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

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.

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.

OK, yes, this is what I was getting at without realizing it. I suppose my fear is that when we start talking about getting something "wrong" it shuts down unexplored-but-possibly-fruitful avenues of engagement... but I can get behind a theory of "getting something wrong" that leaves room for an opening-up

Right and wrong aren't the right frames of reference anyway. I tend to talk about music crit in terms of boring vs interesting, which is closer, but really the whole thing is a bit too nuanced for any single dichotomy to capture it.

Like, on the funky house thread I complain about the way in which a FACT Magazine article on Jam City waxes lyrical in its attempts to draw links between the music in question and a whole bunch of tenuously related genres past and present - this isn't "wrong" (it even has the artist's imprimatur) and on a formal level it "opens up" the music, and yet often there's still something very off-feeling about that sort of music criticism, in the way that it ultimately shores up a more abstract, all-embracing notion of what makes music worthwhile, as if the more "open" a piece of music is stylistically (in terms either of intention or result or both) the better it is almost by default. So in this way, what appears to be open-minded criticism can start to seem close-minded in its ruthless application of implicit assumptions regarding open-mindedness... Like, there are contexts in which educated hyper-articulate dilettante eclecticism can start, rather counter-intuitively, to seem almost oppressively hegemonic.

I think you can introduce good and bad into this (not necessarily "right" and "wrong," though that can certainly enter into it, and one great joy is dissecting the factual inaccuracies of people whose received opinions are so toxic, if only because it's something you can throw back without having to qualify it all that much or open up some go-nowhere convo about diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks or some such thing), and that when we do the conversation here starts to point at what one of the big issues is: we're defining what we want from the world by the conversation we can have with it, and a good conversation is like the ideal space. That conversation doesn't have to be a literal one, but, e.g., Lex is looking for a literal conversation that fits his ideal, and he's not finding it, or when he thinks he finds it, it's tainted by some bad conversation.

Which is kind of the story of conversations, I guess, and particularly music conversations for some reason (no institutional ways of creating a safe space for high-level convos is a double-edged sword -- keeps deadly dullness and joy-sucking out but also lets a ton of other smaller bores in, a death by a thousand paper cuts deal where at least in, say, academia sometimes you can avoid the biggest or most threatening knives, or whatever). We're pointing to all the small ways in which musicwrite doesn't give us what we're looking for -- some of it being obvious sexism, or less-obvious sexism, most of it having to do with a shitty conversation. And the only way to remedy it is to build a better one ourselves, which sucks. It's hard to build a conversation by yourself, or with a really small group with no external incentive for doing it. ILM is the story of such a conversation, one of the few, that works, relatively speaking.

Anyway, I guess the big point here, if there is one, is that this seems to be an argument about the state of conversations, and if that's the case, I don't (usually) actually care about the content of the conversation -- you should be able to have a good conversation about R&B with someone who knows little about or HATES R&B, but what you end up getting is this sort of timidness about the subject, a lot of the baggage intact without at least the boldness of being WRONG. And the people who are boldly wrong, La Roux for instance, are SO wrong that they're not worth engaging with -- they're not being wrong in productive ways, hence they're offering a terrible conversation.

I don't think there's any way to make a bad conversation better, though, without actually getting into the brains of the conversers and changing them: otherwise you just need to find a new place or new people to talk to. And so part of Lex's anxiety about this, I would guess, is that he's fearing that the music he loves doesn't also lead him to the conversations with people he wants to be having.

"what appears to be open-minded criticism can start to seem close-minded in its ruthless application of implicit assumptions regarding open-mindedness"

This is what bothers me about a lot of high-end so-called poptimistic writing, mostly American, that I've been seeing lately: open-mindedness, in and of itself, doesn't mean anything if you're still bad at getting ideas across and can't talk to someone else in an engaging way and are a boring boring boring boring bore. (Strikes me, to use a better Frank Kogan foundation for the developing conversation, something like a PBS Laser Beam, a way to take all of culture that isn't just "for the group," like the trash culture of the 60's becoming the punk culture of the 70's, say, and turn it into gray water instantly, without the benefit even of the support group that usually comes with it.) Something the Singles Jukebox keeps reminding me is that I don't care what anyone likes in particular so long as they write or talk about it well, though I would bet plenty of times what you like is also indicative of the kinds of conversations you'll have about the stuff you like, which is a whole other can of worms.

Frank sez, re: PBS:

"my complaint about the indie/PBS/lonely hearts club in 1987 wasn't that the people in it didn't have broad tastes, but that they ruined everything they touched. In any event, I can't see that the importance and effect of what people say and do in regard to music is inherently different in kind from the importance and effect of what people say and do in regard to health care or in regard to global warming or anything else. That doesn't mean that musical events are as crucial as some of these others, but they are certainly influenced by the discourse, and by how well or poorly people speak."

In this way, opening "us" (or them, or whoever) up to more stuff can also make the conversation that much more rancid -- but since there's no way of keeping us (or them) OUT of the conversation (part of what Ned is experiencing, I think, since though I'm sympathetic to the "everything was better when you were 12 argument" I do honestly think something has fundamentally changed, quickly, recently) is a leveling of the music playing field, so that it's as hard to find a truly Big Thing as it is to find a truly "safe" uncontaminated little music niche for yourself), we have to work on either ignoring them or finding the usefulness in the badness or changing them altogether. And two of these are annoying and the other is usually impossible, I think.

great post (first one), the last paragraph about bores with good taste is spot on.

(part of what Ned is experiencing, I think, since though I'm sympathetic to the "everything was better when you were 12 argument" I do honestly think something has fundamentally changed, quickly, recently)

The question of that fundamental change is always going to be potentially loaded, I figure. Was it generational or was it caused by perception? (Or both, or something else...)

Well, since I'm a bit younger than you, my experience of the same thing at the same time in the same way probably means something, though not sure what. I bet you could look to the shrinking industry itself -- even though a lot of commentary about how MJ was the "last of something" feels overheated, there's something in there that's factually true, except I'm guessing a more helpful measuring stick would be Britney Spears, not MJ. (I'm guessing her steady decrease in sales is obscured somewhat by relatively stable chart standings, though I haven't explored it.) But if MJ/Madonna are pop-culture touchstones, something that everyone at least has an opinion on whether they like them or not, I do think we're pretty much over that mode of cultural reception. Now rather than not LIKING something, you just say (rightly) that you haven't heard it. I could easily imagine someone, even someone kind of plugged into a mainstream-ish culture (several family members, for instance) who has honestly never heard, or even heard of, most of the #1 artists of this year, which probably wasn't true even in 2000.

Oh your last point has been readily demonstrated all the time, trust me, and it's not just on the outer fringes. I know at least one friend who expressed dumbfounded amazement that a slew of writers/music fans/etc. out there hadn't seemed to have heard either of the Black Eyed Peas number ones this year, even after having a death grip on the charts for more than half its length.

x-post

Like, when I was 13, we could have had a no-holds-barred fight about Rage Against the Machine, but it's probably genuinely more difficult now to share common music that overlaps with the music you happen to like, even for someone with fairly broad taste or an intense interest in talking about music. I mean, I know who BrokenCYDE are, but it feels like an active process of investigation to actually listen to it. (I was somewhat shocked when I first heard 3OH!3 casually in a public setting, mostly because I hadn't heard any popular music I'd talked about recently with anyone in a public setting in so long! Most in-store music is specified for a given store and usually not that contemporary -- just had the weird experience of sitting in a coffee shop that played only 90's singer/songwriter stuff, Lisa Loeb etc., from what I presume was some Satellite radio station or specialty mix, and thinking "there is no difference between this place right now and this place in 1996 except for the sign for free wi-fi.")

Short summary seems to = one risks getting music "wrong" when one writes and/or thinks badly. Which seems reasonable to me -- it's true of almost everything. Other than that, though, I don't think there's anything wrong with the interpretive process that necessarily accompanies the movement of art from one cultural context to another. For instance, the way dance music or hip-hop are understood and used by, say, indie/hipster audiences... The latter probably won't understand & use the music in the same way as serious/knowledgeable fans of the genre. As a result, the qualities they value will necessarily seem "wrong" to anyone who really cares about and has spent substantial time with the genre. And that's okay. I don't see anything wrong with this sort of appropriation and reinterpretation.

(part of what Ned is experiencing, I think, since though I'm sympathetic to the "everything was better when you were 12 argument" I do honestly think something has fundamentally changed, quickly, recently)

The question of that fundamental change is always going to be potentially loaded, I figure. Was it generational or was it caused by perception? (Or both, or something else...)

the landscape of the music industry is such a volatile one that seeking "fundamental" changes and patterns like this over several generations is sort of fruitless - recording technology's only a few generations old, the way people approach/examine/create/digest/market/purchase music changes at variable rates

x-posts

(And I also don't really want to go on a warpath against BrokeNCYDE in part because it took me so much effort just to find the stuff in the first place. It didn't come looking for me, so why should I go looking for a fight? There are answers to that, but they aren't as obvious as when bad music messes up the flow of your everyday existence.)

contederizer, all the more reason to just say "bad" instead of wrong. Sure, they're not wrong, if by wrong you mean what they did was one valid possibility given what the music is. But one can use something in a valid way and still totally suck. If my argument for why they suck is better than their argument for why the music's good on "their terms," I win the conversation, and will be rewarded with their contempt and a lifetime of isolation and bitterness.

Curt1s -- I want to buy that, and I'm usually quick to put the brakes on, but I do think something is different. Maybe fundamental is the wrong word for something that changes a lot anyway (or is too new to have clear "fundamentals"), but I do think that music culture, reception-wise and industrially, isn't just experiencing variability that's in the same ballpark as the relative variability of, let's say, the past fifty years (and hey, maybe it's just my own social blinders and this isn't true of other countries or social contexts). But since I have no evidence I won't take it much further than that.

Bug OTM. I fully endorse the reduction in scope to good arguments about music vs. bad ones.

Short summary seems to = one risks getting music "wrong" when one writes and/or thinks badly. Which seems reasonable to me -- it's true of almost everything. Other than that, though, I don't think there's anything wrong with the interpretive process that necessarily accompanies the movement of art from one cultural context to another. For instance, the way dance music or hip-hop are understood and used by, say, indie/hipster audiences... The latter probably won't understand & use the music in the same way as serious/knowledgeable fans of the genre. As a result, the qualities they value will necessarily seem "wrong" to anyone who really cares about and has spent substantial time with the genre. And that's okay. I don't see anything wrong with this sort of appropriation and reinterpretation.

― from alcoholism to fleshly concerns (contenderizer), Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its easy to say in rhetorical generalities. but things can easily be lost, & are all the time, when u shift contexts like that

I know at least one friend who expressed dumbfounded amazement that a slew of writers/music fans/etc. out there hadn't seemed to have heard either of the Black Eyed Peas number ones this year, even after having a death grip on the charts for more than half its length.

I want to say this is insane to me but then I remember all of the hair metal that I actively shunned back in the 80s and thus never, for example, heard a Winger song in its entirety until this decade. (ps I want my pretty mind back)

Headed for a headache.

Forgot to link the convo from LiveJournal here.

I think a better comparison wouldn't be hair metal or Winger (though I'd bet you'd at least HEARD of Winger and simply chose not to listen to them), but instead whether or not it was possible to actually avoid hearing or knowing about, say, Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" when it came out.

Oh hey, thanks -- 'anchorlessness' is a good choice of word but the way I've articulated it more to myself is process vs. product, where I am increasingly interested/comfortable with the former not the latter. (This does not just apply to music.) I'll probably have more to say about that in the Stylus piece.

Probably not the thread for this, but damn, looking at "biggest jumps to #1" mostly being within the past 3 years is like looking at the record hot days happening in the past 10 years. (Obvious difference that ruins the metaphor is that this has everything to do with downloading counting toward the charts, and streaming as of 2007.)

* 97-1 - Kelly Clarkson — "My Life Would Suck Without You" (February 7, 2009)[2]
* 96-1 - Britney Spears — "Womanizer" (October 25, 2008)[3]
* 80-1 - T.I. featuring Rihanna — "Live Your Life" (October 18, 2008) [4]
* 78-1 - Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent - "Crack a Bottle" (February 21, 2009)[5]
* 71-1 - T.I. — "Whatever You Like" (September 6, 2008)[6]
* 64-1 - Maroon 5 — "Makes Me Wonder" (May 12, 2007)
* 58-1 - Flo Rida featuring Ke$ha — "Right Round" (February 28, 2009)[7]
* 53-1 - Rihanna — "Take a Bow" (May 24, 2008)[8]
* 52-1 - Kelly Clarkson — "A Moment Like This" (October 5, 2002)
* 51-1 - Usher featuring Young Jeezy — "Love in This Club" (March 15, 2008)

x-post, Ned I'm actually writing about this now as an IRL project (having to do mostly with media education) -- could email you some of the musings etc. if you like. I think our issues are pretty similar, but that we're probably using different approaches to talk about it.

Sure, I know I have your e-mail around but if I can't dig it up, ned at kuci dot org -- I'm going to be working on the initial draft this weekend.

In fact just e-mail me directly, will be simpler!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYjD8jYfWBI

There's a vision.

Mention that song in your piece, Ned. I'll give you a dollar.

BRIBERY

I know at least one friend who expressed dumbfounded amazement that a slew of writers/music fans/etc. out there hadn't seemed to have heard either of the Black Eyed Peas number ones this year, even after having a death grip on the charts for more than half its length.

I've said this repeatedly, but it's really, really easy to not pay attention to huge mainstream songs like this. I do because I'm interested in What's Going On in Pop Music, but I'll also note that the vast majority of times I've heard "I Gotta Feeling" have been from listening to the radio in my car. If I didn't drive, or even if I just took the top 40 stations off my presets, I might have heard it a couple of times in a public place (or at a wedding or whatever) but not been able to ID it or remember that I'd heard it before.

Moreover, I don't think this is any more true now than it was 10 years ago (especially for me, since I was in college then and very suspect of mainstream pop culture). Is the difference that critics no longer feel an obligation to pay attention to Top 40 because there are so many other stories now?

i think if i heard 'i gotta feeling' on a station i listen to i would remove said station from my regular rotation