the quietus : the new look

search function says he's barely posted since 2008 and since then has mostly talked about his own articles, so I can't say I've seen any of his posts before fifteen minutes ago

I also don't read The Quietus

It is Neil, he has indeed posted here off and on for many years.

It's the real Neil Kulkarni as far as I can see.

I want someone younger than me to get foolish about pop again, to stop telling me all the things I could be listening to and start telling me why I SHOULDN’T listen to certain things. Reattach guilt to pop, reattach hierarchy, reattach shame, reattach style, remember style’s difference from fashion instead of just adding their void-voice to the general hey-if-you-enjoy-it-that’s-cool numbness of discussion. Stop fucking rehabilitating everything and start locking stuff up and out and AWAY. Out of reach for a reason. Pleasure forced to justify itself again. Make like music is a revolution in heart/head/soul that changes your life, not just a soundtrack to that existence of clickable consumption and commodity-fetishism that passes for living the dream in 2010.

This is the crux of it really. Sorry Neil, but the idea that no one's doing that any more is patently nonsense. The whole article just reeks of Simon Reynolds-style old man railing from his sandpit that the kids haven't run with his idea of the future from 15 years ago.

Gucci Maine, Gudda Gudda, Weezy, Yung Jeezy, Wacka Flocka, Wiz Khalifa, Wale, Vado, the new Unimproved Rick Ross & Fabolous, way way too much god-damn Drake: you seriously ain't missing a pissing thing unless you crave yet more gold-plated groin gyration, stoned self-importance, the endless repetition of ad-copy rhymes & in-da-club shoutiness

Yeah this is exactly what I thought when I listened to The Recession. FFS.

For the record I read Neil's stuff all the way through before publishing and I enjoy it. This extremely lengthy article was edited on an iPhone on a train, so I'll apologise if any spelling mistakes crept in. I don't necessarily always agree with him... I like some Wacka Flocka Flame and Gucci Maine for example. But his main points are spot on.

My main point here is there's a big difference between not being able to understand something and it not making any sense. The point about The Quietus is that we're a British site and are keen on reflecting this as well. So not only do I love the way Neil writes but by the same token I find other UK hip hop writers mentioned in this thread excrutiatingly bad in a way unique to white British bloggers pretending to be white American journalists pretending to be black American rappers. It's not really any of our concern how Americans feel about our hip hop coverage, just our British readership. That said we get a healthy portion of our readers from the US so we must be doing something right.

Our strength and the fact that a lot of people read us lies directly in the fact that we trust our own judgement and don't pander to anyone else's tastes.

Anyone can write for us if we like the cuts they send in. John @ The Quietus dot com.

I've taken two writers directly from ILX discussions like this in the past. But to the poster above... your cuts would have to be better written than your posts. Opinion on its own is nothing.

are you making a subtle point abt not pretending to be Americans w yr spelling of Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane?

man i haven't read this but man my fellow goons (if i can be considered such) you gots to chill /epmd

i mean like forks said he didn't like a lot of this stuff in the swag thread and got an unceremonious stfu i mean c'mon

Again I was just joking about writing for the quietus.

This extremely lengthy article was edited on an iPhone on a train

Doran, you are a valued poster, smart dude and a sweet guy but you def not doing yourself any favors with this

It's a small business still in its second year run entirely by three people. If I have to go an do a job for someone else I still have to be working. There's nothing I can do about that. I have to pay my rent etc.

But we're hopefully going to be in a position to sort out sub editors for next year. I know it's something that's long overdue. In fact it's my main concern about the site.

KSH: No, I'm just rushing about and not checking anything. Apologies.

for the record that was c sharp major w/ a display name that starts "ksh," not me :-)

disregarding anyone's opinion simply because you disagree with elements of their taste is such a dumbfuck internet persona thing to do
the proliferation of this attitude is a major reason why i avoid most of ilm
i subject myself to "LOL u LIKE a$her U so CORNY" on swag threads because internet SERIOUS BUSINESS/good source to find new music/useful to hear what people who don't share my tastes think about a genre that matters to me.
"I stopped paying attention to you once you mentioned artist X who I hate who is by any reasonable outsider estimation only marginally different from artist Y who I like" is just the worst of looks

aka "LOL zingculture"

lol u like asher roth

that too.

Bad taste is fine if someone's at least attempting to make a convincing case for it, rather than writing a circular mess of nonarguments and critical cliches.

presuming you're defining "bad" as "not mine" in that sentence

being butthurt about other people dismissing ur opinion is a dumbfuck irl thing to do

Hey everybody...first meeting.....um....My name is Matt....and I like Black Star better than Waka Flocka Flame.

xp because rap threads guys never get butthurt about dismissing of opinions, oh no.

ah, but that butthurt can be waved away a few posts later as "jokes."

more like 500 posts later

i dont go on rap threads there are dudes who like asher roth there

I am champion at beer pong

xpost to forks

It's not so much that he likes Asher Roth but that he recommends him as being a good alternative to what he essentially calls stupid hiphop. Because inane rhymes about beer pong are sooooooooo much more speshal than i dunno a devin record.

Oh and using mainstream hiphops love of gold and weed as a stick to beat it with - like why have you cared to listen to the genre since run dmc's dooky gold rope?

forks is otm in this though, there's a contingent among the zing crew whose take is like "you don't like what we like? LOL U MUST BE SO STUPID OMG U R NOT DOWN WITH THE RAT PACK" and it's like "wow, guys, turn 19 already"

the rat pack?

ref to obscure lyric, don't mind me I'm sleepy.

lol u must me so stupid omg u r not down with the odd future wolf pack kill them all

but the broader point: within the petri dish of ilm, the rap heads seems especially hegemonic & intolerant of any opinions that fall outside of the consensus imo - and it feels like they've really worked hard to get to this insular point of intolerance, so who can begrudge them their "achievement"

ethan started it, deej just carries the torch imo

uabiho: how does that work in terms of being called a racist for not liking all of the same ukhh as the guy who wrote the article?

aero you're acting like we're picking on some feeble dude w/ a blog -- the actual piece itself is as inflammatory if not more!

Fuckin hipster cunts fucking it all up for everyone forever: not to piss on your parade pricks, this rag-mag bullshit’s fine if your life is spent giggling about pop, but for those of us who need it to make life worth living it’s simply not good enough.

no no I don't give a shit about the quietus piece, you guys are in the right on that count, it's just like srsly for like 10+ yrs, as a guy who was into rap from the ground floor & had his life changed by it it's been like "really? you have to like exactly the same shit as everybody else or yr a herb? fuckin bummer, that's exactly what foghat fans were like"

forks is otm in this though, there's a contingent among the zing crew whose take is like "you don't like what we like? LOL U MUST BE SO STUPID OMG U R NOT DOWN WITH THE RAT PACK" and it's like "wow, guys, turn 19 already"

― guess I'll just sing dream on again (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, October 26, 2010 6:29 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

isnt this exactly what his article is saying, though

also, who does that here? name names.

except NOT DOWN WITH THE RAT PACK is QUITE RITE MATE CREATIVITY AINT WOT IT USED 2 BE FANCY A PINT

Seriously I don't think any of us (deej maybe) have a problem with him not liking ringtone canon music. It's that he seems to have made up his list of underground* alternatives** from flicking through some random blogs ignoring whole huge scenes like 'Bama or Oakland etc.

*underground music such as that hard to find Big Boi album. Never even heard of this dude.
**Drag-On, seriously? As an alternative to finding weed-smoking and materialistic hip-hop? In 2010? Seriously? I mean really?

[in trying to find out if anyone cared about Drag-On in 2010 I found out that Swiss Beatz named his first child Prince Nasim, so watch out for a fat rapping boxer coming to yr blogs anytime soon.]

i dont think the swag cru is particularly down on old heads. i think m@tt gets along w/ us fine, its just a 'stay in your lane' kind of thing. old head condescension is much more annoying than taking new music seriously. sorry if you disagree

But what rap's megastars don’t understand as they book their limos & collaborators for a swift evac from rap's stinkydoings

shocked that the word "droogies" doesn't appear in here somewhere

not that we even tell m@tt to 'stay in his lane' -- we tend to encourage him to check out nu stuff were feeling (frankly on some levels im closer to M@tt's outlook than swag cru's, i.e. lil b)

dude, whiney, all y'all. that is how the entire rap discussion crew on ilm comes off to me. I stopped bothering to participate like 5 years ago because it felt like such an insular what-we-like-and-only-what-we-like scene. you can say "ua yr nuts, that impression is yr insecurity" if you want but i seriously don't think so, ilm rap thread regulars are total dicks about what they like & dont' like. like, worse than me on the metal thread is how bad.

"isnt this exactly what his article is saying, though"
my point was that BOTH sides are guilty of acting insular and intolerant in this teapot
maybe it's a hip hop thing? battling is v much the bedrock of the culture tho lately there's more beef amongst bloggerati than performers

i can never tell if anyone in swag cru actually likes lil b or if they are just pointing and laughing

don't say "bedrock," forks

its really not like that aerosmith -- id say were just pretty aggy abt ppl who rely on cliche /received wisdom about new rap

i mean, i disagree about a lot of new rap -- the omgwtfk crew isnt my thing, although i think theyre alright, and i dont like lil b at all. i rep for bay area rap that pretty much no one else is feeling (or at least talks about). m@tt & myself and some other folks (except surfboards lol) rep for 90s style shit like roc marciano.

bagging on asher roth or drag-on is like, fish-bucket stuff, not really representative of how we usually talk about rap

this dudes article still sucks

and LOL at "stay in your lane"
just don't participate in the conversation unless you are READY TO TYPE WITH THE BIG BOYS

i've been reppin roc marci hard and want a namecheck too