has ilm gotten more indie lately?

Do you feel like a lot of the rap being ahowcased here is indie, Rev?

Naw not really but if we're going by ILM poll results, no more than one rap album has top tenned in each of the past four years.

2010 Kanye West, Big Boi
2011 DJ Quik
2012 Kendrick Lamar
2013 Kanye West
2014 YG

Maybe Vince Staples or Future or Young Thug will get in as well as Kendrick this year, who knows.

I feel like Future and Vince are likely candidates for top 10

Well if ILM has gotten more Indie it certainly isn't reflected in the track poll nominations.
Going through that, I felt like every second song was something that belonged in the hip hop, afrobeats or R&B thread or it was Carly Rae Jepsen song.

And has Courtney Barnett really been getting lots of praise around here?

Yeah its been modified for sure; otoh ppl seem p invested in obfuscating the undeniable "indie"-ness of Grimes, which us kind of a telling sign imo

I do think the albums poll promises to have one of the least indie, or even rock, top 10s in a while

If Sufjan Stevens and Courtney Barnett finish really high on this year's album poll, I'll be surprised. Or am I missing something and that there are other strong indie candidates, just not those obvious ones?

And not Tame Impala either.

Julia Holter.

Sleater Kinney is probably the big one.

this is an interesting theory imo! though I've sort of come around on authenticity narratives, which I used to hate but which I now prefer strongly to the alternative i.e. governing pop discourse - what the hell, I say, we've been opposing "here's who the artist was and here are the forces that shaped them culturally and here's the music they made and here's what it meant to them" as a hermeneutic for so long that it's kind of a interesting one to try on - more interesting to me, anyway, that the nth iteration of "here's how the music makes me feel and a few stray sociocultural points, please RT and share" anyway

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 17 January 2016 13:45 (1 hour ago) Permalink

You're talking about *something* but you're not actually talking about what I brought up, so I guess I should stop trying to get people to talk about that.

Because what you're talking about here is subjectivity versus objectivity in music discussion, which is kind of a mug's game. (True "Objectivity" does not exist; etc. blah blah objectivity is just a certain kind of subjectivity which people pretend not to notice. Even "who the artist was" is open to interpretation - how many different David Bowies have you read about in the past week?) The Subjective tone (blog voice, where one acknowledges the subject) is, I feel, more honest, but it's much easier to do really really badly, especially if the person writing isn't that interesting or is a bad writer. But isn't that true of all writing. I feel the second approach you describe, the Objective Biographer, is even harder to get right, easier to fuck up really badly, and much more open to projecting all sorts of nonsense (who gets to define what shaped another human being "culturally" especially the further away the writer is from that "culture") and when it goes wrong, it's not just boring and self-obsessed (the criticism of blog-voice) but actually dangerous in terms of opinionated people with unspoken agendas presenting their cultural biases and opinions dressed up as "This Is The Objective Fact" which gets canonised and passed down as true.

When you read totally subjective Blog-Voice done well - I was just reading Sabina Tang on the Singles Jukebox this morning, writing about China Girl, a song I have always disliked, and opening up a completely different viewpoint on it, which split the song wide open for me - it provides a necessary counterpoint.

None of my top five albums of the year are indie, and as one of the historical ILM defenders of (certain strains of) indie, I think that conclusively proves that it is *not* getting more indie. QED, case closed, lock thread.

I'm curious; what non-rap, non-indie albums made the top 10 each year?

I never voted in these because music sucks

Also I forgot HAIM

From the past 5 years:

2014
TODD TERJE - It's Album Time, APHEX TWIN - Syro , TINASHE - Aquarius, FKA TWIGS - LP1, TAYLOR SWIFT - 1989, D'ANGELO AND THE VANGUARD - Black Messiah

2013
KACEY MUSGRAVES - Same Trailer Different Park, PARAMORE - Paramore, THE KNIFE - Shaking the Habitual, SKY FERREIRA - Night Time, My Time, BEYONCÉ - Beyoncé, DAFT PUNK - Random Access Memories

2012
FRANK OCEAN Channel Orange, JESSIE WARE Devotion, TAYLOR SWIFT Red, DAWN RICHARD Armor On, JOHN TALABOT ƒin, MIGUEL Kaleidoscope Dream

2011
Katy B - On A Mission, Beyonce - 4, Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow, Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust

2010
Lindstrøm & Christabelle - Real Life Is No Cool, The-Dream - Love King, Janelle Monàe - The ArchAndroid, Robyn - Body Talk, Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh

Thank you very much good sir :)

Some of these might still arguably be considered Indie, like Sky Ferreira, I'm not too sure.

Daft Punk has that indie guy on it

Yes, Paul Williams, right?

wow ilm likes some radical stuff, didn't see those albums in any other lists anywhere - it's amazing we're resisting indie whatever that is.

"ILM year end polls" != ILM

I'd venture that more ILM users do not vote in those polls than do.

Oh, do shut the fuck up, you tedious cunt. ― Turrican, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 5:36 PM (3 hours ago)

"For real the Mojofication of ILM is worse than any number of people repping for Dirty Projectors or whoever. At least the proliferation of sub-New Jersey threads has levelled off, but right now the board feels particularly dominated by people who would rather make lists than actually talk about stuff."

if by "talk about stuff" you mean "make bitchy snide comments" then yeah, i'm totally in the "make more lists" camp

ur self is so righteous rushomancy

this whole argument is so weird when you realize that even the most shambolic 'indie' act has a much more potent promotional infrastructure than 75% of what major labels put out

like i mean you can say that the explosion of indie-leaning blogs was in large part a function of knowledge workers' dominant class, but the complete professionalism (and willingness to work with 'smaller' outlets) of pr types at both independent labels and independent promotional agencies, at least in the states, helped it attain a dominance not seen even during the go-go-alternative '90s

was odd future the first proof that said infrastructure could really work well with hip-hop artists? (chris?)

anyway i look to ilm for a refuge from the blind SLAYYYY QUEEN discourse that's all over social media and it's still working on that from my perspective

also sorry about using variations on 'dominate' in that last post, i'm distracted by jarvis on bowie

srsly though there's this weird undercurrent to the anti-nostalgia brigade where they seem to be saying "why don't people don't get excited about new music the way they did in 1974?"

let's all pretend the back half of the 1975 album doesn't suck

wait are they indie now

nobody knows what is indie anymore. But generally anything labelled indie that gets in the eoy ilm poll *isn't* indie

rushomancy, someone called into a radio appearance i did on friday saying that he (he, of course) wasn't as excited about new music as he'd been when he was a teenager (in the '70s) and i was like 'uh... you know that's just LIFE, right?'

like yeah shit seems bleaker as you get older, it's called 'life experience'

indie is dead, everything is indie

the only good ilm threads are the ones with almost nobody on them

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Sunday, 17 January 2016

tbh this has always been true

When you read totally subjective Blog-Voice done well - I was just reading Sabina Tang on the Singles Jukebox this morning, writing about China Girl, a song I have always disliked, and opening up a completely different viewpoint on it, which split the song wide open for me - it provides a necessary counterpoint.

this is probably a how-do-you-take-your-coffee q, but, for me, subjective blog-voice (well-named!) doesn't provide counterpoint: it's the governing trope, it's what everybody does. I think people accepted "there's no such thing as objectivity so let's not bother" a long time ago, and I think the result's been a governing critical discourse that's basically a running livejournal of people's musical opinions, and it's exactly as interesting as that sounds. nb I'm hugely guilty of participating enthusiastically in the subjective revolution, no zealot like a convert, etc

enjoying yr thoughts on this, sorry if I stray from the point it's in my nature

I think indie has come to just mean stuff that fits the Pitchfork sensibility a
other than the handful of mainstream pop/rap records they review. Definitely no illusions about the "DIY"-ness of it.

as i said its mainstream rock/pop now. Not indie not even vaguely alternative.

Someone upthread said ILM has gone classic rock and soon music from the 00s that pitchfork/nme championed will be seen as classic rock.

'out on the road today/ i saw an anco sticker on a white tesla'

maura otm on the weirdness of this discussion.

not sure the right thread for this but i've been thinking about how my own music listening has changed. like i just have other things going on and i don't _need_ to feel engaged in the same way, and i don't interact with other people in the same way where i felt like being more engaged with music would help with that (and maybe it didn't, and i just thought it did) so instead i just sort of graze randomly through soundclouds and occasionally if i want to actually hear an album that's _way_ more effort (christ i haven't been in a record store in years, i guess some still exist) so i tend to be lazy and only hunt it down if everyone is talking about it or if i know i'm going to want to hear it anyway -- and i basically very seldom music crit because its either "here's someone i'm just going to disagree with" or "here's another review of someone i've never heard of" and somehow the "well, you _should_ have heard of them, so learn now" voice in my head completely stopped.

and there's definitely an element of getting-old-music-listening in there too w/r/t incrementally more classical, and incrementally more classic rock -- things i hadn't paid attention to the first time round, but which seem more likely to have a good payoff, and worth spending time with individually as opposed to collectively (i.e. where certain new music really only pays off enjoying and thinking about in the context of everything surrounding it and there's so much effort, while other genres can, despite the inter-discursive stuff happening from the authorial voice, still produce artifacts that are more self-contained, and have the room and luxury to build up their own discourse over a broader span of time). and i think i have a longer attention span as well, but can't let it disperse as much. so just the way my brain has organized itself over the years makes it hard for me to listen to lots of music like i used to.

part of the thrill was also sort of the creation of this canon of "holy shit" bangers and i feel like there's certainly less conversation about singles that have that quality (taylor swift and crj being notable exceptions here).

none of which really has to do with indie, whatever that is anymore. i listen more to 90s indie because it was good and i stopped for a long time, and i sort of miss it, because it reminds me of younger me, which i've come to terms with being ok with.

i don't even know who contempo indie artists are, and they feel more disposable than contempo-pop artists in terms of who anyone else will remember or care about two years from now, fwiw.

this is probably a how-do-you-take-your-coffee q, but, for me, subjective blog-voice (well-named!) doesn't provide counterpoint: it's the governing trope, it's what everybody does. I think people accepted "there's no such thing as objectivity so let's not bother" a long time ago, and I think the result's been a governing critical discourse that's basically a running livejournal of people's musical opinions, and it's exactly as interesting as that sounds. nb I'm hugely guilty of participating enthusiastically in the subjective revolution, no zealot like a convert, etc

enjoying yr thoughts on this, sorry if I stray from the point it's in my nature

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, January 17, 2016 12:14 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think that subjective voice was pioneered by rock-crit back in the 70s tho -- it was always a give-and-take between how you made the music work and where it came from, and the latter is innately harder and more high-wire because you can be actually wrong, and to be rignt, i mean how will you know -- you need to like go and do research and shallow interviews don't help, and even then 2/3 of the time you don't get a real answer so you just spin some bs theory anyway, but what the music does for you, that you _know_.

but the new thing i think is the dominance of the _fan_ mode of reception rather than the _critical_ mode. its like if some people went around in school with "metallica rules" on their backpacks and some people with "slayer rules" but nobody had a "metallica rules / slayer sucks" backpack or something. there's no sense of context and conversation, not a musical unpacking, not a broader engagement with "where is this genre going and why" -- all things that aren't the same as the vastly more difficult bio-focused stuff you're describing but all of which are _about_ subjective/social response not just _the act of_ subjective response, and consequently also take some effort to work through well, and can in their own ways fail.

yeah the '70s rock crit's subjective voice was definitely there, it just came from people whose station in life rendered them more 'objective' (cough)

(also a lot of the writing was very bad, please let's not forget this)

Joan Crawford (dude I can't call you that!) - it depends on your frame of reference. Because I don't really engage with the blogosphere at all. When I engage with music journalism it tends to be stodgy Brit muso press (you know - the publications where you are not even allowed to use first person in your pieces. Seriously, I quit jobs like that because I could not type "HardRockMagazine went to see Hawkwind" because it felt so awkward and so wrong) or critical theory types I follow on Twitter writing academic pieces, or Wikipedia and archives and rock biographies at the moment. Because I am old.

So the few times I run into Subjective blog-voice it tends to feel like a corrective - especially because it tends to be things that have been reposted by people with good taste.

I know ILX is really down on Tumblr but for me, Tumblr fandom is like the great corrective for aging populations who can't get excited about anything any more. I *love* seeing how excited my younger friends get about the artists they love - whether that's some young person's band of today that I've never bothered hearing or some Sparks record from 1974 that is new to them.

I also remember being a teenager in the 80s, and older people from the 60s who had lost their excitement sneering at me saying "why are you listening to The Church, this is just The Byrds sped up, nothing new under the sun" and thinking new music IN THE 80s (which is now considered a golden era by the next generation below me) held nothing new because they had lost their shiny newness of excitement. So I try really hard not to do that to other people we are just aging.

But this has become me talking about a thing I don't engage with (rather than me chewing over the thing I've been pondering) so I should go back to painting but no one will tell me if the gold version or the silver version is better.

Every year that passes feels like I listen to less brand new music than I did the year before, but when the end of the year comes and I look back on what I've absorbed over the last 12 months I find I'm either holding steady or am actually listening to more. It's probably 60%-new/40%-old favorites in any given year, or thereabouts.

I'm about to turn 42, so I don't know how much longer I'll have the energy, but I don't see why I wouldn't like to discover good new music for as long as I live.

part of the thrill was also sort of the creation of this canon of "holy shit" bangers and i feel like there's certainly less conversation about singles that have that quality (taylor swift and crj being notable exceptions here).

― Option ARMs and de Man (s.clover), Sunday, January 17, 2016 12:36 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there are two options basically:

1) that "holy shit" blends into the same ambient internet roar of "holy shit" that accompanies most major singles, particularly if they're good for memes ("hotline bling" compared to, say, "fight song")
2) pop single gets a weak attempt at canonization but for whatever reason ("whatever reason" = "these are really just twenty people on the internet" and publications have no interest in this unless it's part of a sponsored deal) it doesn't take. not sure what 2015's would even be -- "Cool for the Summer"? Susanne might qualify here

call him 'smithy'

and possibly

3) the market is just so fucking flooded with alt-pop and the quality bar is reasonably high (like, not *high*, but at least OK) that finding the HOLY SHIT among the "sure, this is OK" is harder and seems less rewarding. obviously there are worse problems to have, but

also, it's been said but the definition of "indie" is so fucking weird. courtney barnett? (I know this isn't actually the case, and her name keeps coming up because she is consistently near the top of whichever list or canon is being shat upon at the time, but I'm always wary of "blunt female artist becomes successful, MUST DISCREDIT")

I also remember being a teenager in the 80s, and older people from the 60s who had lost their excitement sneering at me saying "why are you listening to The Church, this is just The Byrds sped up, nothing new under the sun" and thinking new music IN THE 80s (which is now considered a golden era by the next generation below me) held nothing new because they had lost their shiny newness of excitement. So I try really hard not to do that to other people we are just aging.

YES YES YES

xp the guitars on that Courtney Barnett record certainly code as "indie" to me (I like the record a lot).

"For real the Mojofication of ILM is worse than any number of people repping for Dirty Projectors or whoever. At least the proliferation of sub-New Jersey threads has levelled off, but right now the board feels particularly dominated by people who would rather make lists than actually talk about stuff."
if by "talk about stuff" you mean "make bitchy snide comments" then yeah, i'm totally in the "make more lists" camp
― diana krallice (rushomancy), Sunday, January 17, 2016 10:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Courtney Barnett is great!

Haha like I dunno the New Jersey thing was just some half tossed off idea that I had at work sorry I ruined this Algonquin round table.

Ilm is always at its worst when contemplating the state of ilm. I really valued it in the last week, the Bowie and Blackstar threads have so many lovely posts