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

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?

Whether the blind spot is merely reducible to a different or encompassing context that I am simply not aware of at the moment (this seems to be your position) or if the blind spot is a byproduct of the artwork's singularity. There's usually a bit of both: the first time I listen to an unfamiliar piece of music, I am still working on acquiring the context (whether aesthetic or sociopolitical or both) that will allow me to gain a better appreciation of it. Once I've listened to it enough times, I either start to get bored (the blind spot that so fascinated me in the beginning is no more) or I come to realize that there is something irreducibly mysterious about the work, something singular that I will keep returning to and that I will never fully make sense of. In the latter case, the work partly escapes its overarching context or, if you prefer, creates a wholly singular context for itself. That is what I am interested in.

I am not keen on 'blind spot' as a shorthand/running together for any sort of vague/ignorant or maybe just negative experience with music. there is obviously no definitive context, hence everyone liking everything slightly differently, dancing differently and all the rest of it. a constant state of mystical wonder and other ineffabilities are highly personal which suggests yr not dealing some pure separate thing so much as v much forging yr own strong context with it. music 'escapes its context' in the sense of you changing how you hear it all the time, to say that every rehearing creates a new singularity doesn't seem v useful to me

I take ignorance a step further: I don't know if that singularity is wholly new every time, which implies that it's potentially more (or less) than a synonym for the unknowability of perpetual flux or some such.

Besides, I'm not sure that your overly broad definition of context is actually helpful here.

I guess if it isn't distinct then it isn't v singular. I think the singularity thing is a red-herring. maybe there is some use to talking about the impression of unity and coherence, but my concern was picking apart this idea that there is some pure, perhaps strictly musical form, and that therefore socio-cultural concerns are nothing more than an optional filter we can apply for a bit of colour. arguing for two distinct categories is a lot more work

We're obviously not going to solve this particular problem on ILM but I certainly don't believe that socio-cultural concerns are mere varnish. I do think our current aesthetic paradigm tends to overstate their importance, though, which is why I'm interested in the alternatives.

I mean we're talking about pop-as-unremarkable but the poor showing by major pop stars such as Katy Perry (nil), Taylor Swift (one), Fifth Harmony (nil), Zara Larsson (nil) etc suggests to me that ilx generally likes pop in a discerning and critical way?

I don't think there is a current aesthetic paradigm or a musical one or even an ilm one.

the best i can make sense of yr position is that you are arguing for the importance of some sort of ineffability/pure experience shorn of the all-too-effable (but not yet defined) 'socio-cultural concerns'. obv I think unmediated experience is a nonsensical (& corny) idea and see the most transcendent musical experiences as having the same underlying mechanics as the most numbed, alienated and mundane. I don't see the purity, the essential core from which we can judge the relative importance of various aspects.

'Ineffable', 'pure', 'unmediated', 'transcendent', 'essential core' – your use of these words to describe my position is disingenuous, to say the least. There's no dialogue at this point.

I'm putting something out there because you've not made your position clear, but it's a sincere effort to try and work out what you think. if there's no dialogue it's because you're unwilling to talk

I'm not exactly 'unwilling to talk', as these exchanges have made clear. I think you're mistaking the ambiguity of my position for a non-position, which I suppose is fair enough – it's a risk worth taking as far as I'm concerned. So I'm going to try and formulate, one last time, what I've been trying to get at…

Aesthetic objects are simultaneously multiple/relational (context-dependent) and singular (context-disruptive). That which disrupts context is not 'substance' or 'essence' in the old, premodern sense. Rather, it is a kind of withdrawal that is more-or-less synonymous with the thing's strangeness and otherness – its inner black hole, as it were. This withdrawal is an ambiguous, disorienting operation from our vantage point, which is why I spoke of 'blind spots' and 'ignorance' – it points towards myriad (im)possibilities that are necessarily unfinished and inconclusive, i.e. left in abeyance. As such, withdrawal does not resolve the strife between context and its other(s) – on the contrary, it compels us to consider, be it only for a moment, the undecidability of this antagonism.

I've yet to be persuaded by aesthetic models that explicitly privilege one over the other. Neither purely contextualist nor purely textualist (so to speak) positions make sense to me, which is why I am interested in what happens between, even beyond the two (assuming there is such a thing in the first place, to which you'd no doubt reply 'there isn't'). In other words, you've made up your mind, whereas I'm still on the fence and thus gruellingly – and no doubt failingly – trying to account for this doubt and indeterminacy.

But insofar as so-called 'absolute music' is now a taboo notion (hence my allusion to the 'current paradigm'), any position that puts pure contextualism into question is bound to appear absolutist in the obsolete sense, even when it seeks a provisional, and hopefully more nuanced, third way.

Wow, did this thread stop being interesting and entertaining.

wow, did this thread start being interesting and entertaining?

I like Charli XCX a lot but "Boys" sounds like my daughter playing Smashy Road and is dull, that is my complaint

well she was
prolly
thinkin
bout

Yeah I don't see ILM as being particularly poptimist, ogmor and boxedjoy OTM basically. None of the top four songs appeared on even a quarter of the ballots submitted (although I'm not sure how that compares to previous years' winners) and I'm not seeing loads of pop-only ballots on the stats thread. (Did anyone vote for all of them? FWIW I voted for Boys, love New Rules and am indifferent to the other two). People have varied tastes and I think the overall results bear this out.

If the list was full of the Chainsmokers and Ed Sheeran then the handwringers might have a point, otherwise I'm just assuming it's another "eww girls pop music" kneejerk reaction and leave it there.