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

i wouldnt go that far dog latin.

I think there are now plenty of indie/rock kids out there who are ready and willing to diversify and explore other styles, but for whom diving straight into the deep end of r'n'b is just a little outside their comfort zones. When an artist is presented in the way of Frank Ocean, it doesn't feel like such a leap and hopefully this will lead to further exploration: "Well I can deal with Frank Ocean, how about The-Dream" and onwards...

way late to this but sort of can't believe this kind of strawmanning still goes on. people are not genre partisans anymore, by and large. (except maybe rap and metalheads I guess lol)

it's really more that there are people who are genre partisans and people who aren't, regardless of genre

there are people who like to think they're not genre partisans (and genre isn't quite the right word tbh)

what is the right word

"aesthetic"? idk i'm multitasking right now

challops partisans

EVERYONE is an aesthetic partisan* though

Oh, I'm probably an aesthetic partisan - not that I like solely a single aesthetic, but that I can quite clearly partition 'my' aesthetics and 'not-my' aesthetics. But that has nothing to do with genre at all.

^ likes pizza aesthetics

Yeah, emil.y makes complete sense - that I think most ppl do have overt or otherwise aesthetic preferences which slot into distinct patterns, though whether that dovetails neatly with "genre" is another kettle of fish.

Fotherington T what did you mean by

This is where JR and I have ~differences~ but I am really uncomfortable with the way that "Metal" has been raised to that position of automatic rockist privilege that "Indie" used to occupy 20 years ago, now that "Indie" has become completely mainstream.

^ likes pizza aesthetics

― Minga Frump (Jimmy Riddle), Thursday, December 15, 2011 4:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

aesthetic paisan

aesthetic parmesan

agree with the whole "aesthetics" thing, but really:

way late to this but sort of can't believe this kind of strawmanning still goes on. people are not genre partisans anymore, by and large. (except maybe rap and metalheads I guess lol)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 15 December 2011 16:26 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

you're seriously telling me you never meet people any more who say they hate "all rap" or glorify rock music because "it's more real" or whatever? this is diminishing, which is what i was saying upthread, but it hasn't gone away.

I don't really want to get into it, JR, because this is not the place, and I probably shouldn't have brought it up if it was a challop I was not prepared to get into an argument of. But a lot of the dialogues that I see happening around "Metal" these days just remind me uncomfortably of the discussions around "Alternative" and "Punk" and whathaveyou back in the late 80s and early 90s, in terms of insider/outsider positioning and authenticity narratives.

But I am running on way too little sleep at the moment to pad it out into any cogent argument, so I'd really rather not.

ou're seriously telling me you never meet people any more who say they hate "all rap"

More common for me to meet people who like "all music except country."

you're seriously telling me you never meet people any more who say they hate "all rap" or glorify rock music because "it's more real" or whatever? this is diminishing, which is what i was saying upthread, but it hasn't gone away.

I literally cannot remember the last time anyone said this kind of thing to me. maybe in the 90s in lol college. certainly none of the kids I know talk this way.

you're seriously telling me you never meet people any more who say they hate "all rap" or glorify rock music because "it's more real" or whatever? this is diminishing, which is what i was saying upthread, but it hasn't gone away.

The 'i like everything except rap/metal/country/reggae/rave shite/opera/punk/modern rnb that isnt like the yardbirds' brigade have not gone away. They exist and sadly get younger every year.

modern rnb that isnt like the yardbirds

lol

the late 90s was really bad in the uk for "real music" type shite. dont forget 'classic songwriting' either. *shudders*

shakey you have no idea how many people still say " proper rnb is like 60s bands like the yardbirds or the who and not this modern shite"

Ha, I used to spout that kind of nonsense once upon a time, back in the mists of time. And then I grew up, phew, that was easy.

okay no one says "proper RnB sounds like The Who", at least not in the US

and funnily enough Dan I'm not in the US!

(Though TBH I'd have been more likely to say that R&B was stuff like The Supremes and the Ronettes and not that modern stuff they play on the radio. It's like talking to an alien, sometimes, the stuff I believed when I was younger.)

They exist and sadly get younger every year.

plural of anecdote is not data etc. but no one in the under 25-brigade that I know (which is maybe a dozen people or so) def don't espouse these attitudes. music is just EVERYWHERE to them, and as such they may have favorite artists but they don't have super-strong genre opinions - firm aesthetic divisions don't exist for them, there's just too much music around for them to even bother taking the time to establish personal aesthetic politics. I can play them whatever and they just think "eh yeah that's allright." they're more blase than anything else.

xp

Maybe you guys have a boogie rock equivalent?

xps

shakey you have no idea how many people still say " proper rnb is like 60s bands like the yardbirds or the who and not this modern shite"

this literally does not happen in the US. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who believe this and they are both 45+ old hipster geezers that are not representative of anything, they are total oddballs and they know it.

also yeah lol at calling the Who or the Yardbirds rnb gtfo

Though TBH I'd have been more likely to say that R&B was stuff like The Supremes and the Ronettes and not that modern stuff they play on the radio.

it's more likely/common that people would say they like that "classic" r&b stuff like Adele and not that weirdass obscure-o shit like the Dream!

but no one in the under 25-brigade that I know (which is maybe a dozen people or so) def don't espouses these attitudes.

urgh double negatives. fixed.

i think it's easy to get a warped sense of perspective, when speaking to relatively open-minded people on ILM, that the majority of people are very much open to pop, hip-hop, metal, dance and modern r'n'b that isn't the Yardbirds - but I think really you don't need to go too far outside the confines of this board to meet plenty of people who talk about "proper rock" and things. Just look at that Guardian Comments section for a start.

that guardian comments section is horrible , dog latin. PilkingtonsMagpie seems a not very nice guy for a start.

The comments ive read the past few days in that section have been race obsessed. Is it always like that? (yeah yeah welcome to the internet)

internet comments sections? really?

I'm talking about actual living breathing people I know and see on a regular basis, who don't know anything about ILM and tend not to have strong opinions about music. which is the vast majority of the music-listening and purchasing public.

xp

i dont like katy b but i approve of its placing just to annoy these people tbh

xp

fwiw one of my fave R&B albums of 2011 sometimes kinda sounds like '60s Who and Yardbirds:

http://thehurstreview.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/stonerollin.jpg

^^^ I was gonna say

had no idea he even had a new album out - interested!

plural of anecdote is not data etc. but no one in the under 25-brigade that I know (which is maybe a dozen people or so) def don't espouse these attitudes. music is just EVERYWHERE to them, and as such they may have favorite artists but they don't have super-strong genre opinions - firm aesthetic divisions don't exist for them, there's just too much music around for them to even bother taking the time to establish personal aesthetic politics. I can play them whatever and they just think "eh yeah that's allright." they're more blase than anything else.

xp

― aesthetic partisan (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 15 December 2011 16:56 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

although I do agree with this, it's only really something that started happening 2000-onwards and has much more recently becoming the norm in my experience. Before electro-revivalism, before mash-ups and other cross-genre/cross-aesthetic movements the tribal signifiers were much more clear cut. Yeah you had the Prodigy, but they kind of jumped from "rave music that ravers like" to "rave music that indie kids like" over the course of a year. Indie kids dabbled with dance, but they had a particular plot mapped out for them that included Orbital, Chems, Prodge and Big Beat but didn't really include going to clubs and watching DJs. If you were a rock kid listening to dance, it had to have that auteurist "band" context (cue lots of terrible attempts to fuse metal guitars with drum'n'bass).

internet comments sections? really?
I'm talking about actual living breathing people I know and see on a regular basis, who don't know anything about ILM and tend not to have strong opinions about music. which is the vast majority of the music-listening and purchasing public.

xp

― aesthetic partisan (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 15 December 2011 17:05 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

you must live a very privileged life if this is the case. But again, I agree that rabid genre affiliation is on the decline.

I only like proper r'n'b like Johnny Otis and not any of that the Who shite tbh.

I sadly only like music that sounds like the Yardbirds

rhythm'n'birds

It would be nice if we are moving towards a genre-less utopia in which people listen to a wide variety of music and don't have narrow tastes. I'm not convinced this has totally happened though. It's especially annoying when people don't seem to recognize their own genre blinders. I think most of us have a particular type of music which is like comfort food for us, we almost effortlessly enjoy it - maybe it's the music we grew up with. It's easier for us to enjoy and recognize quality in new music of that type. When we dismiss music that's not of that type, we have to be very careful that we're judging it fairly and not just speaking from our prejudices.

good words to remember as we go into our own EoY

i think people consciously and deliberately rejecting whole genres is on the decline but surely the flipside of that, for better or worse, is a rise in tokenism or dilettantism, or people who only accept a type of music in very narrow or conservative terms. plus, i'm not sure if a generation of teenagers getting passionate about rap or dance through Mac Miller or Skrillex is any kind of net win for anybody.

i'm not sure if a generation of teenagers getting passionate about punk through Nirvana is any kind of net win for anybody.

It would be nice if we are moving towards a genre-less utopia in which people listen to a wide variety of music and don't have narrow tastes.

I think we have definitely been moving in that direction in the last decade. dunno if I agree that it's inherently preferable (genre partisans produced great music, rules can be useful, etc.) but it is what it is.

xp

i'm not sure if a generation of teenagers getting passionate about punk through Nirvana is any kind of net win for anybody.

it wasn't :(