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

if ppl could stop making BASIC assumptions about how i relate to the world that would be appreciated

That's basically one of the things that makes writers interesting... Would an audience follow a writer whose tastes have no through line? Maybe but it seems unlikely to me.

lex i get a haughty 'stop generalizing about what i write/cover, you haven't seen 99% of it' feeling whenever people try to box me in so i sympathize, but i read yr shit and yeah the extent to which we were stereotyping your work was exaggerated, sorry. but i also don't tell people they need to read more of what i write before they talk about it because it just feels terrible to outright tell people that a) they need to read EVERYTHING i write and b) they can't say anything about me until they have.

I mean I assume you make basic assumptions about how I relate to the world (music wise) but maybe I'm mistaken?

anyway happy holidays i wish i could give you all big sloppy hipster kisses, god bless all us crazy fucks still talking about this shit on xmas, i'm gonna go put the kid to bed and drink some eggnog peace

they can't say anything about me until they have.

people can say things but if what they're saying is that my entire stance/deal is [this kinda silly and dumbly reductive one-note shriek] duh i'm gonna take offence

Getting a handle on how people think across a spectrum of stuff is one of my favourite things about ilm.

tbf you shriek a lot

like even the offense you take to these things is so shrill that it kind of encourages the perception of you that you're fighting against

I mean I assume you make basic assumptions about how I relate to the world (music wise) but maybe I'm mistaken?

not really!

if i knew what my favourite writers thought about any given music why would i need to read them? i like it when people are surprising for whatever reason, i like a certain illogic, because i find the idea of ~taste~ (music and otherwise) slightly illogical, or at least highly complex, too much so to reduce to a set of strict "beliefs"

all lex has in this world are his balls and his word

what is that a reference to, is it comedy -_-

scarface (the movie) by way of a bunch of rap music

Hi bros, I got pork and martinis, let's have a summit

give me a shrieky popist whose taste is divergent from my own over any even-handed fair-minded pretense-of-objectivity thing, please do

What point of comparison are you thinking of specifically.

i like it when people are surprising for whatever reason, i like a certain illogic, because i find the idea of ~taste~ (music and otherwise) slightly illogical, or at least highly complex, too much so to reduce to a set of strict "beliefs"

― lex pretend, Wednesday, December 26, 2012 1:07 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with this, and if I have a strict belief it's the meta-belief that stands behind this, which is that taste is shaped by experience and is then expressed in concepts, rather than the the rules preceding the experience of the music (though in truth it's more of a snake eating its own tail kind of thing).

OTOH I think most of us like it when people are surprising within reason - taste may be a flag planted in sand but typically the sand doesn't shift that much from day to day (e.g. you thought Ciara was amazing yesterday and you'll probably think the same tomorrow). The fun part of surprises in people's taste is not random absolutist reversals, but how a change in opinion or a new avenue of enjoyment subtly reorders everything else, recasting it in a different light. Not absolute reversals, but a deepening of complexity and nuance.

And in this sense what I think is mostly objectionable is not people acting like you have a couple of familiar critical stances, but people acting like that complexity and nuance isn't present when clearly it is.

But really for me great critical interventions involve concocting or at least reframing particular ways of listening to records in a manner that requires a certain amount of consistency or repetition if only to get the point across. An example that is always present to mind for me is the way that spizzazzz (for me at least) changed the meaning of the word "real" (as in "realness") forever (e.g. defining mushy R&B balladry as a site of realness). A certain critical stance doesn't have to be narrowly ~ideological~ to achieve that kind of resonance for me but it does have to aspire to be a kind of toolbox or secret code, to offer a way of unlocking records that the reader can try to apply to other records. Absolute consistency - rigidity - spells out the code too easily, so the best secret codes have this kind of tension where you the reader feel that you have a partial handle on it but nevertheless can't exhaust it or define it absolutely.

tbh these days i forget "realness" ever meant anything else. the foremost purveyor of realness in pop right now is taylor swift, to me this is obvious.

but what i dislike about pinning down how anyone's taste operates is that there are's fundamental illogic in how i respond to music that i can't reconcile myself - kogan's boney joan rule is an example - so i don't really see how other people are claiming i constantly draw x flag in y sand.

And in this sense what I think is mostly objectionable is not people acting like you have a couple of familiar critical stances, but people acting like that complexity and nuance isn't present when clearly it is.

oh, this too, but REALLY all they do is reveal themselves to be incapable of reading that.

The boney joan rule speaks to complexity not contradiction though, I think. It's an injunction against turning metaphors into rules.

If we don't assume that there should be qualities that are either universally good or universally bad in music then it's not a particularly worrisome notion. But only very simplistic or rigid people hold to that idea.

What I mean by taste is more a mode of approach: a sense that someone is likely to hear the same things you hear in a given record, even if only within a limited sphere of overlap between what you like and what they like. And it's not so much the liking or not liking that is important; it's literally how they hear what they hear, what they point to first, what words they use to describe what's going on.

tbh these days i forget "realness" ever meant anything else. the foremost purveyor of realness in pop right now is taylor swift, to me this is obvious.

Yes, of course! But pre-spizzazzz the notion of framing things that way would never have occurred to me.

Boney Joan is actually a really good point of reference for this entire discussion; it's basically an illustration of the fact that we never have anything other than sand to plant our flags in. But it's pretty rare that anyone's writing - unless it's hopelessly equivocal - ever really acknowledges it.

hipsters' newfound love of R&B

"Newfound" in the sense that we're coming up on a mere century since Bix Beiderbecke?

(Don't mean to distract from the discussion, I know we need to do this every few years.)

Pls tell me Boney Joan is a Boney M/Joan Jett collaboration I didn't know about

http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/archive/2007/jul/12/the-rules-of-the-game-no-6-the-boney-joan-rule/

i have a rule about legitimate intellectual concepts with eye-rolling names, it's called the Kogan Groan Rule

that is a pretty awful name

Such fascinating and enlightening thoughts in response

im not getting involved in the argument either way just sayin

hey i said it was a legit concept, has usefulness, etc.

Michelle Myers bringing it:

http://theremixbaby.tumblr.com/post/39019851611/loverman-cliches-soapy-drama-and-bottle-service

Yeah, that's a great post, although the Trey Songz comment just make me think of:

I just had a mildly horrifying thought re: phrasing - Can you imagine how much less affecting these songs would be if instead of FO, it was my stronger-voiced mans Trey going all vibrato-monster on them?

― Cap'n Hug-a-Thug (The Reverend), Saturday, 29 September 2012 18:56 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yeah i'm no FrankOphile but it's definitely nutty to say Trey Songz made a better album and/or could better serve FO's material.

Trey is increasingly interesting to me in that he's got a good combination of talent/taste/popularity/work ethic, isn't making dance pop moves, and is semi-consistent as a singles artist, but he'll never make a great album and in years like this year all his success seems very hollow and irrelevant.

"FrankOphile"!

I kinda find Trey interesting in that he's somehow become the default center of r&b as a genre that everything else exists merely in relation to.

for better or worse, obv

myers talking some goddamn sense. she was good in halloween too

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5pbz6VwBX1ryrcu2o1_500.jpg

hey remember king? did they go on to do anything

http://www.kanyetothe.com/forum/index.php?topic=176613.0

I think I asked them what they were up to on twitter once and they never replied.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PPxEWkLiAs

on the album

I've been meaning to get around to that record all year :/

is good

That Myers bit = one of the most sensible things I've read about all this so far

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anybody driving faster is a maniac? – George Carlin

^^^^ I always think of this when I see "hipster" threads now

ha otm

anyone cooler than you is a hipster, anyone less cool is a square, makes sense

http://www.factmag.com/2013/03/04/vandross-prince-dangelo-theyre-saints-to-us-inc-talk-debut-album-no-world-and-stripping-the-blackness-out-of-rb/

You'd think the bros in The Inc. would know how to navigate these waters more delicately, but no, everything they say in this interview is a disaster

Do you think the term alt-R&B is actually a way of taking the blackness out of R&B?

AA: “Yeah, it’s just taking the struggle out. I mean, there’s been all kinds of struggle – there’s black struggle, there’s been some white struggle, there’s been struggle around the world, and when we make these, you know, tags… that’s struggle’s real, and we don’t want to keep perpetuating it. We’re not here to just jump in the ring.”

DA: “I think you’re right about taking the blackness out of it, and that’s the worst part about calling music that name. We make black music, you know, we’re not trying to say that we’re making something else. We’ve always been touched by that music and that’s what’s gotten us out of some places, that’s what’s liberated us and healed us. We’re making music for that same reason – we’re not making it to be played in a coffee shop where everyone’s all happy, this is not for that.”

AA: “We’ve never even said that we are R&B. We’re just making our music. R&B is pretty much dead, rock and roll is dead – the only thing that’s left from this stuff is spirit. So that’s how we see it, it’s like a spirit, and when we need to get in our zone we put on Reverend James Moore. They’re all like saints to us – Luther Vandross is like a saint, and Prince and D’Angelo.

“And then on the other side, the poetry side, I look at people like Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful too.

And then on the other side, the poetry side, I look at people like Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful too.

omg

You'd think the bros in The Inc. would know how to navigate these waters more delicately

lol why would you think this

their album is just so so so bad

the one based around the dodgy gulf war metaphor is probably the nadir