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

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 :(

I think the idea of a genre-less utopia is worth interrogating. what would be so great about it?

I wouldn't mind if a generation of teenagers got passionate about the Who through Raphael Saadiq.

I got passionate about twee Scottish indiepop through Nirvana, is that any better? (Don't answer this, lex.)

like, why is it preferable to have everybody enjoying everything

xp

i'm not really one to beat anyone over the head with the canon but if your go-to parallel for Skrillex and Mac Miller is Nirvana i can't even

Nirvana was way better than Skrillex tho

lol xpost

people who only accept a type of music in very narrow or conservative terms

yeah this is what i was getting at earlier - it's like, maybe even narrower than the word "aesthetic" implies, it seems like it's more about social class. not in terms of actual specifically economic class but class in the koganesque sense - the kind of person we perceive ourselves to be. more & more i see music dismissed with the kind of formulation, "but that's music for [x]", where x = "chavs" or "hipsters" or "mondeo drivers" or "boring office workers" or whatever

(Would love to see a thread about "the oddest pathway by which you discovered a genre/aesthetic of music you now love" but that might have to wait for real ILM to return)

lol all roads lead from the Fall

more & more i see music dismissed with the kind of formulation, "but that's music for [x]", where x = "chavs" or "hipsters" or "mondeo drivers" or "boring office workers" or whatever

lol you do this all the fucking time

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.

― some dude (Mr. Stevenson #2), Thursday, 15 December 2011 17:21 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

true, true. maybe we are entering a new age of "genre-hopping" where bands will do a token track in a given style all through an album. But it doesn't have to. At least Skrillex isn't doing this - like it or not, he has a trademark sound that isn't really derivative of anything else (the nu-metal/dubstep/trance comparisons are overplayed). I like to think of Katy B as a positive example - she's equally credible to the dance underground as she is to the pop mainstream and she achieves this not by awkwardly cutting and shutting dubstep with pop - it's a very consistent, fluid, natural mix.

Katy B the innovator in brastep

maybe we are entering a new age of "genre-hopping" where bands will do a token track in a given style all through an album

you mean like the Beatles or Primal Scream

I think the idea of a genre-less utopia is worth interrogating. what would be so great about it?

to expand on this a little - one of the things I like about (the increasingly rare) genre partisans is that their dedication often results in a treasure trove of a music collection, highly specialized knowledge, a more finely nuanced grasp of the genre, etc. When I come across someone whose got some huge country or jazz collection or whatever, I am deeply grateful that these people don't have broad collections, that they opted to specialize. Cuz y'know who else would take the time to digitize Waylon Jennings' entire (and largely out of print) discography.

Drowned In Sound - Albums 2011
http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4144253-drowned-in-sounds-albums-of-the-year--5-1

20: Destroyer Kaputt
19: The Field Looping State Of Mind
18: Aidan Moffat & Bill Wells Everything’s Getting Older
17: Wild Beasts Smother
16: A Winged Victory For The Sullen A Winged Victory For The Sullen
15: EMA Past Life Martyred Saints
14: Low C’mon
13: Tom Waits Bad as Me
12: Bon Iver Bon Iver
11: St. Vincent Strange Mercy
10: Metronomy The English Rivera
9: Beirut The Rip Tide
8: Bright Eyes The People’s Key
7: Nils Frahm Felt
6: When Saints Go Machine Konkylie
5: Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
4: SBTRKT - SBTRKT
3: PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
2: Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
1: The Antlers - Burst Apart

yeah honestly i have pretty much zero problem with people who have a very rich and nuanced appreciation of some particular musical niche to the point of total disinterest in anything else -- so long as they can talk about what they love without ranting about what they don't listen to and why every 5 minutes (xpost)

Is there a word for the sort of desperate bending over backwards people do to consider people like Skrillex because, despite not really liking them they're terrified of suddenly seeming old/missing out on the new Nirvana?

it's called a "reverse Tebow"

lol

ban dog latin

skrillex is pretty much the music i've been waiting for all my life, it just came 16 years too late. i don't think he's the next nirvana, but i don't not like it. really, "skrillex" is a shorthand for that filthstep sound in general, and i'm kind of tired of having to make analytical excuses for liking it. because, fuck it, it's fun and dirty and daft, and in that way, yeah it brings the teenager out in me.

ban away, if that's a problem.

PS KILL PEOPLE, BURN SHIT, FUCK SCHOOL

tbh i'm not hating on anyone who genuinely likes skrillex music, just engaging in "kids like it, it's the new nirvana" type bullshit whether facetiously or sincerely is nagl

also "it's a THING so we HAVE to make ourselves like it"

lex yr transformation from wide eyed poptimist to grumpy old man has been a wonder to behold

so tired of every lex post being immediately followed by urgent reports about whether they square w/ other people's idea of who the lex is

Should've stopped after first six words there

there are people around here i'm more sick of than lex

Guess I set myself up for that one

Pitchfork Top Albums of 2011: 20-1

20. Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise
19. Danny Brown – XXX
18. Atlas Sound – Parallax
17. Clams Casino – Instrumentals
16. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo
15. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
14. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
13. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
12. James Blake – James Blake
11. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
10. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
9. Real Estate – Days
8. Drake – Take Care
7. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l
6. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica
5. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
4. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
3. M83 – Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
2. Destroyer – Kaputt
1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

For the record, my comparison was not Nirvana to Skrillex. My comparison was 'kids these days' to the generation directly preceding it...

looking at all of these in one place is so numbing

LWE 5-1

05. Steffi ft. Virgina, “Yours”
04. Kassem Mosse, “Untitled-A”
03. SCB, “Loss”
02. Tin Man, “Nonneo”
01. Omar-S, “Here’s Your Trance, Now Dance!!”

looking at all of these in one place is so numbing

yah srsly

lol p4k tho