P2K: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1

I would want to narrow down my earlier comments, then, to verbal discourse around music. In the case of salsa, for instance, as I've mentioned before, for years I didn't like it. Then I caught a Puerto Rico Day parade and warmed to it slightly. (I'm not sure it was necessarily the dancing, of which there wasn't much, and probably what little there was wasn't even too good.) Then taking salsa lessons pretty much gotten me to like it and then being in a club setting and seeing people dance (one particular couple alone on the floor, actually) sealed the deal.

(Of course why this sort of exposure worked for me for salsa but hasn't worked for me for "dance music" or swing or zydeco is another question.)

(I also find banda more tolerable when I am shopping in Pro's Ranch Market.)

Okay but this is purely becoming about you rather than about people generally - why is it that you assume that other people's tastes can't be changed by what they read?

Mine are all the time!

Maybe I'm way over-generalizing from my own experience, but I find what you describe really hard to imagine.

For all I know it's a position that nobody has any sort of connection to! - I feel you, Ned. Actually, you've essentially articulated my own general relationship with music better than I could have hoped to. As the 00s pretty neatly matched my 20s, I've self-consciously grappled with the possibility that I was beginning to experience music through a "kids these days" disconnect/filter or if things really are as fragmented & shape-shifting as they seem. No definitive answer on that yet, but your post goes a good distance in phrasing said dilemma in a way that is applicable to my own perceptions. Looking forward to the finished piece!

Maybe

Probably?

I can't get with this, though it's partly situational. In my world the music that is sneeringly dismissed without engagement is generally hip hop, contemporary r&b, female singer-songwriters, and country music. That is, what you're calling "FUN" in my world is the domain of racists, sexists, and classists; and I find those repugnant.

This times 1000. I think this is the most OTM thing that I've read in this thread yet.

(though granted I did avoid it for a week while on holiday.)

And this is what gets me over and over, is how much of this upholding and deification of "basic taste" or whatever is just lazy excuse making for those who want to privilege music made by and beloved by white men* over music made by or beloved by anyone else.

*I was going to add "middle class" or "tertiary educated" in there, but this plays differently in the UK, where this is this reserved homage of "working class" music as revered by university-educated men who still wish to identify as "working class." But that's a whole nother kettle of fish.

Um, I think Matt was kinda defending e.g. Lex's sneering dismissals of indie.

But The Lex's sneering dismissals of indie are very much in response to and in echo of the USUAL sneering dismissals of the above.

Also, the idea that discourse can't change one's tastes is patent bullshit. The difference between my tastes circa 1999 and 2009 are almost entirely down to ILX. I'd be a much narrower person without it. So yes, discourse is hugely important.

I think Lex himself would say that his sneering dismissals of indie are more than just a "response and echo". He really hates it as music, and clearly derives some enjoyment from that. He and Matt are on the same side in this respect. Sure you can say that it's less of a problem when you're making a counter-discursive injunction (i.e. against pitchfork or whatever) but that doesn't mean the motivation is "pure".

This is not me having a go at Lex by any stretch: I used to be in the same camp pretty much, and still feel a certain allegiance that way.

Personally I think dismissal-without-engagement mostly works when you've got a prior history of engagement on which to draw from - this is what powered FT's anti-indie period, for example.

Obviously dismissal-without-engagement when practised by people w/r/t a genre that they really don't get is always going to fail, partly by just being wrong, and partly by almost inevitably tripping into dodgy social assumptions.

my vocal dismissals of indie are very much response and echo! cf metal - i really don't enjoy listening to it, i don't really get any element of it, but i don't dismiss it precisely b/c my knowledge and understanding of it is so limited, and it doesn't occupy the same amount of cultural space as indie. i mean the point about my indie hate is that i do like indie on the rare occasion that it's done well (yeah yeah yeahs, santogold, um).

I don't think that his *hatred* is response and echo. But the way that it is phrased, and the timing very much seems to be reactive. I'm not saying that justifies it, but think about it - 9 times out of 10 (just not in the rarified waters of ILX) when someone dismissively says "All X is shit!" with that edge of viciousness as well as snobbery, the target is not rock or indie, it's pop, R&B, rap - the historical backlash against disco, etc. etc.

There was definitely an element of this in mine own adolescence, mainly learned in an effort to be accepted by certain peer groups.

x-posts

My private example is always gay club culture, which I started feeling very critical of (in the years immediately following coming out), which was followed by grudging affection and then a sense of understanding. Of course back when I was very critical I felt like I "got" this culture. Whereas even though now I would say I feel a sense of understanding, I would actually be more hesitant to put myself forward as an authority. Maybe this is just a general part of aging whereby you trust yourself less after witnessing yourself getting things wrong so much in the past.

This is why I feel less inclined to HATE things than I used to: I'm more aware of the likelihood that I will get it wrong and have to retract.

x-post Lex but this goes back to my question I asked you re the difference b/w Fall Out Boy and Animal Collective. Are you saying you feel you "understand" the second more, so can hate it more comfortably?

i think that particular example is a split between

a) when writers like cis and tom have praised fall out boy, i find i actually recognise the qualities they're praising in the music - i just dislike it for different reasons. the same is not true of animal collective.

b) one gets an annoying kind of default critical respect, the other gets automatic default critical rejection - as i probably said when the album was released, what irked me more than people merely liking animal collective was the undertone that they were an Important Band who, regardless of whether you enjoyed the music, were somehow worthy of your attention anyway

Maybe this is just a general part of aging whereby you trust yourself less after witnessing yourself getting things wrong so much in the past.

Completely true. Of course, I discovered this, aged about 17 when I discovered that some of the Classic Rock I was sneering at as a teenage punk was actually quite beautiful (e.g. discovering the power of some of the mellow folky passages of Led Zeppelin) And again in my 20s, discovering that the pop music I'd had to disavow as a teenage punk - despite the sneering of my contemporaries - had some incredible things going for it, and Duran Duran would ultimately shape my tastes as much as if not more than Sonic Youth and Black Flag.

This is why I feel less inclined to HATE things than I used to: I'm more aware of the likelihood that I will get it wrong and have to retract.

Like I keep saying, the things that inspire HATE - that passionate kind of loathing - are the things you are more likely to experience turnarounds on, than the things that inspire more just a kind of ho-hum boredom. When 90% of music is landfill whatever, it's the 5% that inspire hatred and the 5% that inspire love that are much more likely to flip than the landfill.

It's obvious, again and again, the stuff that people HATE HATE HATE says as much about them as people as the stuff that they love.

and to the Lex - the whole thing of this "Important Band" - is to ask the question - important to whom?

I mean, in mine own experience, in the late 80s, Sonic Youth were The Band who were being talked about that they were going to be considered Important. And of course cheesey disposable pop like Duran Duran was not. But ultimately, both bands were Important in their own ways - sometimes it takes time to accomplish this, i.e. the critical reevaluation of Duran Duran that has made them utterly "cool" again when trust me, when Daydream Nation came out, nothing could be considered more naff than owning DD albums.

The problem is, who does the evaluation - and who does the reevaluation - and for what reasons.

Like I said, Important to whom? DD were naff when only girls who were growing into suburban mums still liked them. But when they got rediscovered by the asymmetrical Hoxton crowd - the taint of girlyhood has been washed off.

girlyhood has been washed off the taint.

I feel deeply conflicted 'cause I know exactly what you mean Lex about the critical reception surrounding Animal Collective and yet i love them. It was actually a really big thing for me, realising that, like it kinda was a sign that my former deep antipathy towards indie-culture had slipped out of my pocket somewhere a few miles back (though yeah, obv some of the writing is awful).

I think the tipping point for me was reading Andy Battaglia writing about them in The Onion AV Club about 4 years ago and thinking "Andy writes really smartly about 2-step and Herbert and Lil' Jon and Annie and etc. etc. etc. and he makes AC sound so good, I should probably give them a chance." Which I guess is similar w/r/t you and Fall Out Boy.

(Whereas stuff like Fall Out Boy and Paramore has seduced me not via writing but via awesome radio singles)

i mean the point about my indie hate is that i do like indie on the rare occasion that it's done well (yeah yeah yeahs, santogold, um).

I don't want to contradict this because I usually like the indie you like, but the form of this statement is one which coheres to the point I was making above about gay clubbing. 8 years ago I would have been very critical of music played at gay clubs and then justified this by pointing to the 5% of gay club music I thought was excellent.

I don't think "more right" now. Maybe what's different now is that I feel closer to gay club music per se, and i'm less likely to impose my typical external standards (sonic invention, performative unpredictability etc.) on it and be critical when it fails. Is this a more appropriate approach? I dunno. It's not like the standards I was imposing before were obviously unreasonable. Maybe I was more right before? Maybe I've dropped my standards? Or maybe my earlier position was the equivalent of someone getting upset when hip hop/r&b doesn't sound like Timbaland? I assume that to the person "closer in" to a genre, even a reasoned and articulate 5%-er (and I hope I fell into that category) is gonna sound like someone who "doesn't get it". It's hard to say how much of that is tied up in yr position and perspective.

First sentence of that last paragraph should be "I don't think I'm "more right" now."

I don't dislike Animal Collective or anything, but the fact remains, I cannot get through more half of MPP at a sitting. Sigh.

9 times out of 10 (just not in the rarified waters of ILX) when someone dismissively says "All X is shit!" with that edge of viciousness as well as snobbery, the target is not rock or indie, it's pop, R&B, rap - the historical backlash against disco, etc. etc.

yeah i didn't even really know that the r&b > indie taste set (to grossly oversimplify) really even existed before coming here. before it seemed like indie was universally accepted as critical gold besides stupid punks or metalheads and stuff.

i think feeling superior about what music you listen to over those who like something different is silly and it's something you should grow out of but most probably dont (on all sides)

i admit i feel strange kind of superiority over a lot of people wrt their tastes in music, but generally the people who's tastes i don't feel this way about are people who have totally different tastes than mine. people who's tastes i tend to dismiss are those which i recognize as similar to my own but shittier, or if they like a lot of the things i like but dislike the rest of it for bad reasons. but generally when i come around to remembering that most people are not as nerdy and intentional about it than i am i realize it was silly to ever care in the first place.

I'm mystified by any strong defense of one's own general taste and/or any similarly strong condemnation of anyone else's. Sure, for fun, talk smack, whatever... But to treat the vagaries of individual taste as a form of political or even an aesthetic argumentation seems absurd to me. Our taste isn't "improved" by the inclusion of this or the exclusion of that. Taste is not a museum and our role with regard to it is not curatorial (that brings up individual taste vs. public expressions of that taste, which is where things become difficult). With regard to pure, interior, individual taste, neither posterity nor your board of directors will fault you for the acquisition of lesser works. And taste that accommodates objects from a variety of cultural sources is not in any meaningful way superior to taste that limits itself to a single cultural vantage point.

I mean, sure, in the case of some strawman white power dude who only listens to racist black metal and streetpunk, personal=political arguments make sense -- but we're not talking about those sorts of cut-and-dried extremes. Instead, we're talking about the vague way a specific culture seems to describe itself in expressing its collective taste. And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Even if the culture in question happens to be middle class white peoples.

Though they reflect acculturation, our responses to art are often atavistic, primal, and emotionally profound. Moreover, there's often very little apparent rhyme or reason to them, on an individual, experiential level. My gut feeling is that the more honest we are with ourselves about our basic tastes, the less rational, coherent and defensible they will come to seem. And again, that's okay. Even if we happen to be giving voice to our culture. There's a difference between unselfconsciously giving voice to one's own culture and devaluing other cultures, right?

OK, I'm gonna say this one last time.

Being female is not a genre.

Being female is not a "culture".

Being female is simply the way that half the human race was born. Yet when the complex system of the inherent sexism (and racism and everything else) of The Canonisation Process is enshrined and justified as being purely "personal taste" of which there is no accounting - I call utter bullshit on "taste".

and i'm gonna cosign that and say this one more time:

contenderizer is basically right about personal taste. you like what you like. the problem is when the critical discourse is slanted so heavily towards one particular type of taste, to such a limited set of aesthetic values, and one particular "culture" ends up being canonised and privileged above others. and this is particularly irksome because for a minute in this decade, it actually looked like the conversation was going to open up, that things were heading in the other direction, but at some point it closed in on itself again.

When did things look better, Lex?

I mean, I guess critically it's a particularly bad time for most of the music you (and I) like, but that seems the fault of e.g. a UK press that loves La Roux as much as it is the fault of Pitchfork etc. which anything has drifted more towards pop etc. over the last six years or so.

I'm guessing that Lex is frustrated by the fact that the rise of "popism," rather than making pop music more prominent than indie rock in the discourse, has simply been coopted as a critical strategy by indie and has, perhaps ironically, made indie a bigger concern by widening its tent.

jaymc do you really think my agenda is as simplistic as "MAKE POP MORE IMPORTANT THAN INDIE LOL?" after all these years u don't know me. it's sad. f .xls i i don't consider myself a pop fan any more.

tim, things looked better when lots of critics and writers, many on this board who went on to bigger things, seemed like they were interested in exploring and understanding critically overlooked genres on their terms. you may remember those debates! they made it into the new york times!

yeah i agree re: uk press and regularly shout at people accordingly.

haha, maybe all the people you're shouting at are intentionally hyping things to drive you crazy

i actually do suspect the entire british public of sending la roux and calvin harris to no 1 JUST TO PISS ME OFF

i mean there's no other explanation

^_^

tim, things looked better when lots of critics and writers, many on this board who went on to bigger things, seemed like they were interested in exploring and understanding critically overlooked genres on their terms. you may remember those debates! they made it into the new york times!

Sometimes there can be such a thing as too much success though - big flashy articles about how Justin Timberlake is an important factor in his own success would be slightly redundant now surely? Anti-rockism (rather than popism) "won" because everyone remotely sensible agreed with it; but because that turned fighting the good fight into a form of shadowboxing it kinda sucked the oxygen out of the issue.

I'm pretty sure almost all the writers you're talking about are still writing professionally and successfully about largely the same kinds of music.

The difficulty is: how do you frame all of this music in a way that will excite outsiders if it's not attached to some kind of "good fight" you're fighting?

What makes the current state of UK pop particularly egregious is that it's like taking six months' leave from the army and then returning to find out that your own troops have become corrupt and are tormenting the community.

Anti-rockism (rather than popism) "won" because everyone remotely sensible agreed with it

yeah, exactly, and the issue became genuinely tired to talk about because everyone claimed to have taken it on board. and then went back to exactly like before!!! maybe even worse because taking anti-rockism on board = giving lip service to non-indie genres while failing to engage with them or understand them particularly deeply b/c, you know, taste is sacrosanct.

music critics giving lip service to genres while failing to engage with them or understand them particularly deeply shocker

................................

nice seeing u all, I'll let myself out

yeah, exactly, and the issue became genuinely tired to talk about because everyone claimed to have taken it on board. and then went back to exactly like before!!! maybe even worse because taking anti-rockism on board = giving lip service to non-indie genres while failing to engage with them or understand them particularly deeply b/c, you know, taste is sacrosanct.

It's a tough one: one common attitude now seems to be for people to treat, say, R&B, the same way you or I might treat metal. That is to say: "I'm sure some of it is really amazing but I haven't really explored it enough to get it and please don't trust my opinion one way or another."

Being on a show with a dyed-in-the-wool metal chick has certainly opened my eyes a lot in this regard; the big difference with full-on metal fans seemingly being that they seemingly no longer care about mainstream representation, and in fact get very suspicious of anything that does get picked up on by outsiders.

I think this tendency is true of other genres too (e.g. I react to FACT's attempts to crown indiefied equivalents to uk funky in the same way that Mia reacts to the press's treatment of Sunn O))) and the like) but I think more generally fans of genres like hip hop / r&b / dance music etc. still want mainstream "rock crit" to reform itself in their favour (I know this tends to be my default position).

i.e. the fact that "other people don't understand" is still a problem with other people rather than a quality of the music itself - and note in the UK Funky thread I'm effectively in your role, railing against the failure of the press to understand and not distort the music, while you're perhaps correctly shrugging your shoulders.

I guess you might argue that there is some race/gender dimension to polite indifference to R&B/Hip Hop that isn't true of metal, but I dunno: if, say, you're politely indifferent to R&B, hip hop, dance music, folk, classical music, country and et. al. it would seem your root problem is not an aversion to any particular culture (tied in somehow with race and/or gender) but an over-subscription to one culture (certainly one which seems to privilege or be embodied by middle class white males).

I guess you might also say that metal doesn't have the same widespread commercial dominance of r&b/hip hop, but surely this is mitigated somewhat by metal's longterm cultural relevance - as a "music critic" it seems fairly bizarre that I would effectively have "no opinion" on Black Sabbath, Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica et. al. let alone more recent metal.

For me at any rate I suspect I've unconsciously come around to an essentially Hippocratic position on all this stuff: that is, the first job of the music critic is to do no harm. I tend to get much more annoyed by writers actively mischaracterizing music they think they "get" but really don't understand at all, rather than long term systemic ignorance or indifference. e.g. I think the old Pitchfork's attempts to write about Basement Jaxx or Daft Punk were actually more of a problem than the fact that they didn't write about popular music generally.

However I'm not endorsing this position, because if anything it encourages people to be even more blinkered and "risk-averse" in their music writing and/or music listening.

e.g. back circa 2001 I used to write about hip hop all the time because I was blissfully unaware of how "wrong" I was getting it. I listen to the same amount now but almost never write about it because I'm self-conscious how ill-equipped I am to write about it in an informed and understanding way.

Is that shift a good or a bad thing? Probably a bit of both. Certainly it encourages writers to "stick to the brief" a lot more, and not be adventurous in the music they write about.

im a little afraid of the whole concept of "getting [a genre] wrong" because it strikes me as an easy tool to dismiss differing opinions

Yeah but so many crits are so unafraid to wade out of their depth and put a bullshit spin on music they don't know the first thing about, because they can write well enough that it's at least palatable bullshit that gets past editors, that I appreciate Tim being able to say that (even if I'm sure he understands hip hop better than a ton of people who write about it a ton).

yeah. i dont know--is there such a thing as getting a genre "wrong"? serious question. obviously you can get your facts wrong in certain ways, and misrepresent the content of a genre (im thinking of here of the popists favorite "all rap music is about bitches and hoes" strawman), but outside of that what would getting one wrong mean?

i think the worst thing about some music writing and some of the more snarky commentary on musicians is the ascribing of almost malevolent motives to the musicians or just simply writing about them as if they're completely abhorrent human beings.

yeah. i dont know--is there such a thing as getting a genre "wrong"? serious question. obviously you can get your facts wrong in certain ways, and misrepresent the content of a genre (im thinking of here of the popists favorite "all rap music is about bitches and hoes" strawman), but outside of that what would getting one wrong mean?

Well "wrong" in an objective sense maybe not. But obv whenever you start getting into an area of music you start off with all sorts of thoughts and opinions about it that you then disown later on when you get to know the music more. The problem with hip hop, I think, is that it's so big and varied that a person may have listened to some of it casually for years and still be effectively a novice with respects to other parts of it - the biggest issue being that they apply ideas of what "works" from the stuff they listen to a lot to whatever they're having to assess, and mark it down or up to the extent that it conforms.

A more radical example was that old Pitchfork review of Rooty where the reviewer said the only really good track was "Broken Dreams" because it reminded him of Stereolab.

In this sense the most obvious examples of "getting it wrong" tend to involve applying a value system that the music itself is disinterested in. Asking why cheesy dance music isn't more accomplished or serious, or why minimal techno doesn't have more "proper songs". Asking why rap doesn't use more live musicians.

More subtly, say, new york rap fetishists simply dismissing the lyrical approach of southern rappers because it doesn't accord to the style they're used to.

Chuck Eddy has a good argument to the effect that it's more interesting to say judge metal on disco terms or vice versa than it is to judge every genre by it's "own terms". But I think to do this well you have to understand what each set of terms are and what they involve. And chuck is at his (relatively) weakest when he doesn't understand the terms, which to his credit he freely admits - I'm not going to take his criticisms of Aaliyah particularly seriously, for example.

Something like "the balearic revival" is a good example of people using the "wrong" terms but doing so in such a way that it effectively creates a new discourse; it's obviously much easier and more profitable to do this with music that was already fairly liminal or even excommunicated.

well, you can put 'getting it wrong' another way ... its more about recounting some received, half-digested wisdom back without thinking positions through clearly & carefully, or without engaging w/ the broader spectrum of opinions, trying to place your writing in a recognizable, honestly-investigated 'context' that = 'wrong'

Yeah...getting an 'outsider' perspective or a different school of thought on a genre that's usually discussed in one way can be a great thing, but more often than not you either get writers who are so arrogant that they treat their biases like cold hard facts, or are so insecure that the lead paragraph is always full of hemming and hawing about what their baggage with this genre is or why they hate most of it.

Leaving aside how you determine which is which, we could probably draw a distinction between "getting it wrong" in a way that actually opens up (thinking about) the music in question, versus "getting it wrong" in a way that shuts it down.

I think the key difference being that in the former your conceptual categories (or "biases", though they're not always this explicit) are affected by the process, whereas in the latter if there is any contradiction between the concept and the music the concept prevails at the expense of the music.

Probably the most common form of professional shut-down criticism is the review/article which praises "the wrong thing" in a particular piece of music, congratulating it for achieving some imposed goal that implicitly undermines either the rest of what that music is doing or what other related music is doing.