the usefulness of disliking music, as a writer or as a listener etc.

sarcasm is a perfectly fine substitute for literacy

xp Lord Sotosyn

As a reader, I'd be much more interested in a friendly back and forth by 6 critics disputing an album's merits and responding to each other than a half-dozen capsule reviews.

we've been over this elsewhere but year you are too attuned to the media herd mentality. given that most of what i value in music is at odds with what 90% of current critics value, i see absolutely no point in giving a shit what they like or dislike - after all it's not like they seem to give a shit what i like or dislike! the feeling is mutual.

Lex the reasons I O_O'd at this is that you spend a lot of time on ILM and in reviews beating people over the head for liking some media herd option you deem awful when they could be liking (insert superior artist in roughly comparable area of music).

I totally agree that you are not overly swayed by herd mentality but that doesn't mean you aren't very attuned to it.

So am I obv. Though I still haven't listened to the Drake album.

ILX herd mentality keeping you from it! I kid...

oh you know what i meant tim.

ronan do fuck off, or at least stop being sarcastic in such a fucking basic way for the sake of it

Well i guess I'm curious then as to how you distinguish your approach from deej's (apart from in ways that aren't relevant to this thread).

i don't think i fret about it as much? my approach in this area is basically the same as al's

i'm 'fretting'?

i guess i do wonder to what degree increased coverage is simply forcing me to pay attention & bring more critical energy to bear, at which point it goes from 'this is good enough (because i'm glossing over weaknesses because they're just artists trying to make it w/ some novel ideas it i have no ill will)' to 'there are lots of flaws relative to the stuff i like a lot more'

like, it's important that a response to hype is about the music itself & not the hype. i guess that's something i try to make sure to dilineate

*and i have no ill will

that with increased coverage comes a more complete critical look -at a certain point you stop looking at what they do different and start looking at the complete package, at where it might start to grate or leave you uninspired to spin again, how someone you already listen to fills that void better, etc

ronan do fuck off, or at least stop being sarcastic in such a fucking basic way for the sake of it

yes "for the sake of it", this is all such a load of fucking shit. "herd mentality" is a term which is only entirely subjective and means nothing. you might as well be on here saying "my taste is actually better than the majority"

arguments like "herd mentality" are the sort of shit used to denounce all pop music ever made, if you can't see that then you're several fathosm too deep inside the critic snowglobe, time to get some air.

or maybe just keep swinging so far against the things you hate that you begin to ressemble them, all healthy adult behaviour...good luck.

you don't even read my stuff. i have no idea why you keep on trying to pick fights with me on ilx.

?? because ilx is where people discuss things, like on this thread.

So lex you're saying the diff between you and deej is that while you might get angry that the hivemind (of whatever hive) is wrong, you don't get caught up on the whys and wherefores of those differences?

(I am genuinely curious about all of this stuff for a variety of reasons so I'm not trying to be faux-dense or anything)

i don't really know what you're asking any more, it all seems a bit pedantic at this point? i don't want to end up boxing myself into a mode of thinking that i don't really subscribe to. i don't have any hard and fast rules when it comes to these things, i do whatever i feel like doing when i wake up.

ronan why on earth should i discuss my critical approach with someone who's not interested in reading my criticism? and who is being offensively rude even by the standards of people who dislike me?

take the high moral ground as you say "fuck off" as an opening gambit...and don't discuss anything anyway. really great...none of this stands up to any scrutiny so yeah, don't bother.

idk ronan yr whole first post seemed p mean spirited in a thread that acknowledges its failings in it's premise. I guess I can see yr problem with the lex but everyone finds themselves disagreeing with 'consensus' at times

also I think saying oh review the music not the hype is dumb I mean it's p indivisible anyway but lots of time they hype is really the meat of what's interesting/important to address

i don't really know what you're asking any more, it all seems a bit pedantic at this point? i don't want to end up boxing myself into a mode of thinking that i don't really subscribe to. i don't have any hard and fast rules when it comes to these things, i do whatever i feel like doing when i wake up.

oh well in that case I will simply disregard yr prior comments.

lots of time they hype is really the meat of what's interesting/important to address

this is sad

also I think saying oh review the music not the hype is dumb I mean it's p indivisible anyway but lots of time they hype is really the meat of what's interesting/important to address

― blah blah blah (є(٥_ ٥)э), Wednesday, December 7, 2011 6:24 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

while i do agree -- i think i was more saying this as shorthand for, like, not forgetting to involve the music & its relationship to the hype rather than responding to the hype exclusively -- can i just make the easy zing here abt how its funny that this is what the chillwave thread guy thinks

Lex the reasons I O_O'd at this is that you spend a lot of time on ILM and in reviews beating people over the head for liking some media herd option you deem awful when they could be liking (insert superior artist in roughly comparable area of music).

the thing that pisses me off about this characterisation of what i do is that, actually, most of my posting and the VAST majority of my writing is about music and artists i love. in the nu-sandbox era alone i have been very active in the r&b thread in this regard. if you want to see me as someone who spends 90% of his time raging against the hivemind and their drake-loving ways, idk, it's just a warning sign not to involve myself in a discussion with you because you obviously don't know me or my work.

see i think its almost creepy to feign operating w/in some kind of rigid formal vacuum when yr listening to/writing abt music. i mean its at its base so clearly not true but why would you even want it to be true? i mean why not just listen to bach if you want music divorced from any kind of meaningful contemp social/experiential context

like i guess imm 'hype' is standing in for the lump of intangible elements that surround a work of contemp music which is fascinating and impt stuff!

lamp lex is arguing two opposing extremes here -- he completely ignores hype, but he will rail aganist what he recognizes as hype (somehow ... despite completely ignoring it) when given the opportunity

i'm not even sure who he's talking to here, it's not like there are any major Drake boosters in the audience or something. everyone contributing to this thread seems to discuss or write about largely underreported, niche or unexplored areas of music w/ great regularity.

can i just make the easy zing here abt how its funny that this is what the chillwave thread guy thinks

haha i think the funny thing abt this is i spend a lot my time listening to stuff that like a couple hundred other ppl are even going to hear, which makes things both harder cuz the conversation is so small but also easier cuz 'hype' is so easy to deflate and avoid

tbrr im critical of myself for choosing to mostly listen/write/care abt shit that comes in ltd cdr runs of 100 copies, i think in part its a way of escaping the whole debate like april sd upthread. its weird to get such a rep for being indie or w/e when like ive only heard mb 5 or 6 records from any of the indie mag lists, one of which is lol drake

yah i think w/ chillwave it strikes me bcuz my feeling w/ that genre that it was like, here's the revolutionary way of thinking, of music as distorted memory, now that we have that thesis we can enjoy some sweet easy listening tunes, and it struck me that you had to have the hype of the metanarrative in order to even engage in the 1st place

and i remember SR argued that we had it backwards; that first came the music, THEN the narrative -- but if someone reads about the narrative & checks out the music after, then that's the way it is for them, and his argument is simply no longer accurate! that most people listening to chillwave probably read about it & werent following the scene at all, right?

idk i'm just trying to move this away from talking abt lex

if you want to see me as someone who spends 90% of his time raging against the hivemind and their drake-loving ways, idk, it's just a warning sign not to involve myself in a discussion with you because you obviously don't know me or my work.

Haha, totally unnecessary hyperbole much?

To be fair to you, "raging against the hivemind" posts are mostly more memorable (regardless of whether they are right/wrong/good/bad) than positive posts so I am pretty sure in my head I do overestimate the extent to which this categorises a lot of people's (not just your) posts.

i think what i'm talking about in my post, rather than an excuse to dogpile on chillwave, is more that when you have a niche scene, and people are writing stories abt how it develops, then people hear the stories & decide that this stuff is Important because of these narratives rather than because the underlying scene is Important, there's some weird kind of disconnect in quality

or something

xp

haha well the term 'chillwave' was coined as a satire of critics need to taxonomize/structure music but atm there was def a rush to kinda provide a narrative or framework for a bunch of sounds/scenes/ideas that were coalescing. (and still continue to work themselves out, i guess) there was for listeners in on it a real sense of ~something~ connected and new happening ime. and i think part of it was a desire to present the music sorta fully-formed to new listeners so that it 'made sense', mb? a rush to history or w/e

anyway i think the 'other ppls memories' thing was overstated, really my big ~theories~ are abt technology and anxiety blah blah blah indeeed but there are also all sorts of counternarratives that are p dominant (lol lazy lol nostalgia lol hipsters mostly)

ugh idk we tell ourselves stories in order to hear &c &c &c

for me it's like, there are a lot of layers of 'narrative' that can or usually do go along with a record or a musician, and the further out those layers go the more masturbatory and solipsistic it is for a critic to focus on. like you've got the artist's backstory or basic facts of how a record was made or whatever, and then beyond that you've got some scene they're part of or some idea of their role in the evolution of a genre or aesthetic, and then beyond that you've got some horseshit about how their success is a symptom of some cultural phenomenon or a psychological need of the listening public or whatever, things that just get carried further and further out from the sound that was being captured by a microphone or assembled by an actual person with an instrument or computer or whatever. all this stuff can be drawn on and woven together in interesting ways but i still think that more often than not it's just a crutch for music critics to be pretentious armchair sociologists instead of perceptive listeners.

Isn't that more just a general problem of critics' reach exceeding their grasp, rather than there being set concentric circles of relevance?

It seems to me that biological info is used as ridiculously as pop-sociology - if the latter tends to get used more ridiculously I think it's more that it's easier for critics to be totally way out of their depth when dealing with that kind of thing as opposed to, like, basic biographical facts.

biographical info obv.

would like to read more reviews with biological info though.

Yeats and Hygiene, A Comparative Study: The poetry of
William Butler Yeats is analyzed against a background of proper
dental care. (Course open to a limited number of students.)

http://www.angelfire.com/blog2/endovelico/WoodyAllen-GettingEven.txt

i'm not talking about "so-and-so was in a cult as a kid HOW FASCINATING" hackery i just mean the basic facts of how many people made a record, what they played, where they're from and how long have they been working together

Okay. I was thinking more the stuff that gets assumed coming out of that - the special magic of Rumours deriving from all the intra-band affairs/break-ups, and so on.

well, things that are happening while the record is being made and songs are written about it, you can't really avoid that being written about imo

and then beyond that you've got some horseshit about how their success is a symptom of some cultural phenomenon or a psychological need of the listening public or whatever, things that just get carried further and further out from the sound that was being captured by a microphone or assembled by an actual person with an instrument or computer or whatever. all this stuff can be drawn on and woven together in interesting ways but i still think that more often than not it's just a crutch for music critics to be pretentious armchair sociologists instead of perceptive listeners.

so true, i wish more music writers would stop with the sociopolitical insight

xpost - Oh no of course not, and it's not like that line on Rumours is wrong even - it's just that I see that kind of thing as being an area full of pitfalls nearly as much as the more hi-falutin "this record is emblematic of ghost-modernism" kind of approach.

Perhaps because what is common about all of these things are assumptions about how music actually relates to what is outside it. And relationality can be riddled with hi-falutin bs either openly (pop-sociology) or secretly e.g. in what you assume to be the relationship between the artist's life and their music.

Like, you can have a perfectly reasonable line about how an artist's working class experiences have influenced their musical decisions, which you then turn into BS by underpinning it with (and framing it within) a concept of authenticity.

lmao ghost-modernism please tell me you just made that up

I wish. I saw it the other day in a simon reynolds post (naturally) but it's actually a quote from Prince Rama talking about their own music I think?

Which is one complicating factor: when musicians do this sort of thing themselves, does that make it more forgiveable/justifiable for critics to follow suit, or should we just assume that the musicians themselves are full of it?

haha im totally guilty of trying to rope music into some larger point abt aesthetic values or est some kind of connectedness btw things, i mean its obv p easy to do badly and its not like id base a review around this but thats like 80% of what my longform essay writing is abt :(((((((((

yeah artists have become really disgustingly savvy about working the press and realizing how marketable they are if they name their own microgenre.

This gets more complicated when you talk about interviewing them, like I interviewed one dude who was going on about how lame rappers are that use simple rhyme schemes, but he was a pretty straightforward gritty type rapper himself, so I start to suspect he thinks hes telling me what he thinks I want to hear

I pretty much refuse to do interviews b/c I more times than not I end up getting annoyed with the artist for doing the above plus sounding like dog latin.

haha

i love doing interviews but then most of the people i talked to are not too media trained and are still able to have actual conversations about their music that aren't well rehearsed rituals

lol @ me but thinking abt this some more: its obv subjective but i do think that its easy to shrug off or underrate the value in critics who can illuminate ways that a genre or group or trend is connected to other things, even/esp things beyond music at work in the culture at large. i know its sorta wankish, grad school hangover stuff but its also really valuable/impt. idk at least to me. like, i really hate biographical approaches, those long artist profile pieces that are all manufactured intimacy and 'telling' detail. they are so tedious and empty asked abt the controversy around her celebrity relationships, ms. swift shyly brushed a non-existent piece of lint off her immaculate cashmere cardigan and reached for the straw sitting limply in her strawberry milkshake. 'the thing abt all that gossip stuff', she sighed leaning forward... but i can see what it does for other ppl, the way it helps provide context and meaning to the music. i mean taylor swift's music wouldnt sound the same if she was ke$ha!!

in the same way stuff like stefann goldman's essays for lwe are obv 'unprovable' and not as well grounded as id like, but i really value the fact that hes trying to tie a bunch of things together conceptually, and that too provides an impt context for hearing/evaluating new music

I feel like a lot of indie coverage would benefit from that kind of "what are these guys actually like as people" type reporting, instead of the feeling I get v often which is that they are treated w this auteur-ish respect, as if who they are isnt related to the music they produce, like it's some kind of detached "statement"