thread to track Poptimism 2.0

Going to combine a lot of the conversations we're having in other threads surrounding Timberlake into this one

Here's an excerpt of something I posted last year

An actual poptimist critic would be riding for the pop music that America actually, actively embraces and enjoys like the Chainsmokers, Meghan Trainor, Twenty One Pilots, Lukas Graham, Flo Rida, Mike Posner, Shawn Mendes, etc.

Instead artists who work in the pop genre just started releasing albums and "statements" like rock musicians do and we look at them through that rockist lens because there's no fucking rock bands any more. The end.

I really do think the way a "pop" artist can be critically loved right now really does mirror classic Rockism. For a lot of them You need to either:

A) Releasing a big album statement like a rock band (Beyonce, Rihanna, Kesha)
B) Basically *be* a rock band (The 1975, Harry Styles, Paramore)
C) Be a not-as-famous underdog people can champion like an indie rock band (Carly Rae Jepsen, Jason DeRulo, Jeremih)

Lorde doesn't track into any of these, but she's pretty big too.

I think the way a "pop" artist can be hated right now is, as Jordan pointed out, is even the slightest perceived dip in quality – Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus – is now license to do flying trampoline dunks on their career, even though critics really got behind all of them not all that long ago...

I dunno, I definitely feel like the critical window w/ what pop music is "good" is becoming increasingly narrow, it's interesting to watch.

no way sna

Are people still listening to Lukas Graham at all?

B) Basically *be* a rock band (The 1975, Harry Styles, Paramore)

i guess i should note this doesn't map onto fall out boy (who prob are closer neighbors to twenty one pilots here anyway). i also don't think the 1975 are really *there* yet, or at least in my experience there's been heavy resistance

Doesn't the "flying trampoline dunks"-approach extend beyond pop, and is more media jumping on and off the hype train? Arcade Fire got the same treatment (perhaps for going pop; though their quality dip was more than slight)

xpost Ned, I guess I could update that list to be, like, Ed Sheeran, Halsey, Imagine Dragons, Chris Brown and Charlie Puth

Where does Bruno Mars fit in all of this?

when was the last time critics were behind eminem

I'm also confused as to what point critics were actually behind Katy Perry, as I remember her first two albums getting relatively negative reviews at the time.

all i remember is the Teenage Dream title track showing up on a few EOY lists in 2010

Doesn't the "flying trampoline dunks"-approach extend beyond pop, and is more media jumping on and off the hype train?

ah yeah this does remind me of clowning on movie trailers

Yeah, that's fair re: Katy P

I feel like Ariana Grande is a decent counterpoint to this though - her singles and her last album have been generally well liked by critics and she isn't any sort of underdog nor is she making big album statements

We are in an an era of unprecedented chartpop conservatism imo. The algorithms have churned out Imagine Dragons and they'll keep churning out similar

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

the former also feels like it's less music qua music criticism and more cultural criticism, while the latter is a developed aesthetic stance that i think Tom Ewing summed up well in this piece, regardless of what you think of its surrounding argument https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/can-pop-music-survive

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

"the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable" seems like a slightly loaded statement to me, but I guess it depends on what sits behind it. I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

yeah, "interesting" definitely is a better word than "valuable"—although i think the slipperiness between the two is the foundation of the confusion around what poptimism is that seems to have pervaded.

re: the quoted text in the first post, my understanding of the nebulous term 'poptimism' was simply that it asks critics to put forth the slightest modicum of effort required to avoid having a kneejerk reaction against music just because it was successful or marketed to people that typical (white male) rockcrits don't see as credible, i.e. women, poc and young'ns... not that a 'poptimist' must have the exact set of tastes equal to the mythical median "target audience" consumer, who therefore enthusiastically and earnestly recommends virtually everything that is successful.

so not quite sure what is different about poptimism 2.0!! not that i had a particularly strong grasp of what 1.0 was

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism tbh, i saw it as pretty much a shortcut to catch untrained undereducated music critics up w/ arts/literary criticism broadly

"it" = poptimism or anti-rickism?

er rockism

anti-rockism

Lorde definitely fits into Whiney's category C; she's a one-hit wonder whose latest album is almost entirely propped up by critical goodwill.

otm

I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality.

It amazes me that critics who write about pop have to clarify this point over and over; it should have shut up those trolls who cock eyebrows wondering why pop music critics don't write treatises about The DaVinci Code and Transformers.

im trying to imagine if any of the rappers i'd written about had a career trajectory like hers, how quickly they'd be tossed out by the critical apparatus ... waiting x years to drop a follow up album

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, February 5

otm

i mean, ppl who took a 'poptimist' approach to the genres i liked def helped me look at them in a new way but a lot of times they were just as much invested in "scenius" & the relationship between the local and underground + national and commercial just in other genres

I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

the early 00s seem like a golden era of pop music in comparison to the 2017 charts

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:33 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this goes back to what austinb refers to above as the "slipperiness" between the propositions that popularity is interesting and that what is popular is good.

This is a slipperiness that need not exist - it emerges from sloppy thinking as follows:

1. Hypothetical pop music critic says (or implies) that "popularity is interesting in itself."

2. That same hypothetical pop music critic says "this particular pop song (currently at number one on the charts) is great!" <-- Although pointedly does not claim that all commercially successful pop songs are great, or that her enjoyment of that particular pop song emerges from its commercial dominance.

3. Observer of hypothetical pop music critic complains: "Your approach to music criticism assumes that pop songs are great because they are popular."

4. Hypothetical pop music critic seeks to clarify: "No, that's not what I'm saying. You're conflating two separate propositions. Allow me to expl-"

5. Observer cuts in: "Sorry, I've stopped listening, a magazine has accepted my pitch for a hot-take on how the orthodoxy of populism has come at the expense of critical appreciation of less popular artists, and I've got a deadline to meet."

^^ they should teach this post in schools

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

like, what poptimist thinkers thought became what was cool think, and if this small group of influential people gravitated towards a particular school of Pop music, ppl would gravitate towards particular styles of pop as being representative of this theoretical argument, and now x years later we have carly rae jepson

those two posts are making slightly different points i realize

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:34 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alfred is correct here, I think. People tend to conflate any handwringing about the state of popular culture with Dialectic of Enlightenment, but (at least in part because it would be so exhausting "in practice" for anyone not so profoundly invested in negativity as Adorno was) there's no such thing as a music critic who both considers that popular music en masse should be viewed first and foremost through the frame of how it is culturally/socially damaging and is actually interested in writing about it in any detail.

If I had to name the critic that springs to mind in response to the question "who do you think has written the most and most thoughtfully about the problems with the current composition of commercially successful pop music" my answer would be Maura, and that is no surprise: it is precisely because Maura is open to the prospect of commercially successful pop music being good that she has both the interest and the capacity to write thoughtfully about how and why it might not be.

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:54 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Any professional music critics, though?

there was a period where i found myself really put off (pre-streaming service era) by the coverage of "popular music" that seemed like it was undercounting hip-hop, or not recognizing its cultural breadth bc it was invested in this sorta discourse of the pop as populist marketplace & center of the teen zeitgeist ... some of the stuff ann powers (a critic i do respect on a number of levels) was writing around this time for example, the hollowed-out sounds of like 00s/early 10s "pop music" have aged awfully in many cases imo (not talking about taylor)

*late 00s/early 10s

i think whiney's characterization of poptimism in the op is subtly at odds with my own, but also recognize what he identifies as poptimism 2.0 as a thing

There was a conversation in early 2012 i'm thinking of (w/r/t Ann)

Year-End Critics' Polls 2011

i'm not sure i was right back then, but i think i was getting at something that felt kind of 'off' about a perceived poptimist status quo

like it felt like the way we wrestled w/ "pop" was very detached from earnest enthusiasm & was almost anthropological and dispassionate cataloguing of what teens listen to

i am possibly being hugely unfair to ann but i think there was something there that has been validated by the way the streaming economy completely shifted the sound of the 'pop charts' in something akin to the 80s/90s soundscan moment

I think that for most (especially young) people who would self-diagnose as "liking pop music" in some concrete, active sense, the actual commercial performance of any given piece of pop music is of decreasing importance - i.e. Carly Rae Jepsen and Rihanna and Lady Gaga and Charli XCX and Ariana Grande and Katy Perry and Meghan Trainor are all competing on broadly the same terrain for stans, which competition could broadly be boiled down to two zones of possible success (you need to succeed on one, but ideally both):

(a) quality x quantity of bops

(b) fierceness of instagram/twitter feed

In this sense "pop music" in the sense of genre has become detached from the charts and even commercial success to a much greater degree than whiney's opening post suggests - carly and the chainsmokers are much more aligned than they are opposed.

On basically every single possible level of this debate, the transformative impact of social media (which has become the space in which the enjoyment of popular music is performed) simply cannot be overstated.

t swift notably unfierce, which might explain the sudden critical volte-face at the first sign of weak bops

Looking back on that thread i think both you (deej) and lex were right, or perhaps rather the truth was the combination of your respective positions: "pop" moved from being what "just folks" listen to becoming a smaller, activated niche with a much more concrete sense of genre identity.

However, this is not a problem with criticism, IMO, but rather a real reaction to the fact that the patterns of music engagement are so much more decentralized than they used to be such that talking about what "just folks" listen to now is just not as relevant or meaningful: it's very difficult to point to a community of people who are primarily invested in "chart music".

i think ive veered slightly from the original convo but this was the post i was thinking about when you asked the question, tim, if there were actual professional critics who'd allowed the distorted version of poptimism to shape their work:

yeah i mean i don't mind the shopping at whole foods thing, or that she's writing to a generalist audience, i guess it's more that I don't get a sense of what she likes as much as a sense of what she thinks she needs to cover, all of which she's vaguely enthusiastic about, and as a result the coverage is of a fairly rote series of artists I guess? idk I guess I'd just like to see some more personality in it or something

idk I'm probably being unfair. at a certain pt. the job is covering what people are likely to care about. although i'm not sure that explains the tuneyards thing which is p niche right?

― Regional Thug (D-40), Wednesday, January 4, 2012 8:31 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha, that was until last week the last time tune-yards was something i might talk about in an ilx post

i suppose there is nothing intrinsically conservative about chartpop now, as it's never really existed along a conservative/progressive scale - it's simply always been about consumer choice

i don't quite know how to express my disgust at music like the chainsmokers without finding recourse in phrases like 'conservative' or blaming algorithms. it's hard to express the firm opinion that chartpop is worse now than it was ten years ago because i'm forgetting that good stuff still sometimes does well and bad stuff still sometimes did well then. and that some of the good stuff is familiar, and some of the bad stuff is novel

perhaps one can say that nowadays it is simply easier to produce music that you know for sure will go viral, regardless of its worth as music. something like lukas graham feels like some sort of elaborate prank on humanity - 'here is something terrible and you're all gonna LOVE it. xoxo denmark'

that's what they said about Disco Duck though

perhaps one can say that nowadays it is simply easier to produce music that you know for sure will go viral

there are ppl throwing bullshit at the wall 24/7 trying to make it go viral. it is not 'easy'

if anything it's the work i see going into projects like Roy Purdy that makes them seem so swaggerless

what happened to rtc? i miss him during these debates

agreed

it would be interesting to track similarities between the more successful artists achieving widespread exposure through youtube etc

the chainsmokers literally built themselves up by looking at popular songs on hype machine and remixing them, piggybacking off the fame of already-known songs. many youtube sensations (including bieber here! but also pomplamoose) built up their follower counts by covering already popular songs. there is definitely a self-reinforcing aspect to pop music in this decade that's been accelerated by "most popular" lists being the most common means of discovery for new users, and it's hammered in further by search engines being both too literal and utterly fungible.

something that isn't talked about enough: the way streaming/track purchasing consumption is measured compared to album sales factors into the confusion about what, exactly, is "popular," or "pop." if you were one of the 162,000 people who bought WITNESS in its first week, even if you listened to it nonstop for a month, your consumption would count less than 200 people buying "chained to the rhythm" (which would count for 20 album-equivalent units) or 6000 people streaming its first 30 seconds then peacing out because there was a new song by someone else (which would count for four album-equivalent units). the math is really screwy (and, as post malone and his label proved last year, extremely susceptible to shenanigans). WITNESS was a crappy record that reflected the conservatism plaguing pop in the late 2010s, but i do have a sense that its actual popularity was measured a bit short.

probably related to the previous point: lorde (82,000 first-week album sales) sells out arenas so i'm not sure if "one-hit wonder" is a precise enough term for her brand of popularity.

also i think there's a big difference between the sort of writing that pops on social media – the posts with bumper-sticker headlines that focus on the Big Name of That Week and shoehorn their records into whatever sort of shareable opinion will pop at that time – and the original popist idea. maybe that's why "anti-rockism" is a better way to go, although given the way "pro-life" works better than "anti-abortion" in rhetorical discourse even though the latter description is, you know, more accurate, it seems like saying you're an anti-anything cedes too much ground to your antagonists.

(and yeah, narrative plays into this a lot. the "squeak of the resistance" discourse around cardi b probably helped her transphobic comments be not much of A Thing...)

the chainsmokers talk about their strategy in this billboard interview

The group’s strategy came to them after remixing a favorite song by Sigur Ros singer Jonsi: They would make dance versions of the indie tracks charting on music blog aggregator Hype Machine, catapult themselves to the top of the same charts and, as Pall puts it, “peel off a couple of Phoenix fans, peel off a couple Two Door Cinema Club fans and, in the process, garner some attention from the label and agency side of things.”

"agency side of things" my god

great post ty

ah, the infamous Pool Interview.

Miami has a lot to be sorry for, among which is the location for every dickwad and his agent looking for SEO branding opps cooked up poolside at the Mondrian.

it's really astonishing how the Chainsmokers are the worst people imaginable while the music they make manages to be even worse

there is definitely a self-reinforcing aspect to pop music in this decade that's been accelerated by "most popular" lists being the most common means of discovery for new users, and it's hammered in further by search engines being both too literal and utterly fungible.

that's a big aha moment for me right there.

relatedly does anyone else feel like weird al should do a fart-themed parody of "Thunder" by Imagine Dragons?

Honest question for those older than I: Has there been another time in pop music history where an artists' political views and personal behaviour were as important as they are now in terms of how their work will be received by critics? I feel like an impact of streaming has been that it's just *so easy* for people to have this attitude like "well, this person did or said the wrong thing - regardless of whether this is good music or not, why would I bother spending time on their art when I've got all of this other work by unproblematic people at my fingertips?". And this seems to be an attitude endorsed by a lot of publications (see: the absence of good albums Ariel Pink and Brand New etc. in most publications year end reviews).

Justin and Taylor are in interesting development in this regard, because now it's not only what artists say that is having an impact, but that what artists *don't say* is just as important. I agree that Taylor's album wasn't very good, but there was definitely a mass pile on for her remaining quiet about politics. And now a lot of criticism of Justin's record mentions how tone deaf it is to have a free spirited happy-go-lucky back-to-the-woods album considering the state of the world.

I just feel like it's been a long time since I've seen a piece of music writing that is really satisfyingly able to articulate like...which songs are good, and why, and which songs are bad, and why. I know music criticism should be more than just that, but in the last few years most stuff presenting as music criticism has really just been cultural commentary.

One of the big shifts is that the evolution of social media, pop stars' engagement with social media, and then reporting on pop stars' engagement with social media, means that people feel like they have a sense of an artist's politics and personality even if they don't have a strong engagement with the artist's work. At a practical level, even 20 years ago a piece along the lines of "Taylor hasn't said enough about Trump" would have been difficult to substantiate, and doing so would have required a detailed immersion in existing media that would have been a forbidding exercise for the non-fan. I think up until recently a situation where you would know more details about a pop star's life than their music would be unusual, whereas now it seems unsurprising.

with all due respect, whiney, what makes you think criticism has anything to contribute to an understanding of this music? i mean, surely isn't a lot of the appeal of chart music that it can be enjoyed without mediation, you don't need to read about it or think about it?

so critics should only write about the music that no one actually listens to? hmmmmm....

Honest question for those older than I: Has there been another time in pop music history where an artists' political views and personal behaviour were as important as they are now in terms of how their work will be received by critics?

When I was a kid and just started reading pop writing, around the time of the UK miners strike, there was a dogmatic line among some writers at the NME. Sometimes this was justified - eg calling out bands that played Sun City etc. But I remember a very dodgy interview with the Pet Shop Boys around the time of the first time of the first LP basically slating them for not being OUT and PROUD like Bronski Beat or whoever. Not sure this critical stridency had any impact whatsoever on the sales of the artists concerned however.

This thread feels interesting but I don't know any of the music it refers to.

there was a key editorial change at NME shortly after the end of the miners' strike (which was 84-early 85): it had been highly political since c.1973, when it became the vector of the countercultural politics of the underground press, and was later the most attuned to the political wing of punk

the editorial shift in 1985 actually broke a lot of the continuities: a lot of senior editorial went elsewhere, along with their years of experience, and the sense of a collective ethos

so from mid-1985 onwards the way politics was handled was a LOT more callow and gesturey (and the paper's sense of entitlement increasingly less deserved IMO) (lol also they were giving me more work so as night follows day…)

i forget if the piece i wrote w/terry st4unt0n abt paul simon busting the anti-apartheid cultural boycott was before or after the PSB piece (i feel it was probably the following year but i'd have to go to rock's back pages and check)

NME fully depoliticised in 1988, when the editor that management had installed in 1985 was kicked back out for being useless (i won't name him) and a "safe pair of hands" brought in: tho ever after that there was still steven wells :)

see my book due out later in the year, he added cheekily

ah, that "Youth Suicide" cover, those were the days

also nice to see the OP finally drifting round to something like my insistent ILM insights of 2002-03, viz "popism is a useless word, it's rockism all the way down dudes" (the word poptimism hadn't been coined yet)

i am on deadline (can you tell?) and hence not going to hunt for the actually relevant posts :D

The economics of streaming make this very tricky anyway because the charts just aren't especially reliable as a pop window any more - a sale used to count once regardless of how many times it was played, now the charts are skewed because of people playing that one Chainsmokers song again and again, or just listening to it by default because it's there in all the playlists. OTOH it's also an excuse for every middle aged dude to blame "algorithms" as the reason why they feel alienated from modern music, as opposed to the more old fashioned "getting old".

There's definitely a nostalgia WRT how to pop *used* to be at play here, a kind of millennial version of the old "we only like 80s Madonna" indie-pop crowd. It also helps that pop stars like CRJ and I dunno people like Robyn before her are able to pitch directly to that constituency and prolong their careers after the charts have lost interest.

Actually successful pop stars who don't fit into any of Whiney's initial three categories - Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello.

>>> the old "we only like 80s Madonna" indie-pop crowd

sounds like my crowd.

I'm sympathetic to people losing touch with music but don't see how you can blame 'algorithms'. Listen to what you want to.

I don't think algorithms can have much direct influence on what I hear, though some kind of indirect influence no doubt. Most of what I hear is a) radio and b) Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series.

Camila Cabello has made some problematic racist comments in private Twitter DMs if I recall? I mean the chatter around her is that she's generally perceived as being a bit of a snake in her personal life.

(and none of this seems to have affected her solo career)

The CRJ thing fascinates me. E•Mo•Tion is a good album and Kiss is a slightly better album but the former seems wildly overpraised by virtue of its unambitious competency.

I suspect one person's unambitious competency might be another person's bouncy pop bliss but maybe this theory is too simplistic

I dont think the two things necessarily have to exist seperately - I do like CRJ a lot! But lets be real here: her image of playful girl-next-door and her 80s pastiche pop is expertly executed without reinventing the wheel.

A question for The Pinefox: Are you an Indie Poptimist?

Indie Poptimism
http://everynoise.com/engenremap-indiepoptimism.html

i reckon Pinefox would be unfamiliar with many of these artists.

Selena is an interesting case because her biggest hits in the last year have been pop-EDM songs she was glommed onto.

Dua Lipa also came up via YouTube! Her record is very good. Refreshing even. I haven’t listened to the Camila (X Factor spawned) but “Havana” is also a breath of fresh air on the radio, even if parts of it were created by some of the usual suspects.

I mean one of the differences between rock and pop is that rock looks backwards to retain relevancy whereas pop has to innovate - compare the overuse of "futuristic production" as a positive signifier for pop music vs "classic rock and roll" and the pride of influence in indie/rock narratives when those styles are undergoing a popularity boom. (Eg "Toxic" vs The Strokes fifteen years ago).

Its not that innovation or retroism are inherently positive/negative attributes. But i think as a listener i would find it limiting if pop was to live in thrall to a golden era of nostalgia.

xp

The rise of fan armies also fuels the “this person is problematic” fire - lots of people devote their free time looking for “receipts.” And also... how many *music* writers are we talking about here? How many of the sloppy yet conversation-informing pieces being referenced are actually by writers for say Bustle (which gets way more traffic than any music outlet), and who don’t have time to engage with the music because they’re on a Content Production Pace, so they reach for the low hanging fruit that also allows them to shut off the possibility of engagement?

Probably worth noting too that multiple people (men) in editorial management have told me that discussing music and how sounds work / gear works / etc is too “academic” for a general audience

but it's always a dialogue. probably the case with "rock" music too, in the loosest sense. and a kind of fake dialogue at that because innovation and revival can't be separated too neatly.

rockism at its heart refers to that privileging of false binaries, one way or another.

xp

Speaking of false binaries and distinctions, what about Nicki Minaj (and to a lesser but notable extent, Rihanna) who release singles chasing different audiences deliberately? "Pop" is a broad church and i always thought it was strange that someone with the level of talent and charisma as Minaj has had to lend her vocals to as many sub-par Guetta singles as she has rapped brilliant verses.

Lorde fits into both category A and category C fwiw.

I'd also say that the influence of Eurohouse and EDM post-2007 or so has led to an objective shift in how pop songs are written and constructed and how they develop both melodically and harmonically. Being slightly reductive, the critically beloved pop music of the early/mid-00s pop boom is built around four main areas:

- Timba/Neptunes shiny futurism (and also futuristic-classicism, all those recycled and reskinned Jacko and Prince and Marvin moves)
- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)
- Punk pop (Avril, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson etc)
- Repurposed dancehall beats and Sean Paul turning up all over the place

Most of those don't really exist in the current pop market, with the exception of some watered down Timba/Pharrell stuff, and dancehall which has only really crept back into the mainstream over the past couple of years. There are some pretty strong rockist or nostalgic reasons for glomming onto all of that (and also frankly Taylor, Beyonce, Lorde etc) that I think explain why critics would go wild for all of that and not, say, an off-the-peg Guetta or Kygo production, even with a famous name attached. (I'm excluding autotune rap here b/c that's no really what we're talking about here). It also makes sense that Bad Liar (which is equal parts Talking Heads, Paul Simon and 90s Madonna) is the Selena Gomez song that became critical catnip.

Odysseus: I would need a definition of the term to know. It's quite an ingenious twist on the term, though.

Is that the real DJ Martian? Is he still alive ??? :O

I don't know the artists in his (?) link.

Of the people mentioned in the OP, Carly Rae Jepsen is the only one whose music I know, thanks to an ilxor giving me some of it. I listened a lot and quite liked it!

odysseus is dj martian's alt

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FCDqWYkl8-I/maxresdefault.jpg

L-R: Martian, Odysseus

Xp dont forget the Winehouse/Duffy/Adele axis of retrosoul

wouldn't that be forks on the right?

Yeah I think Winehouse and Adele don't count for the same reason that, say, the Kaiser Chiefs don't. I did forget Britney/Xtina etc though - I don't think any of this invalidates my theory that critics went wild for early 00s pop because it represented the entryism of things *they already liked* into a (predominantly) manufactured pop context.

infinite xp, will catch up later, but the single best thing I was told during undergrad was my literary criticism professor telling me not to read more adorno

- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)

This was never a thing in the US so I've always kind of mentally filed it under the "pop that critics love that isn't actually pop" category

I think now both Adele and Winehouse dont count but at the time you also had things like Pixie Lotts first few singles, that "always remember me" single by a young girl whose name I forget but i just heard playing on the work radio, Gabriella Climi, etc

But I remember a very dodgy interview with the Pet Shop Boys around the time of the first time of the first LP basically slating them for not being OUT and PROUD like Bronski Beat or whoever.

ah yes the Andy Gill piece, I believe.

Pixie Lott's first single was released in 2009 - way after the period I'm talking about.

crütxgau

Was it as late as that? Christ I'm old

it was John Gill

yes that's him

(I love a man in a uniform!)

(john gill never wrote for the nme, so i am confusing two different things upthread i think)

I think ppl are really forgetting how crazy the post-Manson late 60s early 70s was in terms of radical politics intersecting with pop music

I mean Altamont happened because the Stones a) were shamed into doing a free concert to prove they weren't capitalist pigs and b) hired Hell's Angels instead of real security because the Dead told them to

This is what I had in mind. I cited it in a Pitchfork mag piece a couple years ago.

(the comments are a delight)

I remember John Gill as a music critic for Time Out in the 80s. Neil Tennant mentions the book here in this online diary:

Jill [Wall, manager] phoned upon Friday to say there's a journalist called John Gill who used to work for Time Out and who has got a bee in his bonnet about us has written some book where he stags us off as being hypocrites all the way through. I think it must be a son of gay book - he's using us a kind of touchstone for all that's hypocritical and bad. Anyway, of course the publishers won't give Murray [Chalmers, press officer] a review copy, because there arc review copies about and Murray had heard about it, so he's trying to dig out a review copy, so we'll see what all that's about. That's kind of interesting. But potentially rather boring. To be honest. I don't want to waste a lot of energy on that.

https://www.petshopboys.net/html/literallys/literally_14/literally_14_page_1.html

so critics should only write about the music that no one actually listens to? hmmmmm....

― human and working on getting beer (longneck)

if you're going to write about music it seems like the value in that is to point out things that are non-obvious about that music, to respond to things on a level beyond the immediate. if someone is genuinely capable of praising the chainsmokers once their music is looked either more broadly or more deeply, or within a larger musical context, they're certainly welcome to do that, but i've yet to see anybody who can authentically do that.

yes, moralizing is rife in pop criticism (again this is not inherently bad), but we can if we want dissociate this view from moral value judgments, as well as from the dreaded spectre of Rock Music. it is neither wrong for someone to listen to and enjoy music that is superficially appealing, nor is it wrong for the critic to fail to respond to that music on the basis that superficial appeal does not withstand critical scrutiny.

john gill wrote about his experience with that review here

oh xp to alfred, i found the google books cite

Alfred Soto OTM: I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality.

It amazes me that critics who write about pop have to clarify this point over and over; it should have shut up those trolls who cock eyebrows wondering why pop music critics don't write treatises about The DaVinci Code and Transformers."

If I say to the average person who wants to know what and why I write about certain things, and I say I'm interested in Walker Hayes records or other pop-country stuff, they reply, that's beneath notice, mere commercial trifles, not worthy of study. Rockist. Yet they valorize the "good old stuff": Tammy Wynette's "He Loves Me All the Way," one of the most "poptimist" records ever made (in 1970). Teams of songwriters, a controlling producer, a song ruthlessly edited for brevity, no solos. Meanwhile Walker Hayes is a kind of rockist, he's in control of his art from start to finish and wrote and conceived it himself. I don't know if this situation in country is analogous to those in other fields; perhaps country is just the most extreme example.I believe you can obviously still make distinctions among these grades of poptimist work and still be able to make judgments about ultimate quality without simply saying, all that is popular is therefore good or great. Some pop-country stuff does one thing very well or in an interesting way while lying inert on the laminated particle-board floor in other states, like a fucking gas turning back into liquid. Taylor Swift does some things well, other things she doesn't do at all because she, obviously, is not proficient enough or interested enough in music itself to do them. So she plugs into whatever it is and has at it. Her music is ultimately, of course, in my opinion, unsatisfying as music. As text, great, as something interesting she may have a handle on sociologically, even better. But it's devoid of nutrients. This is a rockist attitude I don't mind admitting.

(and yeah, Hayes uses co-writers and a producer, Shane McAnally. but he's still more of a rockist than a poptimist, in my book, and I cite him because, as Chuck Eddy recently wrote, his Boom is one of the best country-oid records of last year and has universally reviled by critics who want to keep country...rockist.)

adorno roxx literary critics r gay

xp Would you say that the reception of male country artists right now is similar to the way female pop artists have been traditionally viewed? Seems like a lot of mildly popular country acts led by a guy that either debuted or leveled up in the last year - Walker Hayes, Lanco, Midland, Thomas Rhett - gets at least one "not authentic" sneer, although I might not be looking in everyplace. If my perception is correct, though, I wonder if it's because of the way men so dominate country radio?

Adorno's writings on Beckett and Kafka are pretty solid.

ah ok, i think i've solved my confusion: i suspect the 1986 nme piece I'm thinking of spun off from discussion of Gill's (also 1986) Time Out review (as discussed in that 1995 book). Time Out was one of the London listings mags (the other was City Limits): both were highly political, and tended always to deal with music (and the other arts) through a political lens -- as well as setting the agenda politically for London media (which included NME, by then the only rock weekly that was still in any sense political).

(Andy Gill was one of the senior editorial who left NME in 1985.)

Boring pedantic self-involved sidetrack ends.

Yeah, it seems like it's been that way for at least a few years. A disjunction exists between the coverage and good press given the Miranda Lambert gang, Brandi Carlile, etc and the so-called himbos who dominate first-week sales and country airplay.

I've not read it - I'm not mad - but this Dominic Sandbrook book on British popular culture seems to come at the "choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" angle from a right of centre, trust-in-the-market angle - perhaps some Poptimists here or elsewhere have engaged with it more diligently:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/14/the-great-british-dream-factory-by-dominic-sandbrook-review

Most of those don't really exist in the current pop market, with the exception of some watered down Timba/Pharrell stuff, and dancehall which has only really crept back into the mainstream over the past couple of years.

um, what? leaving aside dancehall, which is obviously everywhere:

- Timba/Neptunes shiny futurism (and also futuristic-classicism, all those recycled and reskinned Jacko and Prince and Marvin moves)

...the... weeknd? and all of the post-"Get Lucky" shiny nu-'80s-cocaine-funk tracks from the past couple years, many produced by Max Martin; every time I think it's dying out it goes fuckin' one winged bateman

- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)

maybe not the Xenomania variety, but "retro-80s synths" describes huge swaths of the pop charts at any given point and has so for about a decade.

- Punk pop (Avril, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson etc)

this is the one entry on the list that isn't on the charts per se. but it's not that it's gone -- a lot of these people have just become songwriters. Sarah Hudson is a good example here. (given the market economics, a lot of what might otherwise have been a pop-punk or pop-rock song in another era turns into an EDM topline.)

literally all my exposure to adorno is through ben watson's zappa book. he seems ok from what i can tell, but why have a critical philosophy at all? i think the true poptimist critical stance is syncretism. do anything you want as long as it holds together for three minutes.

I mean Altamont happened because the Stones a) were shamed into doing a free concert to prove they weren't capitalist pigs and b) hired Hell's Angels instead of real security because the Dead told them to

― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

do we still believe this? do we still believe moonlighting cops would have been less likely to kill a black guy for no reason than hell's angels were?

I think the big shift for me wrt politics/social awareness in pop has been moving from necessary discussions about the problematic aspects of popular art (i.e. "Under My Thumb," Graceland, The Marshall Mathers LP) to treating the problematic aspects as something that determines the actual worth of art (i.e. Justin/Taylor/Katy being not woke enough)

I know this is getting close to /mu/ "protect men from cuckfork" stuff, but defining art by its political awareness seems really *disconnected* from an wider audience that is still putting toxic males like XXX and 6ix9ine and Chris Brown and Chainsmokers in the Hot 100. Society is *still* reflecting those values, sadly, and Taylor/Justin/Katy/Bruno are reflections too, navigating this sea as best they can. They can't be expected to be up on the latest Twitter opinion on whether Three Billboards is necessary art or garbage.

It reminds me of the media that spent the 2016 election reposting John Oliver EVISCERATES videos to a tiny audience of self-satisfied, comfy libs while America voted for Trump anyway. As I type this, the radio in the diner is playing MJ and R Kelly's "You Are Not Alone." This stuff is not going away.

It's obviously INCREDIBLY important that we discuss, analyze, dissect, confront, attack and tear down the weird, retrograde masculinity in the Timberlake album (and I did in my review) but it's def a priveliged position to be a scold about it and treat it like the reason his music is bad

I tend to be a little more agnostic/reletivist because I have the opposite approach as lex: I think art is driven by society and not the other way around

for the most part

how do you define "driven'?

Replace driven with reflects

art <---> society, i.e. a reinforcement loop, but the collegiate Wildean I was would have ground his boot in my face

I mean one of the differences between rock and pop is that rock looks backwards to retain relevancy whereas pop has to innovate - compare the overuse of "futuristic production" as a positive signifier for pop music vs "classic rock and roll" and the pride of influence in indie/rock narratives when those styles are undergoing a popularity boom. (Eg "Toxic" vs The Strokes fifteen years ago).

Its not that innovation or retroism are inherently positive/negative attributes. But i think as a listener i would find it limiting if pop was to live in thrall to a golden era of nostalgia.

― boxedjoy, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 12:40 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not really up with JT or what happened at the Superbowl or anything like that, but I find this perspective interesting.

Rock hasn't always been about looking backwards and in its heyday you had styles like 'progressive rock' which by definition were looking to move things forward. Punk music was also seen as radical (despite some of the sound being modelled on 50s rock'n'roll). Like all genres, the radical, forward thinking music of its day ossifies and becomes the stuffy traditionalist benchmark by which olds measure contemporary music. It's hard to mark exactly when and how jazz went from being perceived as a culturally lowbrow movement that was potentially damaging to the fabric of society, to something that is studied in conservatoires and scrutinised by academics. But it happened. And in the last ten or more years, rock has started going a similar way - classicist, stuffy, stuck in the past. This is not 'rock' by definition, rather the natural bellcurve of any cultural movement.

So there's nothing to say that pop - having gone from being seen as a disposable movement in the 80s/90s, to critical re-evaluation by the poptimist movement in the 2000s (which let's not forget was bolstered largely by critics), and finally accepted as a truth by all but the most entrenched rockists - hasn't got much else to push against. If it's been accepted by everyone, it's become the status quo and the purveyance of not just 'the kids' but parents and professors and journalists etc.

It's not that pop itself has become stale as a sound (there are still people pushing rock and jazz into new territory), but as things go on we might see an end to the traditional Madonna/Beyonce/Dua Lipa model of popstar. The kneejerk tearing-down of former idols like Taylor and Justin seem to be the first signs of that.

...the... weeknd? and all of the post-"Get Lucky" shiny nu-'80s-cocaine-funk tracks from the past couple years, many produced by Max Martin; every time I think it's dying out it goes fuckin' one winged bateman

These are fundamentally different I think, there's a big festival-friendly sheen to the records you're talking about, big build-ups and 4/4 kicks and rising Eurohouse chords amid all the Jacko-lite moves, all of which is absent from peak-era Timbaland and Neptunes productions. They're all slinkier, with much more space in the sound and syncopation in the beat. Also the *texture* of current pop is completely different to the era we're talking about.

maybe not the Xenomania variety, but "retro-80s synths" describes huge swaths of the pop charts at any given point and has so for about a decade

Really? Obviously most current chart point is heavily synthy but it's a thoroughly modern sound these days, all those punchy EDM bass sounds or plinky Clean Bandit synths or once again that hypercompressed maximalist house sheen. A lot of the 00s Brit stuff I'm talking about was as much built around chugging 70s glam riffs as it was about 80s synthpop and that's vanished as well. It's the songwriting that's changed as well, big Coldplayish stadium choruses, Guetta bangers, the millennial whoop. I don't think it's controversial to say that pop music sounds entirely different now.

to the traditional Madonna/Beyonce/Dua Lipa model of popstar

one of these is not like the other

xp -- every time the phrase "millennial whoop" is used strauss and howe rip the wings off a baby boomer

I haven't checked the figures but like people are saying upthread, the wide church of 'pop' if you simply define it as 'music that is popular' is peaking at acts like Chainsmokers, Migos, Ed Sheeran, none of whom really fit the traditional model of the teen-pop act as we once knew it. The Spice Girls are reuniting as a legacy act this year and there are loads of 40 year olds at my work going beserk about it

TS: millennial whoop vs barbaric yawp

hmmm. whiney, your take on things is so far away from both my take and what i take to be the collective critical ethos of board posters that i can't even meaningfully engage with it. like, i know you started this thread, but it seems like an argument for another thread at this point.

yeah, for sure, I mean, I shouldn't imply that my way is the CORRECT way, I'm just saying it's a trend I'm seeing. Correct me if I'm wrong!

Also, I think a lot of words usually reserved for academic contexts – like "misogynoir" – coming into wider use if helping this push too, idk

To put it more clearer, in the 90s it felt like we used to weigh the problematic elements of art against its merit, and now art's merit seems increasingly dictated by its relationship to problematic elements

If that's improvement or not is in the eye of the reader/critic/ILXor. But the JT album DOES feel like a weird moment for this. Like Uproxx ran TWO pieces that are like "idk maybe we're doing this wrong"

http://uproxx.com/music/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-takedown-culture/
http://uproxx.com/music/justin-timberlake-super-bowl-halftime-show-man-of-the-woods-album-cycle/

I know both katherine and I are fucking terrified that "music g@merg@te" is always around the corner

vs balearic yawn

Pop, like beer, used to be proudly proletarian, unpretentious, and tasteless.

#Pabst

lmao @ that sentence

from this day forth I'm always going to assume Whitman's "barbaric yawp" sounds like the "aaAAY!" from "Macarena"

I'm more acquainted with the discussion in film criticism, but back then the discussion seemed always to be about separating artist and art, and to some extent that has become increasingly impossible to do. The recent thing that has stuck with me was a film magazine making a list of the best sex scenes in film, and put the butter scene from Last Tango in Paris as number one, the same scene that had been at the center of a storm after Bertolucci admitted to withholding information from the Maria Schneider before the shoot, making her feel violated. But he did that to get an effect out of her, the exact effect that the magazine thought was so good. So that scene was hailed not in spite of, but because of the despicable way it was made. And the feeling that a lot of especially 70's cinema was hailed not in spite of it's problematic content, but to a large extent because of it, is sticking with me (hi, Woody Allen...)

I'd wager something similar is going on with music, especially with appropriation. Justin Timberlake has always been a watered down version of the Timbaland sound of the late nineties, but critics still liked it despite of it. And now there's more focus on him never getting good press despite of being the conservative and safe version of Aaliyah/Missy Elliott, but because of it.

conservative and safe version of Missy Elliott

are you talking about the Missy Elliott from the Mountain Dew commercial?

but back then the discussion seemed always to be about separating artist and art,

and, whoever said it upthread, it is, in fact harder to do this in the age of social media

It's hard to mark exactly when and how jazz went from being perceived as a culturally lowbrow movement that was potentially damaging to the fabric of society, to something that is studied in conservatoires and scrutinised by academics. But it happened.

It's not that hard - it started in the early 1950s, when jazz's commercial prospects were eclipsed by rock 'n' roll; all the same people who'd been calling jazz vulgar and lowbrow heard Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry et al. and thought/said/wrote, "OMG, we thought jazz was bad? These new barbarians will be the death of us all!" And as far as jazz entering the academy, that was a years-long struggle, instigated by jazz musicians themselves who were a) in search of critical respect and b) seeking the relative job security of professorships. And in the late 60s, they were able to break in in large part because of broader social upheaval - free/avant-garde jazz was, rightly or (mostly) wrongly, portrayed as a voice of Black Rage and Social Justice, and institutions decided they needed to get in on that action, so Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor and Roscoe Mitchell and Bill Dixon and a few others became college professors.

specialist publications existed that didn't see jazz as culturally lowbrow well before the 50s (uk's melody maker started in 1926, down beat in 1934, jazz hot in 1935): the start of the move from that perspective is in the 30s, tho it didn't bed in in academic terms, as grawlix says, until the 50s (john lewis and gunther schuller founded the modern jazz society in 1955; nat hentoff and martin williams found the jazz review inc 1958)

the poets, novelists and critics of the harlem renaissance were taking jazz seriously even earlier

(and gilbert seldes wrote "the seven lively arts" in 1923) (obviously in one sense these were all outliers, but they indicated when/where a particular trajectory began

I think the big shift for me wrt politics/social awareness in pop has been moving from necessary discussions about the problematic aspects of popular art (i.e. "Under My Thumb," Graceland, The Marshall Mathers LP) to treating the problematic aspects as something that determines the actual worth of art (i.e. Justin/Taylor/Katy being not woke enough)

To me it seems like the opposite. I think critics are still starting with the same central notion of “Do I like this music?” they always have, but then they’re working backward from that conclusion to find moral justifications for their preferences. And that’s the easiest thing in the world to do when they already don’t like the music, since all art is problematic in one way or another. So now it’s not enough to just rip on Miley, JT, Taylor and Katy for putting out mediocre-to-crappy albums—they’re also an affront to your values. (And yeah as David argued, there’s some clear hypocrisy here; critics are all too happy to give Migos or Cardi B a pass b/c they like their music).

But I think it leads to some sloppy criticism in the reverse, too, with critics holding up a lot of great albums as social statements they may not have been intended to be (SZA, Rihanna, Frank Ocean—acts that put out great albums that work best on the personal/emotional level). We see this a lot with Lorde, who put out an immensely lovable album that critics sometimes strained to imbue with an importance it didn’t need in order to enjoy it. Critics have started retrofitting any album they love as a political statement, b/c "great pop album" alone isn't reason enough to celebrate a record now.

cynical question: do they do that for clicks?

what in 2018 isn't?

whoever said upthread that we're back to revering the album is OTM, only now revering the album also includes admiring the way in which the album's politics and mine mesh.

part of this is just what critics do -- imbue albums with importance -- but the rest, at least of what I've read, comes from a place of "the personal is political." (and not always explicitly, but also from a place of "it is valid and often enlightening to talk about music as it is received by listeners and by the world" -- I'm pretty sure this showed up in one or more of Tom Ewing's taxonomy-of-pop-writing articles, none that I'm able to find now though)

xxp I think it's deeper seeded (and genuinely less cynical) than that. Writers have so deeply internalized what gets clicks that it's rewired their critical minds in some ways. Like, a whole generation of writers has been trained to think of music criticism primarily on these terms, and that's become how they construct arguments about an artist's worth

what

care to back up that statement with some... anything

so you're implying subconscious "performative wokeness" or something? isn't that more cynical?

this is genuinely the first time I've heard the old false consciousness saw applied to pageviews and I'm just kind of stunned right now still

From the POV of my students, the majority of whom belong to an ethnic/racial/sexual minority, it's refreshing that they get to pick the pop stars who most correspond with their politics. That's not cynicism.

so you're implying subconscious "performative wokeness" or something? isn't that more cynical?

― Evan, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 9:15 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's way more cynical imo

and as with most critiques of How We Write Now Lol it ignores the relationship between writer and editorial to make a point about young writers having been brainwashed over time into being click-hungry paragraph generators. even if you feel you're noticing this as a trend it's, like, impossible to measure and there are roughly 1000000 counterexamples

I always assumed younger writers quietly resented having to churn out 15 pieces about Taylor Swift a month but maybe it's not that quiet.

We see this a lot with Lorde, who put out an immensely lovable album that critics sometimes strained to imbue with an importance it didn’t need in order to enjoy it

idk man. i don't really *agree* with this per se as much as i read... at least one piece trying to twist itself into knots about how important that record is, but otherwise deep reading ... is... part of criticism? like things become important as you excavate meaning from them and apply meaning to them. i mayyyy be bristling at this bc i was recently accused of reading a fall out boy song too deeply (sorry it is very in character that i keep bringing them up in this discussion). none of the other examples you mentioned really register with me: as much i think blonde is less a record than an empty space to project yourself onto (not that that doesn't describe a lot of useful and good art, things that are less substantive than evocatively minimal so that the viewer/listener feels as much a part of the piece as the artist? idk i'm actually rambling now) the writing about it has, ime, always been really sharp and really connected to the personal dimensions of ocean's music. (in fact the other two examples you mentioned, sza and rihanna, are *also* personality showcases with a little to a lot of empty space left for the listener, which the writing responded to i think)

idk. i think something is going on with How We Write Music Crit Now Lol and it's not great—not necessarily a new depth of bad so much as maybe a familiar badness in a different package bc of how social media has reshaped our relationships to songs/albums/artists as well as our relationship to personal expression? but i'm also speaking from a position where i've basically already decided forever that pans are a very narrow and dull form of criticism for the most part, and extramusical elements getting drawn into pans is potentially a long established tradition, it's just easier to observe the pattern now bc literally everyone is writing the same two paragraphs (encouraged by editorial!) about jt and janet and the superb owl

i never participate in these discussions bc my thoughts never feel complete about them lol

i also feel like five different discussions are happening in this thread and i'm responding to like... a third of one conversation

w/o rereading the entire thread to check if anyone's already mentioned this, but a thing that social media has greatly amplified is the real-time 24/7 performance of persona as a key element IN the project, alongside shows and videos and singles and LPs and acting roles and slim volumes of poetry and etc

obviously this dimension has been part of pop since day once (=jenny lind) and was part the ideology of romanticism even before that, but (equally obviously) not 24-7 until quite recently and therefore far less of a faff to work at unravelling and examining and checking the various moving parts against one another

(i am basically only responding to earlier posts i have made, that is how i roll)

agree w/ brad on importance of deep reading whenever applicable; it's an undeniably essential element of finding emotional common ground and through-lines in music or any other art. forcing deep reads on anything, pop or otherwise, is probably silly, but i think it naturally occurs often as not

Has pop music content always had such a strong focus on the artists' personality?

Like, yeah I know that everyone from Bowie to Madonna to Prince were able to reinvent themselves every few years and allow themselves to inhabit these different personas, keeping it fresh etc.

But increasingly it feels like, let's take Taylor for example, pop music requires the listener to invest in TAYLOR as a personality cult.
The music assumes you have some kind of interested in her and her life and career (the whole 'The real Taylor can't come to the phone right now' thing).
This is something that's been around in hip hop since forever, from mentioning the artist by name to whole albums based on real life events. Certain strains of confessional rock music do this too, but usually it's shrouded by metaphorical devices, unless we're talking about Sun Kil Moon or the last Mount Eerie album.
Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky, but you knew that already. Ziggy Stardust died and was reincarnated as Aladdin Sane, but this was more of a panto act. Madonna likely drew inspiration from events in her life, but I don't really remember her singing about HERSELF as Madonna.
Often with an artist like Taylor Swift you're acutely aware that you're listening to Taylor Swift, not just a pop song. It's an illusion-busting and myth-creating effect, a bit like the cultivation of a Twitter feed. It's the creation of a personality rather than a persona. There's little artistic license or theatricality to hide behind. Conceptual flourishes, if they appear problematic, can't be put down to theatrics - they are an transparent extension of the artists' public image. You can't separate the public profile from the music

hah, wrote that before Mark S's post

Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky, but you knew that already.

LMAO Should read: Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky', but you knew that already.

It's difficult to tell whether social media has eroded the importance of MYSTIQUE as a commodity in pop, or whether fans just demand that level of engagement and relateability now (I mean the current biggest pop star is Ed Sheeran so chicken/egg really). I like how tightly limited and controlled Beyonce's public pronouncements are and I wonder how long it'll be before some svengali turns up with an act who are pretty much banned from using social media, and whether you could ever get away with that now.

I mean, there was that whole boomlet of acts kept deliberately anonymous -- the Weeknd before he became a huge pop star, stuff like Who Is Fancy, etc.

Somewhat related is the thing where acts, once they become big, will scrub any prior history of past music deals, demos, names, etc. from the Internet, as not to appear to have failures on one's resume. (or I guess to avoid any problematic old tweets from showing up). Lana Del Rey-gate was the biggest example I can think of where someone actually got called out on it

"Madonna likely drew inspiration from events in her life, but I don't really remember her singing about HERSELF as Madonna. "

A *lot* of the press around LIKE A PRAYER specifically was about her being "honest" (first album after Sean Penn divorce, etc) although she pushed back at that assumption and played with it. In a VOGUE interview (May '89) that was subheded as exploring "the private woman behind the public merchandise," she said “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art... They try to make everything an absolute truth.” And in INTERVIEW (also May '89) she said “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna told Interview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”

(sorry about the wonky pasting, i cut and pasted it from my review)

Often with an artist like Taylor Swift you're acutely aware that you're listening to Taylor Swift, not just a pop song. It's an illusion-busting and myth-creating effect, a bit like the cultivation of a Twitter feed. It's the creation of a personality rather than a persona

Not really. You can choose not to. The act of singing in from of a mike or an audience means creating a character.

a brand

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a brand to settle where I will.

I do not relate to mattdc’s breakdown of millennial pop at all, and I also think 180 degrees differently than him about the effect of streaming: its been a long needed corrective to an industry that had become detached from culture

Also I know it’s a cynical marketing move for many of them but OBVIOUSLY SoundCloud rap is the new decade pop punk

Over here that's the stuff that critics gravitated towards. Obviously that leaves out a lot but if you pick any chart from, say 2003 there's a hell of a lot of music that even the most pro-pop critic couldn't be arsed to mount a defence of, any more than they could The Script or whoever.

I also feel that streaming has enabled new sounds (eg UK afro) to break into the pop mainstream more quickly whole also making the charts more homogeneous - there's a definite sound that I think of as Spotify pop at this stage and daytime Radio 1 was full of it last year.

(Also the US and UK feel further apart and more divergent than they've been for a while which is going to lead to a fair amount of talking at cross purposes)

(Also the US and UK feel further apart and more divergent than they've been for a while which is going to lead to a fair amount of talking at cross purposes)

otm, has been for a while; the only people who care about Xenomania in the US are people who read about pop music online

No one cares about Xenomania here either nowadays and the very name would probably elicit blank glances from people even thought they were given the keys to Britain's biggest manufactured pop group and reality TV/tabloid sensation for pretty much their entire career. That era - 2004/05 in particular - was the last time the two countries felt this far apart, particularly because our charts were full of Britrock at the time. They've moved closer together and further apart at least once since then.

i've been reading this all with a lot of fascination, and i just want to throw in some of my 2 cents as someone on the cusp of "millennial"/"gen z".

i notice that, at least amongst my peers, there's a general disconnect between their ACTUAL listening habits and personal tastes and their tendencies for what they post on social media. the latter is often determined by what's discussed here—political leanings, calling out artists, dissecting their political alignments, dunking on and stanning them to varying degrees (this extends down to indie too! a FB group im in recently renamed itself to Porchrician Thunderdome for a time because everyone had been mocking porches for so long). however, there's a general self-awareness that that behavior doesn't necessarily represent actual listening habits—a favored phrase is "all ur favs are problematic". in reality, a lot of listening seems determined by intimacy, personal alignment, and a sense of relatability on a smaller scale, rather than on a political one—in tandem with a shrugging "they're bops tho," which defines a lot of engagement with chart pop. the intersection of the two is where you get an artist like Carly Rae Jepsen.

what does seem to get elided for me via these forums is an engagement with the outside world that's based on observation rather than participation—possibly as a result of the globalized listening ecosystem, lived experience and authenticity performance is valued far above deconstruction or the inhabiting of characters not identifiably proximal to the artist. if you look back, the big albums of the 2010s are defined by a continued move away from storytelling and towards theatrical performance of the self, which your mileage may vary on the value of.

these are two sides of the same coin, and it's one that poses a weird question for pop music (and society!) that feels like it's coming to a head right now. what does broad populism look like when the determining factor in securing fans is the unpacking of one's specific position, sociopolitically or emotionally or both, in society? i can't imagine a madonna, or even a michael jackson, coming about in the current pop ecosystem.

the counterpoint i guess is people like bruno mars, an exception to a lot of these ideas. but he comes to his popularity through a different kind of *historical* specificity not unlike what the weeknd did with his own pop turn—nostalgia for that assumed universalism which in itself represents a sort of specificity.

this is a rambling post and kind of disorganized, but i think y'all get my drift

there's definitely a disconnect between my actual listening habits and what I post on social media, but generally that's more because people don't give a shit about what I listen to / don't want to hear about me go on about the same 10 albums 100 times each

(the "I" to be clear is referring to me and only me, this isn't directed at anyone else)

idk. i think something is going on with How We Write Music Crit Now Lol and it's not great—not necessarily a new depth of bad so much as maybe a familiar badness in a different package bc of how social media has reshaped our relationships to songs/albums/artists as well as our relationship to personal expression? but i'm also speaking from a position where i've basically already decided forever that pans are a very narrow and dull form of criticism for the most part, and extramusical elements getting drawn into pans is potentially a long established tradition, it's just easier to observe the pattern now bc literally everyone is writing the same two paragraphs (encouraged by editorial!) about jt and janet and the superb owl

i never participate in these discussions bc my thoughts never feel complete about them lol

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Tuesday, 6 February 2018 16:42 (five hours ago) Permalink

this feels right to me.

In some ways my frustrations now are about seeing critical approaches that I "fought for" (to use that term very loosely) being used in ways I find uninspiring and lazy. This is not to say that I fought for the wrong things but rather that no approach to thinking about music comes pre-guaranteed with significance, meaning, nuance, insight etc.

In fact maybe what frustrates me is our apparent failure to remember that fact.

Perhaps the biggest way in which callout-culture writing has morphed into a kind of nu-rockism is not necessarily any of the specific stances taken but rather the way in which particular frames are simply assumed to lend an air of depth and authority to what is not necessarily anything more than a superficial hot-take, thereby discouraging differentiation in thinking/writing outside of relatively shallow political binaries. "Justin Timberlake sucks because he is the embodiment of white male privilege" may well be correct (or more precisely: there are interesting and potentially persuasive ways to make this argument) but as an argument it shouldn't be assumed to have any special significance or power simply because it gestures towards a political frame.

For me the point of calling out rockism was less about demanding a rejection of any notion of authenticity than it was asking that we think harder about it, that we unpack what we mean when we try to articulate why a given artist or piece of music feels more real or more important or more auratic to us than something else does - and come up with something better than just a circular hierarchy without foundation (this is authentic because it is not that, and vice versa).

On balance I think that the current popularity of politicized hot-takes still tends to produce more thoughtful writing than the worst artifacts of old-rockism, but I see similar risks in its codification and formularization - in particular, the risk that the apparent self-evidence of our dichotomies provides us a free pass to think less carefully, both about music and about politics.

Probably the other issue which feeds into the changes to music crit is the influence of twitter, and the way in which it elevates the bald assertion to a higher level of social and critical significance in terms of instigating "important conversations" about current issues/people/events.

A lot of music writing which I consider to fall within the rubric of "callout culture" feels like an assertion that started as a tweet and then was padded out to 400 words. And typically the assertion (at least if you haven't seen it in like twenty-five versions already) seems useful as a prompt for thinking, whereas the padding is just padding (i.e. the prompt evidently failed for the writer at least).

A related but separate influence is the way we now expect articles to lead with their most strident proposition.

Agreed, Tim. I get the feeling that it's common for people to start formulating their savage hot takes ready before they even hear/watch something to maximise the amount of likes or retweets they'll get. There's a competition to become the first to have the most biting take on something, with "I'M SCREAMING!" being the sought out reply from the Twittersphere. And then that hot take become consensus about art - JT is a textbook example of this.

The opposite is true for artists who align closest with the, I guess, millennial political ideal. Like, I can already tell you exactly what the Twitter consensus to whatever Beyonce does next will be. No matter what it is. A lot of knee-jerk "SLAY QUEEN" kinda stuff with little reflection.

are we still pretending to be talking about legacy media critics

if you seriously think the reason Beyonce gets better reviews than Justin Timberlake, is because of those damn millennials and their social justice, and not because Beyonce is making excellent, innovative music and Justin Timberlake is making terrible, dated music, then you should probably stop hate-reading Twitter, or at least redirect your complaints to the comments section of Salon

Some of us most certainly are, others should probably think more deeply about why they associate appropriated slang w their ideological opponents

I wish Katherine could see my twitter timeline right now bc this conversation is really not just happening among Whiney style chapo/cum town podcast listeners. This convo is happening in lots of different spaces ...

I just don’t trust any consensus but that doesn’t mean I’m eager to watch the music press from caring too much about Beyoncé to caring too much about Wilco

if you seriously think the reason Beyonce gets better reviews than Justin Timberlake, is because of those damn millennials and their social justice, and not because Beyonce is making excellent, innovative music and Justin Timberlake is making terrible, dated music, then you should probably stop hate-reading Twitter, or at least redirect your complaints to the comments section of Salon

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Wednesday, 7 February 2018 2:34 AM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you seriously think the reason Beyonce gets better reviews than Justin Timberlake, is because of those damn millennials and their social justice, and not because Beyonce is making excellent, innovative music and Justin Timberlake is making terrible, dated music, then you should probably stop hate-reading Twitter, or at least redirect your complaints to the comments section of Salon

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Wednesday, 7 February 2018 2:34 AM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW I'm not talking about "legacy music critics" per se and I certainly don't think the above proposition - but I'm not sure if this is directed at me or just at triggercut?

Sorry the first quote was meant to be the query about whether we're pretending to talk about legacy music critics.

my dumb outside-writing take is that 'poptimism' was always related to a specific brand of pop sound, although varied in origin and basis, that spanned the original reach

and for a lot of time, it was maligned by some writers! but the jump-on, around the y2k point, was when a lot of things were coalescing and creating things that were both "pop" and popular, whether it was the boy/girl groups, the soloists, the max martin acolytes and timbaland bastions. the nu-madonnas, the torch bearers and rock inverters

there are a lot of modern analogues but a lot of them are consciously or unconsciously seizing on the same themes, the continued pop from the familiars or the carly raes doing good things for the base. but the idea that popular music at large was the same thing as that "pop" is a weird idea, because of the poptimist duality

half of it was always some lineage/recidivism riff championing the bits that were now popular and the other half was pushing music critics liked that was popular but also intriguing

there were a bunch of things that were lost because like all genre segments, genre and love for genre is always backward-looking and eventually what we accept as "pop" slides into that maw

tl;dr maybe I should get into Imagine Dragons now

(actually listened to their stuff today after hearing it in a movie trailer, my early take was "big riffs and choruses and that's it" and for fuck's sake that is actually the whole band concept, their verse parts are so bad)

the threads are blurring together at this point; when this originally came up, days ago, in the defense of Justin Timberlake against the dreaded politics (I cannot believe that this endless dark night of the critical soul has arrived because of MAN OF THE WOODS, of all albums), the claim was "oh, we're talking about legacy media critics doing this, not people on Twitter."

does that album have a couple passable cuts to anchor a tour where he does Timberlake standards? that's really the thing

For what it’s worth I literally never said it was only about legacy media critics, my disdain for a lame critic consensus extends to people on Twitter sure but is less about any specific position than a set of shared assumptions which yes are currently reflected by certain legacy journalists

But I understand now that any criticism of those shared assumptions & the cynicism with which they’re donned like a costume could *only* come from being a Gamergater who thinks Beyoncé is bad 🙄

Imo worse than having been on the wrong side of an argument is opportunistically switching sides & pretending you meant it all along, I find this cynicism pretty unforgiveable, if you’re only right when it’s popular you’re never really right

I think Steven Hyden packages it neatly with his bit on the Default Smart Opinion:

"A Default Smart Opinion is an opinion that’s generally considered to be inarguable because it’s repeated ad nauseam by seemingly intelligent individuals. . . . The usual formula for a regular smart opinion — research plus careful consideration plus nuanced analysis — doesn’t apply. You needn’t actually listen to a Nickelback album or watch The Big Bang Theory or study Kim Kardashian’s collected philosophical scrolls. You merely have to recite recycled bits of conventional wisdom.

Like, no one has to justify their piling on Timberlake at the moment because The Default Smart Opinion is just that he's now bad. You don't even have to listen to his new album to join in! But yeah, regardless of how I personally feel about Timberlake or Beyoncé, I think using these shared assumptions as a launching point for a piece are almost always counterproductive to good or interesting music writing. Either in praise or in denigration.

this is a rambling post and kind of disorganized, but i think y'all get my drift

― austinb, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 8:16 AM (ten hours ago)

i notice that, at least amongst my peers, there's a general disconnect between their ACTUAL listening habits and personal tastes and their tendencies for what they post on social media. the latter is often determined by what's discussed here—political leanings, calling out artists, dissecting their political alignments, dunking on and stanning them to varying degrees (this extends down to indie too! a FB group im in recently renamed itself to Porchrician Thunderdome for a time because everyone had been mocking porches for so long).

I definitely don't

ok, but the actual Default Smart Opinion at work here is that "____________ are vapid, are listening to music the wrong way and ruining music writing," where _________ is never defined as a group of real people with names but instead by an ever-changing group of nebulous signifiers that, for some reason, match exactly all the reactionary stereotypes about "millennials" and progressive writers. This opinion is not questioned and never examined.

Katherine, are you being ... triggered ... by triggercut?

Also, the only person doing the whole "wow new music writers are ESS JAY DUB cucks" thing is triggercut, a poster I've never heard of, so we don't really need to get too far off topic here

steven hyden has no sense of irony does he

Manic Pixie Default Opinion

steven hyden has no sense of irony does he

― lowercase (eric), Wednesday, February 7, 2018 7:20 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he lacks a lot of sense

and humor. Does he think "study Kim Kardashian’s collected philosophical scrolls" will have the Default Smart Opiners slapping their knees and going, "This'll knock'em dead"?

You'd be surprised!

He really does fill that role of craft beer philosopher for a sea of middle class rock music fans quite successfully, for better or worse.

well the position that elevated him to 'importance' was one where he was hired to be klosterman ii so...

Yeah, Hyden is not the guy to talk about coasting on received wisdom.

xp with grawlix, and seriously

anyway i think tim is pretty OTM about this. and it's certainly not only millennials who can get drawn in by the oxytocin rush of likes and retweets and "social media popularity." if anything "legacy music critics" (which is also a fairly nebulous term!) are probably more susceptible to it because it's proof that they're not out of touch despite their bosses' needling and editors' turning down of their pitches. (probably worth noting: having that thought just made me google "eric garland age.")

I still have yet to locate this mysterious distinguished 60-year-old male critic for a paper of record who writes I'M SCREAMING on social media

The screaming is DEAFENING!

— Bob Lefsetz (@Lefsetz) June 17, 2012

funny, but that's not the same and everyone here knows it

maybe they're secretly Russian trolls like large swaths of the internet are turning out to be, who knows

'twas merely a jokey interlude, do carry on

it's not simply writing I'M SCREAMING, katherine. surely you know, even in your seemingly endless crusade to prove that concern about the way music journalism (and journalism as a whole) is going is merely ageism and nothing else, that there's a spectrum of effects here. although if you want to see adults trying on the lingo they perceive to be "of the youth," i suggest you look at any media outlet's snapchat story.

I don't think it's just ageism, but I do think it's displaced resentment: resentment that's really about a certain group of people existing and saying things. this resentment happens to be the exact same resentment shared by the most reactionary parts of the world, and is often phrased in the same terms. I don't know how many times I have to rephrase this until it gets across.

and yes, I'm invested in this, given that I am part of the wave of writers who have supposedly ruined everything for everyone.

katherine, again, literally one person in this thread was doing that

at this point it's been, what, five threads across three days, all because people didn't like a mediocre-to-terrible Justin Timberlake album and thought some plausibly racist elements about its elevation were plausibly racist?

given that I am part of the wave of writers who have supposedly ruined everything for everyone

no offense but a lot of your re-triangulating of peoples' arguments seems to be an attempt to bait people into saying exactly this to you, even though nobody really thinks it!

I still have yet to locate this mysterious distinguished 60-year-old male critic for a paper of record who writes I'M SCREAMING on social media

Well, me neither. This is a a misrepresentation of what I said. What I was saying is that music critics (whether they’re “legacy” or not, that doesn’t really come into it) increasingly seem like they’re writing for that kind of response. I just feel like it’s getting harder for writers to represent their thoughts and feelings on music honestly when they know that saying the “wrong thing” can set off a firestorm against them. But this is just my perception of course. So, a question for the music writers here: how much do you think about a potential social media response to a piece before posting it? And how have you dealt with any social media backlash you’ve had to a piece? FWIW, I think the writers who also happen to post here demonstrate more honesty and integrity than the writers of the kind of pieces I’m referring to here.

I also resent the accusation that I’m arguing that “new music writers are SJW cucks” thing. Come on, now. I don’t believe that at all. I think social media is having a huge impact on music writing, so I just want to have an honest discussion about what those impacts are.

like there are a lot of STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE WAY JOURNALISM IS MADE AND CONSUMED at work here that go far beyond "we hate the kids"* and it's frustrating that you're continually recentering the argument so that it's writer-focused

*if anything it's "fire all the executives and also nationalize google"

The sum total of my thoughts about the potential social media response to anything I write is to lock my account before anything gets posted so I can at least cordon off the angry tweets about my writing ability and sometimes my appearance to a place where they do not bombard me in the office. I forgot to do this for the Grammys piece because I was too sleep-deprived, and ended up regretting it.

oh and nationalize facebook too obv

thread to track Poptimism 2.0 katherine

Thread to Defend Justin Timberlake Against The Mean Millennials doesn't exist yet

ah, yes, it was definitely the rogue millennials and not the gen-xers and xennials assigning, editing and dictating the editorial visions of outlets they own and run

i mean if you're getting shitty dms that sucks but to me your replies from the post-grammys scrum look pretty positive? 'magnificent' and 'powerful' are pretty great compliments and ones that not many people receive

This is where the benefits of being a niche writer covering niche music really show up.

how much do you think about a potential social media response to a piece before posting it?

Not at all.

And how have you dealt with any social media backlash you’ve had to a piece?

This has never happened to me.

The sum total of my thoughts about the potential social media response to anything I write is to lock my account before anything gets posted so I can at least cordon off the angry tweets about my writing ability and sometimes my appearance to a place where they do not bombard me in the office. I forgot to do this for the Grammys piece because I was too sleep-deprived, and ended up regretting it.

didn't you get into a fight with some shitty nu-metal band recently lol xp

didn't you get into a fight with some shitty nu-metal band recently lol xp

Ha! You're right - I forgot all about that. They wound up printing my piece on a T-shirt, I believe, which I thought was kind of awesome. (They didn't send me one, though, which sucked.)

time for us to all take to twitter to @ that band with "send unperson the shirt, you cowards"

The idea that young social justice forward millennials love the discursive status quo seems like a massive assumption on katherine’s part to me.

I've seen countless variations on young justice-oriented people saying "stop wasting time arguing whether Taylor Swift is a white nationalist when ICE are rounding up children in hospices", etc. There are too many cases that look like publications taking important social-justice conversations and monetising them with incendiary thinkpieces that are probably written in good faith but cynically commissioned to capitalise on the angry reaction they're going to cause, often with the kids writing them hung out to dry.

Katherine, you mention getting abuse for your work *a lot* on here. Do you think you are more open about this than others? Because if being a (female) critic in 2018 means being harassed (with misogynistic bullshit I presume) for every single thing you write, it's even worse out there than I thought.

belatedly: it's a matter of degrees. I get more of it than writers who do not write about pop artists with easily provoked fanbases -- the appearance stuff, I think, was about a Fifth Harmony review, although it could well have been for a Halsey or Jessie J or Christina Aguilera review -- but I get way, way, WAY, way less than other female writers, I think (I obviously don't have a full slate of it). And the most actively malicious actors, as far as writing about music goes, tend to... focus? (that's the wrong word, and the gruesomely wrong word) on other writers. and I probably get less overtly misogynistic stuff and definitely do not get the racist harassment others do. this disclaimer should probably go on every time I mention it.

I don't know that I'm more open about it; it just has bothered me more and more as I get older

No, you don't need to stick a disclaimer on it at all. It's still harassment, even if others may have it worse. It's a matter of degrees probably, but it's both harassment and both completely wrong. I get you'd be an easy target for bile coming from a pop star fanbase, which sucks but is probably not as invested or substantial as either critique or harassment. It's gruesome but I fear the word 'focus' is all too real in the instance you describe.

What a world, though.

i've noticed you say that before, Katherine, and I'm sorry it happens. For what it's worth, i feel pretty fortunate to sit on the sidelines and watch music debate between those I consider to be exceptional writers and thoughtful debaters. Katherine, Maura, deej, unperson, Whiney, Tim...I know about a tenth of what any one of you know so it makes me feel like a bit of a student (or, to put a more self-flagellating spin on it, a dilettante...since I have zero commitment to any one area of music interest.)

anyway fuck those jerks, if I ever see a Katherine byline I read it.

Yes, good discussion.

omar little much, much more than a dilettante imo

https://media.giphy.com/media/6g4tyNc0VEGiI/giphy.gif

also, one of your threads from 13 years ago got bumped on ile today. an excellent thread about birdshit. just fyi

Damn, that one is a classic joint from my dearly departed twenties.

anyway, sorry if I upset anyone

Katherine I was intrigued by your comments above about feeling part of a "wave" of writers disrupting the role of legacy music critics.

Is that merely a timing thing (i.e. anyone who started writing after a certain point in time is part of the wave) or do you see your approach to music writing as meaningfully distinct?

the term "legacy music critics" interests me too. What does it mean in 2018 -- the equivalent of music crit tenure insofar as this is possible?

It's probably a function of first writing about music online myself (though scarily this was now almost 20 years ago), but I feel like the gulf between what I would consider to be "my generation" and people who got their start in the 70s through 90s is at least as distinct as any gulf vis a vis Internet 2.0 writers.

Though of course there's not really "gulfs" per se, rather an endless succession of shifts which different writers alternately embrace, reject or ignore (or some occasionally convoluted and contradictory combination of all three reactions).

just to keep everyone informed - brad quit ilx over an incident last night - can those of you who are friends with him maybe persuade him back to ilm at least, with the promise of emo and hugs or something :(

him/them/brad :)

What incident?

Oh never mind, I know what it was.

It's probably a function of first writing about music online myself (though scarily this was now almost 20 years ago), but I feel like the gulf between what I would consider to be "my generation" and people who got their start in the 70s through 90s is at least as distinct as any gulf vis a vis Internet 2.0 writers.

I had a discussion about this with (I guess) former ilxor xhukh at one point, and it seems to me there were at least 3 generations of pre-internet music critics:

• Old Fucks Who Started It All (Marcus, Landau, Marsh, Christgau, Meltzer, Bangs, etc.)
• 70s Rolling Stone Crew (Cameron Crowe, Jaan Uhzelski, etc., etc.)
• 80s Voice Writers and Assorted Brits (Greg Tate et al.)
• 90s Kids (too many names to mention here, and I suppose this is where I fit in, since my first paid byline was November '96)

Is that merely a timing thing (i.e. anyone who started writing after a certain point in time is part of the wave) or do you see your approach to music writing as meaningfully distinct?

It's a timing and demographic thing, I'd date it to around 2010 or so

My first paid byline was spring '99 but did it intermittently through 2003, after which it became a more regular freelance phenomenon. I guess I'm on the late end of the blog cycle.

but no, I don't remotely see myself as any kind of #disruptortwopointoh, unless the thing that was to be disrupted was my own security, which, stellar job all around there to me

FWIW my surprise was mostly driven by feeling very um 'close' to your writing style - as in the voice just feels so familiar to me in the best possible sense that it seemed startling to then ask myself rhetorically "is this writer in fact emblematic of a new generation that I don't fully understand?"

It's a timing and demographic thing, I'd date it to around 2010 or so

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Thursday, February 8, 2018 5:01 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tumblr generation

my only overarching issue w the tumblr generation is a tendency to think they invented politicization of music writing

i do think i came up in an era where you had to argue radical ideas from within a 'reasonable' frame whereas post tumblr it seems a radical approach is taken more seriously

but they did invent the meme-ification of music writing, give'em that

the term "legacy music critics" interests me too. What does it mean in 2018 -- the equivalent of music crit tenure insofar as this is possible?

It's always been weird for me, I think. If you count my grad school work at UCI, when I was also the campus paper's main music reviewer, then I've been doing work one way or another since 1992, and though I was let go as a freelancer at the AMG in 2012, I did spend almost fifteen years contributing to its database on a regular basis. But it's never been my *job* and I never thought of it or any of the other work for all the other spots I've written for over the years as what I've done in terms of my day-to-day. (Which I realize is the case for you as well, Alfred, as well as many others.) Instead -- helped by the fact that in 1993 I started talking with people via newsgroups, email and the Web in general -- it's felt more like I've just always been steadily talking here and there about things as I choose. And it's a reason why I'm terribly casual about what level of work I do or don't do at this stage of my life, I pitch as I do, chime in as I do, don't feel the need to grapple as deeply as I might have done in the past, but that's not that I'm not thinking about things. I'm just thinking about a lot of other things too. And honestly I'd rather read more thoughts from others in most cases rather than put whatever supposed imprimatur I could on a subject of discussion.

the problem with music writing in 2018 is that the original purpose of music writing was to explain to readers what a particular piece of music sounded like and offer an opinion on whether or not the reader should try to hear it for themselves

mid-2000s music writing was especially valuable to people because online consumption of music was a disorganized and constantly changing landscape and music writers served as guides who helped readers find the best stuff there

spotify new music friday effectively drops a stack of free promo CDs on everyone's doorstep every week, and spotify themselves do a fine job of organizing new releases in such a way that helps every individual user easily find the new stuff that best suits their particular interests. pitchfork's front page can't compete with spotify's "new releases" tab. spotify already knows what you personally like to listen to and can make educated guesses about what you want to check out based on that data. what determines the way pitchfork's front page looks on any given day? most of the reviews they run every day only show up there because a publicist asked nicely. they're reviews of mediocre records that most of the site's writers don't have any interest in hearing. as a reader, it feels alienating.

i don't like the JT review, but i also can't blame young writers for trying to find a way to write about music in a way that feels important and useful. streaming has removed the need for music writing to function as a consumer guide because the audience no longer needs to spend money to hear music for themselves. it's no longer necessary for music writers to organize the chaotic landscape of online music consumption for the benefit of listeners because that landscape is no longer chaotic, and the data about listening habits that spotify and apple have access to is much a much more effective tool for organizing and recommending music than the sum total of knowledge contained in the minds of all professional music writers combined.

young music writers are not worse than old music writers, old music writers just had the benefit of circumstances that made their writing more important and useful to readers. there was a clear purpose to what they were doing that readers understood and appreciated. that's no longer the case, now.

I don't buy any of that. My interest in art criticism has never been for it to function as a consumer guide. I want to read someone who understands something. I want to read writing where someone is putting important things that other people sense about a given piece of work into words.

^^^

I would guess that most people in this thread have always consumed music criticism to better work out how to listen to music more than to work out what to listen to.

streaming has removed the need for music writing to function as a consumer guide because the audience no longer needs to spend money to hear music for themselves. it's no longer necessary for music writers to organize the chaotic landscape of online music consumption for the benefit of listeners because that landscape is no longer chaotic, and the data about listening habits that spotify and apple have access to is much a much more effective tool for organizing and recommending music than the sum total of knowledge contained in the minds of all professional music writers combined.

This is simply not true. Plenty of people enjoy hearing something that sounds nothing like anything they've listened to before. Also, Spotify is terrible at "organizing new releases in such a way that helps every individual user easily find the new stuff that best suits their particular interests" if those interests include jazz, classical, music from non-US/UK countries, or basically anything that's not utterly standard mass-market Western pop. And that's before we even get into the issue of writing about music that's not available on Spotify at all (there's a lot of it, you know!) and will thus require some actual effort on a reader's part to seek out.

I think the biggest influence on this whole thing-we-are-discussing is a social media inspired change in how we sort and organise ourselves and what information and opinions and allegiances and signifiers we use for that.

There’s a reason why 2016 articles on Kanye vs Taylor and Bernie vs Hillary could feel startlingly similar.

i.e. I think it’s too narrow to frame this solely in terms of patterns of music consumption

who is reading about jazz, classical, or music from non-US/UK countries? who is publishing it? who is reading and publishing writing about music by writers who have great passion for and expertise on the thing they're writing about?

i do not see any evidence that there's a market for nuance, for writing that is educated and/or educational, for expertise. i see news articles that summarize tweets and rushed takes on mass-market pop from good writers who are too busy trying to make rent to spend any time at all thinking about music that isn't the stuff everyone else is talking about and therefore approving pitches for.

i'm old enough to remember what the platonic ideal of music writing was supposed to look like, and i don't see anything like it today. what i see sure looks like an industry that's on the brink of being automated out of existence.

idk, The Wire is still in business, although others could speak to what capacity it is operating as a publication

books on music still sell reasonably well, as far as books go

I have no idea what "the platonic ideal of music writing" is supposed to be, especially when music writing has always been pretty varied. Any examples there?

who is reading about jazz, classical, or music from non-US/UK countries?

Lots of people. Granted, many of them are over 30, so they really have no excuse for continuing to exist, but they do.

who is publishing it? who is reading and publishing writing about music by writers who have great passion for and expertise on the thing they're writing about?

The Wire, Jazz Times, Down Beat, Bandcamp Daily, Stereogum, Pitchfork, the Log Journal, WBGO.com...those are just the first places I thought of. There are fucking tons of outlets for serious, thoughtful pieces on music that requires serious thought. Are there as many as there were a few years ago? No, but...

i do not see any evidence that there's a market for nuance, for writing that is educated and/or educational, for expertise. i see news articles that summarize tweets and rushed takes on mass-market pop from good writers who are too busy trying to make rent to spend any time at all thinking about music that isn't the stuff everyone else is talking about and therefore approving pitches for.

You're not looking hard enough. Seriously.

i'm old enough to remember what the platonic ideal of music writing was supposed to look like, and i don't see anything like it today. what i see sure looks like an industry that's on the brink of being automated out of existence.

You're wrong. But your first question makes me think you don't actually care, anyway. You probably like whatever the algorithms tell you you should like, and that's fine. It's a big world. There's room for all of us.

the wire, sure, that. unforced genuine expertise presented without concern for the popularity of the thing being written about. archival work focused on music that might otherwise never be discussed or cataloged, serious and thoughtful discussion of music that never relies on conventional wisdom or Default Smart Opinions.

what is the wire's circulation? who is reading that stuff? what do you think is bigger, the audience that's looking for great writing about music otherwise might not have interested the reader or the audience that's looking for Default Smart Opinions at lightning speed they can then parrot back to their friends in real life in order to seem hip and knowledgeable?

how many of the writers who are capable of the type of great thinking and great writing that a mag like wire might publish are just giving it away for free on here or elsewhere anyway? how many examples have you come across of writers who do their good writing about the subjects they are actually extremely passionate about on their tumblr or wordpress blog for free and inferior hot takes on mediocre zeitgeist records as paid work for publications?

did you really register an account just to complain on this thread in a long-winded manner?

i do not see any evidence that there's a market for nuance, for writing that is educated and/or educational, for expertise. i see news articles that summarize tweets and rushed takes on mass-market pop from good writers who are too busy trying to make rent to spend any time at all thinking about music that isn't the stuff everyone else is talking about and therefore approving pitches for.

your unspoken assumption here is that "mass-market pop," and writing about it, cannot be nuanced, educated and/or educational

I don't buy any of that. My interest in art criticism has never been for it to function as a consumer guide. I want to read someone who understands something. I want to read writing where someone is putting important things that other people sense about a given piece of work into words.

― timellison

otm

Fader, Okayplayer, Afropop.org, remezcla, songlines, plus a small handful of major Papers/magazine writers and alt-Weekly ones

Cover non-us, non-uk Music

did you really register an account just to complain on this thread in a long-winded manner?

― mh, Saturday, February 10, 2018 1:24 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

srsly

your unspoken assumption here is that "mass-market pop," and writing about it, cannot be nuanced, educated and/or educational

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine)

sure it can, but nuance and expertise are inherently less valuable to audiences now that it is easier to hear music than it is to read about it. people who are still reading about pop music are looking for Default Smart Opinions. they do not want to learn, they want to have their biases confirmed. you should know this better than anyone; all of the nuance and passion that inhabits your writing about popular music cannot do anything to stop your readers from heaping abuse onto you as punishment for your unwillingness to reinforce Default Smart Opinions.

i'm not advocating for music writing to become an online marketplace of Default Smart Opinions about pop music, but i think it's silly to pretend that's not what's happening just because there are small corners of the internet where communities form around other perspectives. who is the audience? what do they want? critics don't ask those questions enough.

the audience is Jann Wenner and he wants you to say nice things about U2, I think

who is the audience? what do they want? critics don't ask those questions enough.

Again, you're just wrong. Critics ask themselves these questions every day. They do so while formulating pitches.

what do you think is bigger, the audience that's looking for great writing about music otherwise might not have interested the reader or the audience that's looking for Default Smart Opinions at lightning speed they can then parrot back to their friends in real life in order to seem hip and knowledgeable?

I am aware that I write for a small audience. That's why I do it. I have consciously chosen to make a 20+ year career out of writing about things that only a few people are interested in, because those people are very interested. I seek a passionate audience, and the way to find a passionate audience is to write about obscure artists. (Or superhero movies.)

fwiw re: the argument i was having with katherine this seems relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/arts/music/popcast-justin-timberlake-meek-mill-twitter-criticism.html

it's no longer necessary for music writers to organize the chaotic landscape of online music consumption for the benefit of listeners because that landscape is no longer chaotic

even if your premises about streaming services are right, the way they operate to provide music for consumption would still present a need for 'organization' by writers because the services conceal, even obliterate, the social and personal contexts which were the matrix in which chaos-organizing music writing worked.

Yeah j. Otm btw music writing is for people who love good criticism and good writing not for ppl looking for musics recommendations, tho in past eras a lot of hacks got by bc it coincided w those things

I've come to think that the best critical writing (music, art, lit - whatever) is an end in itself - ie not parasitical of, or dependent on, the medium of choice. Consumption has altered the market dramatically, but the good writers will always produce because that's what writers do. I do find that the best stuff is much harder to source (I probably mean 'stumble across' as much as anything), however, and this can lead to a weird kind of reading paralysis. Back in the day, Twitter was a goldmine, but now it's just too noisy.

this article responds to the title in the photo

https://www.avclub.com/heres-why-you-dont-like-new-music-any-more-1822926904

"This all makes sense, of course. We’re still developing physically, emotionally, and sexually in our early teens"

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/sgp-catalog-images/region_US/showtime_svod-130064-Full-Image_GalleryBackground-en-US-1483994509386._RI_SX940_.jpg

"RANDALL!"

Based on incontrovertible, anecdotal evidence, that's mostly true for non-obsessive types, i.e. not ILM, i.e. most people.

yeah, no shit

non-movie people keep making movie memes referencing the franchises of their youth iirc

That was less a dig at pomenitul and more about a conversation about an aggregated news post about a Times story about a study that found something most of us knew

the comments truly prove that while most people lock in their tastes early, internet commenters are quick to tell you that they are not the average person

this study definitely seems pretty no-shit

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-songs.html

THAT SAID i really do think that there's something to be said for the better marketing that existed even ten years ago — these days, simple awareness of new music is very low among the general populace because of the ways media consumption habits have been rewired. add trump's sucking up all the air to that and it's nearly fatal

gauging how my coworkers (mostly extremely normal cubicle-dwelling suburban types) listen to music is illuminating and has really changed over time

the one that makes no sense to me is my coworker who is in his mid 30s and mostly has youtube sitting open with either 90s rock or a handful of newer things streaming on his work computer. somehow, since youtube has some instructional stuff on it, it's not blocked by the work web filter. but it's restricted mode so it's incredibly variable what you can get to. he also likes imagine dragons, I think

https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/

some definite weird categorization is going on in the charts with the prominence of synths in #1 hits -- mainly, uh, a bunch that say "no synth" clearly have synths (mickey, power of love)

but other than that, some good (albeit traditional) observations with data to back it up:

1. pop music is becoming more homogenous

2. the working environment of music production is something that has never been seen before

(2) is one that is really interesting to me. 4+ and sometimes 10+ people working on a song, where one is assigned a snare person, and s/he is in charge of finding the right snare sound; ditto for kick drum person, etc.

laying the framework of a tune, then pumping out songs this way, with your man zedd being the most prominent example

seems a little contradictory at first, but this:

From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.

just seems like a sad state for music to be in. so each producer is basically a manager that hires different people for different parts of the song -- something like this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-song-the-middle-zedd-maren-morris-grey.html

In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.

and, again, rockist although it may be, but hip hop (and i would add edm) is the main genre pushing this:

Hip hop is now the dominant genre, a track-and-hook archetype. Beats are programmed, copy and pasted or downloaded to mimic top producers. Recreating whatever’s fashionable has never been easier.

i think all this would be fine, except musical diversity in top 40 hits is close to nil

That new John Seabrook books gets into the hit factor division of labor a bit. One guy does the drums, one guy is good with hooks, one person does lyrics, one does vocal melodies, one does bass, etc. But all more or less independently.

as opposed to the old days where charlie would do the drums, and keef would be good with hooks, and mick would do lyrics and vocal melodies (two things!), and bill would do bass, etc.?

josh, i get what you're saying

sadly, people on ilx criticize the lowest of the hanging fruits, and if someone (fact checking cuz) doesn't read the article, they'll just hang on to that

so the argument is that there are now teams of 5+ people producing a track that are assigned specific things like a kick drum or a snare sound and it is all done in a lab, as opposed to in a collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style

keyword in josh's argument is independently, which again, if you didn't read the article, is easy to gloss over

with DAWs, you can pretty much collaborate with anyone, anywhere, which is what happened to the zedd song in the nytimes article i posted

except it's not just collaborating over the internet, it's people assigning a particular part of a song as a producer, not a musician, based on what is hot and popular, so the sounds themselves become closer sonically to each other. there is no longer a unique dynamic or timbre in a maybe slightly differently tuned tom or size of a kick drum, to name a couple examples

the example on the pudding site is that there was still some musical variety in 80s top hits, where now they are closer to each other sonically, and a lot of it is attributed to trying to match the same sonic palette of whatever is a hit, and probably doing so with greater accuracy due to everything being digital

i get all that and i read the article and saw the word "independently."

obviously production methods continue to change and obviously that's going to affect the results.

but it's a continuum, not a seismic shift. technology being introduced, adopted and tweaked over time. as the article notes, pop (and rock and hip-hop and country etc for that matter) artists and producers have always tried to sound like what's hot at any given moment. now they just have more shortcuts to make that happen.

this is misleading...

From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.

...because according to their own numbers, that dropped down to 32 percent from 2015-2017, which is pretty much the same as it was in 1995-1999. which suggests that at least some of the changes they're attributing to current technology and culture may have happened more than two decades ago, for better or worse.

john seabrook has written some insightful pieces on how pop is made, but his quote "the process doesn’t lend itself very well to art" is a little too get-of-my-lawny for my taste.

"collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style" is one way to make musical art. it has never ever been the only way.

"collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style" is one way to make musical art. it has never ever been the only way.

― fact checking cuz, Sunday, June 3, 2018 9:47 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

even with early electronic bands like kraftwerk, music was still done in-person in a collaborative way. unless you're talking about the, what, less than 5% of musique concrete or whatever that had tapes and sent it over to other people. it sounds disingenuous to say "it has never been the only way," since it actually was the only way for most up until, say, the 1970s

...because according to their own numbers, that dropped down to 32 percent from 2015-2017, which is pretty much the same as it was in 1995-1999. which suggests that at least some of the changes they're attributing to current technology and culture may have happened more than two decades ago, for better or worse.

― fact checking cuz, Sunday, June 3, 2018 9:47 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, you're misrepresenting the argument. in the mid-90s, producers weren't assigning a person to find the perfect kick drum online and swapping files over the web en masse and collaborating in real-time. it certainly did happen, but again, you are focusing on like the less than 5% that did to argue that the phenomenon occurring now is no big deal and has happened before. from 2005-2014 there was an increase, then from 2015-2017 it dropped 11 points. personally, i don't consider that an indication that things will go back to how they were in the 80s and before

the data from 2018 onwards will be interesting. zedd's the middle was released this year and he has tapped into a formula that works

i dont understand the concern here at all

zedd will be out of fashion in a year if he isn't already

so far this thread seems more like rockism 2.0!!

any argument that goes "10+ people worked on this song!" is complete garbage because the most common reason there are that many writers listed is sample credits

for instance, the song this thing chooses to whine about modern music is "Uptown Funk," over half of whose credits are because of "All Gold Everything" (interpolated) and "Oops Up Side Your Head" (sued, were added to the credits)

(also, "Uptown Funk" and "Havana" are very weird songs to choose if you are complaining about all songs sounding the same, because they are both fairly distinctive as far as top 40 pop goes)

xxp

not really

havana literally had 10 songwriters that put the song together and this is without crediting sampled artists

unless you mean the person who actually recorded the kick drum and sold it to the company that produced havana, but i'm sure no one is giving these people credit right now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_(Camila_Cabello_song)

sure, which is why I said "the most common reason," not "every single instance"

and if you really want to dig into it, then one of those writers is Young Thug, who obviously is there because of his verse and nothing else; another is Kaan Gunesberk, who's a session musician (this is a pretty good article about what he does: https://www.spin.com/featured/how-hitmaking-producer-frank-dukes-is-reinventing-the-pop-music-machine/); another is Camila Cabello, who it is probably safe to say didn't do a huge amount. Starrah and Pharrell did backing vocals. I could go on but I've already done way more research about this song than the purported researchers. but who needs to do research when you can drop a "one can imagine" in front of your hypothesis?

you're misrepresenting the argument

i'm staring at their own chart and quoting their own numbers but ok

in the mid-90s, producers weren't assigning a person to find the perfect kick drum online and swapping files over the web en masse and collaborating in real-time

sure, but they were absolutely recording drums digitally and using them to trigger perfect kick and snare samples. maybe this was more late '90s than mid '90s, i'm not a historian, but, seriously, this is not a new thing. it's gotten easier, that's all.

(xp) if today's songwriting credit conventions (and business protocols) were retroactively applied to the beatles, "one can imagine" a lot of songs suddenly having lennon/mccartney/harrison/starr/martin/emerick (and probably random other people here and there) credits.

I mean, this is a "study" whose conclusion is "more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds," which is like saying a costume designer oversees the direction of a movie

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

lol

i'm so done with seabrook being considered an expert on this stuff. "what i see when i look at this data is [the same dusty pet theory that i was hammering in my error-riddled book that is already becoming irrelevant as the industry continues to change in ways that i am ill-equipped to understand]!"

i'm so done with seabrook being considered an expert on this stuff.

otm

I didn't like the book, got the impression he knew next to nothing about music.

(i actually liked his book, numerous flaws aside, btw. but still.)

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

it should also require the researchers spend a certain amount of time listening to the music they're writing about.

pudding's analysis (to their credit, it's one of their better music-related ones!) systematically ignores that many compositions credited to one writer in the past would have, by today's standard practices, been credited to many more. like, read about how some of these songs and albums were actually put together! read about thriller and bad, to start. there is no easy way to normalize the raw numbers based on social and cultural changes in the industry, but that doesn't mean that settling for the raw numbers is adequate.

these data-driven analyses can have great value imo! but the people who generate them need to be, like, hyper-vigilant about the implicit assumptions that are made when they collapse the complicated reality down to a few easily understood numbers. sometimes the understanding you think you are gaining is fatally compromised by the nuance you've lost. pudding has disappointed on this front multiple times. (their 'best' music projects are the ones that attempt to say the least: here's yesteryear's charts presented in a neat visualization, without any blathering or analysis! the analysis of spotify streaming numbers was not very insightful and contained some truly awful writing. the analyses of hip-hop lyrics have been abominable and deeply misguided.)

if this is one of pudding's better music-related analyses I'd hate to read the worse ones

I accidentally posted this in the kanye thread but it mentions Max Martin being a #1 hitmaker since 1985, which is hilarious, because you just know they got that year off Wikipedia -- in 1985, Max Martin was in a newly formed Swedish hair metal band that wouldn't release its first (mediocre-selling) album for six years. shit, that's on Wikipedia too, it would just take ONE CLICK

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

This will happen the day after what I want to happen, which is for every year-end critics' poll to start listing publicists alongside artist, album title, and label.

i think they meant max martin is the #1 hitmaker (songwriter/producer) by their metric from the period 1985-present. like, not implying that he started as a hitmaker in 1985.

(incidentally, some of the errors in seabrook's book very obviously did come from misreadings of wikipedia articles!)

if they meant that, it's sloppy-ass writing, especially considering it also mentions "the adrenaline-charged bubblegum sound of the past 10 years," which started apparently with a 1995 Backstreet Boys song. like, pick one start date and stick to it

While there are plenty of burgeoning Max Martins (e.g., Metro Boomin, DJ Khaled)

pudding's most useless analysis of pop music is 'the most timeless songs of all time'. i quoted this excerpt in another thread over a year ago but it still astonishes me every time i see it:

For example, in 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is?
Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68.

Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer. When we examine pop hits, popularity is so much more than song quality.

But future generations don’t remember Bobby Lewis’s dancing and good looks. Spotify only catalogues his music. And unfortunately, that quality didn’t endure in the same way as At Last. (And of course, we have not even considered the role of covers, samples, and movie soundtracks, etc. – a future project to undertake).

And for this reason, it will be weird to hear future generations reverently listen to groups such as Nickelback – the kids only know their music, not what they culturally stood for in 2015.

like, try cracking open a fucking book! this represents the absolute worst of (what aspires to be) 'data journalism'. (same feature surmises that onerepublic's "counting stars" was initially popular in 'indie music circles' lol.)

the adrenaline-charged bubblegum pop of Seabrook's prose.

whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time... One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer.

it's so sad that the civilizations from the mid 20th century didn't leave behind any records of what life was like back then, how people lived, what they looked like, how they even consumed audio-based art in those primitive times.

I had never heard of Zedd until I clicked on this thread.

so ya, i think katherine's point about sampling credits is valid, for sure

and while i actually enjoy the nitpicking of his argument, the point he is trying to make is that hits have become more homogenous in their sound, which i think is accurate, at least to my ear

and at the bottom he links this:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-music/pop-music-too-loud-and-all-sounds-the-same-official-idUSBRE86P0R820120726

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

...

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

i think the whole loudness wars has been dying out in recent years, actually, but there is something to be said for the resemblance of timbre palettes in top hits

it could be that producers are seeking the same type of heavy kick drum and using mostly synths in middle frequencies to create lush sounds, but the details are super scarce

it's more of a curiosity for me rather than some hidden agenda btw

he also links a study that says the opposite, so

i think he does that in an effort to provide transparency, which is actually pretty laudable

from the 'most timeless songs' article:

For the entire 1980s, Don’t Stop Believin’ is the most-played song on Spotify. This song barely charted on Billboard. From the 70’s: Bohemian Rhapsody. If we were to time travel to either decade, no one would reasonably believe that these two songs would be cultural touchstones for their respective decades in 2015.

apparently hitting #9 on the Top 100 counts as 'barely charting' and while a large part of Don't Stop Believin's current popularity stems from usage in TV etc., this seems like an absurd assertion to make about Bohemian Rhapsody considering its huge success in the UK at the time? not even good at the 'data' part of 'data journalism'

re: the 1985 Max Martin thing, I think they're trying to say that Max Martin has written & produced more hits than any other producer/songwriter since 1985 (when their dataset for producer credits starts)

taking credits as gospel is a bad idea imo

credits are political, they're a summary of leverage and not of cotributions

any argument constructed on the foundation that credits can be taken at face value is inherently flawed and will have to be thrown out entirely the next time another cultural or legal paradigm shift changes the way people within the industry think about the process

^ otm

james otm

also yes stop citing seabrook. having a good job doesn’t make him not a dumbass

i have never read john seabrook

but anyway, the dudes the wrote the pudding article made another page of the top #1s in 3,000 places

https://pudding.cool/2018/06/music-map/

1/ finally updated the music map for May 2018. This is a breakdown of the most popular song in 3,000 cities around the world from last month. https://t.co/iHni87eJbu

— Matt Daniels (@matthew_daniels) June 4, 2018

4/ worth nothing that most of Mexico is listening to a song by NJ-based Nicky Jam and Colombian J. Balvin.

it sure is

worth noting even more is that said track was produced by two Dutch guys

i am not convinced by this analysis that music today is more homogeneous than it was in the 1980s (!)

may i ask why the article was shared in this thread? like, "here's evidence of why we need to be taking this evil new strain of poptimism seriously!" or something? personally i was considering reviving this thread with a link to the thread where some of ilm's influential early adopters are heaping praise onto the new charlie puth record, thus setting us up to thoughtfully enjoy whatever ed sheeran, maroon 5, meghan trainor and james arthur put out next. phew, the poptimist threat has been vanquished and all is well again!

No particular reason

Feel free to post whatever u like man

I am still so annoyed by that "timeless" article. Early takedowns, including me going on about their amateur-level misreading of Pearl Jam data, can be found here: songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

For example, in 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is? Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68. Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer. When we examine pop hits, popularity is so much more than song quality.

It's baffling to me that someone who writes about music would have to turn to extra-musical factors in trying to understand why "Tossin' and Turnin'" was a bigger hit than "At Last"!

Yet, have you heard of it?

haha - lemme rack my brain

if this is one of pudding's better music-related analyses I'd hate to read the worse ones

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine)

Things That Can Happen in European Politics is one of the all-time great historical analyses, up there with Albert Thayer Mahan

lmao

the pudding people don't appear to have any experience writing about music outside those pieces hence their extremely bad engagement with their data

pudding in, pudding out

Pudding poptimism

Pudtimism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII&t=21s

i don't even know if we've already done this but lol peak fucknut

sick of these yet? https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/projects/what-makes-a-hit/

(i haven't read the paper the visualization is based on)

Oh god

It is funny to me that an article might begin with a caveat along the lines of "pop music is often derided as manufactured...", and then follow that up with the most manufactured and useless I-Made-Some-Arbitrary-Metrics-To-Try-And-Correllate-Characteristics-Of-Pop-Singles-With-Chart-Performance pie-charting

There are so many things I want to learn about with regards to pop music, and statistical charting of tempos and "acousticness" aren't it; if anything, articles like these make me feel as if people are missing the point, making pop music all about "numbers" instead of "feelings"

i wanna see an analysis of those EQ tweaks they do to rev into the chorus of every song now

yeah i get the sense that these features don't adequately describe the audio analysis tools they are leaning so heavily on as the basis of their work. like the most this one says is 'sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2' but none i have seen so far has critically examined whether the select metrics these tools zero-in on are actually that salient as far as whether people respond positively or negatively to music. of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is, lol. ridiculous.

of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is

― dyl, Monday, July 23, 2018 12:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be fair this is also the music-critic party line

"sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2" is insanely obvious to anyone who's ever used serato

another thing i sometimes wonder about these pieces that do audio analyses of hits is how often the tracks they feed into their analytical tools aren't even the correct ones. like the one i linked above says it sourced audio from spotify (if i'm understanding correctly), but, like, you don't even have to go that far back in the history of the charts before you start turning up hits that aren't on any of the streaming services or digital download stores. not to mention the many that aren't available on digital platforms as their original versions, but ARE available as bad, cheap-sounding re-recordings from 15 years later. personally when i am searching for old + relatively forgotten chart music i often have to turn to youtube when the streameries don't have the proper versions!

If I had a way to automatically deactivate the Spotify audio-attribute API whenever anybody tries to use it to explain or predict hits, I would totally do that...

ha. yeah, and dyl otm - - - i'm waiting for something like "we analyzed fifty bubblegum hits from the early 70s, and surprisingly, the feature most predictive of a hit in this period was tinny late 80s digital production"

"the late 2010s were characterized by an uptick in songs that sound as if they have been shifted up a half-step in key"

Lol that's a joke, but that's actually a good trick. When you tune the track a little sharp it pops on radio

the streameries

nice

oh I meant people pitch-shifting videos for YouTube to get around copyright detection but that works too

this is killing me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q34lJ5gEJs

lmao that's deserves to take the 77 this year

lol excellent work.

loving this new mountain goats

UMS, how did you encounter this 4-year old youtube with 38 views?

Didn’t we talk about his guy recently in some thread?

I saw it on Facebook via a former ilxor

btw this guy's body of work in insane

so this is what kozelek is up to these days

Listen to @alyandaj's cover of @TheNational's "I Need My Girl" https://t.co/hfv5RvyYNQ pic.twitter.com/kCm6qp8e1C

— Stereogum (@stereogum) July 31, 2021

I was really hoping this would be the Pitchfork Peppa Pig review