thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

i wouldn't have voted for those songs i liked if not for that damn poptimism forcing me to!

REAL TALK

I'll save my fatalism for the other discussions.

complaining about poptimism in 2018 is the ILM equivalent of moaning about hipsters with their dubstep and their skinny jeans and their ringtones. It's not like it doesn't exist exactly, but it's hardly a going concern and the argument was done to death at least ten years ago

Overexposure of formulaic shit with little to no musical content – it's all about the image – is a tragic problem in an age of unprecedented stylistic hybridity and variety that barely anyone takes advantage of.

image is good! image is silent!

xxp
idk DL, 2018 *may* just be the right time for a counter revolution. Many of the Poptimists are after all parents now. Aren't you supposed to rebel against them? Can't see this board as the fulcrum though, especially if your best argument is "it's formulaic". (I kind of like "does not contain enough music" as a potential hill on which to plant your banner though. A movement of Neo-Mozarts railing against the charts by shouting "not enough notes" would be fun to watch.)

hai ;)

like any true ideology poptimism is the shades you don't know yr wearing.

What about the 'poptimism reinforces conformity' argument? You simply ignored that one. There has never been as much music as there is now yet we favour discussing the same limited palette of sounds, vocal styles and structures over and over again – there's very little to differentiate ILM's top 4 tracks when set against the broader background of genres and even sub-genres the rest of the poll exhibits. Odd how we consistently return to the same two or three focal points even when offered unparalleled diversity. I've said this before, but I get the sense that the cultural discourse surrounding music is ultimately more interesting to people (perhaps especially ILMers) than the music itself, which is why pop rules supreme: it's prime fodder for the cultural studies paradigm. Beyond the surface politics of it, however, there's very little going on most of the time.

Just to preempt, I'm not advocating for a return to rockism, which is equally dumb, albeit for different reasons.

What I want is a real level playing field, i.e. true neutrality, wherein every single genre and – in a more utopian sense – artist is given a fair shake. We now have the tools for it, at least in theory.

In an ideal world, every ILM poll voter would listen to every nominated track and album, and judge them all along the same subjective lines. I mean, I *try* to do something approaching that myself. But in practice it's impossible and the Carly will always rise to the top, because Team Carly

We aspies will ever rail against it, but this is How It Is. We must simply look between the lines for scraps of unusual excellence. Did you like Akrakabo? If so, the poll did its job

that ultimately comes down to exposure which isn't really easy to solve, would be nice though. did listen to a lot of nominated tracks that were new to me but still ended up voting for CRJ because it's a very enjoyable pop song (if uninteresting but i've yet to grow tired of her)

i like 3/4 of the top 4 but do find them a bit underwhelming as a top 4. it's not hard to understand why they'd end up as the top 4 in a year like this without a few overwhelming board favourites like there usually are though

btw pomenitul, take heart: you are basically saying what I said for 5-10 years. your ILX learning curve will hopefully be steeper

i didn't listen to most of the 77 stuff because the images didn't grab me but i really liked the LOONA stuff even though i'm not that much into k-pop. the red velvet song disappointed me though. it wasn't nearly as good as the 77 song they had last year.

even though i didn't listen to it i liked the idea of this year's 77. the notion that people are out there really loving stuff i've never heard of. i like the globalist ethos as well. does sun-el musician get played on the radio in america? is "poptimism" a thing in 2018 or is it just a rebranding of "populism" without its toxic nativist associations, the idea of being able to listen to what people in south africa genuinely enjoy instead of konono no. 1 or whatever vanguardist stuff got embraced by fourth-worlders?

nah man keep it coming with the carly rae jepsen or whatever, i won't be listening but i like that you are. is she _interesting_? fuck if i know, but if she's not isn't that in the nature of polls? regression to the mean, the bottom reaches of any chart are going to be more interesting than the top.

Haha, for what it's worth I first stumbled on ILM in the early 2000s and kind of forgot about it after that, so the shift in hivemind opinion that took place during my absence may or may not make it harder to (re)adapt.

xp

pomenitul come hang out on the "Sun Ra by year" thread, fun stuff

Sure, I'll check it out. Can't remember the last time I listened to a full-length Sun Ra record (last one was probably Atlantis) but I always enjoyed what I heard, without ever being bowled over.

In an ideal world, every ILM poll voter would listen to every nominated track and album, and judge them all along the same subjective lines.

I pointedly didn't listen to a single one and voted on the basis of what I actually loved in 2017. If you have to cram for a poll you're doing it wrong.

I wouldn't say wrong, but I agree that different approaches are fine

If everyone voted on the basis of what they heard on a playlist in January 2018 it would be a complete misrepresentation of the board's taste last year.

well yes, but it raises the question of what the poll is for: is it "what did you vibe to in 2017" or "what was your favourite music released in 2017" - I favour the latter myself, but I see the poll as an amalgamation of the two approaches and honestly it's probably better off that way

pomenitul: "...the music itself..." < you are a disgrace to the nation of france with this shit

rushomancy: the idea of being able to listen to what people in south africa genuinely enjoy instead of konono no. 1 or whatever vanguardist stuff got embraced by fourth-worlders?

sounds like we're making great progress here

I'm not French. Also, hyperbole much?

Overexposure of formulaic shit with little to no musical content – it's all about the image – is a tragic problem in an age of unprecedented stylistic hybridity and variety that barely anyone takes advantage of.

― pomenitul, Monday, January 29, 2018 3:58 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are Turrican and I claim my 5 quid

Just because the boundaries between aesthetics (text) and the sociopolitical (context) are porous, doesn't mean they're meaningless, btw. Outright dismissing 'the music itself' as an operative, useful notion to talk about music is kind of lazy tbh.

xp

If everyone voted on the basis of what they heard on a playlist in January 2018 it would be a complete misrepresentation of the board's taste last year.

― Matt DC

is that the goal of the 77? to snapshot an objectively accurate representation of the presumed "collective taste" of the message board? i question whether this is even possible. i'm not sure the 2017 music i've listened to can be meaningfully collectivized. i always took the 77 as a fun exercise wherein people who listen to a lot of music can list the music they like, obviously there's a collective element in that some people put a lot of work into promoting the music they like, but that collective element is a perpetually moving target. it doesn't stop at any point. god knows how many 2017 records i heard on random lists and loved and didn't get nominated because i didn't bother to mention them here or have the time to nom anything.

is it any different than any other list? people name records they like to try and persuade other people to listen to them. good enough!

Only a single person can have a vaguely similar, nonstandard opinion on ILM. Obviously.

xp

there's no distinction between them because that's how meaning works; the contexts which lend sound meaning are mostly other sounds. there will always be a context; neutrality is both a lie and another context

I can actively work towards suspending my own prejudices when approaching a musical piece I'm unfamiliar with. That I can never wholly succeed does not invalidate the process as a whole – quite the contrary.

bjork looks like a giant idiot with that vag on her forehead

so like, are we not allowed to say bad stuff about the stuff in the polls on the threads themselves now? it all happens here? I used to like it when the threads got clogged up with angry Deafheaven fans getting butthurt

I can actively work towards suspending my own prejudices when approaching a musical piece I'm unfamiliar with.

you can try to discount specific factors from influencing you, take the weight off certain superficial reactions and so on, but you need to positively build some sort of context in order to win yourself over to something. and of course people succeed in broadening out their understanding of what's going on and what it means all the time

I don't get why you assume I'm denying the role of context based on what I wrote upthread. Are you arguing that any proposition other than 'all is always contextual and nothing else' is a gross misunderstanding of context? If so, that strikes me as an exaggeration, not least because it denies things their singularity, i.e. their strangeness, alterity and difference.

I can't see music as singular given that it happens over time and is constantly changing, every repetition bearing an incrementally larger weight

strangeness, alterity and difference are all ways of framing an ignorance of context, a sense that there is a logic at work you haven't understood yet

Sure, but once again, that doesn't invalidate the singularity of a given piece of music. Yes, it fluctuates based on who is playing/listening to it and when, but to say that it possesses no form of its own strikes me as excessive. No two performances of Beethoven's late quartets are the same: on a microscopic level, that is an undeniable fact, but on a macroscopic level, so is the statement 'there is no context in which Beethoven's late quartets can be said to be the exact same thing as Migos's "T-Shirt".' The fact that context is insuperable doesn't mean that everything can suddenly transform itself into something else if the context is 'right'. Things tend to resist metamorphosis into other things so as to maintain their otherness, most often successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.

Lastly, even we can never wholly understand a given context. Even that which appears to be familiar can reveal its uncanniness at any moment – a mere breach is enough.

*not 'even we can never' but 'we can never'

what is happening??

'thread to dis hyped 2017 releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about'

okay. I want to complain

there will always be myriad forms to understand at every level. I see no value or use to singularity in this context. you can still have yr mystical encounters once you accept yr sense of the limits and distinctions between things is one of many things that is up for grabs.

You may not see the value of singularity as a concept here, but

you can still have yr mystical encounters once you accept yr sense of the limits and distinctions between things is one of many things that is up for grabs

doesn't go against my overall argument.

it makes it hard to understand how you think yr engaging with music as in any sense a singular thing

I engage with every piece of music as a simultaneously singular and multiple thing.

my contention is that saying music is singular or can be thought of just "in itself" is meaningless given its complex structure and inter-relationships

Think of it as the blind spot or case vide of those complex structures and inter-relationships. You would argue that said blind spot is merely a different context of which I am ignorant. I would then reply that that may or may not be the case (it remains to be seen), and that when I am faced with a given piece of music (or work of art) that ignorance is an invaluable part of the aesthetic experience as a whole.

not sure what the 'it' is you're talking about & so I don't understand this post. what remains to be seen?