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

Politics, whether at its best or at its worst, is the last thing I want to hear in a musical work. It's always a part of it, of course, even when kept at bay, but aesthetics is more exciting to me.

I was talking about reading about music, i.e. about the hyping of music, the subject of this thread : how we write about music is political, and thus so is how we stand on pop music. anti-pop snobbery is a sure sign that I have no time for a person: eventually they will have me also up against the wall.

I don't hate pop music by any stretch of the imagination, but any discourse that enshrines it above all other genres (this is what I meant by 'reductive poptimism', which is indistinguishable from rockism) is, in fact, politically violent in that it silences less populist approaches to listening and music making. The amount of music out there is more overwhelming than ever – I don't think the solution is to systematically fall back on the same melodic contours, the same simplistic rhythms, the same comfortable timbres that are tautologically popular because they are popular. I always come back to that Kafka line about how a book should be the pickaxe that shatters the icy sea within us – I want music to do the same, whether it be pop or (more often) something else entirely.

We will spare philosophy PhDs (but not critical theorists) when it is time for the cull. xp

I agree with pomenitul. The idea you touched on before euler—that the “subjective” pleasures of indie are worse politically than the pleasures of the masses—seemed really sinister to me.

Systematically favouring works that are short and earwormy (loosely speaking) is an impoverished way of looking at music imho.

xps

Like, I love that experience, but I can't imagine wanting it more than everything else music has to offer.

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.

i can’t believe y’all have “misgivings” about the nts sessions, my god remove your heads from your asses

listen to something and engage with it on its own terms imo, which i guess isn’t what this thread is for

i’ve skipped over the reductive poptimism convo bc it reeks of “this SOUNDS like a real thing that no one actually practices”

i do disagree with almost everything euler said though

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:35 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM

tbh treeship the zing hits the mark, I can't deny

brad in my world of overeducated people I hear things like pomenitul is saying all the time, which is why I like coming here, rather than talking to those people, about music

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.

I get what you're saying, and that's why I'll never disengage from pop music completely, but its triumphant prevalence can and does often preclude aesthetic diversity from seeping through. Basically, pop seeks to maintain the status quo, i.e. the fact that, genre-wise, the top 1% dominates 99% of the musical market. Sure, the analogy is flawed, in that it's not just about concentration of capital but also about concentration of collective affect, yet insofar as ears don't come with lids, we are so used to having certain sounds thrust upon us in public spaces that I can't help but feel like we've been 'groomed' to dislike anything that diverges from the Earworm God. If anything, there's a political point to be made (not that it hasn't been, but I feel like it's less audible in our current century) that exposure to un-pop music attunes us to other ways of listening, which is a potentially ethical act.

By the way, I have also gotten into such arguments with stuffy (mostly French) academic types who in reality care very little for music, and I tend to adopt a stance similar to yours, Euler, but I'm no less wary of overcorrection, which I encounter far more often in the English-speaking world.

yeah I get that; ILM has never seemed to me to be a home for pop-as-status-quo, so these discussion are different than when I'm talking with someone sneering at anything written during the twentieth century, which is more like the people I spend my life with

I feel you, those are the absolute worst. They usually care more for the prestige that ostensibly comes with such an opinion than the music itself, which they don't even listen to anyway.

The Beths, what are you all thinking?

― boxedjoy

tunes are good

you guys really need to read more late 20th century rock crit if you don’t get why poptimism became a thing in the first place. raging against the 1/99 split of pop and everything else while denigrating an ideology that came up *because* of a similar elitism (from the ruling class within media) is... ironic? utterly white dude?

market poptimism, which is uncritical and rooted in the hope that an artist retweets praise and lifts the social media profiles of the writer/publication, is closer to the straw man against whom you’re railing

I'm not exactly defending rockism here. If anything, it's a tired debate – there are so many genres that get little to no attention at all.

Incidentally, my (French) wife has far, far less patience for poptimism than I do. The whole 'lol white dude' thing is so clichéd and American-centric.

and yet it isn’t untrue if you actually go back and read old music writing and look at the bylines

sorry to annoy your lady with facts

I don't really get what you're arguing tbh. That the diversity I'm clamouring for is wrong because pop deserves its continued revenge on rockism?

I mean theres no such thing as apolitical music - every choice and every sound is the result of a political positioning, whether it's avant-garde experimental sounds or heteronormative pop love songs. Your relation to a piece of music is informed by the interplay between your own beliefs and how they integrate with the aesthetic choices made

I mean theres no such thing as apolitical music - every choice and every sound is the result of a political positioning, whether it's avant-garde experimental sounds or heteronormative pop love songs. Your relation to a piece of music is informed by the interplay between your own beliefs and how they integrate with the aesthetic choices made

Also, generally I find that people who claim they have no time/interest for politics are people who have the privilege to switch off from it and not constantly be engaged - lucky you if that's the case but as a gay man in a world still populated by huge numbers of people who literally dont want me to exist I can't afford that luxury. That permeates everything I do even if its on the tiniest level and to pretend it doesn't is disingenuous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZYHP6IBoac

I mean the finer points of poptimism are there for debate if you like but I really get my back up when people think it's easy to seperate aesthetics from politics and wilfully disengage with their own positions of power and privilege as a listener and consumer

My position is that music is ever political but that it doesn't boil down to politics.

As for poptimism, of course the history of the term matters, but if anything, it didn't go far enough. So many sounds are still excluded.

progtimism

The Beths, what are you all thinking?

going to studiously avoid pomenitul's excellent baiting and second boxedjoy. or at least...the beths are fine, but the way some of you go on about them it's like they're more than an extremely basic indie outfit with wholly unremarkable songs

I know right, how could anyone enjoy these intricate, joyous, technically proficient pop songs?!

I usually give most albums a full play to decide if I like them or not but I couldn't finish The Beths one. I like a lot of retro-leaning jangly indie but it sounded so flat and lifeless and the exact moment I gave up was when some harmonies crept in and nobody in the studio sounded remotely like they were doing anything beyond fulfilling an obligation

if you have recent power-pop you'd like to recommend in its place I'd love to hear it

^^Have you heard the Courtneys? (They don’t have a release as “recent” as the Beths, granted)

Bring back Vivian Girls etc

Poptimism refers to like a really specific opposition to a boring and homogenous canon that rock critics had built up in the US and UK. And I am for it—there was no small amount of misogyny and homophobia underneath the “disco sucks” attitude of the 70s and how that filtered down to critical consensus in the 90s. I’m proud of ILM to the extent that ILM helped undermine this specific kind of aesthetic bigotry.

However, as a general attitude, “poptimism” is a disaster because popular taste more often than not props up popular prejudices. Is anyone here a poptimist of sitcoms? Of cable news? Of course not. Even like, with pop music, it’s idiotic to say the highest charting stuff is the best out of democratic solidarity is dumb. All this music might tell you is what the common denominators are among a vast swath of listeners. It doesn’t tell you much about what really drives any one of these listeners, because “the masses,” to quote another poster, is just an abstraction. Championing “the masses” seems at odds with being interested in people, even.

I like the Courtneys but they're a cut below the Beths on a craft/songwriting level imho

I love a few Vivian Girls songs but if you're gonna dis someone for rote songwriting... xps

I know its not the same thing really but when I listen to the grace of the new Belly album or the cathartic new Hop Along, the Beths just felt so anaemic and scrappy

Obvz the correct answer is Charly Bliss

You're right, none of those bands are doing even remotely the same thing.

matt dc's post on the beths' thread sums it up for me:

This is like the least challenging album ever recorded but it's really addictive. I dunno, sometimes, more occasionally than is claimed, when you've got the tunes that's really all that matters.

Interesting to hear they've got a jazz background though, it does SOUND much tighter and more muscular than records like this usually do. Like usually you listen to a straightforward indie rock record and it feels like aesthetic decisions had been made because the band weren't capable of doing much more, or couldn't think of anything else to do. Here, it feels like they've arranged things this way because that's what the song NEEDS.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 11 October 2018 12:28 (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I only mention the Courtneys, b/c when I read a Beths review they were mentioned as a comparison (and I love the Courtneys) — so I checked out the Beths and was like, uhh this ain’t at all on the same level for me.

(The Beths seem fine, I wouldn’t “complain” about them; just not my thing, I guess)

I mean if they weren't getting so this buzz - i wouldn't notice or bother. But I'm genuinely curious - a lot of posters whose taste I normally look to for recommendations and feel alignment with are really into it and I dont hear what there is to hear in it, which makes me wonder what I'm missing

I'm glad this thread reminded me to listen to the Beths again, anyway.

Agree with everything Pomeniful said, and some others as well. Sorry to continue that conversation / tired debate (indeed) but:
Have people come up with a term for the belief that all things hip hop (pop rap, trap etc) are the rightful cultural compass and center of all musical dynamism ? Because I hear that a lot, while Poptimism seems to have reduced to a narrow obsession over a few exaggerated / delirious / ecstatic pop qualities (that can only be found on records that explicitly go for them and which seem forced to me).

@boxedjoy, I think you might be listening too hard.