Magazine/website/record store BEST OF 2011 end-of-year list pile-up

SFJ from the New Yorker 2011 tracks in his Spotify list

http://www.myplaylistisbetterthanyours.com/spotify/playlist/27081/

lol @ token

ooooops. meant 2 say lol @ token hipsterism

http://www.jlcauvin.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/token.jpg

http://www.jlcauvin.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/token.jpg

I give up.

wait is there supposed to be ONE token hipster track on that playlist? that's what that means, right?

yeah some dude otm i didnt really notice any

oneohtrix stuck out to me, but shrug. there are definitely things on that playlist i have not heard & am not interested in hearing so maybe i don't know what i'm talkin about.

lol lamp

if anything sticks out on there, it's the chris watson track.

Tim Sweeney's best of 2011:

http://www.beatsinspace.net/playlists/605

The Chris Watron record is superb. I may be biased towards it due to having just completed my first year where I've had to get a train more days than not. The Andy Stott 'We Stay Together' record has quality train ambiences going on too.

-Watron
+Watson

I've hardly seen the Junior Boys album come by on any of these lists, which surprises me.

Terrorizer is meant to be out today, anyone got the top albums list?

Pretty independent-looking list in local weekly:

http://alibi.com/music/39879/Sonic-Deluxe.html

On first 43 seconds, this Caretaker thing sounds great.

(I see it's already been mentioned a bunch on this thread.)

the first 43 seconds of the caretaker record could be the beginning of a really amazing record but they are sadly just the first of many seconds of the caretaker record

I don't outright ~hate~ a lot of music.

But for instance: I am not a big Bob Dylan fan. I think this is because I'm less interested in lyrics than I am in interesting sounds, and I also don't find much appeal in traditional folk/blues structures. I suspect that Dylan partisans are, generally, the kind of people who sit down and pay attention to words and who not only aren't bored by the trad structures but find strength and emotional depth in them. It's not my cup of tea, but I can see how he appeals to people who listen to music differently than I do.

― jaymc, Monday, December 26, 2011 9:01 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Permalink

You basically just defined my "problem" with Dylan perfectly. When the sounds of his music are interesting to me, I'm interested. But for the most part the sounds leave me cold.

I notice that I don't pay much attention to lyrics until a good 5-6 listens in, and I'll never get that far along if the sounds don't interest me from the start.

i dont like that jaymc post, makes dylan seem all cerebreally distant instead of visceral. i find my interest in dylan to be fairly visceral & entertaining before i even think abt the lyrics. i mean, no one sounds like him

yeah there's a whole world of chin-stroking 'lyrical' rock out there that is in part derived from dylan but his appeal seems kind of singular (and i say that as not a huge fan myself)

yall need to read Kogan's Disco Tex essay; classic Dylan is well-enmeshed in the tradition of turning lyrics into the semiotic equivalent of "interesting noises", all the while working fully in the aforementioned folk/blues structures

1962 and 1963: "A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall" and "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" are Bob Dylan’s original attempts to resemble the mambo. In Cuba in the ’30s, when everyone was adding horn parts, Arsenio Rodriguez (I’m told) took the call-and-response section at the end of the son and scored the horns in the rhythms of Yuka drum parts, increased the polyrhythms. (Yuka is a Bantu musical form that survived in Cuba, I think. I don’t know what I’m talking about; I took a course once.) Arcano and Cachao did something similarly polyrhythmic to the call-and-response section at the end of the danzon. The call-and-response section tended to grow and grow at the expense of the other sections. James Brown did something similar in the early ’60s, took a song ("I Lost Someone," "Prisoner Of Love") and threw a church-derived call-and-response vamp into it; the call and response grew and grew on his records and dominated his live show; finally (on some stuff) he abandoned the "song" form altogether and just did the vamp, and put in new polyrhythms (derived from Caribbean rhythms but jammed tight between the measure bars) to form his characteristically tense North American funk. And Dylan did something analogous (though without the focus on polyrhythm, so it really doesn’t have much to do with mambo or funk, does it?): he had all these words he wanted to put in, so to get them in he’d take a sung line and just vamp on it, adding line upon line of words, rather than getting on with the song. (And it gets real tense, you’re ready to scream while you’re waiting for the tune to resolve.) He’d also use vocal as drone, rhyme as drone, word-repetition as drone, so you had a blues drone stuck in the middle of a folk song:

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

Finally he sold out and went electric and on "Subterranean Homesick Blues" he got rid of song altogether and just did the vamp (and the drone and the repetition).

i think its sorta '...' for ppl like the lex to defend or attack stuff on the grounds of taste like one of the only worthwhile things that comes outta the whole retrograde actually poptimist worldview is that the snobbish class conciousness and false refinement of 'good taste' is basically totally bogus

good point

huh?

to what?

for ppl like the lex to defend or attack stuff on the grounds of taste like one of the only worthwhile things that comes outta the whole retrograde actually poptimist worldview is that the snobbish class conciousness and false refinement of 'good taste'

I can't follow.

No snark -- I just can't parse this.

pictured: a lamp

http://www.elephantos.com/images/marijuana_leaf_lamp.jpg

i was saying 'good point' to lamp -- there's definitely like a word or clause missing in his post that makes it hard to read but i agree with the sentiment

imo poptimisim (or w/e) was in part abt dismantling the sort of assumptions that underlie arguments abt 'good taste' many of which are just snobbishness and like lifestlye signalling masquerading as 'judgement'. like the idea of having 'good taste in music' is in itself suspect because it divorces the music from its own context and puts into yrs and also because it makes listening abt like consumer selection rather than comprehension

that's not really poptimism so much as bourdieu

well i mean i thought thats where they got it from but idk, my limited conception of the 'project' was that it was more than just a way of justifying yr girls aloud cds at yuppie london dinner parties

but really i have no clue and am an idiot

i still think saying that something shitty because its in bad taste is lazy worthless criticism but w/e

but really i have no clue and am an idiot

good point

j/k but no really i feel you. i've been thinking lately about how i don't really trust anyone who isn't enthusiastic about at least some things that are deeply uncool or in 'bad taste.' and like when people taunt me about listening to Limp Bizkit or "Moves Like Jagger" or something all i think is isn't it kind of obvious i'm not really worried about whether people think i have 'bad taste'?

if your gut has never lead you to some places you're not 100% comfortable going then you're probably not actually listening to it

Trying to explain ambiguity or vulgarity to an audience is half the battle of a critic imo.

totally

i mean i will happily needle whoever for listening to drake but it's not because i'm aghast that anyone likes such a gauche pop rapper, if anything my problem with him is that his music is so disgustingly tasteful and timely

as a guy known for defending purportedly risible crap I can imagine being persuaded by a cogent analysis of Drake, but I've yet to read one that didn't inadvertently paraphrase his press releases (e.g. the buzzwords "introspective," "tortured," "speaking his mind," etc).

haha dismissing stuff as tasteful is even worse imo

i don't think bourdieu or our revisionist&idealized poptimist project thought you cld have asocial criticism shorn of those biases. it should instead be the aim to bring those values to the fore and mb have ppl engage w/ the contingent foundation their taste is built on.

i think you can make big BLEUGH partisan dismissals w/out being dishonest, blind or self-deceiving about the nature of yr own taste/personal lamp brand

sure but i dont know how 'worthwhile' it is? dishonest also isnt really the same as lazy i guess

im probably being foolish simply becaue i really like thinking abt taste and self-image and social position and how they map onto preferences in music and how they help give form and nuance to pop music and its nice if other ppl are doing the same rather than just lol u have shitty taste or w/e

ugh this is all really popmpus and stupid probably but like i do think drake projects a kind of... connoisseurship in his rapping that feels p upper middle-class but that also seems to reflect/intersect with the very this season production work on 'take care' which in turn is kindof alienating to me or maybe just of a piece w/his narcissism

i dunno man, i listen to music instead of thinking about self-image and social position (xp)

but otm about drake. kind of ties into how i always felt like he just kind of stepped out of the vapor of 2008/2009 when the 2 biggest rappers were kanye and lil wayne as like this mathematically calibrated halfway point between them, and for all the ways he doesn't fit the profile of a rap star in and 'interesting' way he's also just kind of a slavish sycophant to other rappers and his audience in general.

sure but i dont know how 'worthwhile' it is? dishonest also isnt really the same as lazy i guess

this is the nub of it, right?

Like, the problem with disliking something because it's bad taste isn't that it's wrong but that as a criticism it doesn't really tell you anything about the actual relationship b/w the speaker and the music (other than in a bourdieu distinction sense). It's a boring statement, whereas the answer to "what do you mean when you say something is bad taste?" often can be quite interesting. It's really a "use other words please" issue rather than a "yr critical model is flawed" issue IMO.

To my mind the main relationship b/w bourdieu and pop(tim)ism is the idea that r'ships between social groups and pieces or types of music are there to be interrogated rather than generalised in order to bolster yr opinion.

Needless to say not everyone who likes chart-pop necessarily abides by that injunction.

haha someone around here (hurting, i think) told me recently that for someone with such good taste, i have really questionable taste. i took this as a huge compliment.