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

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"

tbrr and its been a long time since i looked but indie coverage would benefit from p much anything that wasnt an awkwardly constructed sentence or a reference to another band

More generally isn't the issue how these tactics are disproportionately distributed amongst genres.

So you get ad hominem crit (positive or negative) of stars like Taylor and Drake vs the small-scale inter-referentiality and over-priviliging of particular emotional impacts in indie rock writing vs post-dubstep and chillwave as reflective of the (ghost)modern condition of musical experience... and, like, none of these approaches are bad in themselves but it'd be nice to see some of the subjects and styles mixed up a bit more.

Not that people are consciously saying "oh if i'm gonna write about X then I have to do so in Y style."

I think most critics would say they're not really conscious of shifting their style based on what they write about (I don't sense that I do it, for instance).

It's more the issue of the venn diagram overlap between how people write and what they are drawn to musically.

imo more writers should use illustrations cf themartorialist.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-great-non-2011-song-i.html

Chillwave is a good example of as thing where (for me personally) there was too much written and talked about it for me to then hear any with my own ears - to listen to any would only be possible through the collective ears of everyone else and the only reason to do so would be to add my opinion to the pot but without it really feeling like my opinion.

Then yesterday I heard that james ferraro record without knowing anything about him at all and I liked it! Different from what I normally like (simultaneously makes sense that I would and also strange that I would) - but then read a bit about it and it was kind of annoying what was being written, so I didn't read any more

Chillwave is a good example of as thing where (for me personally) there was too much written and talked about it for me to then hear any with my own ears - to listen to any would only be possible through the collective ears of everyone else and the only reason to do so would be to add my opinion to the pot but without it really feeling like my opinion.

mark richardson did a good bit abt this on pitchfork, he compared it to seeing the 'most photographed barn in america' http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/8713-this-is-me-music-making-as-re-blog/

But I'm not a critic! It doesn't matter if I never hear a record, or hear it too late. It doesn't matter that I've never heard drake or metronomy or if i hear james ferraro later than everyone else. for the most part I actually DO hear music in a vacuum, or in my own contexts

A critic is much less able to do this so I think lex is right when he says about context - I would find it impossible to hear most of this music without context - I've already an opinion on many of the artists on the EOY lists without ever having heard most of them! But that opinion isn't my own, its received

xp

mark richardson did a good bit abt this on pitchfork, he compared it to seeing the 'most photographed barn in america' http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/8713-this-is-me-music-making-as-re-blog/

― joey joe joe junior shabadoo, Thursday, December

I dpnt think thats anything to do with the music though or any attendant qualities about it!

Its more to do with it being a thing that is talked about a lot and with strong detailed opinions - but that I haven't heard for myself. It could be any genre, I was just picking an example one that I was unfamiliar with (albeit the kind of one people like to intellectualize)

I mean - and I don't wish to criticize here - but even just the URL of that is the kind of thing that would make it even harder for me to hear chillwave for myself because on some level I now think that a chillwave artist is remaking music as a blog/tumblr/whatever - but before I've actually heard them to see whether I actually really do think that or not!

And even after hearing them i will still think that to some extent!

Maybe I'm too malleable and not opinionated enough!

I'd be interested if people are able to identify, in retrospect, the tipping point where they were no longer easily swayed by popular discourse in respect of particular genres - i.e. where they no longer felt vulnerable to that filtering of exterior viewpoints april refers to.

b/c I totally identify with that viewpoint april, but not in respect of areas of music I feel really familiar with and as much or more of a critical content generator than recipient.

april that's not an article about chillwave, i was just talking about the idea of responding to music's discourse making it impossible to hear the music

haha well, i mean you can just listen and see how well the framework seems to fit what you hear, i guess. like id argue that a bunch of tumblrwave stuff esp that new james ferraro record is sorta commenting on its own invisibility, the emptiness inside the air quote (haha arent i glad theres no sb on the sandbox)

Agree with Tim, inside a genre its not quite the same...

I'd be interested if people are able to identify, in retrospect, the tipping point where they were no longer easily swayed by popular discourse in respect of particular genres - i.e. where they no longer felt vulnerable to that filtering of exterior viewpoints april refers to.

― Tim F, Thursday, December 8, 2011

...in practical terms i think it might be as simple as "I hear a record before I read/hear about a record"

but even within a genre, and even with no one talking about an artist this can sort of happen - it can even be your own words that do it!

Like, i really liked a record by an artist this year and told a lot of people oh this record is really good. Now when that artist releases another record, people will probably ask me "oh what do you think of the new one?!" and that almost creates a micoversion of the above. This would happen even if no one asked! Its not the same but its like a smaller version of it, "I should have an opinion on record no 2 BECAUSE I had an opinion on record no 3"

it was the record i liked, not the artist per se

oops that should be "because i had an opinion on record no 1" not 3

I should say the smaller version detailed above isn't really an actual thing that happens or affects in the same way. Is probably more subconscious, but the mechanism is similar

And of course there is more reason for me to hear record no 2 than there is say radiohead or metronomy

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

i wasn't mocking the entire thread by any means, just find people talking about "herd mentalities" pretty rich. i mean, it literally is saying other people's taste is based on them following each other like actual animals in a field. other people (and seemingly it was a huge percentage of them) put as much thought into what they like as a cow does when it follows another cow. come on!

anyway to move things on, i come at all this from the position of completely ignoring most current stuff just because i got a bit tired of having to engage with it and have opinions about whatever new thing each week.

i find weirdly if you never read about music and just pursue your own natural habit of an occasional mix here, following up a track you like if it happens, that any sense of hype just disappears really.

i listen to a lot of older stuff like jazz or classical and opera and things at the moment, just because i find it a nice removal from my job which involves processing about 30/40 very pop type pieces of content a day, and it's nice to have something which exists far beyond that.

but equally i do still check beats in space and stuff, oftentimes i'll hear something and really like it and it'll turn out to be someone i've seen friends posting about on facebook, or whatever, and i think "oh okay...that's who that is."

this sometimes reminds me that often hyped things are actually good, if i find myself looking up a track and it turns out to be whoever.

i guess overall what i'm saying that being relatively unconscious of hype about things isn't that different from being really inside the genre and feeling able to rubbish it. the net result is making your own decision.

it's just less angry, there's no need to really be that bothered, some people are hyping a record...very good.

are there people who are somehow beholden to hype or something? i'm quite interested in where choice stops here...pretty sure hyped things are hyped because everyone who likes them genuinely does so.

the funny thing is that what you're saying is what i thought was the baseline of the lex's worldview, but it's like he's pushed so far he's come back around to the other side

i assumed everyone on ilx had a baseline of dismissing talk of "herd mentalities", like as i said, isn't that the most common way people dismiss pop music?