Elitism in Pop Music

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between poptimistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of poptimism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.

your displaced /pol/ ethics in music journalism campaign

fuck off with this shit

sorry. that was rude of me. but I don't appreciate being called a fascist/gamergater. i don't give a fuck about the new JT or TS albums, it just doesn't seem to me like their music or personalities have actually gotten worse. deej is otm re: the clear opportunism in their willingness to roll completely with the flow for their social media posts & "criticism"

deej otm, this whole thing has been v depressing

yep

haters gonna say it's 'gate

crut otm

sorry. that was rude of me. but I don't appreciate being called a fascist/gamergater.

I don't appreciate thinly-veiled "music criticism was great when only reasonable men like me did it and terrible now that the SJWs who don't care about music have taken over" commentary, so I guess we're even

I don't know if I'm helping, but it sucked then too

1. I am not a music critic 2. the exact same people who propped up these artists are the ones who are suddenly jumping ship 3. I support social justice; you are apparently confusing me with someone else

and Whiney otm, rockist music critics suck too

i just like how buying Tortoise on Warp apparently made you a top tier savant in 2001

People are jumping ship. Hmm, let's see herE:

People dislike the new Taylor Swift album. Which is the most likely explanation?

A) Taylor Swift has radically changed her sound in the past decade and fully embraced the most purposefully dislikable tabloid version of her personality.
B) They don't care about music, unlike me.

People dislike the new Justin Timberlake album. Which is the most likely explanation?

A) Justin Timberlake has made three albums in a row that are loudly, embarrassingly terrible at worst and retreads at best.
B) They don't care about music, unlike me. And they're not REAL Prince fans. I bet they can't name three of Prince's albums.

point taken.

Yeah Katherine ... that’s not at all what’s happening here.

i dont even care about whether or not someone likes or hates their shit, on a personal level; i just hate the clear opportunism

Taylor Swift embracing her tabloid persona in that one video really affects how the music sounds

I don’t like the Timberlake albums either! This is selective amplification of what a lot of ppl see as the new woke, not some new genuine engagement w politics

I'm definitely not a music critic, and I don't seek out music criticism anymore, but I follow the big pop event album threads on ILM and the discourse surrounding the Swift album at least was hostile from the moment the first single was released. As katherine put it on the Swift thread:

the near-unanimous hatred for this is baffling and if this were by anyone but this pop season's designated critical villain I suspect people would love it

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Friday, August 25, 2017 5:58 AM (five months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

& that is how it's turned out. I find it baffling. & at least that thread let me know who on ILM should be ignored (that def doesn't mean you, katherine, who got it right from the start)

if there is an explanation of the following that is not "they're not real Prince fans," please enlighten me:

like w so many of the people getting "angry" at justin on prince's behalf i just think i dont believe you. They clearly don't actually care! there's just no way. these ppl weren't buying prince albums before he died

xp -- embracing her tabloid persona to the point of making an entire quasi-concept album affects the songwriting and the lyrics, which are what most people who hyper-praised country Taylor Swift praised her for

Like I’ve never in my life cared about Taylor and got super annoyed circa 20/20 experience at how many of my peers were gassing mediocre records (cf “mirrors” at 11 on Paz’s and jop). If anything I should be feeling validated. But I don’t, because this newly “critical” approach feels like ppl responding to buffeting trend winds not some new “realer” engagement with politics

just wow @ g@mergater k@therine stanning for taylor's white mediocrity, she's cancelled

xp

what if i don’t like reputation because i find jack antonoff’s production work claustrophobia inducing and find taylor’s vocal shortcomings way too prominent and think the mba lyrics of “endgame” are depressing? the last track is nice though.

also isn’t part of the problem here the way The Discourse coalesces/is forced to coalesce around single albums because of the general narrowing of all cultural talking points (thanks trump, thanks google and facebook)? and so bad reviews are in a way pushback against that

the difference there is that the Taylor Swift single is not terrible, and the Justin Timberlake record is; if anyone but Justin Timberlake released "Man of the Woods" (I don't know who the most likely candidate would be -- Shawn Mendes or Charlie Puth?) people would probably still find it bad.

i think it’s pretty terrible! i heard it in a cab after reputation had faded from my memory and i was pretty appalled

My senior production students seem to love Jack Antonoff, ugh.

i wonder if it’s generational

I think it’s bad but not substantially worse than 20/20 exp which again ....

My senior production students seem to love Jack Antonoff, ugh.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, February 5, 2018 12:47 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wonder if it’s generational

― maura, Monday, February 5, 2018

Draaaaakke

my 17 yr old daughter loves antonoff's stuff, fun, bleachers, the Lorde album, etc

I’m not mad consensus swung one way or another I’m mad at how few people I believe, and how opportunistic the perspectives feel, how non-genuine. Saying that I’m wrong or presumptuous to find them not genuine ... feels like beside the point if I’m saying they’re doing a bad job convincing me

totally fair to dislike Reputation or Jack Antonoff! a lot of people do. but I regret to inform you that according to today's discourse this means you are not a music fan, just a reed blowing in the wind and accumulating emoji handclaps

i guess discourse is where you find it.

(that was not an opinion I share, in case it wasn't clear)

Actually, I find Man in the Woods better than 20/20 Experience because two songs ("Breeze Off the Lake" and "Montana"), maybe a couple others, are enjoyable pieces of music that will sound good on the radio if the album cycle makes it that far. He's never made a front-to-back banger, although it's not like I expect him to.

To me The Justin Experience since 2003 has required us in a fractured pop culture era to accept his indomitability across all media; you have to believe by studying his self-promotion that JT can make good music. Except for his okay debut he's made attenuated shitty albums. In this new cultural moment suddenly the internet acts as if it wasn't aware of his weaknesses.

how can you like "out of the woods" but hate "man of the woods" think abt it

makes sense if you don't enjoy being of the woods imo

can we just go back to liking cool alternative guitar rock

I was really trying not to say "I only like Taylor Swift when she still played guitar".

*liked

totally fair to dislike Reputation or Jack Antonoff! a lot of people do. but I regret to inform you that according to today's discourse this means you are not a music fan, just a reed blowing in the wind and accumulating emoji handclaps

― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Monday, February 5, 2018 11:51 AM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is literally not what I’m saying but since you’ve decided I’m a Gamergater what I’m saying no longer actually matters

can we just go back to liking cool alternative guitar rock

― j., Monday, February 5, 2018 6:07 PM (five minutes ago)

we've come full circle!

enjoying Timberlake during the actual period when he actually irritated Prince only turn on Timberlake during a random Super Bowl years later is classic Twitter incoherence, god save the haters

— 🌺JUSTIN CHARITY (@justincharity) February 5, 2018

If JT had done a Grant Hart tribute instead he could have solved this mess

yeah and come out fucking loaded like bob stinson

The status quo, with any pop artist, is for a critic (the word used generally)'s opinions to align perfectly with an artist's commercial success and/or PR campaign. So with Justin Timberlake, the status quo opinion would be to maintain that Justin was innately incredibly talented and destined to succeed, because he succeeded -- unlike, say, JC, who was destined to flop, because he flopped. The status quo on Justin Timberlake around The 20/20 Experience was that he was an auteur making high art; the status quo is currently that he's an icon, as American as the Super Bowl and the frontier. With Taylor Swift, the status quo would be to maintain that she is the most famous person in the music industry and thus the best. Et cetera.

This is not how "status quo" is used here. How it seems to be used here, and in all of the last 100 times this has played out, is "talking about social justice," a stance that happens to align nicely with the tide of reactionary backlash the world's seen in the past couple years. (The reason I brought up /pol/ is because an incredibly common accusation from that camp is that people are just "virtue signaling.") There are also undertones of "being a person of color with an opinion" -- I don't think it's a coincidence that this argument comes out in its fullest force whenever the criticisms have to do with race, and that the greatest outrage is reserved for people using handclap emojis (a Black Twitter thing) or using the phrase "white mediocrity."

(Also, it's possible to have a genuine opinion about an album that happens to align with the most popular opinion. Always going against received opinion every single time without fail isn't authenticity, it's deliberate contrarianism, which is just as fake as the "status quo"-ing people decry.)

if you agree with *most* but not *every* "social justice" thing people on Twitter say, you are basically 4chan, which is why I'm taking a stand against the nigel the pedo seabird

Like, I think everyone except like four people on ILX are down with the basic tenets of social justice and representation and equal rights and making all the proper adjustments after years of white cis male dominated critical discourse and a white cis male dominated industry. It's sucked for a long time and there are great strides being made every day.

But that doesn't make it not corny when sites do a total 180 on pretty innocuous music by Justin Timberlake

Especially when the ca. 2012-2013 indie rock writers gushing over giant pop albums scanned as try-hard in the first place

with major websites in particular, oart of it is that, now that these major pop stars have basically shut down access to everyone but the New York Times once every few years -- the only interview with Timberlake himself, as opposed to Justin Timberlake Has a Cold-ing, that I've found this album cycle was iHeartMedia -- people can criticize them because they're not going to get the Justin Timberlake interview anyway. but again, that has nothing to do with people on Twitter

*whispers* butwhatifyouwereneveraJTfananyway

Authenticity is quite marketable now, and for white pop stars that means shifting away from the hip-hop and R&B-influenced sounds that made them famous, and toward the sounds of Southern and country rock

Katherine... this is NOT accurate. He didn’t shift away from hip hop and r&b sounds. And he worked with the same black songwriters and producers he has for ages.

my sense lately is that whole of popular cultural criticism, which includes pop music criticism, has changed in the past several years (imo paralleling the rise of twitter, but this is conjecture) to more clearly foreground issues of social justice, anti-racism, intersectionality, etc... for people who look like me (white guys, which includes many of the initial posters in this revive), we're probably a little more likely to see the gears moving, so to speak, in some of the lazier essays (that much-discussed outline article on JT being an obvious example) the new movement produces, because unlike the women and POC who are doing more and more of the writing (a good thing), these ways of thinking do not come as naturally to us. but I think it's important for me, and other white guys, to consider that this is probably how music criticism read to non-white guys for basically the entire history of the craft, and, you know, open our minds to new ways of looking at the world

so I'm not really mad at that outline essay because while it's bad, a certain percentage of essays are always going to be bad, and this is just what bad essays are going to look like increasingly now I guess.

part of me is also just glad that I am at the point in my life when I have the least use for pop music criticism, so I feel very uninvested in any of this

I mean, it isn't a sneak preview of one track off a tracklist, it's an album trailer, conceived and released as a deliberate piece of marketing meant to convey a particular message, and conveying it with the subtlety of a lumberjack's axe. (I can't find anything about who directed it, what agency, etc., but given the caliber of personnel Justin Timberlake got for every other video this cycle, I doubt it was done on the cheap.) It's valid to write criticism about what that message might be, the same way it's valid to write criticism about any other type of advertisement.

(Trailers are also increasingly large parts of album roll-outs in general, with as much if not more deliberate label and creative attention paid to them as the album itself. Where is the line beyond which something becomes superficial and not worth commenting upon? Would it be inappropriate to write about Kanye West's 20-odd minute "Runaway" film, for instance?)

It is valid is an argument / backpedal I can agree with, I suppose

I can’t help but feel like part of what people are reacting to is a white tendency to treat certain ideological positions as inherently fixed, as authentically representative of say young black women without acknowledging the multiplicity and contradictory perspectives generated by a group that is *not monolithic*. And what ends up happening is white people and sometimes nonblack POC jump on board to one POV without realizing how by parroting the arguments of say a black woman there’s a big context shift, and that it does not mean the same thing coming from them that it did for the people who first drew attention to it. And also do not realize that one person’s perspective is not a stand in for all the perspectives of the wider group. That amplification effect is unavoidable of course, but it still has a distortive effect on conversations around lots of subjects.

Katherine... this is NOT accurate. He didn’t shift away from hip hop and r&b sounds. And he worked with the same black songwriters and producers he has for ages.

It'd be inaccurate if it said he completely abandoned it. He did not completely abandon it. He shifted toward it. Even if you discount the general Americana influence as present in Timberlake's music all along -- I don't particularly agree with that, but just discounting it for argument's sake -- putting the most critically acclaimed person in country music, Chris Stapleton, on an album where, previously, your albums did not have Chris Stapleton (emphasis on "albums," I know he cut tracks/live performances) constitutes a shift to country. The fact that "Say Something" is likely the next "official" single (AFAIK it hasn't been officially sent to radio yet, or at least doesn't show up on the list of upcoming pop radio songs, but given that it's charting so well, the one he's performing on TV, etc., I would be surprised if it weren't) corroborates that shift. (Stapleton also co-wrote more than one track on the album, so it's not some isolated gimmick.)

s/"it"/"hip-hop" and "country" respectively

putting the most critically acclaimed person in country music, Chris Stapleton, on an album where, previously, your albums did not have Chris Stapleton (emphasis on "albums," I know he cut tracks/live performances) constitutes a shift to country

What kind of shift did Tim McGraw putting Nelly on his album constitute? What kind of shift did Brad Paisley putting LL Cool J on his album constitute?

I agree there was an overlay of country but the premise everyone is mad at is the idea that he shifted away from r&b. It’s a damn r&b album. Aren’t most of the Songs are written by James Fauntleroy? Cmon. It was a premise that reflected a broad twitter consensus. I’ve liked other things that writer has done and don’t think I’m above having bought into some bs consensus at one time or another but the article was a good example of what happens when we let the script in our heads write our pieces for us

tim mcgraw wanted to be an honorary st. lunatic

A) A shift from reality into fantasy, because Tim McGraw never put that single on his albums
B) A shift into the following: genre crossover appeal of the sort he did a lot during that album cycle; accidental racism

Putting a cowboy hat on is not the discursive equivalent of Miley Cyrus shitting on rap music in the press after exploiting it for an album cycle. The piece’s thesis was frustrating for drawing that comparison. Justin Timberlake has made r&b for two decades and one album cycle ago he was cast among hip hop royalty, performing songs about wearing suits and ties with jay z. The comparison was silly and lightweight even if the writer is not

the cowboy hat was a reference to Lady Gaga, whose album cycle included more than cowboy hats

I didn’t follow that at all but replace it with stood next to a tree or whatever superficial marketing led everyone to believe justin was abandoning the genre that made him

If the album is mediocre it’s mediocre we don’t need to invent objective reasons it was mediocre... I do not think this is he main reason politics has come back to the forefront (generally speaking I think it was overdue, fwiw) but I do get that feeling that some of the leaning on politics is that it creates a more objective lens through which to view an artist’s success or failure, a sense of certitude in a world slowly recognizing the subjective nature of its interactions

I guess (to me) Gaga -- though she def had elements of modern r&b and hip hop -- felt pretty apart from that? (much moreso than JT or Miley), like she's so jazz hands drama kid at heart, she always had a sort of old school showbiz thing to me

(so i guess her playing with whatever dressup she's doing on a particular album always feels subservient to her Lady Gaga pop, kind of like Madonna could embrace house music or w/e but it's still Madonna music)

yeah Gaga was more disowning dance-pop than disowning R&B; "Rainbow" is Kesha doing the same thing (her case is a lot more complicated for the obvious reasons, one of which being she genuinely did hate some of the music she was making). It's the same sort of authenticity move, however -- and to the people they're aiming that authenticity at, dance-pop and hip-hop might as well be interchangeable shitty music, etc.