Are you cool with forks making Spotify playlists out of every rolling thread without permission?

As a total side comment/pro tip, the best approach to functionality in Youtube-heavy threads is to turn off "display images" in your preferences while you're browsing that particular thread

― Chikan wa akan de. Zettai akan de. (Noodle Vague), Thursday, February 4, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

#howIRoll - srsly tho', wonder if that could be a default option to then be switched on if the poster wants to.

I just listened to Anthony Braxton's 'Trio and Duet' and Anthony Child's 'Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle v.1' back to back for no other reason than they fell alphabetically adjacent but they ended up informing each other in ways I couldn't have otherwise arranged or predicted. All revelations are valid. Any approach is meaningful. There is no spoon (feeding).

You are being spoon-fed by the alphabet.

maybe spotify should sort its streaming music autobiographically like john cusack in high fidelity

we can argue the correct ideology of aesthetic preference all we like, but my decisions are ultimately practical ones. i adopt pan-genre dilettantism because the musical aesthetic philosophy i was raised under, which is generally termed "rockism", is pretty untenable these days. i can't pretend that beck and jack white represent the apex of what music is capable of these days. maybe other people are still able to profess a coherent aesthetic philosophy, and if you can do it, well, go right ahead. but i can't.

trying to find the good in all music seems like a very pointless and undiscerning goal to me. the logical end point is to enjoy everything, to flatten out your own tastes to encompass everyone else's? an aesthetic without hate is incomplete to me, you need to know what you stand against in art (and every other part of life) as well as what you'll go to bat for.

finding the good is not the same as "flattening out your own tastes" &c, that's a false equivalency. an aesthetic without hate is a mature aesthetic that understands something about creativity; you probably won't ever arrive at such an aesthetic, but that's fine too - I still have an irrational hatred of mayonnaise, we've all got our crosses to bear

Lol you pompous, dishonest twat

I hate jazz, for what it's worth, but I don't think that makes me a better listener, nor that learning to appreciate it would render my aesthetic "incomplete". I'm not even sure I believe that's a thing, an incomplete aesthetic, but if it is a thing, I'm pretty sure learning to love things you currently hate is a movement towards more completeness, not less.

Everyone hates shit and articulating that is incredibly important to any sort of critical thought. Trying to enjoy everything is like rendering enjoyment meaningless

Trying to enjoy everything is like rendering enjoyment meaningless

I think there was a time in my life when I would have agreed with this in some visceral, defiant way, but at the moment it seems wildly and profoundly and patently wrong to me.

If I love X things and hate Y other things, you would grant that my love of the Xs is meaningful. And I can move some things from the Y group to the X group, and as long as there's still something left in the Y group, all my X loves are meaningful. But if I move the last thing from Y to X, it invalidates the meaning of all the meaningful loves in X that were meaningful one minute before? Do you really believe that the difference between my "really" enjoying "Delirious" and "not really" enjoying "Delirious" is whether I still hate jazz as I'm listening to it?

I don't believe that.

any schema of taste that requires "hate" to make sense or have some sort of validity is, i would've thought, pretty plainly juvenile

Glenn and JCLC otm.

hate is a strong word haha

Implicit in this thread is a tension between posters who fancy themselves as bringing recommendations to the table and those who are perceived as just skimming off the top. Most posters do both obviously, but it explains why people get huffy about other people not "putting the effort in".

tbh the one rolling thread I start and contribute to every year is full of stuff that i've skimmed off the top from elsewhere, which makes it even harder to draw a line

it's just weird and rigid to think of enjoyment as a zero sum game --- my dislike of idk bland country-pop doesn't free up spare enjoyment units to be spent on a few carly rae jepson songs or destroyer or w/e

this is absurdly basic. leaving aside the thornier issues surrounding enjoyment and end goals of listening to music, everyone listens with a negative awareness. the possibility of excellence requires the possibility of failure. if everything sounds glorious then our critical faculties are not required

man, i've got a LOT to say in response to that line of thinking lex and i will later on but i did want to say right now to will m:
the KING album came out yesterday, so I added the track that was missing on the countdown. That probably reordered your playlist somewhat. Everything is still there.
Spotify does occasionally drop songs from rights issues but i find it's rare and primarily centered on mixtape culture and contractual issues more than anything else (from a layperson's perspective, glenn could speak more about that). The service is exponentially better for retaining content than soundcloud or youtube though.

http://orig09.deviantart.net/f4d6/f/2012/220/0/0/i_love_everything_by_punkichi-d5aeb36.png

I used to derive some sort of pleasure from hating some music but decided I was too old to waste time on that at the ripe old age of 30. But now I find that my enjoyment of all music has been rendered meaningless. Can't believe I've been enjoying music the wrong way all these years

i think i could be characterized as someone who "loves everything" so i find half of this conversation really reductive. critically thinking about anything I react to poorly almost invariably causes me to appreciate it more

i'm off to the pottery studio (to work on, among other things, some Miguel 'Coffee' mugs), but here's a thought that occurred to me in the shower: as much as I enjoy a spirited discussion, the bump I'm most hoping for on this thread is mattress saying that he's started the soundcloud/youtube/what-have-you lists for the bobbins thread. That, more or less, would justify the existence of this thread for me.

To turn this idea around, it implies that if you love everything, you can become a better listener by learning to hate something you currently love. I feel like Ursula Le Guin already basically settled every argument of this form with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

there are artists (and critics too) that are not worth spending time on bc the ways they execute their ideas are boring w/ poor mechanics but i find pretty much every genre has something to recommend it.

yeah, you can like lots of genres, or all of them, and still be discriminating within them w/r/t artists. but I'm sure not gonna go the Branwell/Interpol route of trying to make myself like something by listening repeatedly, I'm almost 50 and life is too short to waste time on music I don't click with after a reasonable effort.

weird to me that somebody who curates the "worst songs" playlist is seemingly being accused of trying to make people "like everything"

I think it's perfectly natural to hate a song or songs that you don't like and can't avoid. This seems less likely to happen as one ages and as the Internet provides more options.

To this point, we have a thing we're working on Spotify that finds the people who listen to a particular style, and then looks for the music that is most distinctively popular among those people. So, e.g., it finds the country music that real country fans are most into, as opposed to the most popular country music. I find that even in styles where I mostly hate the popular stuff, the insider stuff is always interesting. (Except jazz, which always sucks.) If you're interested, go to the Spotify profile for https://open.spotify.com/user/critical_masses and scroll down that account's public playlists to the ones called "__________ Discovery"...

also pretty weird that "enjoy" becomes kind of meaninglessly monolithic in the process. like there are lots of things i enjoy in different ways or different moods or to greater and lesser degrees. lots of stuff on my shelf that i like more and less than other things on my shelf, but i enjoy all of them or i wouldn't still have them. think there's plenty of range for critical thought in there without any of the things being 'hated' unless you're positing a really primitive manichean scheme where there is some singular, ultimate, best music, and all the records i have are greater or lesser distances from this pure shining thing. but that's absurd and doesn't lend itself to very interesting criticism anyway ("this album is a 453,600 out of one million, but it would have been 453,700 if the drums on track 8 came in a half-measure later").

and then additionally, the way i enjoy something on first listen, the way someone else is explaining that they enjoy it, the way the author enjoyed it or what they were going for - - - all these CAN overlap but they don't always.

also to muster "hate" meanwhile seems SO in excess of "i don't really dig this" or "i see why people like this but it's not my thing" and even "i really don't enjoy this on many levels, find it offensive, and don't ever want to hear it again" - - - - even the last seems very different from active "hate" a la buddy bradley, where it's something that exercises you when you're not even listening to it or something.

what does that mean that u don't like jazz? like you don't like any at all? no ella and louis?

lol glenn here are some ILX jazz playlists for your listening pleasure

http://open.spotify.com/user/wmcrump/playlist/1oGN61m0OimFiZqhxFb37F

http://open.spotify.com/user/bradcahoon/playlist/1R9iR2xYkZMXZnH8MNU0LG

http://open.spotify.com/user/swellsville/playlist/1hWfRrOTSn4uKyt0YB0hdV (this one is what made me get Spotify)

not gonna rag on you too hard abt yr jazz phobia cuz I think almost all metal sucks, to each their own

must say I didn't think "some things are bad" wld prove quite so controversial

yeah i thought "some things are aesthetically bad" had been proven by science by now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOkzgjW0B9M

Didn't that tosser Johnny hate jazz? Well anyway when people say they hate jazz, they often don't realise they are not telling the truth.

wait if science can't say if things are good or bad then that changes everything

In defense of lex, I think theres no one here who has gotten more out of "hate", ie a discriminating aesthetic sensibility, than lex. Obv he and I don't see eye-to-eye on many things but there's no question that he's been successful at taking a very specific viewpoint, including some staunchly-held political convictions, and translated that p much wholly into some v specific parameters about what constitutes as worthwhile. Which is why its weird that ppl are tripping all over themselves to provide the reducto ad absurdium to his post, when he's here everyday living out what he said. He's not forks, trying to comprehend the vast cosmos of musical endeavor, but he does alright: I totally think that if someone had only the ILX EOY polls as any indication, they would be surprised to find that there weren't more ppl on this board totally devoted to the kinds of causes that lex champions (though, really, there are still a lot)

Most music is offensive piercing antagonistic garbage, there is no good in it only pain. It is a concentrated attack on reverie, rendering work, travel and shopping nightmare experiences without headphones. A good record is able to restore some reverie, but this is the same door the anxiety enters through, the anxiety of 'last friday night' which i havent heard since the last time my colleague played it 4 months ago, but still has not dislodged the parasitic egg it put in my brain, to haunt me at night, over and over. This isnt fair, i dont ask to hear this, there is no good in it. I dont hate the creators, I'm just upset at the people who put this on in public places

I mean, 7 hours of garbage music blasted at you when you are trying to concentrate, that is psychological warfare. The only good in it is the off button

Oh, believe me, I have _lots_ of jazz playlists. I generate many of them myself. I have friends who like jazz. I'm not uninformed or unexposed. And yes, I am oversimplifying just a little bit. I like some dark jazz that isn't entirely not jazz. I like big-band/jazz-orchestral stuff pretty well. I sometimes like jazz fusion and jazz metal even where the jazz elements are evident. Colin Stetson is kind of jazz.

Hey glenn that ___discovery critical mass thing is really cool!

That probably reordered your playlist somewhat. Everything is still there.

I was actually only able to see Realiti Demo for, like, a day. So I just assumed it had been added to Spotify yesterday. But then when I clicked it, it was greyed out (but I could still play it) and it didn't appear on Grimes' artist page. It must have accidentally showed me music I wasn't allowed to access due to being Canadian or something. (ironic, because I live in fucking montreal???)

are you paying premium for the "No Grimes" service?

no, i can hear the inferior album version if i choose to :/

thinking about this further, i think there is a difference between approaching art as a creator and approaching art as a listener. for me, at least, doing creative work is about expressing my individual experience, but listening for me is intensely social, a way of connecting with other people. in a world that too often seems to be dominated by meaningless and petty hatreds, i see music as a powerful way of overcoming those divisions.

lex on lex

Lol you pompous, dishonest twat

listening for me is intensely social, a way of connecting with other people

I don't understand, do you mean other people as in other people around you while you're listening or as in the people who created the music?

other listeners, not creators. not necessarily listening at the same time in the same place, but people who know the songs and who are affected by the songs- developing the ability to relate in the same way to roughly identical stimuli helps me relate better to other people.

Thread got lolsy again

Unlike you ever will

^ makes a living from writing, folks.

kinda respect you backing yr typically vapid philosophy espoused upthread by making yrself such an easy hate figure (the better for others to follow the path, presumably?)

substance vmnic

ilXor.com

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Still mulling over my vote
Lots of issues to consider