"Should we be suspicious of hipsters’ newfound love of R&B?" or "Race and indie music, part 4762"

i have never made any secret of the fact that a small but significant part of my life is spent enjoying exactly that!

who are you favorite rock acts? (not like kate bush who's nominally considered "rock" but you know like lunkhead dudes with guitars and shit?)

first couple YYYs EPs are great

YYYs
hole
pj harvey
ashlee simpson
kelly clarkson (not as much of a cheat as it sounds cuz i prefer her when she's scuzzy and rocky to when she's poppy)
queens of the stone age i guess? i don't know why i don't actually own any of their albums

- lolling that, by this metric, MTV is not a reputable publication on music based on the article linked in this thread (not because I think they are, mind you, but they should be)

no by "sphere" i was referring to indie, not "reputable publications" - my point was that even reputable publications will happily run BS about R&B, dance music etc from writers who don't know what they're talking about.

Now obviously reputable publications also publish BS about indie-rock too, but please find me an article published by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin etc. even MTV in the last hundred years which was about indie-rock but appeared to be written by someone who listened to and knew of hardly any of it (like really, not just b/c they're too stupid to understand what they listen to).

i've been commissioned to write about pj harvey, laura marling and several others who are genre outliers...

about indie-rock but appeared to be written by someone who listened to and knew of hardly any of it (like really, not just b/c they're too stupid to understand what they listen to).

is Dylan indie rock

Ugh, first Jason King doesn't understand black people, now I got people on twitter saying he doesn't understand queer people. Is any unfamiliar author a straight white person?

Oh heavens no. They're straight white MALES.

I mean apart from contrarian slash "let's do this for the lol factor" antics like the guardian getting lex to write about the klaxons.

lex writing about female fronted rock doesn't count either.

eh i'll read anyone on anything if they're good at it. would love to read tim f. on un-tim.f music. doom metal roundup would be nice.

hey, speaking of writing about stuff that you know i really enjoyed reading philip's thing in spin:

http://www.spin.com/#articles/state-of-dance-music-2012-have-we-already-peaked

cuz i learned stuff. gonna listen to to his top trax of the year when i have a moment. and i want to hear that mix cd he talks about at the end of his thing.

and yeah this did make my eyes bug out a little:

"According to Forbes, the top DJs made money hand over fist; the magazine claimed that Skrillex, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta, Steve Aoki, Deadmau5, Kaskade, and even Pauly D all earned $10 million or more a year apiece. Tiësto topped the list with an estimated $22 million salary"

(as someone who also wrote a year-end r&b omnibus, seriously if anything i write about genres music gets tokenistic PLEASE TELL ME, as i really try hard to not do that because i am so sick of indie hegemony) (and so sick of love songs, so sad and slow, etc)

(sorry not to make this all ME ME ME but oh well you know, exchange of ideas right? also i really just found the frank ocean record such a wash, although he certainly captured the imagination of a lot of people i know)

also, doing research on writers before you assume their backgrounds is probably a good rule of thumb!

Now obviously reputable publications also publish BS about indie-rock too, but please find me an article published by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin etc. even MTV in the last hundred years which was about indie-rock but appeared to be written by someone who listened to and knew of hardly any of it (like really, not just b/c they're too stupid to understand what they listen to).

in terms of combatting this you either focus on making rock/punk/indie-centric publications less that (which is short-sighted), or focus on developing alternative but popular channels for criticism with no history of that particular centricity (evidently more difficult).

well obviously pitchfork, rs, and spin don't take r&b or edm or rap as seriously as they take animal collective, spin doctors, and green day or whatever their modern day counterparts would be. but spin getting people like philip or tim or others to write about that stuff is a good start. spin at least has a history of having good dance coverage. rs is a lost cause. and pitchfork has simon and tim and others so they at least make the attempt. they don't really even have to attempt. i'm glad they hire some writers i like.

what is the best online site for r&b and what is the best site for dance music? best writing, that is.

ILM.

Yeah I'm certainly not saying that the big publications never write well about R&B, rap, dance music etc!

Obviously they do, quite a lot. Which is a great thing! I just wish it was more reliably the case.

I think one thing I tend to do in my own writing - which I wouldn't advocate as a rule for anyone else - is to try to get as close to (what I perceive as) what the music is doing as possible, and to avoid using a wider lens unless I'm really really confident (and even then it'd probably be still a fairly honed lens like "how does this fit into broader uk funky trends or etc."), because what deej says here is super OTM:

thing is, there ARE concrete changes & things that can be discussed & described, but you have to be v v careful about using them in writing b/c so many people use the language of spotting actual musical trends as music marketing language

But the flipside of that is that it's that kind of airy worldbuilding that people engage in that probably makes it a lot easier for the novice reader to engage with a narrative w/r/t say an R&B record and find that narrative compelling enough to commit to checking out the music.

Like, writing about R&B in R&B terms is probably the number one way to guarantee that crowd will pass over. "Good riddance" you might say, but having the lowest hits per review on pitchfork isn't something I (or I expect anyone else) would actively strive for.

(as someone who also wrote a year-end r&b omnibus, seriously if anything i write about genres music gets tokenistic PLEASE TELL ME, as i really try hard to not do that because i am so sick of indie hegemony) (and so sick of love songs, so sad and slow, etc)

― maura, Wednesday, December 19, 2012 8:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

twiw i thought it was a good piece, esp because it looked beyond 3 artists (which seems to be becoming the maximum number of artists for a trendpiece rather than the minimum) and didn't really fall to the narrative traps being decried itt

cosign, your piece was great maura

know I mainly lurk but same, if I fuck up I'd love to know these things so I can try not to fuck up in the future

we do have critic-on-critic interventions around here, but they ain't pretty

I know just saying (and again, also, yeah, not to make EVERYTHING ABOUT ME ETC)

Music Critic Intervention would be an A+ program, all of us looking into the camera talking about That One Writer while said writer is taped thinking it's for a Kickstarter trailer about modern indie music...

katherine and maura are about the last writers who need any sort of guidance from us. figures they'd be the only ones who might conceive that they would.

Agreed.

like i was saying re keyshia on the 2012 eoy thread, from where i'm sitting the real shame with all this indie-crit fuckery is the way it ends up totally inhibiting discourse within r&b. traditional values become hugely exalted purely out of desperate reactionary entrenchment, saying "yeah but so what" takes on an sad air of betrayal, asking for something new something more becomes covalent with edgy distortion. and so we have to pretend like the last few years of r&b have been gravy purely for existing, new malign bogeymen have to be revealed and focused on take the blame

like it's not like jackin or funky (or even by virtue of its bubble, dancehall) where the crit is irrelevant and the beat happily healthily rudely goes on, r&b is an established genre with ebbs and flows that can and should bear discussion

idk ultimately i still strongly feel there is something so basic and essential about r&b that a great song will always rise to the top even now, i can't honestly sit here and point to swathes of terrific jams i think have been especially unjustly stiffed by the world

plus yknow fashion is fashion, it's nip and tuck, this is the fun of it, are we really all to stop reading the face every month and get blues &soul subscriptions instead

^^^otm posts

The Face ended at pretty much the same time "The Golden Age of R&B" did.

I wish there was a The Face that got the balance right though. The closest is prob. The Fader and, eh.

if Face EOY lists are anything to go by they got the balance right better than probably anyone. that said they were obviously always just cobbled together during an extended pub lunch.

the best way.

though i prefer to believe they blew cocaine over the flat stomachs of models and then read the results like tea leaves.

the fader covers everything and criticises nothing, as far as i can tell

yeah

hah yeah it feels so absurd to demand accountability from a style mag and yet the fader somehow just forces the irrational urge

well maybe not quite accountability but just a sense of "what barricades have you died on"

the idea that "hipsters"' love of R&B is "newfound" is really hilarious. everybody loves R&B because it is awesome, where's my thinkpiece money

otm, that's kind of the ultimate comedy of this whole thing

i mean last year's "people are repping a beyonce ALBUM, not just the singles" was a bit of a change of pace, but not a monumental one

“This album, I took a lot of risks this album, so expect it to be dynamic, expect it to showcase all my eccentricities. It really is a nod to the fact that R&B used to be an illustrious genre that actually really influenced, a lot of people forget that before this decade, or the last 15 years rather, R&B was, y’know, Funkadelic, it influenced Funkadelic, it influenced Jimi Hendrix, it put hip-hop on, it put rock on, so even bands or groups like Hall & Oates, they were R&B, they were a soul band, they were creative, all of them were different but experimental in their own ways. It’s true to the soul of R&B, but it’s still experimental and it showcases my personality.”

- Miguel on the Wendy Williams Show

lock thread

should we suspicious of this p.dumm article

“This album, I took a lot of risks this album, so expect it to be dynamic, expect it to showcase all my eccentricities. It really is a nod to the fact that R&B used to be an illustrious genre that actually really influenced, a lot of people forget that before this decade, or the last 15 years rather, R&B was, y’know, Funkadelic, it influenced Funkadelic, it influenced Jimi Hendrix, it put hip-hop on, it put rock on, so even bands or groups like Hall & Oates, they were R&B, they were a soul band, they were creative, all of them were different but experimental in their own ways. It’s true to the soul of R&B, but it’s still experimental and it showcases my personality. Also, Panda Bear."

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v617/WidowOfDestiny/Jiggle_Panda.gif

miguel and i see i to i. i've never heard miguel's music but i like him already.

scott! let his love adorn you!