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

i agree with lex's outlook more often than not! that's why it pains me when he couches it in callow rhetorical devices.

Have yourself a joyous twelvetide, Lex. You're still in the top tier of posters imo.

can someone please come round and physically stop me clicking on that

― lex pretend, Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:25 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark

dying

a weird thing about all these pieces is that THEEsatisfaction never get mentioned despite being one of the better "indie r&b acts" AND being on sub pop

Speaking as someone who came v v late to the DDM/Dawn Richard proceedings, but loves Armor On, is there really no chance that all this R&B cred will lead to Goldenheart becoming a major 2013 buzz album?

that stereogum thing isn't the worst piece i've ever read but it also starts from a base thesis (r&b is finally good!) that's totally weighs it down

Good line about Kaleidoscope Dream: It’s not a feel-good album so much as an album about feeling as good as possible at all times, and to its infinite credit, it never fails to make me feel incredible.

Bad line:

last year’s pleasantly pedestrian “Sure Thing"

also "genre cocktail" or w/e he said

Has anyone written a piece in which the writer, thanks to Miguel-Ocean-Weeknd or whatever, has gone back to older R&B and finally heard what he'd ignored? A much better essay than "Holy shit R&B is suddenly hot."

no

redressing sins vs writing generalizations

How much older rnb was written expressly for a demographic of emotionally estranged post-Internet ppl tho

i feel like a lot of people are really into romanticising that whole ~emotionally estranged post-internet feelings~ self-archetype and it makes me roll my eyes every time

i mean any sort of romanticising some archetype you see yourself as is par for the course when you're a teenager but people over the age of 22, c'mon

Pointer Sisters xpost

p much everything lex writes has a sort of victim complex about pop suffering under the shackles of the critical establishment that prefers classic rock & indie

lex i <3 you to pieces but this is very true of you. I can't say "pretty much everything you write," but your deal is very much a Pop Strikes Back!! deal imo. All genres go through a phase of this imo but you seem p attached to it, into describing the music you're into in terms of what it's "up against" etc.

It does sort of make me happy that pop sort of ”won” in the respect that everything is now pop in a way, but this victory is making popists act like old school indie grumps

fucking killer post imo

not the part about pop winning obv. Sunset Strip metal should still be huge THANKS PEARL JAM.

i've been reading people belittle/marginalize/condescend to/laugh at almost everything i have ever loved in music for decades. since the 70's! fuck everybody, in my opinion.

lord save me from people who read 2-3 articles i write in a year and on that basis profess to know what my deal is

i have some people accusing me of being secretly rockist because i make the outrageous assertion that PR strategies have an effect on artists' success, or because i'm not interested in covering shit just cuz it's ~on trend~
and on the other hand i have people apparently stuck in some sort of 2004 timewarp where they think i'm a shrieking pop harpy

alla y'all need to get out my face tbh and recognise that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxkgvvJiLqs

shipz, aerosmith: you really need to go back and actually READ MOST OF WHAT I WRITE before you can say sweeping or dismissive shit about my work. i highly doubt either of you actually do that, so until you do GTFO

i don't think there's anything wrong w/ lex's tone and reverse-rockism is weird considering that rockism is still very much alive as evidenced by the entire discussion of r&b in the first place!

lex I have been posting on the same board as you for a long time. nobody's being "dismissive," a coupla people are telling you how you come off in their opinion. you can be childish and say "OH BULLSHIT READ MY ENTIRE CORPUS YOU DOLTS" or you can say "hmm, really, that's interesting, why would people who don't know me personally think I come off that way" it doesn't really matter I guess but "pop, the beleaguered genre, under assault from the evil forces of indie!" does seem like yr stance a lot of the time

indie is hardly rock, surely?

indie's just low-stakes-and-production values rock I think and certainly in the press I think they're essentially big-fish-smaller-fish-same-pond

otm

Lex you are pseudo-rockist though, given you believe some music is objectively better than other music. I don't think that's an accusation or slur though - surely you're fairly proud of that??

"pop, the beleaguered genre, under assault from the evil forces of indie!" does seem like yr stance a lot of the time

reducing my work to this isn't dismissive? it's pretty obvious you're heavily invested in not taking me seriously, which is fine, i'm not mad, but when you're flat-out inaccurate imma correct you. lol @ the idea that you can profess to know what my "deal" is better than me.

hmm, really, that's interesting, why would people who don't know me personally think I come off that way

because they don't actually know me and don't think troubling to find out anything more than how i posted in 2004 is necessary to make sweeping claims about me.

lex is so fascinating

Lex you are pseudo-rockist though, given you believe some music is objectively better than other music. I don't think that's an accusation or slur though - surely you're fairly proud of that??

i don't know if i believe that! sometimes i do! i don't actually care. i don't ~believe~ anything, i don't have a fucking manifesto written out or anything

No it's not a manifesto, more just how people relate to the world. And people's attitudes to music will tend to imply some basic assumptions whether or not they've been codified.

if ppl could stop making BASIC assumptions about how i relate to the world that would be appreciated

That's basically one of the things that makes writers interesting... Would an audience follow a writer whose tastes have no through line? Maybe but it seems unlikely to me.

lex i get a haughty 'stop generalizing about what i write/cover, you haven't seen 99% of it' feeling whenever people try to box me in so i sympathize, but i read yr shit and yeah the extent to which we were stereotyping your work was exaggerated, sorry. but i also don't tell people they need to read more of what i write before they talk about it because it just feels terrible to outright tell people that a) they need to read EVERYTHING i write and b) they can't say anything about me until they have.

I mean I assume you make basic assumptions about how I relate to the world (music wise) but maybe I'm mistaken?

anyway happy holidays i wish i could give you all big sloppy hipster kisses, god bless all us crazy fucks still talking about this shit on xmas, i'm gonna go put the kid to bed and drink some eggnog peace

they can't say anything about me until they have.

people can say things but if what they're saying is that my entire stance/deal is [this kinda silly and dumbly reductive one-note shriek] duh i'm gonna take offence

Getting a handle on how people think across a spectrum of stuff is one of my favourite things about ilm.

tbf you shriek a lot

like even the offense you take to these things is so shrill that it kind of encourages the perception of you that you're fighting against

I mean I assume you make basic assumptions about how I relate to the world (music wise) but maybe I'm mistaken?

not really!

if i knew what my favourite writers thought about any given music why would i need to read them? i like it when people are surprising for whatever reason, i like a certain illogic, because i find the idea of ~taste~ (music and otherwise) slightly illogical, or at least highly complex, too much so to reduce to a set of strict "beliefs"

all lex has in this world are his balls and his word

what is that a reference to, is it comedy -_-

scarface (the movie) by way of a bunch of rap music

Hi bros, I got pork and martinis, let's have a summit

give me a shrieky popist whose taste is divergent from my own over any even-handed fair-minded pretense-of-objectivity thing, please do

What point of comparison are you thinking of specifically.

i like it when people are surprising for whatever reason, i like a certain illogic, because i find the idea of ~taste~ (music and otherwise) slightly illogical, or at least highly complex, too much so to reduce to a set of strict "beliefs"

― lex pretend, Wednesday, December 26, 2012 1:07 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with this, and if I have a strict belief it's the meta-belief that stands behind this, which is that taste is shaped by experience and is then expressed in concepts, rather than the the rules preceding the experience of the music (though in truth it's more of a snake eating its own tail kind of thing).

OTOH I think most of us like it when people are surprising within reason - taste may be a flag planted in sand but typically the sand doesn't shift that much from day to day (e.g. you thought Ciara was amazing yesterday and you'll probably think the same tomorrow). The fun part of surprises in people's taste is not random absolutist reversals, but how a change in opinion or a new avenue of enjoyment subtly reorders everything else, recasting it in a different light. Not absolute reversals, but a deepening of complexity and nuance.

And in this sense what I think is mostly objectionable is not people acting like you have a couple of familiar critical stances, but people acting like that complexity and nuance isn't present when clearly it is.

But really for me great critical interventions involve concocting or at least reframing particular ways of listening to records in a manner that requires a certain amount of consistency or repetition if only to get the point across. An example that is always present to mind for me is the way that spizzazzz (for me at least) changed the meaning of the word "real" (as in "realness") forever (e.g. defining mushy R&B balladry as a site of realness). A certain critical stance doesn't have to be narrowly ~ideological~ to achieve that kind of resonance for me but it does have to aspire to be a kind of toolbox or secret code, to offer a way of unlocking records that the reader can try to apply to other records. Absolute consistency - rigidity - spells out the code too easily, so the best secret codes have this kind of tension where you the reader feel that you have a partial handle on it but nevertheless can't exhaust it or define it absolutely.

tbh these days i forget "realness" ever meant anything else. the foremost purveyor of realness in pop right now is taylor swift, to me this is obvious.

but what i dislike about pinning down how anyone's taste operates is that there are's fundamental illogic in how i respond to music that i can't reconcile myself - kogan's boney joan rule is an example - so i don't really see how other people are claiming i constantly draw x flag in y sand.

And in this sense what I think is mostly objectionable is not people acting like you have a couple of familiar critical stances, but people acting like that complexity and nuance isn't present when clearly it is.

oh, this too, but REALLY all they do is reveal themselves to be incapable of reading that.

The boney joan rule speaks to complexity not contradiction though, I think. It's an injunction against turning metaphors into rules.

If we don't assume that there should be qualities that are either universally good or universally bad in music then it's not a particularly worrisome notion. But only very simplistic or rigid people hold to that idea.

What I mean by taste is more a mode of approach: a sense that someone is likely to hear the same things you hear in a given record, even if only within a limited sphere of overlap between what you like and what they like. And it's not so much the liking or not liking that is important; it's literally how they hear what they hear, what they point to first, what words they use to describe what's going on.

tbh these days i forget "realness" ever meant anything else. the foremost purveyor of realness in pop right now is taylor swift, to me this is obvious.

Yes, of course! But pre-spizzazzz the notion of framing things that way would never have occurred to me.

Boney Joan is actually a really good point of reference for this entire discussion; it's basically an illustration of the fact that we never have anything other than sand to plant our flags in. But it's pretty rare that anyone's writing - unless it's hopelessly equivocal - ever really acknowledges it.