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

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.

Those aren’t pop songs, they didn’t reach the top of the poll and I think girls have cooties. QED.

Yeah, it's interesting. I never heard the Charli XCX or CRJ songs before this. Acc to Wikipedia, the latter didn't chart anywhere other than Japan and the former didn't chart at all in the US, reaching #60 in Canada and #30 in the UK. They also do sound different from the chart pop music I hear all the time. It's like a completely new kind of 'indie pop' or something. That said, "Boys" also sounds like garbage to me so pomenitul OTM if that is his point.

My suspicion is that the very occupation of engaging with music as a critic or connoisseur is ultimately incompatible with trve kvlt poptimism/populism.

Pomentiful - no offence dude but any definition of pop that excludes ED SHEERAN could probably do with being loosened a bit.

Looks like we're dealing with different definitions of pop here. Those sales are high enough and the songs themselves poppy enough to qualify as pop in my book given how cramped the charts are and how much music (and the kinds of music) they necessarily leave out (read: marginalize).

As for trve kvlt poptimism, I don't know. I feel like it's compatible with a theory-minded, discursive outlook no less than with an 'unconscious' one depending on the context. Different definitions here as well.

xp

Btw, I agree that Ed Sheeran counts as pop music. If anything, it's your definition that strikes me as overly narrow, since it assumes that only the most commercial of the commercial should have made the top of the poll for ILM to qualify as poptimist. I think of poptimism as being more flexible than that, but correct me if I'm wrong?

Yeah, I mean Charli XCX and CRJ qualify as 'pop' relative to Rez Abbasi or Barbara Hannigan. They just don't strike me as what someone would come up with if their primary interest was in celebrating what is currently most popular or fashionable; imo someone who picks those as their favourites of last year is coming from a distinct aesthetic pov, one that is somewhat at odds with the present-day mass audience's (although less so than someone who votes for Barbara Hannigan).

celebrating

Or even critiquing for that matter

xps

It's definitely a different strand, I agree, it's just… not different enough? To each their own, I suppose.

How about someone who votes for both XCX and Hannigan?

8)

These polls are never really going to mainly cater to your or my tastes. I just make a ballot to get myself to review the year and check out a couple of new things; I think of the final results as a resource and check out the odd thing that seems like it might be interesting. There are always a couple of good things in there. xp to pomenitul

That's my general attitude as well, I'm just trying to live up to this thread's promise.

Ha, good work then.

Back on topic! Colleen record is giving me horrendous foreshudders of KAS' arrival at some point on Thursday

^^^that should sell it to a few of you

This innoccuous indie-synth record seems to bother you a lot.

oh i quite liked that KAS album

the innocuousness of it is what gets me down I think! anyway if you like muzakburbling synths that convey the sea or whatever then hey go wild

plop plop

The Kid would have been alright if it hadn't been for her voice. She should stick to instrumentals.

yeah the kas thread is full of criticisms like this ^^^ and they're all wrong

I like that record just fine fwiw, somebody I played it for thought it was The Knife

Not sure Colleen and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith have much in common...well one thing I guess.

fuck off

the records really don't have much in common

was resenting insinuations that i'm a misogynist tbh

i like muzak , what of it, punk

https://www.discogs.com/Farbror-Resande-Mac-Farbror-Resande-Mac-LP/master/1157850

both colleen and KAS lack sufficient hubris to catch LJ's ear obv

pomenitul we may have failed to win james morrison's heart but I appreciate your efforts to flesh out a substantial aesthetic theory. I considered starting a separate thread to debate context and so on but I think ilm's appetite is limited and there's a special pleasure to shitting up the shit talking thread.

I see the sort of strangeness you're talking about as a lack of familiar context (and/or the suggestion of unfamiliar contexts), which is why our sense of the strangeness of any given bit of music varies. the strangeness is relational, it doesn't make sense to me to pin it just on the object, or the observer. contexts can disrupt each other, I suppose, as your focus shifts, but you seem to be talking about something necessary rather than experiential. similarly, other than in a conceptual, logical sense separated from the experience of listening, I don't see room for a necessarily unfinished/indeterminate quality to (some? all?) music. or maybe you're just talking about how things imply their own absence/negation and thinking that any one way of hearing will necessarily be limited and finite & tinged with that lack, which I would agree with, I suppose, although it doesn't effect my enjoyment of pop one way or the other

LJ I was merely suggesting you feel prey to the common mistake of comparing two musicians who are very different perhaps bc they are women, but that doesn't mean you dislike them bc they're women, or make you misogynist. But I apologize and take it back bc now I remember you comparing Hurray for the Riff Raff to The Hold Steady and maybe your comparison game, regardless of gender, is simply mystifying to me.

I'm perpetually baffled by LJ's dislike of LAS. It sounds like music tailor-made for him.

fair, fair. sorry, didn't want to be obnoxious there :(

actually the new KAS has for maybe 3-second periods made me think 'hm' in a not entirely negative way