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

"sex" is the only 1975 song that sounds like "sex" otherwise they've barely made anything resembling landfill indie

people keep comparing the album to owl city which is just beyond me

unless you'd like to point me to the owl city record with the garage track on it

i understand they are unbelievably easy to dislike but generally want more precision about it thanks

xp I'll take any excuse to link this: https://youtu.be/ECN7C1QQyqk

an opportunist move to distance yourself from the exaggeratedly earnest middle-brow herd whose disapproval of this album is just a little bit too easy for you to stomach. Can't let them think they've actually got it, can you?

Is this a list of the track titles? I can't parse it as an argument

― I Accept the Word of Santa (Noodle Vague), Monday, December 10, 2018 4:37 PM (twelve minutes ago)

Think the bit in italics is the title of the next album.

In all honesty the last 1975 sounds to me like what landfill indie was supposed to sound like. It's not weird that there's a garage track on it, it's weird that Bloc Party made an album called 'A Weekend In the City' without a garage track on it.

lmao fred otm

I didn't say I disliked them! I don't really like or dislike anything anymore. I do like their fonts! I'm not being dismissive! I saw a poster announcing their recent album and snapped a photo of it and texted it to my design-y friend to ask why I liked the font so much

OK so the song "Sex" was the song I was thinking of. I don't know why I thought it sounded like Hot Hot Heat when it's a very transparent "All My Friends" lift. And DNTEL and that genealogy of production choices isn't really that off-base I don't think... (though to be honest it all sounds like Ariel Rechtstaid to me, all the 1975 tracks I've flipped through over the last half hour could easily be Sky Ferreira songs)

oh sorry fgti i kinda went on a tangent about more general responses to the record lol

I guess I dislike it for the same reasons I dislike shows like Bojack Horseman. They want to make these trenchant comments on society at large but at the same time package it such a way, that if anyone calls them out on the lacking substance or coherence, then it's totally besides the point, because it's about having a laugh.

I guess they sorta address this themselves. "saying controversial things just for the hell of it", but self-awareness about it only makes it come off as more dishonest to me.

Ah, I see. I don't dislike this band! I don't dislike DNTEL or landfill indie either though. I just hear, when I listen to 1975, an amalgamation of things that were roundly excoriated five, ten years ago, (i.e. latter-day Bloc Party! Frederik otm!) But the 1975 make it work somehow (and I myself think it's because of the excellent choices in fonts)

xp

I guess I just don't hear even the teensiest traces of any of the touchstones being thrown out here on the last two records tbh

the fonts are good it's true

Very onion-esque to insist that you like them just fine by emphasizing how much you like the fonts they choose

...why wouldn't that be a valid reason to like a band? OMD are one of my favourite bands and largely for the same reason

And tbf I have only listened to the singles from the new 1975 album and it sounds like the NME did not actually fold but rather manifested itself as a band

the 1975 definitely succeeded in doing the "we're not that interested in being a Rock band anymore" thing where bloc party dramatically failed

my first reaction to them, on hearing some of the singles from the s/t, was "oh this is the latest version of shitty british indie pop like two door cinema club" (which was pretty unfair of me) but then a few years later i heard some of the sublime EP tracks like "me" via the thread here and that made me willing to love them

honestly, i'd read a piece about the 1975's art direction / visual aesthetic / marketing / etc, as long as that piece talked to the people behind it, both conceptually (Matty, I assume) and in execution ... I would love to read that.

"as long as that piece talked to the people behind it" < - by this I mean i wanna read an interview-based feature w/ analysis, not some writer's essay

I thought fgti was doing a bit (in regards to the fonts) to say that they're very successful in their art direction/marketing... despite the actual music not being that noteworthy.

_these were bold and thoughtful ideas_


Very much agreed. This kind of poptimism, narrowly defined, has greatly influenced my own understanding of music over the years. But since rockism manifestly lost the war, poptimism – in no small part due to the term's suggestive versatility – is no longer 'anti-establishment' in 2018. Quite the contrary, which is why it deserves a bit of a ruffling.

xpost maybe he is, but i like their music and think their art direction is consistently awesome and confident and distinctive and would like to read a wonky piece about how it happens.

same goes for, idk, Fucked Up.

iirc there was an interview with the person who did the neon signs for the last album, let me see if i can find it

huh it might be behind a paywall now

sorry to beat this like a horse but the wider picture is a lot more status quo and it’s depressing

Fair enough. Some of the elder statesmen of rockism are definitely still around and I'm sure they continue to carry clout with audiophile types, but I doubt a lot of young people care for what they have to say. Not saying none of them do – you'll occasionally find them complaining on reddit about how no one plays real instruments anymore –but it's a far less prevalent stance nowadays.

a good place to find rockism these days is the stereogum comments section

Guardian comments is 90% rockism, 10% "never heard of them"

ninthyoung's right, i listen to the 1975 just bc i hate the stereogum comment section that much

or any comments section, really, or any person you encounter in real life (there may be overlap)

tell it to my students' introductory surveys, pomenitul

anyway whatever

maura relentlessly otm itt

I don't know any rockists under the age of 50 so my anecdotal evidence doesn't match your anecdotal evidence. The overwhelming majority of people I know are vehemently opposed to the idea that there is such a thing as 'real' music and primarily listen to pop. Also, I've never lived in the US.

I didn't think Chuck Klosterman was what people meant by 'rockism' at all, although I haven't kept up with his recent work. The famous Ramones vs Ratt was totally an argument that popular but critically derided 'corporate, fake, pedestrian' music should be discussed at least as seriously as critically acclaimed 'important, authentic' music.

*Ramones vs Ratt piece

That may be just "neurological", but teenagers have a high attraction for pedantism and conservatism. 16 years old who discover Pink Floyd or Led Zep etc. That has never really changed and never will. But yeah in real life people are mostly casual, most don't care to have a logic to their listens (god bless them). When you move online, you see everything, including people who should really be made of straw... as maura said.

katherine said* (in that particular way)

Klosterman is just Diet XhuxK is how I break it down to an extent

that’s an insult to xhuhk

revisiting all these Ewing essays is really edifying, and it also makes me wonder how you might conceptualize something that follows poptimism around the current (perceived?) dominance of the Atlanta sound and other streaming-centric hip-hop. a lot of times it feels like that stuff is intentionally pushing against Ewing's (more often implied than explicit) ideas about what populism *sounds* like, musically, and also leans more towards rabid fandom as way to leverage oneself into popularity than reaching across the aesthetic aisle.

it's also interesting to see how little extramusical ethics plays a part in these columns, considering how dominant it is in the discourse now

More to say soon but: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "extramusical ethics" but I think that part of the backlash against evaluating music in terms of 'authenticity' and/or authorial intent in the early poptimism days (as seen in the ca. 2000 Ewing essays that Tim linked) might have involved a conscious move away from or reaction to evaluating music in terms of certain types of extramusical ethics, whether in terms of looking for explicit statements in the music, concern with the identities or backgrounds of stars, or valuing smaller-scale or non-corporate modes of production or dissemination. If anything, it was probably the 'rockists' who had venerated Tracy Chapman and Arrested Development 10 years earlier. ('Rockism' is almost definitely even more of a strawman than any take on 'poptimism' imo, esp considering that afaik literally no one positively identified as a 'rockist' before the term was coined as a put-down.)

I’ve tried several times but this Tirzah album seems insanely boring

i applaud your candour, sir, and your courage

ariana grande being the new popstar everyone is into in the last year or so. idgi. i didn't totally get it with taylor swift or carly rae jepsen either but i really don't get it with ariana

Can’t tell if I’m being hit with sarcasm ... totally open to loving it, just can’t

I liked it well enough once, though I did get a little bored halfway through. I can't imagine willingly listening to it again given everything else there is to hear.

not sarcastic at all! a bit arch but yknow