Elitism in Pop Music

* and gently too btw, despite the 'omg you're calling me a fascist/4chan' pushback

oh and also were the 'poptimists' of the stylus mag era even that uniformly supportive of jt's work at the time? i seem to recall some scathing reaction to "sexyback"

xps: the tolerance for Timberlake's brand from pop culture critics was always going to turn south when the songs became as unpalatable as they now have - without any distraction all the corniness is much harder to ignore. His conventional presentation of manhood is also all so dull and wearying, at least to me personally. This is something I felt lex explained well in his review of the album:

In some ways, Timberlake is a victim of the rapidly changing zeitgeist – though surely it is a pop star’s job to have their finger on its pulse, if not actually create it. His aspirational masculinity is the same story he has been peddling for his whole career – and when he and his collaborators were young and fresh, it resulted in genius. It is also the narrative that pop culture as a whole has sold us for a good half-century – which is why it is increasingly feeling so familiar and so tiresome.

Cardi B's circumstances are not really analogous here so I don't know that she provides a helpful comparison, though I certainly wouldn't say that her comments have passed unnoticed by the same people who have recently piled on Timberlake.

are we man of the woods yet are we man of the woods yet are we man of the woods

what is the 'aspirational masculinity' he is describing there? does he go into more depth than those two words?

though I certainly wouldn't say that her comments have passed unnoticed by the same people who have recently piled on Timberlake.

― monotony, Monday, February 5, 2018 6:11 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmmmmmm isn't the difference between those who *did* notice them and those who (appeared to) not notice them exactly where the me vs. katherine argument is breaking down here

I missed the Super Bowl and halftime show and showed up at my friend's party late. My friend showed me the clip of the half-time show, and we both responded similarly ("that was bad!") and then he made a show of playing "Cry Me A River" one last night before deleting it from his iTunes.

I remarked that I had a soft spot for that song and the 'dialogue' it held with "Everytime" by Britney, and he said "oh no, I don't fuck with Britney. Let me show you how much I don't fuck with Britney," and began playing "Toxic". It was the instrumental version. He had four Britney songs and they were all instrumental. "I don't need Britney when I got this," he said.

Anyway I disagree with most of the sentiments of this thread's revival

Timberlake had mega-bangers

That half-time performance felt like literal erasure of Prince and Prince's own legendary halftime show

I googled "Prince halftime show" after it was over to cleanse my brain from Justin's bullshit and all that came up was "Justin performs with Prince at the halftime show"-- it was literal, functional erasure

Here's lex's full review for context. At least for me, the aspirational masculinity Timberlake presents on this new album is one which conflates manliness with working on the land, having your woman wear your shirt so she feels like she's yours, serving as protector to wife and child, etc etc. Whether it's an overly dramatic shift from his previous work is up for debate I guess. IMO he's probably just been looking at some different Pinterest boards for inspiration as to aesthetic.

I'm not too sure what the argument is anymore and haven't been keeping a list of who has and has not called out Cardi B, but I can understand why people are less willing to disparage her personally when there are other factors like race, gender and class to consider that aren't relevant to Timberlake or, say, Ed Sheeran when he writes songs like "New Man", or Charlie Puth when he favourites Mark Dice tweets.

And a big congratulations to Britney on one year with her hunky instathot boyfriend. https://www.instagram.com/p/Be1Ht6wF4Lj/?taken-by=britneyspears

Ugh, instahot?

uh insta-not

the way ~algorithms~ engage in the erasure of the past fgti outlined is very upsetting

* and gently too btw, despite the 'omg you're calling me a fascist/4chan' pushback

― dyl, Monday, February 5, 2018 7:03 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it was shitty of me to react the way i did to that b/c i revived this thread with inflammatory and flippant commentary and katherine was only responding in kind. i'm glad the popism 2.0 thread got started because, even though i harbor so much irrational bitterness towards the post-max martin/lou pearlman/iheart/livenation pop landscape, i was basically raised by ILM so seeing people talk out why this evolution in thinking happened is genuinely interesting and insightful to me. it was stupid for me to broach the subject in such a hostile way.

i got pretty shook by the 4chan reference because i think i do have that bitter-white-guy-who-got-bullied-in-middle-school thing going on. in my case the bullying was soundtracked by *NSYNC and Britney, so there u have it, katherine otm

i'm sorry i got all "fuck you!!!" about it

Ugh, instahot?

― Video reach stereo bog (Tom D.), Tuesday, February 6, 2018 11:44 AM (five hours ago)

no, instathot

Well, I never!

I remarked that I had a soft spot for that song and the 'dialogue' it held with "Everytime" by Britney, and he said "oh no, I don't fuck with Britney. Let me show you how much I don't fuck with Britney," and began playing "Toxic". It was the instrumental version. He had four Britney songs and they were all instrumental. "I don't need Britney when I got this," he said.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, February 5, 2018 7:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

with friends like this etc

xp: apology accepted.

I think what bothers me the most about this discussion, every time it comes up, is the constant sense of talking about one group of people while meaning another. When I think of legacy media critics -- the few remaining who haven't gotten laid off -- I don't think of people writing hot takes for Twitter likes. I don't generally think of politics being mentioned at all unless they're absolutely unavoidable. These are all things I associate with writers in their 20s, who given the shifting demographics of media* are more likely to be women and more likely to be people of color. The most derided piece of the Justin Timberlake album cycle thus far ("Justin Timberlake is Rebranding as a White Man") was not written by a white male critic for legacy media, but written by a woman of color for a startup (The Outline). The pieces I've seen most praised, among my followers at least (a non-representative sample, but fairly representative of ILX probably) are by legacy media critics: the WaPo review, Lex's piece, etc.

I'm not saying the former pieces are beyond critique (although I do think the former piece is not as bad as many people thought, and that if you're commissioned to write a piece on the trailer for an album that, AFAIK, isn't getting promo copies widely distributed, you are inherently gambling on its sound). But it often feels like what is being criticized is not the substance of the piece but its existence, the very temerity that someone we haven't vetted** is allowed to write! and write about racism! And now they're hiring people from Twitter instead of people we vetted! Whatever will become of real music journalism? And then those exact criticisms get transplanted onto legacy media writers, and the arguments no longer make sense, because that's not who they were originally about.

* there's definitely a glass-cliff component to this, but that's for another thread. what's the analogous term to "glass cliff" for non-executive roles? glass floor?

** I haven't seen it here, but I have seen elsewhere an underlying bitterness: why are *those* people getting hired, and not me? Which, of course, also mirrors reactionary "they're taking our jobs" sentiment exactly.

The Outline piece was (rightly) criticized for being a piece of fan fiction. Or anti-fan fiction, so it assumed the worst motivations on behalf of the artist. That type of criticism – what I refer to as stone soup – is endemic to the internet because of the ever-growing need for "content," endemic to younger writers because they are in less of a position to push back at editors with bad ideas, and endemic to this age because things like promo trailers for albums that didn't even have a single attached barely existed in the old days. (Not to mention that The Outline's self-branding as "So smart, we've made ourselves downright impossible to navigate" should have killed that piece before it ever got drafted, and the editor who looked it over should have probably looked past their own biases during the process of reworking it.) Obviously the lockdown of promos, particularly for writers at non-name outlets, hasn't helped much on that front, either.

The same critiques would be, and have been, made to pieces that posit how awesome something is going to be based on bread crumbs as well.

legacy media critics: the WaPo review, Lex's piece, etc.

damn lex is a legacy music critic now
*dies of old age*

the thing about the piece is absolutely none of this is incorrect, or "fanfiction"; the closest is "heavy country influences," but the album does in fact have that; the latest single (and, it looks like, its highest-charting song) has Chris Stapleton on it! the marketing of the album also absolutely plays into the whole "Younger Now"/"Joanne"/"Rainbow" narrative, by design.

White colonialist fantasies aside, there’s something very familiar about this pivot in Timberlake’s style. We saw it from Miley Cyrus in her hasty rebranding around her 2017 pop country album Younger Now, as well as from Lady Gaga who took to wearing cowboy hats with the release of her 2016 album Joanne. 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. For Timberlake, the pivot should be sonically natural: Originally hailing from Tennessee, Timberlake has never been shy about celebrating his Southern origins. And considering Pharrell and Timbaland are both producers on the album, Man of the Woods is likely to retain some familiar influences. But with his insistence in the video that this album will be his most personal yet, Timberlake is indulging in the inexplicably popular fallacy that music with heavy country influences is somehow more profound or emotionally acute than music that is electronic, lyrics that are rapped, or songs that inspire listeners to shake their asses. Most recently, hip-hop artist Post Malone pushed this narrative in an interview where he said, “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to Hip Hop.”

Timberlake has a long history with hip-hop and R&B, genres invented and dominated by black people. (And to be clear, without African-Americans, there would be no rock or country music as we know it either — but I digress.) His first single as a solo artist featured legendary hip-hop duo Clipse and was co-written by The Neptunes. The success of his second studio album FutureSex/LoveSounds was in no small part due to hip-hop producers like Timbaland and Rick Rubin. There’s nothing wrong with a white artist expressing black influences in his music; still, the ease with which Timberlake can pivot to and away from blackness certainly raises some questions. Pop music is about reinvention, but only white artists are allowed the freedom to leap between racialized identities, depending on the whims of the market. Timberlake can escape his past much more easily than Janet Jackson, whose nude breast at the 2004 Super Bowl — which popped out thanks to Timberlake’s planned pull — directly kicked off the decline of her career, which has yet to recover. (Timberlake, for his part, has never fully atoned in public, though his upcoming performance would be a good place to start.)

xp -- by "legacy music critic" I'm using it a bit broadly here, as is everybody else, to refer to "people who started writing before 2010 or so"

no i figured, and it's true! just crazy to me to think of lex like that but time moves on

it's still fanfiction because it was not based on a listen. that it was correct is a (happy?) accident.

I mean, if you're going to complain about writers "who started writing before 2010 or so" being held up as more important than others, you have to talk about how most of them have have held onto their staff positions at big-name outlets, while other similarly big-name outlets that would also be taken seriously because of their URLs being reflective of some sort of legacy* have ditched full-time music critics because of budget cuts and attrition and layoffs. (the new york daily news, the boston globe, etc.) christgau is an exception to the "people take outlets more seriously than writers" argument but probably the only one.

*i am convinced this is why examiner.com was taken seriously at all; its name had the air of a place where copyeditors and fact-checkers were at least thought about, if not employed.

I'm not complaining about their being held up as more important (although virtually every big-name music outlet has seen a lot of turnover at basically every level of the editorial ladder, voluntary or otherwise). What I'm pointing out is this thing, which happens like clockwork, of displacing one's complaints about one class of writers by attributing them to a different class, about whom those complaints don't make sense. And the more of the following exist, the more likely this is to happen: women writers, writers of color, writers taking progressive stances.

also, "you're right, but you still shouldn't have written anything" is a stance I'm never going to be on board with, sorry. The piece isn't pretending to be an album review.

sorry accepted, and sorry back, but i'm not going to be on board with pieces that are making a lot of assumptions about art based on a too-small-to-even-be-thought-of-as-cursory sample. wait it out or look for cheap bumper-sticker traffic elsewhere.

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.