Erykah Badu: C /D, S&D

People who RT fan compliments are the most disgusting savages.

if you express this sentiment among fans you'll find that some people think of it as just giving the fan a chance to have his/her voice heard - like, I agree with you & would never, but if you say "rt'ing people praising you is gross" ppl will tell you "oh so you're too good to rt a compliment from somebody, fine fine mr. high-n-mighty"

yeah i'm sure it's a weird thing to deal w/ because certain fans/fanbases really get off on the "i have the BEST FANS IN THE WORLD MWAH" thing that seems sycophantic and gross to people outside of it.

there's something really sad to me about how coyne is this 50 year old dude who was slogging through the pre-internet underground for years and now he's just constantly chasing this asinine lol virality culture and trying to be the king of meme music with all his FOUR DAY LONG SONGS FEATURING KE$HA WOAH DUDE

it wouldn't be sad to you in the same sense of "sad" if you saw his bank statement, I think

you have?

no, but they do very well for themselves, I can tell you that - what we out here in snarksville think of as "chasing virality" codes for a larger % of the public as "being famous." what looks like trying too hard to people who think about pop culture all day long just looks like success to people whose engagement isn't as deep-game

see that's the thing, i shouldn't pity him because he got to be very successful at being kooky eccentric artist guy, but fuck what a lamewad

The thing about fans expecting their compliments to be retweeted is so strange to me. It seems pretty self-centered and entitled.

that version of 'race for the prize' they did to cash in on the thunder is just amazingly half assed, even for the flaming lips in 2012

i mean i don't begrudge him his success, in some ways i admire FL for not doing the boring old album-single cycle and trying to do something different, but it's like he's actively trying to be more inane than people half his age raised on youtube (and doing a great job of it)

there's a distinction wrt the things he's RTing that's even worse though, which is that alongside you're right NEVER CHANGE WAYNE!! he's also (admittedly amid just rting every other thing) pasting stuff like

Ry4n W. Bradley ‏@
Seriously?! http://bit.ly/LyY6gF Erykah Badu should be thankful to @theflaminglips & @waynecoyne for reminding people she's still around.
Retweeted by Wayne Coyne

which is like building a treehouse & having your friends throw coconuts out of it at strangers

do you remember when you wrote to the letters column in your favorite bands fanzine and you were stoked that they printed it? or just that one time someone called you out in the audience by name? (for me it was rob crow thanking me for writing a story on heavy vegetable in my school newspaper) i don't think i was either self-centered or entitled or creepy for being stoked about that, it's just that nowadays it's on twitter between adults i guess.

The thing about fans expecting their compliments to be retweeted is so strange to me. It seems pretty self-centered and entitled.

yeah, but - and I don't like saying this any more than I like knowing it - it's a generational thing. what seems crass & gross to us reads different to a different generation. I can either cling to my sense of how things seem to me, or I can try to see things from a different perspective. I have my limits, to me I just couldn't look at myself if I was rt'ing AEROSMITH ROCKS, BIG FAN HERE CAN I GET A RT? but the whole process looks diff. to younger cats, they grew up in a diff. world than I did so it's natural that things would look different to them

there's a distinction wrt the things he's RTing that's even worse though, which is that alongside you're right NEVER CHANGE WAYNE!!

Badu's doing the same YOU'RE SO RIGHT thing on her feed isn't she?

i guess it's just that some sort of not really objectionable thing is being multiplied by whatever coyne did which seems at least poorly thought-out and likely completely creepy multiplied by hating on the fallen genius multiplied by the general thing of hating on twitter

maybe one "multiplied by hating on twitter" should be a "raised to the power of hating on twitter"

i'm with you all though, i got no twitter acct

Ry4n W. Bradley should look up the first-week sales of Embryonic and Return of the Ankh.

no one looks good in this exchange, really sad badu is involved at all tbh

eh they debuted at #8 and she debuted at #4, it's not like they're not in the same basic bracket of success by almost any standard (xpost)

Sales, not chart position.

A funny thing to say, regardless.

yeah i mean they're 2 artists who have different enough fanbases that when one mentions the other half the people listening to "who?"

Ankh: 110K

Embryonic: 32K

Thank you for reviving Badu's career, Flaming Lips.

xpost

has badu retweeted you yet

i wonder if garry shandling still has s1ocki blocked for very gently mocking shandlings retweeting ppl complimenting him, which i still think is odd but apparently it's the present day equiv of an autograph or whatever. 'can i get a RT for my birthday' also creeps me out.

i mean in the 90s when there were just occasional musicians who were really accessible and participated in message boards and stuff, 16 year old me would get pretty geeked out about any guy from a band i listened to responding to an e-mail. and granted, going into a profession where those kinds of interactions are commonplace may have accelerated me becoming a little more blase about it, but yeah i don't know how the novelty of it all hasn't worn off for most people.

because it's still a novelty, man.

trying to be the king of meme music with all his FOUR DAY LONG SONGS FEATURING KE$HA WOAH DUDE

i feel you, but haven't they been doing this sort of thing all along (zareeka etc)? one person's creative high-concept release is another's crass gimmick (see also bjork).

the flaming lips are no bjork

when I get drunk I run like busta rhymes in that one vid and say bjork like the rza

tho when I do it I sound like schwarzenegger

trying to be the king of meme music with all his FOUR DAY LONG SONGS FEATURING KE$HA WOAH DUDE

i feel you, but haven't they been doing this sort of thing all along (zareeka etc)? one person's creative high-concept release is another's crass gimmick (see also bjork).

― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 9:57 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i totally see what he's doing now as consistent with the band's history, in terms of chasing some kind of fun new idea, it's just become kind of grotesque at some point. jack white's become very relentlessly meme-y over the years too.

I'm gonna throw up, ugggghh this guy.

what's ugly about it is his whole bangbus HAW HAW WE FUCKED THAT BITCH OVER attitude

Yeah, this has gotten a whole new level of ugly.

what looks like trying too hard to people who think about pop culture all day long just looks like success to people whose engagement isn't as deep-game

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 8:48 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of the most enlightening / enlightened things I've ever read on ilx tbh. very eloquently sums up my 'Hulk smash'-level rage when I see dudes on stage dancing for chicken and making bank doing it.

dancing...for...chicken...?

Chewing on the expression "dancing for chicken" xp

http://resurreccionepiscopal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/dancing_chicken.gif

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

^absolute first thing that came to mind

I thought chicken-dance but nobody wants to see that

now i really hope If Assholes comes back and explains "dancing for chicken" because i'm so mystified by it. like the best guess is that it's kind of like some randomly specific variation on 'sing for your supper'?

I confess I googled it, thought I was behind on chicken-related slang

As a director I am unimpressed... As your fellow artist I am uninspired

i am really glad she went there with this. like it wasn't just exploitative, it was a really shitty video. they were doing they're usual 'omg kitschy AND challenging' thing, which is what it is (and it seemed to even be what she expected), but the execution/production was just embarrassing. so tasteless

the video would have been been perfect if they just did the blowfly version

http://open.spotify.com/track/3fxjEEwnvYWHmVkbOk3sXd

Jesus Christ you guys, do none of you remember this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkxvxV-S4wM

oh god those wayne coyne fan tweets making me more livid than anyone should be this early in the morning

ha i hadn't noticed whether badu was RTing her rallied masses as well. i want to be precious and suggest a distinction - between criticising, & then referencing your support, & being criticised, then relying on yr audience's reflexive defence - but i'm probably just being a badu fan here. the most reassuring thing about this def the sign that she isn't totally engaged w/the weak collaboration. she's making a record w/flying lotus, iirc, so that'll be nice.

Does anyone know anything beyond that Twitter back-and-forth? There's clearly quite a bit of backstory needed here. 'As a woman I feel violated' is kind of a heavy thing to throw out when we don't have any idea where or how exactly the communication breakdown occurred.

the most reassuring thing about this def the sign that she isn't totally engaged w/the weak collaboration.

What about last week, when she was enthusiastically RTing Coyne about it?

The whole thing could be some kind of set up, I guess.

What about last week, when she was enthusiastically RTing Coyne about it?

^^^

people are going to believe what they already had decided to believe in a situation like this: if you liked Eryka Badu & not the Flaming Lips, you're going to insist that she shares your estimation of them & did all along (even though her long piece insists that she digs their work, still). what actually went down here isn't something anybody not directly involved is actually going to know: Badu liked the idea and got buyer's remorse when she saw the video? Badu liked the idea and people in her camp hated it when they saw it and told her "put some distance between yourself & this," and she told the Lips "I'm going to need some plausible deniability on this"? Lots of complicated shit goes on between artists & management & publicists & handlers & friends-in-camp, etc., and if, when an artist speaks to the public, you ever think "he/she's shooting from the hip here," you're naive, unless the artist is somebody crazy like Britney. It's not "a set up," but the stuff people are responding to is just the outward resolve on something that nobody's actually going to know the details about. attributing lone-actor agency to a successful artist is some believing-in-the-Wizard shit imo