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

"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

ha well I’ll take it then. mostly just baffled by all the praise. I do feel like there’s a crop of experimental songwriting these days that I should be more excited about, but it’s not clicking. See also Kayla Guthrie

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.

do you work at the mall?

Is it really that unusual? I've met very few proper rockists in my life and almost no music snobs.

I don’t get Ariana Grande and think “No Tears..” is a pretty lame track, but am moved by “TY, N”

It occurred to me today on my twentieth listen of Low that they’ve really become the domestic Radiohead that USA has been waiting for for decades

they’ve really become the domestic Radiohead that USA has been waiting for for decades

If only.

xp I don't really hang out with rock critics or teenagers, so yeah, it's unusual to me. And a lot of so-called poptimists seem to frame a lot of the stuff they claim to enjoy in rockist terms anyway; I never really think of rockism = a preference for rock music but an antiquated way of discussing music that seems to very closely resemble the celebrity-watch of the kind of modern music criticism you see on Pitchfork et al

what the fuck are you talking about

Tbf, the "what is rockism?" thread was started in 2000 because people couldn't make sense of it then either.

(although, amazingly, Tom 3wing did think it had to do with privileging rock music and "the ways rock music gets talked about", and was probably not a catch-all for every possible type of snobbery, prescriptivism, or prejudice, while recognizing that it was a "silly term".)

imo the discourse is missing the point, but largely because it's tough to describe the nuances of music-consumption..

There are people who are whole and feel comfortable with themselves, and do not know oppression firsthand, and these people feel OK with music that is nothing more than the fruits of the training and rehearsing of individuals who, like them, exist entirely within their own selfhood (that is, they don’t feel any conflict in their life), and are completely content to simply enter a studio or walk on a stage and demonstrate the fruits of their labour without any concern as to, say, “who they’re borrowing from”, “what they’re saying”, “who they are”, or “the potentially detrimental effects that their complacent ‘craftsmanship’ might have on individual listeners who do not have the same access to the methods with which this music was created.”

Those people are “rockists”, broadly, but also essentially include any Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac fan who would never consider themselves a “rockist”— in fact, they may simply have, sometimes, “rockist” tastes, sometimes, and wouldn’t think it beneath them to rate their favourite Beatles when it came down to it. (What I mean is: everyone is a rockist, sometimes.)

And there are other people, who think that whole process is full of shit, and doesn’t take into account intersectional politics, or current or past politics, and have other approaches to music listening.

There are those who think that everybody is entitled to a career in music and actively stan music made by neophytes (because of the originality and interest created in every individual’s approach to music-making)— but also because it reflects a far more societally ecumenical approach to culture-creation— that we are all music-makers. It reflects our own amateurism with regards to music-making, and makes us feel good about ourselves that our content creators are also prone to accident and amateurism and moments of greatness.

There are those who think that music (or culture in general) is an effective venue for corrective measures for socio-economic oppression, and prioritize the genius of black people, poor people, trans people, and see the previously-described “canon” as being, as stated earlier, the product of privilege, and thus, one that should be subverted, if not destroyed.

And there are those who wish for a completely consumerist attitude toward pop music, because we are in a culture war, after all, and because a consumerist attitude un-ironically reflects the true intentions of a culture-industry, and so their unabashed adoration for (say) Ariana Grande not only unites the listener with the “working class” but also commodifies the intention and the body of the artist/performer/creative group as being, essentially, what they are, as the culture industry would dictate: expendable. It makes people feel OK with themselves to turn humans into cultural objects to be used and destroyed.

In short, to try and reduce things to a dichotomy of rockism-popism is frustrating (for me) to see people do. People listen to different musics at different times for different reasons. I am “rockist” because I adore extremely talented and privileged classical musicians making wonderful music in expensive concert halls. (I don’t actually care for “rock music” made by men except for Jon Spencer and Black Sabbath, don’t ask me why, maybe because it’s a caricature of white maleness.) I am “neophyte-ilic” because I enjoy the music of young people picking up their guitars for the first time. I have “intersectional tastes” because the music industry has generally left women and black people with lower salaries, despite their greater achievements. And I enjoy the experience of “consumerism”, because I’m a human, and I experience schadenfreude when a pop star fails, and enjoy a redemption narrative when same pop star (or a different one) makes a comeback— I, too, enjoy turning human musicians into objects of cultural consumption.

Oh there’s also that weird strain of “obscurantism” or something? maybe the wrong word, but it’s that human psychological tendency to prefer music that is less popular, or undiscovered. I don’t really go for that, personally, because it smacks of Bad Thoughts (i.e. colonialism), but I recognize that sometimes as a curator you have to surprise people to be of value, rather than playing them shit they’ve already heard.

But anyway, all these different approaches to music listening are inherently contradictory, and result in various contradictory statements that I’m myself inclined to accept and embrace, and have repeatedly stated, such as:

Beyonce’s “Lemonade” is the greatest album of all time
Electrelane is the greatest rock band of all time
Big Thief is the only good band in the world right now
“Thank You, Next” is the greatest song of all time
“Escapade” is the greatest song of all time
“Uptown Top Ranking” is the greatest song of all time
Xiu Xiu is my favourite band
When I’m cooking at home I only listen to Low on repeat off of Tidal
When I’m at my boyfriend’s house (by myself) I only listen to Stockhausen on vinyl while cleaning up his shit
When I’m at my boyfriend’s house (with him) I might sneak in some early Stereolab or Young Marble Giants in between his insistence that we only listen to New Order and Lionel Richie on repeat
Foxy Brown’s “Ill Na Na” is the greatest album of all time

Music listening is a present-tense act and so things shift and are malleable and I will totally cop to being an enormous stan for the execrable “Love Yourself” (Bieber/Sheeran) because it always plays at 7am when I have woken up to early and am shopping for raspberries at the supermarket to make morning smoothies and am consumed with thoughts of my abusive ex from my anxious dreams the night previous, and sing the song to myself while thinking of his abusive ass.

I hate Madonna, because 90% of her music is ass, but I also love Madonna, because I like seeing a 60-year old white woman continue to be a pop star, it is beautiful.

Functional listening, present-tense listening, you see? It shifts and changes.

Which Stockhausen records?

haha

Fantastic post, fgti

'neutron dance' is horribly awkward and flat. why this garbage and not lauer?

compro is bland derivative shit.

not derivative, just boring. even more boring than this post

Many xposts but I just want to say Tirzah is boring in a good way.

xpost i'd describe compro as corny

that's maybe the best thing you could have said to get me to listen to tirzah again. would u say the good part of the boringness comes from an 'authentic' 'amateurishness' lol

fgti that post changed my life

xps I really, really don't get "Neutron Dance" - the melody is so obvious and not in a fun good way, the first time I heard it I could feel myself cringe

Otm that piano hook is dire

I can't sleep so I moved the whole poptimism/rockism discussion here: What Is Rockism ?

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