"Should we be suspicious of hipsters’ newfound love of R&B?" or "Race and indie music, part 4762"

Its a confused piece, can't really decide about what can unlock the piece of music: is it the turn of phrase conceived beforehand or specifically a performance...er, I guess its a combination of both, but it just zig-zags in between the two poles.

Not sure if its Lex's fault but the links don't help. His piece is linked to an article about Christopher Ricks, after saying that he is adored by the crowd that takes to the way the words appear on the page.

And the you see in the first para that Ricks owns nearly 2000 bootlegs...I would guess its about performance too.

A sharp yet untrained mind, that could naively tease out an insight that fans miss is an attarctive idea but you actually need to do some engagement and leg work otherwise it can easily come off all dashed off and forgotten in five seconds. But then why would you put yourself through that if the initial sound is unattractive to the ear in the first place.

"The best exist not in a dry textual vacuum but are inextricably connected to the nuanced vocal inflections, the rush of notes, the tempo shift. A line that appears banal on paper can be – not seem, be – profound in the mouth of a talented vocalist. Words that look like nonsense can sound intensely meaningful if delivered as though there's something important at stake. And music can breathe vitality into cliches"

probably no point in getting the lex to listen to 60's dylan where all this stuff he describes happens. i love dylan but you couldn't pay me to listen to the new album. well, maybe if you paid me...

i know the whole jason king thing has been cleared up BUT dude wrote the new liners for the voodoo vinyl reissue, i think he knows his shit (mentions frank in there btw, also 'full moon' in relation to 'voodoo' which i thought was really interesting but that's totally off topic)

2 things i'd like to add to this (aside from "smh dog latin")

- the idea of indie r&b as applied to frank ocean & miguel has been really weird... but it's sort of an unavoidable snowball at this point. that said "indie r&b" is not a made up construct... it's gonna be a prevalent thing in 2013 before it dies out. acts like inc. and autre ne veut and young & sick and alunageorge will all be putting out albums in 2013 and will be getting a lot of press and this conversation will continue to roll on, though it will be a bit more appropriate when applied to those bands.

- i've alluded to/mentioned this before but you can't overlook the angle of marketing wrt to miguel, and it goes for the other two major acts in this made up group as well (frank w/ odd future, weeknd with his aesthetic & beach house/siouxsie samples). with art dealer chic miguel specifically pushed the artiness of his image to the forefront in order to appeal to a "hipper" (if not hipster!) audience. he also decided to release free stuff to the internet for that reason as well. when they started rolling out kaleidoscope dream, they specifically targeted media outlets that catered to an audience that had only just started to approach him as oppose to sticking with the core r&b fanbase like trey songz or something would. it's a testament to the album that it all worked out so well for him but people often just latch onto what is pushed in front of them.

i think people overstate the normal-ness of miguel's initial public image, though. first time watching the "sure thing" video before the song caught on with me i was like 'this guy's pretty weird and hip, huh, might be too out there for me'

acts like inc. and autre ne veut and young & sick and alunageorge will all be putting out albums in 2013 and will be getting a lot of pressNEED TO FUCK OFF AND COMMIT HARAKIRI OR SOMETHING BECAUSE THEY ARE SO LACKING

is there really an act called "young & sick" though

if there is i might just seriously quit this entire industry, it's all over

miguel pretty much told me this entire thing was an exercise in grabbing the indie demographic. why not, it's the easiest demographic to market to

also i never write anything for the "lol" factor! i hate "lol"s, i hate fun, i hate ~light~ writing, surely everyone knows this by now. if you don't i am FOLDING MY ARMS at you

fmda

fuck my damn ass?

hahaha, folding my damn arms!

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOMqqI-kzHY

Lex believe me no-one could read you articles and think you're writing for the lol factor - OTOH commissioning you to do a klaxons review is trolling no matter how thoughtful the intention behind it.

okay one listen to miguel's do you song and its already better than any indie chillwave pitchfork shit i've ever heard.

not really a surprise though.

It's a really good song (not because of any initial ostensible parallels with shite chillwave acts I might have drawn upthread), def voting for it in EOY. Have heard the album through a few times now and would like to congratulate Matt DC on recognising Time Of The Season being referenced for a whole eight bars. Well done.

i'm all for talented r&b artists taking second-rate indie/chillwave ideas/sounds and effortlessly making them work/sound better. its like what the lex said in his dylan thing about turning cliches into gold. which is just another dumb way of saying i am all for talented people taking anything from anywhere and making it work.

Lex you being funny and you not wanting to be funny aren't mutually exclusive

Your slow, horrible realization that highway 61 revisited by PJ harvey is a dylan cover is one of my fav ilx lolz of all time

i'm all for talented r&b artists taking second-rate indie/chillwave ideas/sounds and effortlessly making them work/sound better

wanna break this down for us a bit more? what do you see as the first-rate indie/chillwave (if any)? also miguel sounds like a huge amount of effort went in but i know what you meant really it just bugs me when people think of something sounding effortless as a virtue by default

that was a dumb word to use. sorry. it sounds like a breeze. that miguel song i like. i obviously have no idea how much effort went into it. maybe a ton. whereas a lot of indie/chillwave sounds labored to me. not a breeze at all. its TRYING to sound breezy. but the air quotes areound the word breezy get in the way. hell even breezy is the wrong word. sorry. sunday morning. i'll think about it more. maybe. some people are just cooler than other people. and yeah i don't know what first-rate indie/chillwave would be.

sorry myself it's just all a bit false dichotomy for me as i don't hear any real or specific indie/chillwave influence or appropriation in miguel (to use the same example) as opposed to your perfect point upthread about the traditional mingling elements of rnb, soul and rock and the somehow lost sense of people from different backgrounds being able to cross into other zones successfully in people's minds.

well the song was produced by Jerry Wonda of noted chillwave group The Fugees

when was the first junior boys' record

feel like tht ws a watershed for hipsters' newfound love of R&B

xp must've been his idea to sample Enya that time. looking fwd to Miguel crooning about pussy over 'Caribbean Blue' in 2013.

"Should we be suspicious of R&B's newfound love of hipsterdom"

there are elements of miguel's do you song that remind me of...uh, i don't know, the kind of modern non-r&b internet stuff that i would check out after looking at a pitchfork end of the year list. nothing really specific. and mostly it just sounds kinda normal for lack of a better word. i'd have to listen to it again. maybe i never would have even thought of it though if i had just heard the song and didn't know there was a debate about indie r&b. who knows?

the one kinda first-rate indie thing i can think of - now that i've had more coffee - is that goth band that looks like klingons. i mean, if whoever is responsible for their sound worked with an r&b singer i think it could be amazing. or maybe it would be horrible. but honestly i don't know why people don't hook up with more often with some of the amazing edm people out there. fuck indie people. pay michael mayer to produce your album. that would be amazing.

that goth band that looks like klingons

really hope this is their actal name

i think a lot of those kinds of musicians would work with r&b style singers more if they really cared about that kind of singing enough. it's fine not to what with that being only one way of approaching it. i'm not half as frustrated by weak singing on indie stuff as i am by other excessive lo-fi values. some people would settle for average (or worse) vocals if the ideas behind them appeal anyway especially if they're not prevalent in styles of music where the singing is more important or focussed on. it does help to know exactly what artists are meant here tho rather than dismiss entire genres and ideas outright which R&B endures as much as anything.

'indie people' can mean anyone tho. plenty of great producers fit that bill but are often trying to do everything (write sing play engineer...) at the expense of at least one of those areas. that is one reason why they might be unfairly judged but hey occupational hazards i guess.

i'm all for talented r&b artists taking second-rate indie/chillwave ideas/sounds and effortlessly making them work/sound better

IF they're actually doing that in the first place. Like, one of the reasons it's getting the big eyeroll with reference to the Miguel album is that there isn't really any chillwave in there. There's no reason to assume that Miguel or his producers are drawing upon any of these shitty indie bands. There's no reason to assume they aren't either, but when you make the parallels so strong as to start mentioning actual subgenres like chillwave when there are a load of other influences in there as well it gets ridiculous. Talking about an R&B album with exclusive reference to a load of unrelated indie bands just smacks of assuming indie is the centre of the musical universe.

But it doesn't actually sound like any of this stuff, what it sounds like is both a sumptuously produced modern soul record AND a sumptuously produced modern rock record. And one that wears its influences on its sleeve. And some of those influences - 60s psychedelia, 80s pop rock, maybe even modern stadium rock, are present in lots of chillwave as well, but the treatment of them is sufficiently different to suggest that Miguel is getting them directly from the source rather than via pallid indie intermediaries.

fuck indie people. pay michael mayer to produce your album. that would be amazing

OTM.

i haven't even heard the whole miguel album yet. i think i'll buy it! i'm due for a cd. i bought two this year, i think. do they even make sumptuously produced modern rock records anymore? i would love to hear something sumptuous.

"Now, the Art Dealer Chic EPs don’t do anything as blatant as sampling Beach House or namechecking Coachella, but they do find Miguel — maybe cynically, maybe not — surfing the same sort of gloops of chiffon synth that are currently cool with the cool set."

http://stereogum.com/1041242/mixtape-of-the-week-miguel-art-dealer-chic-vol-1-3/franchises/mixtape-of-the-week/

Miguel's primary influences - which he's consistently talked about, btw - are Prince, Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Jimi Hendrix. fuck a jj.

I think you'd dig the album, scott.

indie fans always complained about the wrong indie being over-venerated in the press. now r&b fans get to do the same. progress!

xxxxpost Jesus, Tim, it wasn't trolling. It wasn't done to provoke a reaction. It was done for wholly legitimate reasons. Why do you feel you can infer my reasons for commissioning it when I have already told you what the bloody reason was!

IIRC that Klaxons review was pretty much the first thing Lex wrote for the Guardian so pretty much no one who didn't actually know him would have inferred very much from that decision, he wasn't an established critic and it would have just looked like a negative review for 99% of the people reading it. It's hardly in sending Steven Wells to review Belle and Sebastian territory.

Also Wells was writing for the NME which had a clear direction. Not sure if that can be compared w/The Guardian at the time (was there a clear music policy then?)

more one-star reviews of more kinds of music please

It wasn't done to provoke a reaction. It was done for wholly legitimate reasons.

If it's not obvious, I was deploying a slightly expansive definition of "trolling" here which includes "having someone write a review in the knowledge that they are not actually the intended market for the music or its hype (even if there are air quote references to dance music in the PR) and that they will hate it and the resulting review will cut across the typical crit discourse."

This is b/c the reason I invoked the lex review in the first place was as an example of something that wasn't stupid decision-making by an editor when it comes to having the "wrong" critic review a record.

Sometimes trolling is for noble purposes. Music criticism needs judicious amounts of it.

Though this kind of trolling happens all the time when critics who don't like pop are assigned to review big pop records - but this has become such a familiar practice that it is mostly accepted as a done thing, and hence falls outside the definition.

"Now, the Art Dealer Chic EPs don’t do anything as blatant as sampling Beach House or namechecking Coachella, but they do find Miguel — maybe cynically, maybe not — surfing the same sort of gloops of chiffon synth that are currently cool with the cool set."

what an absolute disaster of a sentence on every conceivable level

tell me again how stereogum became influential? because idgi

the phrase "cool with the cool set" is just...someone typed that, and filed it, and published it

part of me wishes that guardian comments had existed back in the klaxons days

imagery wise he was definitely riffing on something post-weeknd... "arch & point" specifically, but that sentence is def a stretch... "gloops of chiffon synth" isn't a useful descriptor for the ADC eps at all

how the fuck is anything about arch & point "post-weeknd"? or was it actually the weeknd who invented purple rain all along

who the fuck even listens to the weeknd?

not saying the song is totally based off the weeknd but you'd be foolish to think that there is no weeknd influence there at all... did he mention the weeknd when you interviewed him? he did to me unprompted (not in relation to "arch & point" specifically)

who the fuck even listens to the weeknd?

― Jamie_ATP, Sunday, December 23, 2012 5:47 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark

well he did more in first week sales in the US than miguel, so