the quietus : the new look

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'

correct reading

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.

― Duran (Doran), Tuesday, 26 October 2010 18:07 (Yesterday)

bagsy

Hey, Acoleuthic, I'm not in a position to pay anyone yet but if you're qualified (i.e. you've got better grammar and spelling than me) and you've got time on your hands we'd appreciate the help in the mean time. John @ The Quietus dot com Cheers.

Like I said, all this hate is all v.v good for me (and where there's been actual suggestions of what I SHOULD have written about I'm checking them out so cheers). BUT must say
I love pop. I have always been a fiercely pro-pop writer and I utterly resent being characterised as someone trying to denigrate pop. Because I love pop I have a heartbroken and fierce dissapointment with bad pop music. In my job I talk to kids about pop music way more than I talk to anyone on here. Those kids are mostly faster, funnier and sharper than any of the smug baiting I read on ILM. And most of the hate/critique I read on ILM are written with such a joyless ungenerous self-boosting sneer it's nauseating and/or simply bloodlessly/blandly tedious (i.e pretty much everything I've ever read by that android Lex). As for ideas about the future, I have plenty of them and none of them have anything to do with Hyphy or the Bay-Area. I'm also not entirely sure what y'all think old writers should do other than STOP. Well sorry, I ain't fucking stopping for anyone (although I was considering it after this year) - this thread has most emphatically made me even more convinced I should carry on forever just to piss some of you folk off! Sorry.

i think acoleuthic would be a perfect fit for your magazine

Like I said, all this hate is all v.v. good for me (and where there's have been actual suggestions of what I SHOULD have written about I'm checking them out, so cheers). BUT I must say: I love pop. I have always been a fiercely pro-pop writer and I utterly resent being characterised as someone trying to denigrate pop. Because I love pop I have a heartbroken and fierce dissappointment with bad pop music. In my job I talk to kids about pop music way more than I talk to anyone on here. Those kids are mostly faster, funnier and sharper than any of the smug baiting I read on ILM. And most of the hate/critique I read on ILM are is written with such a joyless, ungenerous self-boosting sneer it's nauseating and/or simply bloodlessly/blandly tedious (i.e pretty much everything I've ever read by that android Lex). As for ideas about the future, I have plenty of them and none of them have anything to do with Hyphy or the Bay Area. I'm also not entirely sure what y'all think old writers should do other than STOP. Well sorry, I ain't fucking stopping for anyone (although I was considering it after this year) - this thread has most emphatically made me even more convinced I should carry on forever just to piss some of you folk off! Sorry.

lollll

omg

nicely done acoleuthic!

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRnZNk2zmOVPlCY5EFCRH_pVS75GRUBBtI1Qi3Rge2drkFhRnw&t=1&usg=__olx3jUl5sumAgDzFupjO-4ATMAU=

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

― The baby boomers have defined everything once and for all (Dorianlynskey), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 7:14 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so by 'tediously consistent' you meant 'in one instance'

slthough - how come y'all is acceptable but 'there's' isn't?

oh god, forgot what arguing with subs was like. I'll shut up now!

y'all agree to subject-verb disagree

Acoleuthic has just emailed other Quietus staffers who don't read ILX and offered to replace all mentions of the word Salem with the word Skrewdriver. I'm waiting for a ripple of confusion to spread round the room.

one's accepted idiom, one's grammatically incorrect

salthough btw

oh haha, totally gonna add an underscore somewhere in the middle of oOoOO as well

So I can't say there's been? As is there has been? Never knew that.

There has been an actual suggestion. There have been actual suggestions. You've been in the game a while, dude.

Always learning! So I can't say eg. There's been a lot of rain recently.

It's like I'm watching recombinant DNA in action here.

Oh you can. It's one lot, after all.