the quietus : the new look

max btw have you heard atmosphere?

morbius strip

― j. sargent & lil k3v (deej), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 12:09 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol two words to prove exactly my point about how much pride you now take in being a cock instead of the nice dude you actually are

"assholes were uncool to me when I got here...I'll show them, by becoming a much bigger asshole"

be proud deej

kinda feel like i wasted the potential of that one tbh. would have made a good double entendre elsewhere

how am i 'being an asshole'

otoh that rah digga record really did turn out to be dope.

lol internet and eight layers of this means nothing to me and yeah yeah yeah but seriously if you're actively electing to be bitter and insulting and standoffish, is it some kind of role playing thing that I'm missing? Or they're personality flaws that you're electing to give free reign on a social forum because there's no irl repercussions? i don't get it.

never mind, you wouldn't cop to it anyway...just enjoy yr "status"

i mean i'm basically the same guy in person as i am on the internet for better or worse, but if I met someone in real life who was as actively aggressive, snarky and browbeaty as this i would be leavin the party

Or they're personality flaws that you're electing to give free reign on a social forum because there's no irl repercussions? i don't get it.

new otm whole-of-the-internet description here.

I mean -- if you can actually with a straight face deny that you've traded in your naturally engaged, enthusiastic, wide-eyed music lover personality for a cynical, sniping, dozens-playing ilx persona, then there won't be any point in me trying to point it out to you

jesus christ you guys enough

I lol'd

im not really sure who's being the asshole here, for real
but i think its u guys

like, i cant talk shit about wack music journalism now?

without having to defend my entire ilx persona??

''''aerosmith'''' i get along fine on ilx !! with a good number of ilx posters.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=83781#unread
can we take it here?

frankly dudes ilx has always been full of bitter & standoffish & insulting ppl -- the idea that this is some weird personality quirk of mine is kinda nuts

― j. sargent & lil k3v (deej), Tuesday, October 26, 2010 8:08 PM (12 minutes ago)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

so if u are asking -- yes i enjoy talking shit -- no im not stopping -- if yr taking it personal when its not -- i.e. accusing your logic of being a 'morbius strip' is not really a super-personal OUCH!!! my feelings!!! type diss. For you, or morbs. But i kinda think forks saying my posting suggests im letting my irl personality flaws have free reign is kind of way more meanspirited & shitty

but hey, i also thought that u know some rappers music dates better than others, and that one can be a knowledgeable music fan w/out knowing the catalog of shellac, & endless other weird-azz points that youve chosen to harp on lately in some attempt to ... i dont know??

eating poptarts, not being able to sleep for the third night in a row, watching wrestling shoots where punk vividly describes homocide nearly drunkenly pissed on his face on somoa joe's floor and reading one of my favourite songwriters get a bit aggro on the internet - this is heaven rite here.

xp i'm standing right here you know.

this article is monolithically dumb, mostly bcuz of the writing style

loath as i am to agree with anything deej says, that which is wrong with the shit linked here has almost nothing to do with "taste". i don't give a fuck whether or not some internet person likes asher roth or whatever. the crimes in question have nothing to do with taste. like, there may have been a time when "passionate poet spitting fire at the moribund mainstream" was a position that needed regular filling, but that time is long since past. you wanna do that shit as a critic, you better have something to say, and your words better be goddam GREAT, and you better know way more about your chosen passion than anyone else. otherwise, step the fuck off and get some perspective. K's shit is intolerable because it's egocentric, false and embarrassing, not because he happens to like the wrong things.

^ asshole retreats to cave for meditation time

rap criticism

i think i want something different from music writing than pretty much everyone on this recent devolution of the thread, and certainly all of ILM's rap goons. i love neil's stuff: it's dense, opinionated, funny, angry, sharp. i've loved it since he started writing at melody maker fifteen or so years ago, i've loved it whenever i've commissioned him to write for me at LLSS (only it hurts to edit any of it for space). i love the fact that very few of the sentences he's ever written would fit within the confines of a tweet. he's clued me in on some of the very best music i've heard. but i guess, ultimately, it's just a matter of taste.

You make him sound like r|t|c, who actually is a really good writer, who I wish I wish I could read other than ILM (or maybe he does and I just don't know). But there's a difference between 'dense' and 'opaque'.

*who I wish I could read other than on ILM

He is usually a better writer than this, in fairness.

Alright. I haven't been following him.

I want to go back to this para again:

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.

Clearly, anyone who's read ILM, hell, anyone whose read hundreds of articles written about music knows this isn't actually the case. The world, the internet, is full of people telling you why you shouldn't like something and why you shouldn't listen to something.

The thing is, there's more of them. They're from all over the place, from different ideological sides, not from a handful of people setting the rules from two offices in different parts of King's Reach Tower. You only need to reed Lex talking about indie or Whiney talking about virtually anything to know Kulkarni's point is nonsense. Kulkarni's real problem is there in "stop fucking rehabilitating everything". His problem isn't that people aren't telling people what to like, and what not to like, it's that they're not doing it from his mates' parameters as laid out in the early 90s. It's exactly what's had Simon Reynolds raging impotently for years and it's kind of embarassing.

i've never liked NK's writing, it makes me feel like i'm dodging spittle all the time

also deej is nowhere near ilm's biggest asshole

also music writers should not write about their...bodily functions at all, ever. it's just gross. DNW

Basically, railing against the status quo is fine when you're the same age as the kids, but when you're 20 years older you just look like a sad old twat who doesn't understand them, and isn't interested in understanding them.

(I haven't bothered to read this lengthy thread digression by the way, I assume it's Deej, Whiney and a few others having exactly the same beyond tedious ruck they have on every thread).

Clearly, anyone who's read ILM, hell, anyone whose read hundreds of articles written about music knows this isn't actually the case. The world, the internet, is full of people telling you why you shouldn't like something and why you shouldn't listen to something.

given that NK has only ever talked about HIMSELF and HIS OWN ARTICLES on ilm for the past few years it's really no surprise that he's unaware that pretty much THE REST OF IT is full of people both enthusing about music you should be listening to and hating on music you shouldn't be - short of actually going in person to NK's office and presenting him with CDs on a silver platter there's not a lot more that people could be doing on that point

(I haven't bothered to read this lengthy thread digression by the way, I assume it's Deej, Whiney and a few others having exactly the same beyond tedious ruck they have on every thread).

yep

Moreover the 'we need to be more discerning' angle only works if you've got a compelling critical angle (or even just a distinct one)... When it's deployed in the service of wu nostalgia it just seems very old man yells at clouds.

I sympathize with the general thrust mildly (for all that hating on things is not my own main forte) but the argument 'wake up and recognise that all of this is shit' only works when it's backed up with new reasons why, and why what's great is great in ways that upset yr complacency rather than hand it a congratulatory beer.

This is what ilm's firebrands (deej, rtc, lex, vahid etc) are conversely quite good at. Could Neil construct a coherent explanation of his own tastes if he wanted to?

would totally add k8 to that firebrand list

deej may not be the biggest asshole around here but he's currently the most tediously consistent at derailing threads and dragging out pissy little feuds ad nauseam. I make it a point of principle never to suggest ban but I wish he'd work out when to let a pointless argument go.

Like Matt says, if Neil K wants someone to tell him why he SHOULDN'T like certain things, he's come to the right place.

But there's a difference between 'dense' and 'opaque'.

again, i don't find him remotely opaque, but ymmv.

railing against the status quo is fine when you're the same age as the kids, but when you're 20 years older you just look like a sad old twat who doesn't understand them

disagree with this, tbh.

There's no way I would have published Neil's piece if he hadn't have come up with about a billion alternatives*, thus putting his money where his mouth is. I see people are only keen on bringing up Big Boi and Asher Roth out of about 40 artists however.

(*And this is not something that he would have done anyway.)

I'm also curious to know what this magical cut off date for stopping writing about popular forms of music is.

I think that's a red herring. Plenty of middle-aged writers can write convincingly about pop music - what they like about it, what they don't. The nut of the problem is that Neil's complaints just don't have merit - young people have plenty of passionate, divisive opinions about music, perhaps now more than ever! But the tribes don't correspond with those Neil knows, so he doesn't see them.

There's another argument to be had about whether tribalism is necessary for music to matter but Neil doesn't appear interested in making that argument one way or another, he takes it as given.

As the guy arguing with deej 75% of the time, i'd like to point out that the thread derail was a combo of random cheap shots and BAWWW coming from forks and aerosmith and was 100% not deej's fault

Asher Roth is the most interesting recommendation in the article by far I reckon (if only because I can't parse it). I can imagine the rah digga being good.

There's no cut off date but sound and fury on behalf of nostalgia will always seem a bit geriatric. It's such an arthritic knee-jerk reaction. Of all motivations for taste nostalgia is probably the one that needs to be deployed most cautiously and precisely.

It's also nice to be told that giggling at a pop song is an incorrect reaction. And by "nice" I mean "annoying if it weren't so laughable".

Tim: It's quite straight forward. You go to the bit of the article where he starts recommending stuff, the paragraph that opens with the sentence: "... there's LOADS of stuff you should be listening to." And then read the artist/group names (which are in bold), most of which have a hyperlink to the person's MySpace where you can immediately start listening to music.

There's really not that much to "parse".

Have to say that a lot of anti-popism of this stripe feels a bit like coded gay bashing, as if the existence of Perez Hilton finally has given 'us' justification to damn all those sniveling materialist fops to hell once and for all. Maybe I'm reading too much into it though.

Duran, no I meant that that recommendation surprised me. Stuff like curren$y was expected.