilm still has that kind of thing

Liking music is not all opinion-jockeying. I barely even care about my own opinions; I'd like information/context/history.

yeah very OTM

btw some of the "don't be mean" posters seem to work themselves up into the wildest, ad hominest invective at the first opportunity so i'm not sure who exactly is supposed to be carrying the personal baggage around here - somebody laughs at your opinions, well, that's what opinions are for

Tbf this probably depends a lot on prior life experience - I imagine that if you are someone who has not typically been welcomed into the back of the record store to shoot the shit about music (insert: gendered social behavior, nerd hardmannery, etc etc), then what reads to the insider as a hey-we're-all-zinging-here opinion-laugh can operate much more as a barrier to newcomers.

I'm getting deja vu as I type this, so I'm pretty sure we have whole threads about this in particular but it'd be something to keep in mind - freewheeling putdowns of perceived dumb opinions are ONE way of carrying on music nerd social banter but maybe the cons outweigh whatever the pros are.

if anything we've just had a lot of opinions and learned to be better at posting and so lots of old posts i would have made i wouldn't make now because i recognize them as dumb, so that's probably some account for the decline in volume

The purpose of ILX is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

btw some of the "don't be mean" posters seem to work themselves up into the wildest, ad hominest invective at the first opportunity so i'm not sure who exactly is supposed to be carrying the personal baggage around here - somebody laughs at your opinions, well, that's what opinions are for

Sure, but let's not pretend that doesn't curb or at times completely stifle the discourse here. I'm a full-time critic who avoids posting in certain threads, simply because I'm confrontation-adverse and don't have the energy to deal with one incessant troll. If that's the kind of forum you want, fine, but can we least stop pretending why it's a mystery that a 20-year-old college student (or for that matter a woman of any experience level) wouldn't feel comfortable posting here?

re: "don't be mean" -- I feel like something of a broken record here but what reads as "being mean" to men often reads as "trolling potentially leading to worse" to women

^^^^^^^^

(I've also seen countless discussion forums/usenets/facebook groups/etc. collapse or dissolve due to unmoderated and/or shrugged-off trolling; ILM is not a unique haven of people who just tell it like it is, this is one of the cliche patterns)

absolutely katherine, but i've also seen a lot of posters exasparated at meanies who are taking the piss out of their regressive opinions. some of the biggest stomp-offs have been from people who couldn't understand why they've been taken to task for saying basically unacceptable shit

It's ok to insult people if they started it. You scumbags.

sure, but when people talk about an atmosphere of toxicity, they generally aren't referring to that

my main takeaway from this thread is how poor we are at assessing ourselves and how similar to every other thread of this nature this is.

xpost

there are all kinds of unnecessary forms of verbal aggression from straight out invective to repeated sniping and we should self-police as a community and try to identify the difference between bullying, salty humour, outright discrimination and policing community standards - they can all look like similar forms of behaviour, they can overlap, they can be used inappropriately.

i just believe that some of the time people who want a straightforward "never say anything unkind" policy are asking for a safe space for their own indirect offensiveness, or asking for the board to become something that it became popular through not being

katherine otm.

NV, it seems like maybe you're pinpointing a slightly different phenomenon - people getting defensive when they're called out/FPed for BEING antisocial, beyond the pale, or otherwise trampling the commons, and they accuse the consensus against them of being mean/unfair? But afaict the kind of meanness being identified here as offputting to newcomers is precisely the antisocial commons-trampling stuff. The people stomping off griping about thread- or tone-policing are not the people we're worried about losing (or never attracting to begin with).

up to a point if you don't have time for people saying your opinion is stupid that's grand, take your stupid opinion elsewehre

Isn't this about behaviour rather than opinions themselves?

Yes. It is.

Katherine otm

Cons of zing-based opinion-centered discourse strongly outweigh the pros for me but I'm among those who has rarely been invited to engage in those conversational opportunities irl. And I used to work in a record store!

I mentioned it before but ilm was the first place I have been where my entrance into the musical conversation didn't bring it to a screeching halt. It's better now that I'm older but it still happens. At least here I'm just b/w words on a screen.

Xpost Yeah I guess I fall more on the side of ''telling people their opinions are stupid may not really be a great practice'' esp if we're talking about Steely Dan and Parquet Courts, not fascism or whatever. How much air does it really take away from you to let the young eager fan excitedly proclaim that Sgt. Pepper's is, they've been told, the most nfluential and greatest album ever?

i really think that would depend on where and how they were telling you

i love talking music on here because...jeez i don't know, it's a mess out here in the real world. my friend who i work with likes to talk music a lot. a LOT. he'll tell you about every string cheese incident show he's been too.

You are a patient friend.

then what reads to the insider as a hey-we're-all-zinging-here opinion-laugh can operate much more as a barrier to newcomers.

freewheeling putdowns of perceived dumb opinions are ONE way of carrying on music nerd social banter but maybe the cons outweigh whatever the pros are.

― tales of a scorched-earth nothing (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 7 February 2017

I agree with this. I think there's a lot of brilliant posters on more quiet forums who don't have any time for mockery. I don't want to banish zinging or anything but I think people should be a bit more careful.

Xxpost to NV: Well, okay, how about on an Internet forum where you have the option of skimming right past their post and saying nothing? (Or, if you are a patient and generous sort, offering a polite paragraph on how, indeed, that is a widely held opinion that many of us here might agree with aspects of, or have in the past, but may not be as universally held or objective as you might think, but hey it takes all kinds and welcome to the board, nice to see new folks around here!)

curious what threads u all are reading? by my watch, there hasn't been a clusterfuck in ~2 years, hell i haven't even read a good zing in at least 18 months

New blood, and more diverse blood, would absolutely be good things, but I don't think it tells the whole story to say ILM's on the skids just because it's no longer the #1 place where a certain critical mass of crtics and young listeners go to eagerly consume and parse out what's current and hot.

― tales of a scorched-earth nothing (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 7 February 2017 16:41 Bookmark

i) it's never ever just been this

ii) the sort of banal input ur all kumbayaing right now is several billion galaxies away from the curious, thoughtful and righteously inexpert beachcombers ilm was built on who deftly and voraciously negotiated lightness of touch with depth of feeling [wipes tear from eye, throws dogtags into ocean]

iii) just re this nauseatingly spiteful, pernicious and foully mealy-mouthed "genre nerds whose literal day jobs require them to keep up and write about new music" recent meme of matt dc's - plz don't ever confuse the ghoulishly entitled and bizarrely resentful airbnb wanderlusts of ilm's keepin it mediocre dickhole dad posse with how actual regular people with jobs, families and responsibilities engage w/ music, cos they have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common

iv) ftr everyone damn well knows i am not and have never been a bully or a troll and if anyone can point out an occasion when an evan r post has 'yielded some interesting takeaways' i will paypal them 50p

anyway i feel like i'm moaning about quality control after the fact. it's easy enough to avoid threads about stuff you don't like/stuff that doesn't interest you. if everybody could adopt a policy of staying out of threads that they don't have anything of value to contribute to i think we'd be peachy and peace would reign across the value. oh, and the "music i hate" threads are all terrible because codifying your taste in the negative is for rubes.

peace everybody

I mean out there in the world ''they're inauthentic and don't play their own instruments'' still counts for critical insight into pop, in most small-talk situations.

I agree it's terrible how we've shut out this kind of insight

Does r|t|c stand for Robert Thomas Christgau?

iii) just re this nauseatingly spiteful, pernicious and foully mealy-mouthed "genre nerds whose literal day jobs require them to keep up and write about new music" recent meme of matt dc's - plz don't ever confuse the ghoulishly entitled and bizarrely resentful airbnb wanderlusts of ilm's keepin it mediocre dickhole dad posse with how actual regular people with jobs, families and responsibilities engage w/ music, cos they have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common

lol fuck off

I agree it's terrible how we've shut out this kind of insight

― wins, Tuesday, February 7, 2017 10:14 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on the other music board i engage with the real/fake instruments argument happens once a week

fyi rtc if you strike it through it's still in the post. FP'ed, i have no idea what yr beef with Evan R is but boy are you making a good performative case for the downsides of weird ''opinion not useful enough'' gatekeeping.

Brad clearly explaining the benefits of the hazing procedure there

as someone relatively new here and much younger than most, this place was indeed pretty intimidating at first due to the sometimes aggressive debates etc. but that seems to have calmed down mostly except for the rare occasion someone is both aggressively overconfident but naive about something?

i don't really know how anyone new would even find this place really these days, i think i stumbled across it via an offhand mention on another board, or it might have been via TSJ sidebar? there's not really anywhere else that comes close

fp's are to be seen and not heard dr cas

FB/Twitter devolved -- or achieved its ultimate goal -- in becoming a 24 hour news channel without respite or time to reflect or react, which the 2016 shitshow made infinitely worse, and I didn't want to spend my day dealing with endless streams of 'here's the new fucked up thing' restated 100 different ways every five seconds.

word

sometimes I would like a board I could post to for ppl who don't have anything worthwhile to say but who are lonely and would like to poll some 35 year old album or something so I wouldn't feel guilty about cluttering ilm up with that sort of thing

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/18/73/df/1873df2c5a28fb528a7a9f956f101e70.jpg

also the 70s album title thread is the best thing in the history of the Internet

yes

I don't think I've ever helped nurture a new artist here or, probably, introduced anybody to anything at all but if I'm gonna shoot the shit about 90s rock I grew up with or 70s no-cred bullshit I'm getting into now, or indulge in some trainspotting diversion like New Jersey hunting or whatever, it's gonna be more fun on this website than with most randos I might meet at a bar. I mean out there in the world ''they're inauthentic and don't play their own instruments'' still counts for critical insight into pop, in most small-talk situations.

Then there's stuff like artst ballot polls, which might seem to the ''ILM is where the cutting edge reveals new music'' crowd like the most pointless of exercises, but I find that kind of deep book-club (mixed with giddy fan club) thing really great- there are like hundreds of songs I hear differently because of some story someone on here told about what it meant to them at a certan time in theiir life, or how the way this one line is sung is the key to the whole thing, or check out the mournful bongos coming in after the chorus, or whatever the fuck.... I think all that's super great and ime hasn't really gone away at all?

I probably should take this to the ilxor appreciation thread but dammit I like reading Casino's posts

Anyway, I guess ILM probably isn't that quiet after all and we're probably not going to do anything about a hypothesized decline until it becomes more apparent

r|t|c admirably soaring above mediocrity by pointlessly being a dick, great work