HAIM

I don't understand -- championing Heart in Motion, released when Amy Grant was 30, is evidence of a Lolita complex?

I've never heard the album in full, but "Baby Baby" and "Every Heartbeat" hold up fantastically. Richard Marx had a couple of jams, too.

I'm on team Heart in Motion

guys his DN has "dyspeptic" in it

As a riff on a Red Red Meat album title.

I guess it's just sorta tragic to me that a writer would take a swipe at Chunklet - who, let's be honest, are sorta the Led Zep to Whiney's Kingdom Come - while extolling the virtues of the "good pop music" of Wilson Philips. My contention here is simply that failing to make a distinction between "pop music" and "objectively terrible music" is far more contrarian and corny (and boring) in 2013 than, oh, I dunno, offering to "pay bands not to play." Whiney isn't here to defend himself, so I'm not going to continue ranting (I generally enjoy CW's writing, follow him on twitter, etc) but that comment sorta made me wanna barf.

Everett linked to this thread in the comments section, lolz

If u cannot get behind "Hold On" and "You're In Love" as "good pop music" get yr fuckin ears checked imho

I actually just prefer Taylor Dane, is all - her drum sound is so much more Neurosis-y

I listen to mostly music where people growl unintelligibly about putting people through a meat grinder or drinking the blood of dead goats...and I can still admit "Hold On" is a damn good song.

music is never an either/or proposition and it became more fun for me when I quit basing my tastes on "hmm, I shouldn't REALLY like this, should I?"

When it comes to music, not liking something is rarely a virtue imo. Not that it can't be fun, but that's another thing.

Both of those posts OTM.

it's not disparaging "objectively terrible music" that scans as sub-chunk corny fuckness, but rather lining up bryan adams, wilson phillips, and rick astley to condemn by utterly meaningless association. they aren't objectively terrible artists. they're in-crowd code for a boring, obvious and massively dated antipop stance. like invoking phil collins would have been a decade back, before that same crowd got around to admitting they actually like phil collins.

and i love chunklet/owings, ftr

chunklet would've made fun of haim but there's a 65% chance it would have been funny about it

xp To what 'in crowd' are you referring, exactly? Potbellied guys who like Captain Beefheart and The Fall or the young, articulate pop apologists on this thread?

This

How fortunate that so many rock critics have discovered the latent love for pop music that always laid deep within, just at a time when it’s been proven that you will not get work if your music criticism does not attract the requisite number of hits in web 2.0.

may be cynical as fuck but it's also pretty otm

also 65% otm too

presumptuous as fuck IMO.

I'm not going to continue ranting

Wtf is this "objectively terrible " bs?

this thread and the creativity and artistry one might as well merge if we're going to head down that rabbit hole!

btw I liked The New Radicals

xp To what 'in crowd' are you referring, exactly? Potbellied guys who like Captain Beefheart and The Fall or the young, articulate pop apologists on this thread?

the former, of course. my people, the middle-aged, postpunk chunklet readers of the world. the rug rats have their own code, in which rick astley probably stands for something very different.

lol at the idea that writing pop criticism gets you any more web traffic than writing criticism about any other music does

seriously

spin's haim feature got crushed traffic-wise by our stream of the melt banana album

also lol @ getting so up in arms about CHUNKLET, oh no who could ever "take a swipe" at it

whiney if i'm not mistaken also likes chunklet and has contributed to some chunklet projects and normally when you say that something is "sub-" something else, it's not a swipe at the publication but the person

If there's two thinks I like, it's subs and Chunklet.

I've written for Chunklet and love Henry, obviously. But "punk rock über alles" as a their default doesn't exactly gel with my worldview.

This thread is sub-Miley and currently over-Albini, but both of those will change with my post.

this thread and the creativity and artistry one might as well merge if we're going to head down that rabbit hole!

― Neanderthal, Saturday, October 5, 2013 11:30 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've purposely avoided that thread because I already feel like Chaplin railing against the talkies here and I'd just as soon not be one more of those guys.

Chaplin later made a couple of awful talkies so

don't feel Chaplin as much as you're telling us "hate more stuff".

"spin's haim feature got crushed traffic-wise by our stream of the melt banana album"

to be fair comparing a feature and an album stream is like comparing apples to the NYT front pge

great thread.

recently i have explained to younger folk just how unfashionable Fleetwood Mac were in the late 80s/90s and had funny looks. people can't believe they were ever not hugely popular/cool or whatever but even i was surprised to watch this. i never considered them to be 'punchline of a sketch/ butt-of-a-joke' unpopular

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9iwNicTDcA

and i mean yeah you can say 'oh so some shit 80s comedy outfit didn't like them so what?' but there it is.

very pertinent post

You're assuming anyone paid attention to chatter. In the nineties the Rumours singles got as much airplay as they do now, and so did "Gypsy" and the Tango singles (particularly "Everywhere").

Hmm. I discovered Rumours and Tusk in the mid nineties and while I didn't read longform articles defending them I didn't need to! The first was already accepted as a classic, the second as a problematic one.

where's the fleetwood mac here

i heard the "oh well" cover

oh well

There are bands out there who bear far more resemblance to Mac than Haim do. It's not a baseless reference, but it's also a reach.

The only song on this album that sounds like Fleetwood Mac to me is "Honey & I"

yup

I dunno I'm still hearing a lot of Mac in it, especially in the guitar. I think a lot of the vague allusion to Fleetwood Mac-style rhythms comes from the very rhythmic palm-muted melodic lines that are all over this album and to my ears very Lindsey B.

Eh I hear it in the fussy percussion/arrangements, but the palm muted rhythmic guitar stuff is a staple of '80s pop in general.

i was trying to decide if the guitars reminded me specifically of lb and ended up thinking that they don't.

i guess the closest you could get is that there are a lot of minimal and carefully inserted guitar parts, which was common on the mac's poppier songs

xp I don't know about the US but in the UK Fleetwood Mac had very little hip cachet in the late 80s or 90s. Mick Fleetwood was best known as the Munster-like guy who did the Brit Awards with Sam Fox. At that time most people would rather have jacked.

I think it's a tiny bit more complicated than that, they weren't mainstream cool at all but the balearic-heads were into them. Those arthur baker remixes of 'big love' and 'family man' in particular.

But I don't hear much Mac in HAIM either tbh.

Fleetwood Mac's biggest wave of resurgence in the US in the 90s was the Clinton campaign -- they were the soundtrack of cooler-than-usual-but-not-really-that-cool baby boomers.

I thought The Dance did it...? A month before the performance my local New Times publication wrote a consideration of their career, even reminding people that Matthew Sweet recognized the brilliance of Tusk by hiring Richard Dashut to produce Altered Beast.

Mick Fleetwood plays on that record, too. I don't think Dashut's presence had anything to do with Sweet's specific love of "Tusk," though.

It's a little too tidy to say "The Dance" renewed interest in Fleetwood Mac, because "The Dance" was their reunion/tour, so duh, of course there was renewed interest, since the formerly broken up band was suddenly touring again. I will say this: there was little to no hipster interest in "Say You Will," and that album is weird and awesome. I similarly sense little to no hipster interest in Lindsey solo, and in many ways that seems of even more interest to hipsters, since it's so strange and relatively not mainstream. So maybe it's the vague idea of Fleetwood Mac that is cool - like the girls at outdoor festivals who wear face paint and vaguely Native American headgear - because I'm willing to bet plenty that there is barely a tiny fraction of, say, Vampire Weekend's fanbase that has ever played a single Mac song of their own volition. Musicians and bands into Mac, that's another matter, but that's already a much smaller pool.