the quietus : the new look

^ 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.

dont be silly
xp

I didn't (and wouldn't for fairly obvious reasons) get any homophobia from Neil's piece.

It would be pretty difficult to get that vibe given the artists he was criticising.

Not the stuff on rap, the anti pop bits.

the past couple of years have made it quite hard not to be anti-pop, to be fair

doran so you are cool with him just calling everyone a racist?

I don't mean literal homophobia, but a distaste for typical gay cultural sensibilities.

Ha ha lex agreed but which critics are actively championing guetta pop?

popjustice? i think most ~pro-pop~ places would

which brings us back to (my own) distaste for many typical gay cultural sensibilities

i mean props to neil for providing all those alternatives but he never lays out exactly why he hates an exceptionally diverse cluster of artists he considers pop piffle. Like i'll gladly tell you that you should be listening to Roc Marciano, Big KRIT, E-40, Yelawolf and Rah Digga in 2010. But only because B.O.B. and Drake don't actually rap a lot on their records. And because Bun is trying to be Weezy. Dude's sole argument seems to be IT IS POP SHITE and comes off sounding like a 16 year old kid who just learned words like "insipid" and "inexorable"

Um I think yours is a little less broad brush... Neil's piece doesn't castigate uk pop in order to defend r&b or Paris.

Xpost

xpost to Whiney - I was thinking more of the interminable row about a single GZA lyric than this thread in particular.

The possible-titles for the book just keep coming thick'n'fast. Keep 'em comin!

― Neil Kulkarni, Tuesday, October 26, 2010

___________________________________________

"this book is a piece of shit"

― max, Tuesday, October 26, 2010

when i write "lol," i'm almost never really laughing. but i'm still laughing out loud, for real, at that exchange.

Hmm: It's a bit hard me carrying on discussing this with a load of people who haven't read it. (And, if you don't understand it, that's not my problem, it makes perfect sense to me.)

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. Too many writers aware of where pop should be fitted/filed on your ipod but utterly unaware of how pop fits with poverty, exhaustion, insecurity, fear, everyday life out here beyond NW1/BN1, where parents don't pay for everything, where music & life have to battle. Critics believing all those commentards. The inability for writers to change the world they write about has meant they all accept that limitation in their ever-apologetic writing.

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.

In this section alone he is not attacking pop, he is doing the opposite. And he is lashing out against nostalgia.

In the same piece, he does not call everyone racist.

If you don't like his writing, I'd suggest you don't read it. But if you want to have some kind of row/discussion about it, then you really need to read it again and actually concentrate this time.

For people who like hip hop writing from a different slant, I'm starting a new series next week tracing the history of US hip hop from city by city, including mix tapes, unreleased tracks and interviews. It's starting in Memphis and includes a mix tape by DJ Spanish Fly and Q and As with Three Six Mafia people. (Fingers crossed.)

what do you think his definition of good pop is?

In this section alone he is not attacking pop, he is doing the opposite. And he is lashing out against nostalgia.

Well, no, he's promoting a version of pop, in a similar way to that in which twee indie kids who don't really like pop music talk about "pure pop". His very approach to pop is inherently nostalgic.

^^^

xp to john doran
am now guilty that i may have inspired that second para with a facebook exchange about how level 42 had a couple of really great songs you know

Again, if this wasn't in the service of such a familiar take on rap (and by extension other popular music) it wouldn't be such an issue.

Leaving Me Now is an awesome song.

Tim F: I don't think this is such a familiar take on rap any more.

Also, heaven knows there's anough to rail against in current pop (used in the widest sense of the word). And if there were ever a time for a real need for anti-establishment pop music it's now. But that gets lost amid the bluster and badly aimed use of loaded terms like "revolution", "consumption" and "commodity fetishism". The Kulkarni piece doesn't really seem to have an idea of the future, and where it might come from, it's mired in punkthink.

No one champions rap that sounds like it's from the nineties anymore?

Ha ha matt I read that as 'mired in kpunk think'